NY Times Update See rebuttal
How widespread sexual aversion is among ultra-Orthodox women is
impossible to say, and the question is made especially difficult because
there is a host of movements and sects with varying statutes and
customs. But there is an erotic ideal that all these cultures share.
After a young woman marries — often, like the Satmar wife Marcus told me
about, to a man she has met and spoken with only once before the
wedding — she’s supposed to feel that sex is a blessing, a union full of
Shekinah, of God’s light, not just a painful or repellent reproductive
chore. Quietly, rabbis refer struggling wives to Marcus’s care. Her task
is to instill desire in them. [...]
Below her brown bangs, Marcus’s eyes fill with tears sometimes when she
talks about how Orthodox Judaism — and above all the most restrictive
branches of Haredi Orthodoxy — can quash female eros by imbuing a
physical shame and a nearly apocalyptic sexual terror, by teaching that
if the laws of tzniut, of modesty, are broken, calamity will come. One
Haredi rabbi I met likened eros to “nuclear energy”: Sex could bring
disaster to the world, but, he said, “the careful regulation” of it can
connect a couple to God and beckon “transcendent experience.” [...]
One
morning at the burnished round table where she talks with her patients,
Marcus handed me a bride’s manual given out by kallah teachers. This
particular book was written for the modern Orthodox; it is relatively
progressive. The clitoris, for instance, is mentioned twice. Even so,
the overwhelming emphasis is on the wife’s responsibility to keep the
relationship on the right side of the law. The Talmud “indicates that
during marital relations, the husband may not look at or kiss the wife’s
makom ervah,” her private place, the manual warns. The lights should be
off, a sheet should cover the couple, the position should be missionary
— the wife is charged with keeping sex spiritual, keeping it chaste.
If
she doesn’t, a parable in the introduction implies, God’s Chosen may
“fall over the edge” of a cliff. “And that book,” Marcus reminded me,
“is modern.” Her Haredi women seem to feel that their bedrooms are all
but laced with Talmudic “trip wires,” she said, where one wrong move can
cause destruction. [...]
The logic of rabbinical rulings can be counterintuitive and confusing to
Marcus, and the decrees vary from rabbi to rabbi, but a line seems to
be drawn between the physical and the psychological. A vibrator can be
viewed merely as a piece of machinery to be applied medically to the
body; racy literature or lingerie might damage the mind. (To finesse her
way around the prohibition against reading soft pornography, Marcus
once hired a cousin who majored in creative writing to produce some
Haredi supersoft porn, and soon she was handing women a printout
culminating in a Hasidic husband’s running his hands over his wife’s
fully clothed hips and giving her a “meaningful kiss.” But the tepid
scene didn’t seem to do much for her patients.) [...]
“I tell them our values are the same,” Marcus said
about winning over her Haredi patients, “but in a way, I’m being
disingenuous.” In addition to working one on one with women, she holds
seminars for kallah teachers. She is on a kind of crusade, a fledgling
effort to carry new ideas about eros into Orthodoxy, to educate the
educators, to persuade them to give brides an abundance of detail about
the anatomy of pleasure, about orgasm. [...]
