Talking about sex is a act of feminist power -- and healing

For so long, so many of us believed that it was wrong to talk about sex. How much pain did that silence cover up?

When I was in twelfth grade at my modern Orthodox day school in Brooklyn, four girls in my grade got engaged. We were barely 18 years old.

We celebrated those engagements enthusiastically. Every Rosh Chodesh, the entire high school got together after breakfast for dancing — the school band played wedding-style music, the gym/dining-room was transformed into a dancefloor, and the building filled momentarily with free-for-all exuberance. But the real highlight of those Rosh Chodesh dancing events was when there was an engagement to celebrate. The engaged girl was held up bouncing on a chair, and if the groom was present, he too, would be held on the chair — like a real wedding. It was a spectacle of joy. Well, adolescent sweatiness and joy.

The celebration of teen brides matched much of the culture of the school. Sure, we were modern and most of us were expected to go to college and work. But alongside those messages was a very particular message to girls, which was that, perhaps even more important than continuing education, we were expected to get married — and soon.

We had countless discussions about marriage, negiyah (prohibitions against touching), and girls’ clothes. We also had countless talks about religiousness and Israel. But in my entire four years of high school, I cannot recount one time when a staff person talked to me about my future in any other context. Not about colleges, not about careers, not about managing money. None of that. Maybe other girls had different experiences. I was great at math and took two years of college calculus. Had I been a boy, someone might have suggested, I don’t know, that I consider engineering school or something. None of that. When the adults around talked to me about my future, the conversations revolved around being religious, going to Israel, getting married, not touching boys, being “good”, being “modest” and covering my body.

I have memories of sitting around with the girls in my class planning our future weddings. We would talk about dresses, seasons, timing, and color themes. I have a picture in my head of a girl in my class making her guest list for her wedding. (She did not have a boyfriend at the time.) One girl in my class said that she MUST get married before she was 20. (She did.) We had discussions about what counted as “old” (23). We talked about the correct amount of time to wait before getting pregnant (two years MAX). We sat in class chatting about these topics instead of, say, listening to the history teacher.

We were what my kids would call “balachiyot”— a Hebrew acronym for “bachurot lechutzot hatuna”, girls stressing over getting married. That is a term that my kids use today, NOT in the 1980s, in case anyone thinks that this practice is merely a thing of the past.

Although some of us were marriage obsessed, I can say for sure that there was one thing we were NOT discussing: Sex. Not really, anyway.

I mean, we had the trip to the mikveh senior year. As if transmitting a detailed and inflexible set of instructions for bodily counting, scrubbing, sticking-in, checking, plucking, disrobing, and dunking in chlorinated water in front of a stranger count as preparation for sex. We had that. Sex-education Orthodox-style

Get this: Two of the girls who got engaged in our senior year were married before the end of the school year, and they were NOT ALLOWED to come back to school. They had to finish their schooling remotely. They would get their degrees because, you know, girls have to get educated! But they were not allowed to be in the building.

Why?

The administration explained it to us as follows: “We are concerned about the locker-room talk.”

That is what they said. Those words. Locker-room talk.

So I guess we all know by now that “locker room talk” is a euphemism for sex.

(Although when Trump says it, it sounds more like a euphemism for sexual assault….)

The school couldn’t even say the word “sex”.

They also assumed that all we do in locker rooms is talk about sex. (I wonder why that is. Is it because we all undress together and maybe have questions? Or is it because it is one of the few unsupervised locations where girls can be outside of male gaze? Or is it because sports is outside of the list of “important” topics and brings out our untamed sides? Hmmm.)

I was thinking about this story the other day. I was chatting with Rivka Cohen, the editor of Monologues from the Makom: Intertwined Narratives of Sexuality, Gender, Body Image, and Jewish Identity, an anthology of personal narratives about sex (“Makom” means “place” but also means “God” and is a Talmudic code-word for vagina, seeing as the rabbis, like my school administrators, perhaps had some difficulty being direct with women.) The book contains dozens of personal accounts of sex, mostly anonymously, and mostly from young, religious Orthodox women. The essays describe many subjects — grappling with “forbidden” attractions, lack of consent, painful intercourse, sexual assault, and many instances of shame, guilt, and ignorance around sex as a result of the way they were educated into the subject. Rivka’s own account describes her own struggles with some of these issues. She was “shomer negiya” for much of her adolescence — that is, obeying rules about not touching or being touched by boys or men — until she wasn’t. When she “broke shomer”, as it was called, she felt broken herself. She had no tools or language to cope with her own decision to awaken the sexual part of herself. The only parameters she had to describe that experience was that she was doing something terribly wrong and needed fixing.

Rivka Cohen

Rivka, whom I invited to speak on Sunday in my Jewish Feminism Reimagined course on a panel about sex — about was talking about some of her lessons from compiling this book, as well as some reactions. One of her observations is that since publishing the book, many people are thanking her for bringing these stories to light. They are telling her that until they read these stories, they thought they were alone, or not normal. Take a look at this snippet. (Transcript below)

Rivka’s description of the importance of sharing got me rethinking the experience of not being allowed to even talk to girls who had already gotten married. The entire point of that awful policy was to discourage us from even discussing anything about sex. About OUR OWN BODIES. I am infuriated just considering this.

Rivka’s refreshing honesty and courage, along with that of her contributing authors, got me rethinking a lot of my own experiences. About how completely uneducated and ignorant I was when I got married. About how insanely limiting and misguided our pre-marital sex education was, both in school and before my wedding. (I have written about some of that in the past), and about the real impacts of that lack of any kind of actual sex education.

I shared some of my personal experiences in the session on Sunday, for the first time publicly, also a radical act for me.