Chances are pretty good that if you’re reading this blog you’ve seen some of the frum intimate forums at Calm Kallahs. Chances are that you laughed and didn’t think much of the fact that in this day and age there were married women that didn’t know sex was supposed to be pleasurable. I have heard many stories of both men and women fainting when they found out about how babies were actually made, what did they think Hashem sent a stork or something? I have searched far and wide for a frummy publication to even mention the word sex and lo and behold I don’t think they exist. Read any of the marriage guides and they talk about communication, hashkafa and even more words of Torah wisdom, but nothing to do with the nasty.
Fact is, frummies never talk about sex. It seems the only time they talk about it, is behind closed doors in kallah classes or when you need to show the rabbi your soiled underwear (which usually winds up in a vending machine in Thailand) to know whether or not you pooped your pants or bled in them. For God’s sake if this is reason enough to validate the need for Yoetzet Halacha, I’m not sure what is. Now don’t even get me started on kallah classes, just like the kashrus industry, you need to find out the facts for yourself it seems – because there’s a lot of varying practices and minhagim when it comes to that special time of month for the ladies. It also seems that there are a lot of varying practices for the sex as well. Some telling me that their rabbis told them anything goes because it’s for shalom bayis, to the “we only have sex naked in the dark in her bed – missionary style (do we call it kiruv style, since missionary position is in reference to Nuns?)
It just seems to me that it’s high time for the Artscroll propaghanda machine to publish some sort of sex guide for frummies. We should also take into consideration that frum men (many frum women too) have so much access to free unrestricted hardcore porn that they may think all sex is supposed to be like they show in the porn films (I myself have never seen a naked person other than the dudes running around the Castor, but I’m sure porn can get pretty off balance in terms of the ways normal “amuetur” people have sex) Everyone is denying it, but porn has entered frum homes and it’s here to stay, in fact I would say that shabbos has kept the print porn industry alive, who else would buy a porn mag? A recent article in the Jewish Journal explains the phenomina of men thinking sex is supposed to be like porn, if this is the case, frum men probably know and expect a lot more than women when they enter the bedroom (or the kitchen, or the playroom, or the car, or the bathroom, or the garage or anywhere else besides her bed with the lights off)
Of course I know that no self respecting frum person would ever be able to write frankly about sex, even the beloved Dr. Twerski has boundaries and Rav Shmuely’s work is not exactly considered frum by any standards, but there has got to be some way around these frum publishing houses which refuse to even write words which could be converted to sex. There must be some tznius way to do it, maybe they could keep it behind the counter at seforim stores with black plastic covers hiding the books so that only married people or people who can prove that they’re engaged can buy. Maybe you would have to get a letter from your mother…then again that leads to busha and we don’t want to compound the sins already garnered from reading such an untznius topic.
I’m pretty sure that dudes who can masturbate to JC Penny underwear ads and entertainment weekly could probably blow a few loads to a guide book about sex for the frum community. I’m not even sure how such a book could be written if every chossen and kallah class teacher tells their students something different. Maybe it should explain anatomy and the science of sex. It could talk about different positions and what the opinions are of each, like the famous Rav Moshe heter for doggy style, because of the backbreaking work many of the textile mills people did and how lying on their backs during missionary position may render them parnassah-less. It may help to mention the shulchan aruch’s ban on men kissing the makom ervah of a woman does not apply nowadays because it’s become the minhag of the land to do such things – even though I have heard rumors of men who selfishly receive but refuse to give.
I’ll you the truth, up until I was 12 I had no idea how sex worked, I honestly thought that you peed into the butt of a girl. I know it sounds foolish, but I’m sure that there are some folks who marry and think the same thing. I recently asked someone if sex was really that important for a good marriage and they told me that it was 50% of the marriage – I honestly have no idea how you could quantify it, but it seems to rank pretty high on already married people’s lists. Single people don’t have sex, so how are they to know?
It comes down to this, like it or not – sex is part of our lives. At some point in our lives we will all have it, it may be with our wives, partners, rabbis or rebetzins or local bishop, but it’s something that is so taboo in the frum community that no one really has a frum source in which to learn about it. So, anyone seeking information about sex is likely to go to another source like porn and do we really want our bas yisroels and ben toirahs learning about this holy act from porn downloads. I can imagine that if frum society was more open to teaching about sex, there would be better marriages and more female orgasms. Then again, learning about sex from porn, may be a whole lot better than learning it from some glossed over book by Feldheim or Artscroll that’s about sex without mentioning the word sex.
Learn more about sexual halacha on 4torah.com
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