About a year and a half ago I was at a Chabad rosh chodesh meeting with one other college student and four middle aged women. The rebbetzin wanted to talk about the parsha (Bereshit) but the middle aged women wanted to talk about sex. I wanted to crawl under the table.

About ten minutes into the discussion one of the women brought up oral sex, and the conversation went something like this:
Various Middle Aged Women: “Well that’s not allowed, is it?”
“Not for men, because they can’t spill their seed, but for women it’s okay.”
“Thank God…”
Chabad Rebbeztin: “Actually there’s a prohibition against a man looking at his wife’s sexual organs.”
Long uncomfortable pause during which I consider fleeing.
Middle Aged Woman: Oh…Well…That’s good to know.
Avert Your Eyes: Looking at Jennifer Lopez's hooha may blind your children
Eventually I extricated myself from the conversation, but since then I’ve been a bit concerned about this. I keep imagining signs: Warning: Do Not Look Directly at the Vagina. In the admittedly crude words of a friend of mine, “Blind muff diving? That won’t end well.”

So I set the crack research team here at Faithhacker on the case, and here’s what I found out:

According to the Talmud (Nedarim 20b) Rabbi Johanan ben Dahabi claims that various sexual acts result in corresponding problems with the resulting children. If a couple has sex with the woman on top [the literal translation is if they ‘overturned their table’ which cracks me up] their child will be lame. The child will be mute if the man kisses the vagina. The child will be deaf if they speak during sex, and the child will be blind if the man looks at the vagina. The gemara doesn’t hold by Dahabi, though. It ends up saying that a man can do whatever makes his wife happy. To support this they bring up a handy little parable: Meat from the slaughterhouse can be eaten salted, roasted, cooked or boiled; so with the fish from the fishmonger. [I will never be able to think about fishmongers the same way…]

In the twelfth century, Maimonides weighed in when he wrote the Mishneh Torah, a comprehensive code of Jewish law. In Hilchot Issurei Bi’ah (The Laws of Forbidden Types of Sex) 21:9 he said that a man can have sex any way he wants as long as he doesn’t spill seed, but it’d be better if he didn’t stray from “the ordinary pattern of the world.” [I’m not sure, but I think that means if all your friends are having oral sex, you get to, too.]

The Shulchan Aruch, a 16th century catalogue of Jewish law says (Orach Chaim 240:4) that a man shouldn’t look at his wife’s private parts because it’s immodest, and contradicts the way he should “walk modestly with God” (Micah 6:8). In another location (Even HaEzer 25:2) the gloss on the text says that a man can do pretty much whatever he wants with his wife, he can kiss any area he likes, as long as he doesn’t spill any seed.

There’s also some discussion about whether the original prohibition that Rabbi Dahabi brings up in the Talmud is not against looking at the vagina, it’s against staring at the vagina. So if you just glance at it, you’re fine.

I find all this amusing, and ultimately comforting since it seems like the wives of all these rabbis (with the exception of poor Mrs. Dahabi) were getting theirs pretty regularly. For all the talk of prude old guys setting the standards, there’s a nice degree of leniency here. It’s no She Comes First (which, incidentally, was written by a graduate of Maimonides University), and I’m not thrilled that women are literally compared to meat and fish, but if there’s one thing I learned in Jewish day school it’s this: when the rabbis leave you room for creativity, you have to run with it. And run fast, before they catch up…