Sex & Love
Jewish Body Part 2: The Sex
By Melvin Konner / February 24, 2009
Whatever we say about women and men being equal now and tomorrow – I have three daughters who I want to see beat the world – throughout the whole human past, including the Jewish past, men and women have had different rules, different roles, different thoughts, and different lives.
Your mother told you men only want one thing, and you may have rolled your eyes, but she had a piece of the truth. Biology and common sense both tell us sex is something women have and men want. We can try as hard as we want to talk our way around this, but we can’t make it any less true–for the Jews or any other people.
In Portnoy’s Complaint, the insanely randy main character famously tells his analyst, "LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!" He’s feeling down because he couldn’t get it up while trying to rape an Israeli soldier-girl who unmanned him.
But Portnoy’s droopiness aside, nobody ever took the id – Freud’s word for our sexual instincts – out of Yid. The first commandment is "Be fruitful and multiply," and so far there’s just one way to do that. Like all men, the great rabbis were scared of their own sexual drive and the power that gave women. But they didn’t lose their sense of humor.
In one Talmud story, the Rabbi Amram has some women travelers staying in one of his rooms, only reachable by a ladder that takes ten men to move it. The rabbi catches a glimpse of a woman and moves the ladder back himself with superhuman lust. But as he’s climbing up to them, his judgment takes over: "Fire at Rabbi Amram’s," he yells, and his colleagues rush over and save him–and the women–from himself.
In another story, two top sages are walking behind a woman.The senior one says they have to get out in front of her or they’ll be tempted.The other reminds him that he once said "fit men" can be around women. Answer: "I didn’t mean fit men like you and me!" Believe it or not, the Talmud also brags about the size of certain rabbis’ organs.
Even more explicit are descriptions of their beauty – the rabbis, not the organs. And beauty is biblical too. Abraham lies about Sarah being his sister when they travel, so he won’t be killed by strangers lusting after her. Jacob gets Leah first but wants Rachel, the pretty one. David watches Bathsheba bathing. Result: adultery and quasi-murder, but also the birth of Solomon and his glorious reign.
So the Jews always kept the id in Yid. Unlike the Christians who surrounded and oppressed them, Jews never considered celibacy a virtue. Sure, sex was dangerous. You had to control it. You had it with another person, of the opposite sex, who you were married to. You had to have it just so often depending on your occupation (scholars more than laborers), and the pace would be hard for some modern couples. Doing it on Shabbat was a mitzvah, doing it during menstruation a no-no. But not do it at all? You have to be kidding.
The menstrual restriction mattered a lot. For the first twelve days of the month, a woman couldn’t have sex or even touch a man, and thi — along with men’s pathetic distractibility – meant women were kept out of the public sphere, and even more so, the religious sphere. This shaped Jewish women’s destiny.
But even the very Orthodox say that when the wife comes back from the mikvah, the ritual bath, after her twelve "unclean" days, and lets hubby know she’s ready, it’s like a monthly honeymoon. Too much availability, they say, makes marriage stale, while their laws and rituals perk things right up again.
Men do have to go to the mikvah at times, when they are unclean because of, say, a wet dream. According to folklore, this means the man was seduced in his sleep by Lilith – Eve’s uppity, hyper, oversexed predecessor – and may now be the father of imps and demons.
But the legitimate sex appeal of Jewish women was perfectly kosher, and of course it affected non-Jews too. In the Purim story, the Jews of Persia are saved because a king is overcome by Jewish beauty, and when we dress up our little girls like Esther year after year, it tells them a lot about what we think.
In English literature too, despite its anti-Semitism, Jewish beauty brings Gentiles to their knees. Shylock may have his "Hath not a Jew eyes" speech, but we know he’s a monster and a caricature of Jewish male ugliness. Yet his daughter Jessica is a beauty sought and won by Lorenzo, a Christian, and she ends up trashing the faith of her fathers. Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe has another famous father-daughter pair. Isaac the greedy moneylender is another cartoon, but his lovely daughter Rebecca wins the hearts of not one but two Christian knights. Unlike Jessica, though, she’s a true daughter of Israel, and no one can blame her for being beautiful.
So for Jews sex is normal and good, however potentially dangerous, and Jewish beauty is a key thread in the weave of the tradition. But of course, just as non-Jews get gaga over Jewish women, Jewish men fall under others’ spells. More on that tomorrow.
For an exchange between Konner and a distinguished Orthodox rabbi on women’s roles, with comments by smart Jewish women, click here.
Konner is the author of "The Jewish Body" and is guest-blogging on Jewcy all week.
POST A COMMENT
If we define "have" as the ability to bring your partner to orgasm when
he/she wants to have intercourse, then when I’m aroused and my husband
isn’t, we could say that he has sex and I want it.
Dear Hamichtav,
Thank you for your comment. I was not writing from a religious viewpoint but from a biological and anthropological viewpoint. To see some of the evidence for my assertions, visit here:
http://www.melvinkonner.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=Sex-Lives-Male-and-Female.html&Itemid=46
 Strangely enough, I was studying the passage you quoted from B’reishit just this morning in preparation for a local tv show where we discussed it and other parts of Avraham and Sarah’s story.
As an anthropologist and medical school graduate, I am not able to accept the ages given in the Torah as accurate in our usual sense. I assume that something different was meant by those numbers. I am sure you don’t agree, but we can agree to disagree.
As for relative sex drive, as I was reading the text, I lose count of how many women the Patriarchs and their male relatives had children by, while their wives of course had sex with only one man each. This was typical of important men in ancient times. Sanctification is, as you say, the halakhic way, but the Talmud talks about the very strong sexual drive of some great sages, and says nothing comparable about women.
Thanks again for your interesting comment,
Mel KonnerÂ
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With the introduction of the Judaic ‘codes of law morality was introduced to the social group.  The idea that both men and women wanted sex and both had the necessary somethings for sex made no difference. They were to sanctify the sexual act.Â
In the story of Sarah and Abraham where Sarah is 90 years old and Abraham is 99. They are both still sexually active and still wanting a child of their own together. In Genesis Chapter 18:10-15 (New International Version) it states:
10 Then the LORD said, "I will surely return to you about this time next year, and Sarah your wife will have a son." Now Sarah was listening at the entrance to the tent, which was behind him. 11 Abraham and Sarah were already old and well advanced in years, and Sarah was past the age of childbearing. 12 So Sarah laughed to herself as she thought, "After I am worn out and my master is old, will I now have this pleasure?"  13 Then the LORD said to Abraham, "Why did Sarah laugh and say, ‘Will I really have a child, now that I am old?’ 14 Is anything too hard for the LORD ? I will return to you at the appointed time next year and Sarah will have a son."  15 Sarah was afraid, so she lied and said, "I did not laugh."   But he said, "Yes, you did laugh."
The woman, Sarah,  is expected to be sexually active even in advanced years.  The miracle of procreation through the sexual act is important for women and men.  Sarah shows disbelief in God’s works and her ‘joy’ of becoming a mother by laughing. Her joy through bearing a child is her joy with an on-going relationship with her husband.  Sarah is moral and she is sexual. Â
We all have what it takes to make sex happen and we all want sex. If some men want sex more than some women there are also some women who want to enjoy sex more than men.  I don’t see how making these sorts of generalisations is necessary. Men and woman, in Judaic terms anyway, should only be surpressed in their morality not in their sexual desires.
Dear Sociologist, thank you for your kind words about my book. Of course you are right about the variation, which is huge, and I am just talking about averages. For a therapist like yourself, averages don’t matter much, although I am guessing that even you don’t try to calibrate men and women to the same standard of, say, frequency or intensity of desire. The last time I looked at the data, around a third of women had orgasms regularly during intercourse, around a third sometimes, and around a third rarely. No doubt men are to blame to some extent for these dismal statistics, but the data on masturbation, which have nothing to do with sexual incompatibility of men and women, show big differences too. In any case, we surely don’t want to say there is something wrong with two thirds of women.
jzh, You are right of course about my omission of same-sex relationships. I fully acknowledge the LGBT (&QQO) parts of humanity, and even celebrate them. (I think Adrienne Rich’s love poems are among the greatest of recent decades.) However, it is interesting that when you compare lesbian and gay male couples to heterosexual couples, lesbian couples have fewer STDs and report less infidelity than heterosexuals, while gay men have more STDs and report more infidelity/partners than heterosexual couples/men. These facts, especially the big gaps between lesbians and gay men, both of whom are oppressed and excluded, underscore the differences between men and women. Heterosexual couples are intermediate because men and women are pulling each other toward the middle. Same-sex couples gravitate toward the basic tendencies of their sex. As always, ON AVERAGE. Still, averages can be useful information.Â
What about the great amount of variation within and between groups? When I worked as a sex therapist I saw both men and women who had no interest in sex and men and women who had sex very frequently (several times a day). Is that biology, culture, a combination, or something else? Just finished Dr. Konner’s book and it was excellent. A wealth of information and insights.
jzh, sorry for the omission!
"Biology and common sense both tell us sex is something women have and
men want. We can try as hard as we want to talk our way around this,
but we can’t make it any less true–for the Jews or any other people."
I really hope that was meant to be a joke.
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