| In the Biblical Sense |
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| Written by Helen Rosner | |||||
| Wednesday, 29 September 2004 | |||||
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Kosher Sex for the Rest of Us: The New Jewish Guides to Getting it On When it hit the market in 1999, Shmuley Boteach’s Kosher Sex was anticipated to be the new undisputed Jewish sex-advice champ. Finally, Jews the world over could reach for something that appealed to the yiddishkeit side of their prurient little minds. And then they read the book. Kosher Sex turned out to be as titillating as a year-old jellybean. Though anticipated by Jews young and old, Orthodox and unobservant, the book addresses only one kind of sex: the married kind. Boteach’s instructions are based on three guidelines: sex is holy, a product of love, and never to be performed outside of marriage. By restricting its mission to heating up the Marriage Bed, Kosher Sex left masses of Jews in the dark: the occupants of the Spring Fling Bed, the Desperate Hookup Bed, the Friends With Benefits Bed, and even the Committed Relationship Bed. Enter Ian Kerner and Leah Furman. Each has written a book designed to appeal to the kinds of Jews who are not dying to know what a Hasidic rabbi thinks they should do once the lights are off. Kerner’s book focuses on the physical, while Furman’s is a guide to landing a Nice Jewish Boy. Taken together, they’re a tricked-out version of Kosher Sex –minus the stodginess and creepy personal anecdotes. At least, that’s how they sell themselves. But are they as really as refreshing as they claim to be, or is this just the old fancy-tagline bait-and-switch? New Voices is up to the challenge. Read on for our report on how well the new guard of Jewish sex advice holds up. She Comes First: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Pleasuring a Woman By Dr. Ian Kerner She Comes First isn’t targeted at a specifically Jewish audience, but Kerner is about as Jewish as you can get. A New Yorker, Hebrew school attendee, and Phi Beta Kappa at Brandeis, Dr. Kerner has written a how-to for the lingually maladept heterosexual male. Between shattering the G-spot mythos and providing a fill-in-the-blank worksheet to record the steps of your new “routines,” this isn’t your grandmother’s guide to how babies are made. Instead, the book is devoted to the halachically sanctioned art of boy-on-girl oral sex, focusing, as the title implies, on keeping her happy. Unlike Kosher Sex, She Comes First couldn’t care less about the marital status of its players. This is because the book draws its authority from trial and error, not rabbinical commentary. Kerner never mentions Judaism–surprising, considering that he admits that poor masturbation habits as a kid (hello, overbearing maternal presence) led to sexual dysfunction as an adult. It was only through focusing on someone else’s pleasure that he was able to turn sex into anything other than a source of Woody Allen-style angst, and so an epic study of cunnilingus was undertaken–climaxing in a PhD and a bestselling book. Kerner does a lot of things right. He doesn’t try to reclaim derogatory terms for down-there, or get too I-feel-your-emotional-pain with his female readers. He doesn’t resort to stereotypes when discussing the bad sexual habits–ignoring the lady’s pleasure, a la Portnoy’s Complaint–that the book seeks to remedy. He assumes that your standard straight guy has a basic familiarity with female equipment, but corrects preconceived notions of anatomy, response, and (ahem) outcome, with illustrations that are just this side of clinical. In his most symbolically auspicious move, Kerner advocates that the clitoris is made up of a lucky eighteen separate parts. This smacks of a chai/clit conspiracy worthy of Rabbi Boteach himself. We tracked Kerner down to get a straight answer. “Everything has a pattern,” he said with a smile. “And that’s all I’m going to say.” Single Jewish Female: A Modern Guide to Sex and Dating By Leah Furman Single Jewish Female bills itself as a guide to Judaism’s take on dating, marriage, and how to navigate life as a single Jewish gal. Furman says she started out writing a good-natured rib on Jewish women who go to extremes to land a Semitic suitor, but was so floored by the sincerity of the women she interviewed that she wrote something that’s “half self-help and half how-to.” The “self-help” is a series of gentle explanations of Jewish identity, and the “how-to” is one long bagel joke. Furman never relates the two, and the book vacillates, trying to reach its readers through cultural touchpoints like kashrut and Hannukah, and proffering generic dating advice that strains to fit a preconceived notion of Jewishness. SJF tries to make Judaism a matter of religion, but to Furman, being Jewish is less about synagogue (though the house of prayer does get a wink-nudge as a great place to meet guys), and more a matter of crazy mothers and last names ending in “stein.” In that respect, it fits right into the current trend of Judaism-goes-mainstream–there are plenty of secular Jews who will relate to Furman’s watered-down religious references. But despite the book’s emphasis on Jewish matchmaking, its concessions to religion have uncomfortably little resonance. It turns tikkun olam into a karmic dating service (be nice to the homeless and God will give you a nice doctor fiancé), and recommends the teachings of Hillel as impetus for exiting a stagnant relationship (“If not now, when?”). SJF tries to address the plight of its title demographic. But to Furman, the world of a Single Jewish Female is one of desperation, codependency, and–if the book’s “how-to” sections are to be believed–mindlessness. Are there really women who choose their post-college address based on a breakdown of North American cities by Jewish population? Or who need step-by-step instructions to making a JDate profile? And SJF has a very narrow take on how to help a lonely Jewish gal find happiness–Furman writes as if non-Jews are bacon cheeseburgers: tempting, but wrong. As for the sections that border on the absurd–well, they really border. “The Caped Crusader” provides field notes on approaching an uncircumcised penis without suffering emotional trauma (Furman’s suggestion: “look away”). It would read like a postmodern skewer of a stereotypical Jewish Princess approach to sex, if it weren’t clear that the section, like the rest of SJF, was pure in its intentions, as earnest as Furman’s vision of the marriage-minded Jewish man. …and the winner is… Neither book presents a unified theory for Jewish sex. She Comes First isn’t a Jewish book, but for what it is–a guide to oral sex–it’s the better for it. SJF is unabashedly Jewish, but for all Furman’s borscht-belt jokery, she makes it clear that a Jewish girl wants to marry a Jewish guy because she wants to send Jewish kids to Hebrew School–not because she’s looking for the kind of fiery action that only comes from a shared history of desert-wandering. So where’s the book that sees Judaism itself as sexual, rather than sex as a means to more Jews? We await the sex manual that brings the two together: a no-nonsense guide to all things dirty, taboo, kinky, and–above all–kosher.
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