Religion & Beliefs
Rated X: A Guide to Rabbinic Writing on Oral Sex for Women
By Tamar Fox / February 22, 2007
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. 
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…
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Looking at or kissing your wife’s Holy of Holies, certain sexual posiitons and all the rest don’t cause birth defects. That and thousands of other facts and explanations from Hillel to Joseph Caro must be discarded as the outdated understanding of a pre-scientific age.
They simply didn’t know then what we do now.
my bad.
As an IU grad, I can’t let that pass: Kinsey not Kinsley!
P.S.: Damn you Jennifer Lopez and Tamar! Now my children will be blind! …Oh wait a minute, my wife and I are both very nearsighted, so it’s likely our kids will also be myopic. Never mind….
is an euphimism for anal sex, not women on top.
You might get an appreciacion of a discussion in Nedarim if you realise – even by the most liberal estimation it happened more than 1200 years before Kinsley.
…that if a man wants male heirs, he should make sure his wife climaxes first. As Rabbi Emanuel Rackman’s discussion of this in One Man’s Judaism points out, if the men are going to be chauvinistic and demand male heirs, at least they’ll first please their wives before themselves, and maybe some of that chauvinism wil be reeducated.
In Rabbi Rackman’s own words, p. 92 in the 1970 edition: "And the Law with respect to Taharat ha-Mishpahah – family purity – sought to provide period of complete continence thereby to promote romance and heighten the mutuality of the spouses’ ultimate gratification of their desires. A charming text of the Talmud is illustrative of this intent. The Talmud was very much aware of the desire of males to have sons. Capitalizing on this preference, the Talmud reminded husbands that sons are conceived in their mothers’ wombs only when the female reaches climax earlier than the husband in the consummation of the love relationshp! (Niddah 31a.) If the male ego was to be flattered by the bearing of male heirs, it must excel first in the art of love. It does not really matter whether the Talmud dictum is scientifically correct. It is at least an abiding invitation to men to be preoccupied with the desires of their wives, and if younger women are, by their very natures, less capable of reaching climax speedily, then men must be the more patient and artful to that end."
Rabbi Rackman similarly interprets the law that after the birth of a daughter, the wife’s impurity period is twice as long as after the birth of a son. During this period, the man cannot have sex with his wife, but can only talk to her. So after the birth of a daughter, the husband has twice as long (compared to after the birth of a son) to emotionally connect with his wife and ignore his own sexual desires.
In Rabbi Rackman’s own words (p. 93): "And the code applied to the postnatal period as it did to the events preceding. After a birth there was again a period of continence followed by the reenactment of the nuptials – with a difference, however, between the birth of a male and a female. The periods of both continence and nuptials were doubled in the latter case, perhaps because vain males needed the benign effect of the Law more when their wives bore them what they wanted less."
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Regarding the spilling of seed, Rabbi Rackman has an interesting discussion on pp. 111f: Discussing contraception, he notes that most authorities permit contraception only for the women, since she has no mitzvah to procreate (because it puts her life in danger, and she cannot be obligated to so threaten herself. Therefore, G-d instead gave her an impelling inner desire to bear children of her own free will, to compensate for her lack of obligation here.) By contrast, since the man has a mitzvah to procreate, he cannot use contraception to avoid the fulfillment of this mitzvah. But Rabbi Rackman disagrees: first, once a man has one son and one daugher, he has fulfilled his obligation, and contraceptives ought to be permitted for him. Second, the Talmud says there is no obligation to have children while the mother is still nursing, since to bear more children during this time would threaten the health of the present child; Rabbi Rackman notes that if the idea is the economic or material welfare of the child, then we could say that similarly, there is no obligation to have children whenever this would threaten the child’s welfare, say if the parents presently lack the financial ability to support additional children. Therefore, says Rabbi Rackman, there are many cases in which the husband is not obligated to have children himself, and therefore, the husband too should be allowed to use contraceptives during such time.
Moreover, says Rabbi Rackman, sexual intercourse is not only for the sake of procreation; intercourse is permitted with a sterile wife, during pregnancy, and after menopause. Since sexual intercourse is not exclusively for the sake of bearing children, a man should be allowed to use contraceptives during acts of sexual intercourse, even if his obligation to bear children is still in force.
(Rabbi Rackman has thus brought two entirely distinct arguments to permit contraceptives for the male.)
But what of the prohibition of spilling seed in vain? Rabbi Rackman is not fazed; he notes that the Biblical story of Onan (Genesis 38:9), taken by itself, seems merely to say that once a man has married his late brother’s wife – an act permitted only for the sake of bearing children for the late brother – he is not permitted to escape the bearing of children. (If he doesn’t want to bear children for his late brother, so he shouldn’t marry his late brother’s wife in the first place!) In Rabbi Rackman’s own words, "As many exegetes say, it [viz. the story of Onan] is authority for the proposition that he who would fulfill the Levirate law cannot vitiate it by dropping his seed earthward. Onan had married his deceased brother’s childless widow and the only justificaton for such a marriage, in the face of the prohibition against it, was that he would cause her to conceive." In other words: there is no general blanket prohibition of spilling seed. (I’m not sure, however, whether Rabbi Rackman would condone masturbation.)
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I don’t know about you but I don’t mind looking at a pussy let a lone kissing it, at least with my girl when im with some female escorts thats a whole different story and with them its just sex and thats it.
A better book is that of David Feldman, “Marital Relations, Birth Control and Abortion in Jewish Law. Chapter Four is most relevant to the discussion here as well as several other passages.
Yisrael Medad, http://www.myrightword.blogspot.com
I don’t recall if it was in the Shulchan Aruch itself, the Rav’s version, or the Kitzur; but the same passage that forbids looking “there” also forbids (in stronger terminology) “kissing”.
I heard this one from my cool, young aunt when I was about twelve and felt much like Tamar with the middle-aged women:
A young man is about to get married, and he asks his rabbi, "Rabbi, can I have oral sex with my wife?" The rabbi looks uncofortable and thinks about it for a minute ans says, "Well, with your wife, I guess that's ok." The young man asks, "Rabbi, can I have anal sex with my wife?" Again the rabbi looks even more uncomfrotable but says, "Yes, with your wife, that's ok." Then the young man asks, "Rabbi, can I have sex with my wife standing up?" but this time the rabbi bangs his fist on his desk and says, "Absolutely not!"
Confused, the young man says, "But rabbi if I can have oral sex and anal sex with my wife, what's the big deal about doing it standing up?" Without missing a beat the rabbi answers, "Sex standing up could lead to men and women dancing!"
I've heard of Winkler's book, but I haven't read it. I just requested that the Vanderbilt library buy a copy. Yay!
I am, however, very familiar with the whole pilagshut deal. On frumsex there are tons of people trying to get pilegeshpersonals.com off the ground. It's a site where you can sign up for a pilegesh. Seriously. Honestly, I don't generally look for rabbinic consent before I hook up with someone, so Emden's responsum isn't all that exciting for me, but I do appreciate it as something that makes frumkeit more relevant to young people.
Pardon me if you've already read this, Tamar, but you may want to check out Rabbi Gershon Winkler's [[http://tinyurl.com/ywu95r|Sacred Secrets: the Sanctity of Sex in Jewish Law and Lore]]. Not only does he discuss the table-flipping and meat/fish bits; he even finds halakhic sources that are lenient about spilling seed via masturbation (yeah!!!). He also discusses at length a responsum, by Rabbi Jacob Emden, which says that nonmarital sex is permitted as long as it's monogamous and the couple observes the laws of niddah. The only catch, from a modern-day standpoint, is that Emden, like other authorities on either side of the issue, refers to such a relationship as pilagshut, "concubinage." I don't think women today would like it if their male partner introduced them as "my concubine." :-)
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