Introduction:
On March 29, 2022, Yeshiva World News posted an article about a new initiative called Kol Kevudah to raise awareness regarding modesty for mothers when they visit shoe stores. Below is a poster that the organization made explaining the need for mothers not to lustfully cross their legs and tempt the shoe store owner who is trying to fit their children with new shoes.
Many of us sense that something has gone awry for Klal Yisroel to be publishing anti-leg-crossing-in-shoe-store-posters-lieluy-nishmas-ploni-bas-ploni, but where did we go wrong? Lest you think that this poster is the product of a one-off crazy person (a woman posing as a man, incidentally), here are several other examples (out of an endless ocean) of advertisements and exhortations aimed at ensuring women do not tempt men when they go out in public.
It is worth teasing out the root of the neurosis and insanity that pervades the Frum approach to intimacy, modesty, and sex when discussing these issues. I believe that there are five underlying issues in Jewish thought that create the jumbled and painful mess of Frum intimacy. These five issues are:
A distrust of pleasure;
An intertwining of shame and sexual energy;
Hyperfocus on ritual “purity;”
An overly didactic system of laws that gets more extreme and complicated with each generation; and
An insistence on creating a rigid, hegemonic, artificial system for an incredibly subjective and intensely personal experience
This post is Part I of a three-part series (I hope) where I will explore each of these issues in depth. Part I, presented below, will discuss the first two issues above, namely Judaism's maladapted attitude towards pleasure and sex. We will explore how Judaism's conception of kedusha creates an approach toward male sexuality based on a fantasy of sexual repression. We will then discuss how this phenomenon gave rise to tznius culture. Lastly, we will consider how Judaism's approach to sex leaves Frum children particularly vulnerable to sexual predation. Parts II and III of this series will focus on the harms caused by Judaism's limited conception of marriage and partnerships as well as the underlying toxicity that arises from taharas hamishpacha and how sexual activity occurs within married Jewish life.
Our Flawed Approach to Sexual Arousal
From the time of Chazal and onwards, Judaism has developed a stance towards the male sexual impulse akin to radioactive material. Sexuality is a terrifyingly powerful force that can unleash destruction unless it is contained to a particular set of prescribed and highly regulated circumstances.
Judaism envisions the perfect Jewish male as one who lives his life in “holiness” and “purity.” In this utopia, Jewish men have conquered their sexual urges. The men walk the streets with their eyes lowered, taking pains not to walk behind a woman lest temptation rear its fickle head. Their neshamos are “pure” because they fiercely guard their eyes against erotic imagery. An ideal Jewish man does not talk excessively to women, and he is careful to occupy his time so that he is not led to temptation. When a Jewish man sleeps, his dreams are “clean” because, when awake, they do not indulge in “lustful” thoughts or actions. A Jewish man gets married young before “evil” thoughts can overtake him and destroy his sparkling neshama.
In this ideal world, the only time a man expresses sexual energy is with his wife. Even then, sex is private. A woman is praised for keeping her hair covered, even at home. Public displays of affection between a husband and wife are entirely forbidden. Couples have sex in a state of “purity,” silently, at night, and in near-total darkness. Even in the context of marital relations, a Jewish man knows that the ideal state of holiness requires him to refrain from excessive sexual activity. (As an aside, from the Jewish perspective, female sexual arousal simply does not exist, as evidenced in the fact that men do not need to regulate their dress or conduct to avoid female arousal.)
The genesis of Judaism’s puritanical approach stems from a conception that humanity is comprised of two forces, a primal, narcissistic, earthly force and a lofty, godly, and spiritual force. From this perspective, our evil inclination controls the animalistic part of us, forever tempting us to give in to our earthy nature and indulge in physical pleasure. From this perspective, our goal as Jews is to resist the pull of the flesh and subjugate our earthly desires to the command of Heaven. While it is true that Judaism believes physical desires can be spiritually uplifted when engaged with properly and for the sake of heaven; still, an attitude of distrust towards physical pleasure pervades Jewish thought. This is evidenced by the commonly quoted idea that one who indulges in too much pleasure, even perfectly permitted pleasure, is a minuval bi’rishus ha’Torah. Chazal praised Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus because of the great lengths he went to minimize his sexual enjoyment.
The dark side of this approach is that it encourages shame and repulsion over physical desires and indulgences. Our “earthly” desires are bad, and we must resist them at all costs. Of course, much of this battle centers around controlling our sexual urges. Chazal relates how great sages would burn out their eyes rather than look at a beautiful woman. They further state that a person must choose death over gazing at an unclothed woman. Indeed, Chazal relates stories of people sinning sexually and attempting suicide or dying out of remorse and embarrassment. These ethe create a culture that prizes sexual “purity,” and the ideal Jewish man is one who maintains an iron grip over his “animal self,” particularly his sexual appetite.
The problem with this approach is that it is rooted in a ridiculous fantasy, more fantastical and out of touch with reality than the ramblings of Ron L. Hubbard or Rabbi Zamir Cohen. Human beings are sexual beings, and our experience with sexuality represents a considerable part of what it means to be human. For most of us, from the moment we hit puberty until we die, sex will play an ever-present role in our lives. Human beings cannot control the presence of sexual thoughts or desires in our minds, nor can we control the manner and form these desires manifest within ourselves.
How Judaism Hyper-Sexualizes Men
A healthy person understands and embraces their sexual nature. Of course, self-control is important to a functioning life, and in a sex-positive environment, a person learns to control how they express their sexuality with themselves and others based on principles of consent, self-respect, and human dignity. They learn to love every part of themselves. If a person feels sexually out of control, they seek help from trained professionals to understand their behavior and learn cognitive tools to combat their sexual impulsivity to better live in harmony with themselves. Despite sexuality being an indelible part of the human condition, it is perfectly possible to contextualize and integrate this aspect of ourselves into a balanced life that pays homage to all parts of who we are.
But Judaism does not take this sex-positive approach, rather in response to the reality of sexual arousal, Judaism reacts with a childish insistence on repression – repress, repress, repress!!! Yet, suppressing such an unavoidable element of the human condition is an exercise in futility, one doomed to backfire badly. Indeed, backfire it does. The “pure,” kedusha’dick Jewish man wishing to live an ideal Jewish life according to the Ratzon Hashem does everything in his power to suppress his sexual thoughts and desires, yet this leads to a cascade of disasters:
First, we, as young Jewish men become hyper-sexually aware in our battle to fight our lusts. Everything about women becomes sexualized. Anything and everything associated with sex send us into a frenzied battle with ourselves. Of course, we are told not to look at or engage with women and to the best of our ability, we attempt to follow that dictum. We remove our glasses when entering Manhattan to avoid looking at the billboards. We do not engage in pleasant or excessive conversation with women at the Shabbos table. We filter our phones and do not read novels or watch material that contains even the mildest form of sexual expression. (Many Frum families do not even allow a computer or smartphone inside their home, out of fear of pornography. To fully understand how bonkers these restrictions on technology can get, consider the fact that the Double Take feature in last week's Mishpacha magazine centered on a story of a man living in Israel who refused to allow his baby to be exposed to Zoom on a neighbors computer, in order to allow his dying grandfather in America a chance to see his grandson before he died.)
But the efforts of the ideal Frum man go much further. Halacha encourages us to avoid activities such as watching animals, even insects, mate, looking at women's clothing, riding on another man’s shoulders, sleeping on our back or stomach, touching our penis without a thick cloth barrier when we urinate or shower, riding an animal without a saddle, or shaking a woman’s hand. Why is all this necessary and mandated? Because, in our battle to avoid sexual thoughts, we have over-sexualized all our experiences and interactions. The ugly truth is that Klal Yisroel is not a “pure” nation – Klal Yisroel is a nation of people who are over-obsessed with sex, a nation of people who are maladapted and not at peace with themselves, a nation of people who are repulsed and terrified of a part of themselves that they cannot escape.
Of course, asking us to avoid our biological reality by not looking or thinking about anything that might trigger a sexual thought is doomed to fail. And, as expected, we fail. Try as we might, we fantasize about sex, and like almost all primates, we masturbate and find our minds full of “sinful” thoughts. The more we try to repress our sexuality, the crazier we make ourselves, and our behavior becomes unhealthier. Our lives become full of guilt, shame, and “dark secrets” as we continually fail to live up to the ideals of Kedushah and purity expected of us. We hate ourselves and view ourselves as polluted and dirty for our thoughts and actions.
Perhaps the worst impact of the constant cycle of trying to control our sexuality yet failing each time is that it creates an incredible sense of helplessness, infantilization, and lack of control. The message we internalize from the time we are teenagers is that, unlike tzadikim, we cannot control our impulses – the yetzer harah is too strong. We fight and fail, we do teshuva and cry and beg Hashem for help, yet we fail again. This creates a sense of loss of agency that many Jewish men carry their entire lives. I have spoken to Frum men who, long after they are married, watch pornography, frequent sex workers, commit infidelity, and sexually act out in various harmful ways – all because life has taught them the painful lesson that, to quote the Borg, resistance is futile. Judaism tasks its men with a mission that they were doomed to fail and, as a consequence, creates a generation of people who view their sexuality as something out of their control.
Furthermore, the hyper-focus that Frum men give to anything sexual is projected onto the outside world. From the Frum gaze, the streets are full of hedonistic sex-crazed people. They assume that the non-Jewish world is a place full of drugs, strip clubs, rock and roll, and orgies. Frum people also assume that anyone who goes OTD (Off the Derech) must have left the community to indulge their sexual urges. (This flawed approach to understanding why people leave the community has a long history. Chazal already reduced people who leave into a simplistic binary: people who leave to indulge in sin, and those who leave to anger God.) One of the most common posts on the OTD Facebook group are women relating stories of Frum men (or OTD men who recently left the community) propositioning them for sex because they assume that anyone not religious must be, de facto, DTF (Down To ****).
Of course, oversexualizing the outside world is entirely a product of projection on the part of Frum men. America’s attitude towards sex is complicated and continually evolving. 2022 is not 1960 and people who grow up in a healthy and sex-positive atmosphere can explore their sexuality without it overtaking their lives. Young people are having less sex than ever before, and the picture our Mashgiach painted of the outside world is entirely a product of his repressed sexual urges.
The Cost of Tznius
Until now we have discussed how Judaism’s ill-conceived attitude towards sexuality hurts men, but the greatest victims of this cultural necrosis are women. There are layers to the damage we inflict on women, and it is worth teasing them out.
First, because the men in Klal Yisroel are trained to become hyper-aware and hyper-focused on their sexual arousal and desires, women are reduced to objects, tempting and dangerous pieces of meat that must be covered, cordoned off, and hidden from lustful eyes. Women must protect men from themselves and must conceal their beauty. Tznious has entered the chat.
When examined objectively, tznius is a brutal, socially constructed engine of misery. How we dress is important and serves as a critical element of our self-perception. For many of us, our sense of confidence and power in this world is tied to the way we perceive our bodies. We rejoice when we look in the mirror and see our body as beautiful, handsome, desirable, and a part of ourselves worthy of respect and pride. When we take care of ourselves and wear clothing that highlights our beauty, we feel magnificent and worthy. Unlike what we were taught in school, people do not wear attractive clothing to attract attention and to be lusted after by the opposite sex; people wear beautiful clothing because looking handsome and attractive makes us feel fearless and powerful and gives us a sense of control and agency in our lives. Yet, in the mad pursuit of helping men tamp down on their tiavaos, Frum women are robbed of the power and joy of confidently presenting themselves as they go out in the world.
It is not an accident that the greatest forces and energy in tznius are centered on hiding a woman’s hair. Multiple studies show an explicit collation between a person’s sense of confidence and self-esteem and the ability to present to the world with good hair. Yet, Ashkenazi women must cover their hair, Chassidic women must double cover their hair with a snood on top of their wig, and many Chassidic women are forced to shave their hair entirely. Wig sellers routinely meet resistance from rabbonim and rebbetzins when they attempt to market innovations that make it difficult to distinguish wigs from natural hair. [See images below.]
Aside from covering their hair, Frum women are indoctrinated to hide their bodies. This covering includes far more than avoiding modern American clothing. It includes covering their collarbones, wearing dresses four inches below the knees, not wearing clothing too red or too colorful, and generally being instructed to treat their bodies - not as a source of unabashed and shameless joy and pride, but as something to be covered up and hidden from sight. This tznius campaign starts when children are terrifyingly young, long before they have any concept of sexuality or are capable of understanding why they are being told to cover their bodies.
But of course, insisting that women cover their bodies is not enough. To fully insulate the men of Klal Yisroel from tiavas noshim, women are forced to make themselves as small a presence as possible. Because a woman’s mere existence is triggering for Frum men, Judaism has relegated women to an entirely passive role in Yiddishkeit. Chazal teaches us that a man merits the next world by learning Torah and doing mitzvot. Conversely, a woman earns her portion in the next world by waiting for their husbands to return from the bais midrash and by sending their male children off to school. A woman’s place is at the doorpost, pining for her husband and children to return home so she can serve them.
But women are crushed and silenced even more. They cannot sing to an audience of men lest their voices arouse the men listening. They cannot daven from the amud. Walls must be erected to ensure that they cannot be seen in shul by men. They cannot give shiurim or share their Torah insights with men. They cannot serve as witnesses or judges. They cannot dance on Simchas Torah or get drunk on Purim – they must sit quietly and watch supportively on the sidelines. Women cannot be leaders, teachers, or rabbonim for men. They cannot be English teachers in boys' schools. They cannot be a member of the Moetzes Gedolei HaTorah. Their faces cannot be published in magazines. They are erased. [See images below.]
Lest you think that this lack of representation does not matter, consider how easy it would be for the Gedolim to entirely prevent the shidduch crisis. In 2004, Rav Shmuel Birnbaum and the American gedolim met to figure out what to do about the shidduch crisis. Even back then, it was clear to everyone in the room that the cause of the crisis was created by the age gap between dating men and women. This age gap was artificially created when American Roshi Yeshiva decided to start sending their students off to Eretz Yisroel for a year or two before returning to America and beginning dating. The Gedolim, all men, decided that, although the shidduch crisis was decimating the women in Klal Yisroel, it was simply too unreasonable to force the men to skip and lose out on the Eretz Yisroel experience, as those years were deemed "too vital" for creating a generation of Bnai Torah. I am completely convinced that if the situation was reversed, and men were the ones suffering, the shidduch crisis would have been solved before the first Moetzes meeting was over.
With the erasure of women comes a loss of power. If women cannot be seen, they cannot lead or take control. A woman cannot be assertive or forceful without being seen, and leadership and power require asserting one’s presence. Yet, Frum men balk at the concept of existing in spaces where a woman’s presence is clearly felt. At a Shabbos table, a woman does not sit at the head of the table; the man sits at the head of the table and makes kiddush for everyone. Quibbling over who sits at the head of the table may feel petty, but it is very relevant – it creates a symbolic power dynamic that colors the entire relationship. If women cannot be singers or askanim or rabbonim or chazzonim or gedolim, then they cease to have a voice in all the communal spaces where having a voice matter. They cannot even be given the responsibility or trust to examine each other's bloody underwear – no, that job is reserved for the Rabbi. Until incredibly recently, women had no communal space to exert their presence – they were relegated to the kitchen and the laundry room. Men make every critical decision in Klal Yisroel because tznius culture has forced women to fold in on themselves and become invisible.
But there is a deeper layer to all this. To a Frum yeshiva man who has never learned to appropriately interact with women, women are not really people at all. Women are exotic creatures whose entire value and humanity are stripped and reduced to the chemical reactions they trigger inside a man’s brain. When a Frum man interacts with an attractive woman, he does not see a person; instead, all the alarms go off in his head, screaming danger and drawing the bulk of his focus on the arousal he feels and the need to control his hirhurim. The woman standing in front of him is reduced to a thirst trap, making it difficult for Frum men to recognize all the dimensions of her humanity that exist past her appearance. [See images below for various snippets into how Frum men end up viewing women given this background.]
The Cost of Silence
Because Frum culture has created so much angst and distress regarding sexual arousal, the topic of sex is verboten and taboo. No one sits down with their tween and explains the facts of life to them. Sex is just not a topic that comes up in a frum household. Even the word “sex” is banned and not spoken. (Astonishingly, the IAmAMother forum, a place where many (rather open-minded, internet-connected), Frum women seek advice from each other, has a rule forbidding the use of the word “sex” or talking about sex explicitly.) Without a clear framework for learning about reproduction or sex, young boys and girls learn about sex through (1) porn consumption, (2) osmosis from their friends, or (3) not at all.
This state of imposed ignorance may not sound bad to a Frum person, but it is, in fact, damaging. The most obvious victims of this silence are “rebellious” teenagers who experiment with sexual activity before they get married. These young men and women are woefully uneducated, and they do not know anything about STDs, safe sex, the importance of consent, and how to minimize the risk of pregnancy. Often this ignorance continues even after marriage. (I once spoke to a married Frum man who regularly sought out and had sex with other Frum men before returning home to his wife. Other than a vague idea about the existence of AIDS, this man was utterly ignorant regarding the risk of contracting an STD and passing it on to his wife.)
But the damage of this ignorance goes deeper. For many men, their primary exposure to discussions regarding sex comes from learning Gemara. Despite being a legalistic text, Shas is incredibly explicit, [see many examples here] and as a 14-year-old yeshiva guy, I could spend weeks talking about all sorts of sexually graphic topics. Developing one’s framework to understand sex from learning the works of Chazal is a terrible idea; first, consent is noticeably absent in these conversations. The discussions in Chazal revolve around men performing acts on women and the legal implications of those acts. Secondly, as an unfortunate byproduct of being a legal text, Chazal often discusses the experience of adults having sex with minors, often in with disturbing imagery. I am convinced that the normalization of pedophilia in Chazal has had had a deleterious effect on Frum men who spend all day learning Gemara.
But the Frum community’s decision to pretend that sex does not exist until marriage has a far more dangerous effect. This artificial silence leaves Frum children and teenagers far more susceptible to abuse than otherwise. Children and teenagers are robbed of a vocabulary to understand sex, leaving them unable to recognize dangerous or inappropriate activity. [See the image below of a woman relating that a girl in her kallah class did not even know that she had a vagina.]
The vulnerability of our children to predators goes further. Many children who are sexually abused don't tell anyone, especially their parents. The overwhelming reason for children staying quiet is because abusers manipulate children to feel shame and embarrassment for their abuse. Children, especially young teenagers, are scared that they will get in trouble with their parents and that they are somehow complicit in the actions that have been done to them. This shame and fear of getting in trouble are compounded in Frum environments where there is no space to create an environment of transparency, positivity, lack of judgment, or trust over sexual issues. (As an aside, it is very possible that a number of the Lubavitcher Rebbeim were molested by their caretaker, see the research on this topic here.) It is a tragedy that when a pedophile targets a child for grooming, Yiddishkeit has already done most of the work for them.
I once met someone who was abused by an older bochur for his entire high school experience. The idea of talking about his older “friend” with his father, a respected Rosh Yeshiva was a terrifying prospect. Knowledge of the abuse only came to light when this person began emotionally falling apart as he got closer to marriage. Predators are cunning and manipulative, they explicitly play on the young teenager’s fear that their parents will react badly and blame them for the abuse. The only way to combat these tactics is by creating an environment of safety, trust, and transparency. It is incredibly difficult to create such an environment within the toxic background of shame and fear regarding sex that exists in the Frum community.
(I cannot leave a discussion regarding how the Frum community’s addled stance towards sex enables pedophiles and abusers without mentioning another horrific blow that Frumkeit inflicts on child safety, namely, the outsized public and explicit value that Jewish law places female virginity. Judaism inherited the ancient obsession with the importance of an intact female hymen, and a woman’s kesubah is cut in half if she loses her virginity. The Torah relates the famous law of the elders examining the sheets for blood after the husband claims his bride has been previously “deflowered.” If blood is not found, the woman is stoned to death at the doorstep of her father. Chazal discuss all sorts of ways they could test a woman’s virginity – having her sit on a barrel of wine, etc. The truth is that the whole idea of virginity is a myth. But for a Frum girl, especially a young and vulnerable teenager, the stigma of being a "used kali" is a potent weapon in the hands of an abuser.
Imagine how difficult and awkward it would be for you to describe your latest sexual encounter with your partner to your parents. Now imagine being a young teenager telling her deeply religious parents that she had sex with an older man and is no longer a virgin. Not only must this girl face the disappointment and pain of her parents, but Yiddishkeit also forces her to disclose her abuse to every potential partner she dates once she enters shidduchim. The fear of this future can paralyze a girl into silence, a fact easily exploited by predators. Men do not share this stigma.)
We need to teach our children about sex in an age-appropriate manner, especially when they reach the age of puberty and begin their sexual development. We need to create environments of safety, and those environments can only exist if sex is treated without shame or repulsion. But Yiddishkeit has tied its hands behind its back by making sex terrifying and dangerous. This leaves Frum people with only one option, to insist that children and young adults remain “pure” and “innocent.” The attendant consequences of this fantasy are far-reaching.
The last harm that I will mention that stems from Yiddishkeit depriving their youth of knowledge of human sexuality is that this approach paves the way for “otherizing” and vilifying LGBT people. From the clueless and cloistered perspective of young Frum men and women, liberals, feminists, and “mischav zechurniks,” can be reduced to raving masses of evil baali taavia, a bloodthirsty mob intent on turning the world into Sodom.
The only way to break stereotypes and create empathy and respect for members of a group is to interact with individual members of that group and recognize that they too are people, just like me and you. It is so easy to hate a group that you do not know, a group that is reduced and abstracted and caricatured until they are cartoonish monsters.
Frum culture cannot recognize sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage, and as such, there is no safe or feasible way to interact with members of the LGBT community in a loving or civil manner – to allow Frum people to recognize their humanity. When I talk to a Frum person who expresses hatred towards LGBT people, I pity them. Their hatred is so primitive and simplistic – these people have never (knowingly) interacted with an LGBT person and their hatred is just an ugly byproduct of the cage that Frum people imprison themselves within.
Conclusion
I am saddened and horrified that Frum mothers in New York must enter shoe stores with the Kol Kevudah poster prominently displayed, reminding these mothers that they are objects, not people. This may be difficult to believe but I love Klal Yisroel. I believe that Judaism possesses incredible beauty and Chazal were astonishingly wise. But our approach to sexuality is deeply flawed. We try to repress and ignore a part of ourselves, rather than learning to seek peace within ourselves and embrace every part of who we are. This misguided approach causes us to hurt the women of Klal Yisorel, robbing them of their voice and place in the community. We also leave our children vulnerable to abuse by suffocating them in a cocoon of ignorance and fear. I know we can do better.