| In the Biblical Sense |
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| Written by Helen Roth Rosner | |||||
| Tuesday, 23 November 2004 | |||||
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Are you there God? It's me, Malkie.  Like most people, my pubescent experience was defined largely by embarrassment surrounding every moment in which I was forced to interact with my mother. But my humiliation was also a point of pride – my mom was the Sex Mom. Every neighborhood has one. She’s the one who goes on about French kissing when you have your first boyfriend over, the one who regales your slumber party with anecdotes about the superiority of tampons over sanitary napkins. Everyone giggles nervously, equal parts horror-struck and intrigued by this person who says “orgasm” to a group of twelve-year-olds with a straight face. It’s hard for me to think that she ever possessed anything but a canonical knowledge of the sexual encyclopedia. Surely she had come out of the womb capable of eloquently lecturing on the beauty and function of each independent part as she slid past it. But when I mentioned a book I planned to write about – The Wonder of Becoming You: How A Jewish Girl Grows Up by Dr. Miriam Grossman, a guide to puberty aimed at young observant girls – she harrumphed and told me that when she was a fresh-faced young thing at Yeshiva Day in New Haven, all they had was girl-boy separation and lectures from Mrs. Hecht about niddah, the rites of purification that accompany menstruation. My mom had to learn about sex the, um, hard way. But things change. In Mrs. Hecht’s day, talking openly about sexual development just wasn’t a priority. It’s much less likely now that a young Jewish day-schooler is expected to extrapolate the whole of babymaking from a little bit of Gemara and a dose of old-fashioned Jewish guilt. The sexual revolution brought with it an expectation that kids should know what they’re doing by the time they actually do it. Naturally, open discussion of sex took a while to work its way into religious communities. But in 1988 – a couple of years behind free love – The Wonder of Becoming You was published, and while it’s not exactly Penthouse Letters, it tells young women-in-blossom a lot more about their bodies than Mrs. Hecht told my mom. There’s a chart of female reproductive anatomy (superimposed on a girl wearing – you guessed it – a high-necked blouse and a long skirt). There are reassurances that we all mature at our own pace (and that you will find a husband and be able to give him children, whether or not you’re wearing a bra in the seventh grade). It talks about “marital duty,” it attributes the existence of fallopian tubes to God’s master plan, and the author congratulates her readers on their recent Bat Mitzvahs. But for all its exaggerated innocence, the book makes a clear effort to demystify the pubescent experience. Right around the time The Wonder of Becoming You was tearing up the charts in Jewish bookstores nationwide, my friends and I were at that point where our parents, teachers, or rabbis sat us down, coughed nervously, and launched into an account of anatomy, endocrinology, and moral accountability. I – a public school attendee and the daughter of the Sex Mom – got a relatively unedited version of how tab A gets inserted into slot B, and how to keep diseases and babies from entering the picture. But the summer after seventh grade, comparing notes with my friends at our Jewish summer camp under the North Wisconsin stars, I realized my experience might not be the Jewish norm. I was missing something most of my camp friends had: a healthy dose of what the Torah has to say about doin’ it. Long before my mom was crowing (and I was cringing) over my first period, my friend Amanda was in fourth grade at a Modern Orthodox day school in Seattle. That year, girls and boys had their afternoon classes separately: while in the next room the rabbis told the boys about “urges,” the rebbetzins kept the urges at bay by telling the girls to start sitting with their legs together. By the time she got to seventh grade, Amanda was learning about the Act Itself. The informational side, she says, was “decent” – her school used a standard anatomy text, and talked about puberty in a scientific way. Still, the coming-of-age excitement had its limits: when her sister recognized a diagram as representing part of the male anatomy, she horrified the rebbitzin by leaping up in class and triumphantly shouting out “testes!” On the other side of the Jewish sex-ed spectrum was Samantha, my summer camp bunkmate. Like Amanda, she was a day-school lifer, but while she attended an Orthodox high school, her junior high was Conservative. In seventh grade, she learned about such standard topics as IUDs and STDs. There wasn’t much in the curriculum about what the Torah had to say. In fact, the class was nearly identical to the one I attended – body odor, hair down there, and making sure your first kiss doesn’t lead to your first child. My first kiss, as it happened, came from Jacob, a camp friend who attended public school in the suburbs of St. Louis. As kisses go it was pretty awful, but in Jacob’s defense, he was a seventh-grader getting amazingly mixed messages about sex. That year, he got a double dose of sex-ed: an hour each week in his public-school biology class, and Tuesday and Thursday afternoons at his Modern Orthodox Hebrew School’s “Adulthood” classes. There, Jacob and his bar-mitzvah-aged friends learned everything from the ritual of laying t’fillin to the importance of not laying anything else. “They definitely didn’t forget to tell us never ever ever to masturbate,” says Jacob. “It was the worst aveira.” Jacob’s Hebrew School, like Amanda’s day school, discussed the phenomenon of “urges,” but euphemistically left it at that. “They told us that we’d be experiencing new feelings,” he says, “but that God wanted us to focus our energy on studying.” It wasn’t until his public school sex-ed class that Jacob had a clue what his body was doing. Even playground speculation was, in his case, futile: “all my friends were also from my shul, and none of us had any access to any sort of accurate information on sex. We had no idea what was going on inside our pants,” says Jacob. “The first time I had an erection, I thought I had hurt myself and was swelling from an infection, but I was too embarrassed to talk to my mom or dad. When they explained the whole ‘when a boy starts to feel aroused’ thing in biology class, it was incredibly reassuring. In Hebrew school, they somehow forgot to tell us about erections.” Jacob’s rabbi didn’t forget to drill into his students’ heads the importance of waiting until marriage to engage in the big nasty. But that speech was left until the post-Bar Mitzvah confirmation class – when, presumably, the boys would be putting the “adult” in “Jewish adult.” Amanda had a similar experience: a few years after the fourth-grade unit on crossed ankles, it became clear that the real purpose of sex-ed class was to impress upon her temptation-riddled classmates the fact that all the crazy plumbing is for marital use only. Amanda recalls being told constantly that sex only happened in “wedlock” – a favorite word of authority figures. Her school emphasized the importance of marriage as a prerequisite for getting physical, because “it was a way for them to make sure ‘urges’ were taken care of in wedlock.” When Samantha switched to an Orthodox high school, she got a similar dose of abstinence-only education. Along with her female classmates, Samantha learned why it is frowned upon to masturbate or engage in oral sex, even if it’s not halachically forbidden for girls, as it is for boys. “We were told that it was done as avodah zara [idolatry] back in the day,” she says. “Also, a woman’s privates can be considered akin to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, and therefore shouldn’t be looked upon by anyone.” But, in tradition of Mrs. Hecht, the main focus was niddah – how to check whether your flow is still flowing using a white handkerchief. They also learned tips on getting back to knocking boots with your husband sooner – by getting your rabbi to professionally diagnose the state of your handkerchief (if the blood isn’t bright red, it counts as “old” and, after the mikvah and seven-day waiting period, you’re free to resume attempted procreation). Although Amanda, Jacob, and Samantha all ended up ignoring the instructions of their rabbis, there are elements of their Jewish sex-ed experiences that manifest themselves in their young-adult lives. They all appreciate the underlying theme that according to Judaism, sex shouldn’t be a source of guilt, though they’ve ignored the bit about it needing to be restricted to marriage. Samantha has shrugged off most of what she was taught, but, she says, “I know that the information we got was probably useful for a lot of girls in my class.” And those other girls were probably in the majority. For most people getting these Torah-sanctioned options – kids in observant homes – they’re a given. The assumption is that they’ll follow these rules and continue the tradition of niddah right along with circumcision and matzoh ball soup. In the end, whether you hear it from your phys ed teacher or your rabbi’s wife, you’re going to get “urges” and you’ll have to deal with them. You can channel them into Torah study and hit up the mikvah once a month, or you can screw Torah study – and anything that moves. Or there’s a whole sea of gray area that you can splash around in until you find a happy medium between the bedroom and the bima. You can also go my mom’s way. She rejected what Mrs. Hecht taught her, but still managed to bring up niddah and the bloody handkerchief while I and three friends were trapped in the car on the way to the eighth-grade dance. Like Amanda, Samantha, and Jacob, she took what she thought was the good stuff – knowledge of anatomy, and God’s own word that sex is a beautiful thing – and went her own direction with the rest. Her direction of course, being that of Sex Mom.
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