“In the state religious school system there’s a time of the year that I call the ‘papilloma season,'” says Michal Prins, who studies sexuality among the religiously observant, referring to a virus commonly spread via sexual activity. “Every year, an announcement arrives from school about the possibility of being vaccinated against it and suddenly social media is flooded with discussions about ‘whether to be vaccinated,’ ‘what does being vaccinated say about girls if they are not engaging in sexual relations in any case?’ ‘Why now?’ Go try to tell them how it works. There is a great deal of silence around it.
“Today, if a boy and a girl sleep with each other, they won’t have any knowledge about how to protect themselves, and sometimes they will also not realize that they need to protect themselves. Furthermore, the army will underwrite up to two abortions for female soldiers, but what happens if a girl doing National Service [a civilian alternative to military service for secular and religious girls] becomes pregnant? There’s no funding in that case, and the girl has a serious problem if it happens, because from the outset there is no recognition that such a possibility even exists. So as a society, it’s incumbent upon us to want information about sexual relations and contraceptives to be open and accessible.”
Dr. Prins, 40, a social worker and a bridal counselor, has for years been engaged in slaughtering an assortment of sacred cows relating to sexuality in Israel’s Orthodox community. She founded Merkaz Yahel: The Center for Jewish Intimacy while pursuing her master’s degree in the Department of Gender Studies at Bar-Ilan University, in 2011. The nonprofit’s aim, according to its website, “is to address sexuality and intimacy in the context of Judaism and the Jewish community,” by means of educational activities as well as personal counseling. Prins went on to complete her doctorate at Bar-Ilan, and wrote her dissertation about the sexuality of religious women. In her recently published book, “Simply to Want,” (Hebrew) and in a podcast, she fearlessly addresses a number of burning issues affecting religious society, among them what she sees as its defective sex education, the prohibition against touching between the sexes, and the connection between religion and feminism. As such, Prins is helping to foment a general wave of sexual awakening which for some time has been washing over the entire community – no less than a genuine upheaval, in her view.
“For the past decade, we have been undergoing nothing less than a religious feminist revolution,” she says, during an interview at a coffee shop in Givatayim. “Until 10 years ago there was no talk at all about sexuality in our society. The only three venues where it could be discussed were a classroom conversation with the nurse in the sixth grade, in a lesson on the Oral Law of the Torah in 12th grade dealing with intimate relations, and in bridal counseling, in which the subject might or might not be addressed with openness. Other than that – nothing. Socially, it was considered a subject that’s not to be touched, where modesty prevails, with the approach being, ‘After the wedding, you’ll already know what to do, it’ll be fine.’
“But a decade ago, the earth started to tremble” Prins continues. “A [Hebrew] Facebook group was formed called ‘I’m a religious feminist woman, and I also have no sense of humor.’ Within a year it had almost 20,000 female and male followers, involved in incredibly deep discussions. It brought about a very significant shift in the discourse, including about sexuality, and I sprang up within that.”
‘The absent body’
“For many years I described my adolescence as years without a body. While asleep or awake, in class and at boarding school, at prayer and in the dining room – there was no body there. After years, I was struck by the memory of the lack of a full-length mirror during all the years in the ulpana [religious high school for girls]… Those are long and critical years in which we didn’t see the body and didn’t live within the body. It’s not the missing knowledge, it’s not that they didn’t talk to us about what perhaps should have been talked about it – it’s the fact that we lived without a body. The body was absent.”
– From “Simply to Want,” by Michal Prins
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“For my doctoral dissertation I interviewed religiously observant women, and suddenly I caught myself and said that it couldn’t be that they were all so upset about this subject,” Prins explains. “Where is the sexuality we were promised? Where is the feeling of being alive? After all, Judaism is very much in favor of this, so why do I keep seeing women with lifeless eyes?”
Excellent question.
“I think that one of the things we don’t say anymore [in a spontaneous way] is ‘I just feel like it (just because)’. When we were young, every time we said ‘I feel like it,’ we were taught to say ‘I want it, please.’ That very basic comment was acculturated, and what’s interesting about the religious-sexual revolution is the ability to say that: I feel like dressing up, taking a vacation, doing a certain job – and, yes, I feel like fulfilling myself in bed, wanting things, enjoying myself. Here’s where a larger question comes in: whether I even know what I want.”
A street in Beit Shemesh, outside Jerusalem. The words on the building at right say: “Women are required to arrive in modest dress.”
That’s a question that cuts across different segments of society.
“We are all consumers of the same culture; we sit in the same cafes, see the same movies. We, religious and secular women, have much more in common than what differentiates us. One thing that’s true of us as women is that in many cases, we feel that we need to satisfy the needs of the other person and we forget our own needs and wants. Women come to me for consultation who have the most accommodating life partner there can be, and with all the latitude to say whatever they want, but they just don’t know what they ‘feel like’ doing, and that freaks them out.
“There is much learning going on here. I become a real dosit [a somewhat derogatory term for a religious person] when I talk about this, but God says to women: You first. You have to enjoy yourself first. We have a singular sex organ whose whole purpose is enjoyment, it has no other function. So God says to us, ‘Excuse me, madam, don’t let them fool you by saying that all women want is a hug and a kiss.’ In the absolute majority of cases, discourse about feminine sexuality will be emotional in nature, and I want to divert the gaze from the emotions and talk about the body. Women also want to and can enjoy themselves, but we also need to know how to enjoy, because that’s something we’re not taught. So you don’t have to come – we’re not running after an orgasm – but women must acquire the knowledge of how it happens.”
You write in your book: “The description of the gift of intimacy between a Jewish couple is apt for certain couples, but less so for others… The problem is that many times this description is the only one there is and the only possibility that’s talked about… At the moment of truth, the couple who married and whose life situation is more complicated, find themselves facing the Jewish-romantic story and feeling that something is not right with them, not right in the body and not right in terms of commitment to halakha [religious law]… A woman who doesn’t like to immerse herself [in a ritual bath], a man who gets uptight ahead of the transition to the permitted period [during which religious women may have sexual intercourse], a woman who chooses to use contraceptives.” Those are quite radical statements, aren’t they? Are such things talked about openly?
“We live in a culture of silencing, and we must break through that silencing, because it is simply hurtful. The script in religious society includes very specific practices and standards that are bound to halakha, but that’s not suitable for everyone. If a woman says, for example, that it’s not pleasant for her to maintain family-purity laws, that she doesn’t like the encounter with the attendant at the ritual bathhouse, doesn’t like being touched, doesn’t like having the hair removed from her back, doesn’t like entering the water uncovered in the attendant’s presence, doesn’t like the attendant saying to her, ‘May you have good news,’ in the expectation that she will become pregnant – if this is not pleasant for her and her relationship is ruined because of it, what do you do? Does the halakhic world succeed in accommodating such a complex story, or does it say: Well, this is a very individual case and we will be hush-hush about it, without recognizing that there are thousands like her? Can we even change the halakha? Those are questions that are now getting greater publicity.
“On the other hand, I took part not long ago in a discussion with two rabbaniot [rabbis’ wives] who deal with halakha. They related that women with a complex story would come to them and they gave them a response, but the next day those women would comment in a public discussion on Facebook and say that the rabbanit provided a different decision. Tension exists between personal and public decisions, and generates a great deal of anger and distrust, so we are in a very delicate dynamic here, one that didn’t exist when we grew up in the 1990s, for example. And those rabbaniot also have to be careful. It’s complicated.”
‘Palpable reality’
“Piles of words are spilled out during adolescence about the prohibition on touching [isur negiah; shunning any physical contact with members of the opposite sex]… Observing this prohibition before marriage will ensure the sought-after thrill afterward. Observing it until there is the right man at the right moment (after the wedding) is what will ensure the eternal nature of the relationship for the couple. Men and women who do not observe the prohibition will mar the relationship which could have developed in a healthy and level-headed way… Touching, desire, curiosity, the natural place at which the body seeks the closeness of another body – these do not receive a place in our culture.”
– “Simply to Want”
An illustrative image of school girls in Jerusalem.
In the second episode of the Israeli documentary series “Erim” (“Awake”), in which men talk about their sexuality, a religiously observant man related that when he met the woman who would later become his wife, they went together to the Sinai [peninsula], where they touched each other’s bodies and did everything except for full intercourse. He ejaculated on her stomach and she lay there, spread-eagled. Something about his description jolted me, and I didn’t understand exactly what it was. I sometimes think about what made it so unpleasant for me – whether it was the fact that the man was religious, the knitted kippa that I found incompatible with the openness and the graphic description, or something in his body language.
“I am being very careful here with my words, and I see that I am getting tangled up while talking about this,” Prins says, very uneasily. In the book she refers to the prohibition on touching, but in the interview, face to face, she asked for time to think about whether to include certain comments in the article, or to leave them off the record. But then, just before I stopped recording her she decided to open up and speak.
“There is an intermediate stage,” she explains, “between the moment the couple knows they are going to be married and the wedding night, when the relationship is stable, a strong commitment exists, but no one offers a scenario of what they should do in the in-between phase.
“The prohibition on touching exists, but during this period the body says it wants something more powerful, and a great many couples do touch. The fact that there is no social scenario that says what the main goal is, what they ‘should’ do, creates a special attentiveness to what they truly want, what they find pleasant. No one talks about this, but it is a very palpable reality, and it is terribly interesting, because it does something to the relationship, and it’s a stage that is unique to religious society. Think of a woman who doesn’t need to be in a rush to have sexual intercourse by the book or according to a particular sexual scenario. In that situation she has a great deal of space to discover her own sexuality, and it’s a wonderful period. And then, if after the wedding she’s stuck and feels no desire, it’s enough for me as a consultant to ask if she remembers how it was before the wedding, and she will smile from ear to ear, and then I can tell her that, there you go, she is capable of enjoying herself and there is nothing wrong with her.”
One of the topics that deeply bothers the religious community in Israel is the “single problem” – more religious men and women who are deciding to postpone their marriage to an older age.
“That is a topic that disturbs and preoccupies us, as a society, and within it you have the sexual issue, which is also silenced over the years. A situation is created in which unmarried men and women can study, travel, develop a career, but sexually they will remain in the same place they were in when they finished 12th grade. The social expectation is that there will be no sexuality until the wedding, and there is a vacuum here that the religious community avoids entering, and even more – avoids talking about.”
This is where the identity crises occur: which am I more, a religious person or a sexual person?
“Exactly. Ultimately, I have a religious identity to which I am committed, and I want to be part of the religious community, but in parallel I also have a sexual and physical identity, and it’s a big question, how do I sustain both of those identities together. There is a broad phenomenon of people leaving Orthodoxy because of that being in the background, or of singles who decide that they are observant except with respect to this particular aspect. It is a discourse that is alive and kicking in the internal religious-singles world, but in the public domain it’s not talked about. You won’t find discussions about this on social media.”
With gender also playing a central role here.
“There is a broader cultural matter here. If I am religious and decide to ‘get rid of the burden of virginity,’ what will people think of me? And if a man hasn’t done that by a certain age, people might think that ‘something is wrong with him,’ and that women won’t want to go out with him. In this case, the man has a lot more legitimacy to go ahead and do it. But what about women – don’t they need sexual contact? And if she does it, is she cheap? This is a discussion that touches on what we, as a society, perceive as feminine and masculine, and here too the silencing has to be breached.”
A traditional dance at a Hasidic wedding.
In the book you talk about a gender gap also in the context of the need for sex.
“No one talks about the fact that different men have different degrees of sexual desire. The media, and films, always somehow present men as having strong desire all the time; that they have urges and aren’t capable of controlling their passion. But when I talk with men I see that although they have desires, and also sometimes strong ones, that still doesn’t mean they will do something to their partner that she doesn’t want. In contrast, when a woman is sitting across from me, she will say that her partner has an urge, and that if she does not satisfy it, he will cheat on her.
“Even if such a thing was never mentioned between them, and they have a wonderful relationship, it is boiling up beneath the surface. Because that’s how we were educated: That men are rapists who can’t control themselves, that we must not walk alone in the dark, that we need to dress modestly so we won’t be raped. And amid all this, the issue of modesty also stands out, and that modesty, too, will always surface in terms of the male gaze vis-a-vis the female body.”
Many of my secular friends, and I myself, are liable to be seized by real panic when they hear religious people talk about modesty, about its various aspects. From wearing shorts to gender separation in academia and separate swimming areas.
“The story of girls not wearing shorts actually started in a state [secular] school, not a religious one. I don’t understand the apprehension, and I will certainly not decide what others should do.”
Yes, but the people who represent you in the Knesset, and who have clout, think differently.
“You know, on the way to this interview I passed through the mall here, and saw a girl of about 10 standing with a seductive look opposite her father, who was photographing her in all kinds of poses. Exactly the same scrutinizing look of someone who is looking at our body – and that is the opposite of educating toward modesty. I can tell you that today, if I speak with my daughters about modesty, it will no longer be the modesty of the length of one’s skirt, even though there is definitely talk about that, too. It will be a conversation of: Did you go to the beach, did you have your picture taken and did you post a picture on social media? From the moment that picture left the seashore, what you were wearing will also not remain there.
“I think that we’ve become a little confused today, and we don’t know how to define exactly what freedom is. On the one hand, there is an illusion of progress, but in the end it’s worth asking what we achieved by this and what viewpoint it serves. Did we really achieve sexual development, which in my eyes says connection to myself and attentiveness to what is good and pleasant for me, or is it like a drug that preserves the old patriarchy?”
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