Jewish Sex: A New Look At An Old Act
by Rebecca Honig Friedman
That’s the headline of the new issue of 614: an HBI Zine, produced in partnership with Jewcy, and it’s a hot one:
Who knew there were Yiddish lesbian poems published in the last century? Or that teen girls were giving oral sex as a gift to bar mitzvah boys? Or that the mikvah could be considered part of erotic foreplay?
Who indeed? I certainly didn’t know about the oral-sex-bar-mitzvah-gift phenomenon, and frankly, I’m sorry I do now. From Shulamit Reinharz’s article, “Sex and the Suburbs”:
…this practice is so rampant that the Reform Jewish movement has taken it on as a national policy concern. … Rabbi Eric Yoffie, President of the Union for Reform Judaism, addressed 4,200 people in Houston for its biennial convention and explicitly talked about oral sex and hooking up. Bravo, Rabbi Yoffie. For him the issue was that girls are “defining their worth by how they please boys.” The degradation of girls flies in the face of the Reform Movement’s dedication to the equality of women, he said.
The implication is, then, that boys are not being as giving with bat mitzvah gifts to their female peers, thus confirming that they are guilty not only of degrading girls but also of ignoring basic rules of etiquette.
If that’s what suburban boys are like, I’m glad I grew up in the city.
Posted on July 24th, 2009 Filed under: Uncategorized |
Wow. You are a rock star. Can you imagine the Hebrew school lesson for the boys? “You might get a bj for your bar mitzvah now that you are a real man. And real men give back, in the form of, uh, going downtown.”
Um, just to clarify, and to avoid potential lawsuits, I don’t think that twelve and thirteen year old boys or girls should be giving each other oral sex. But I do think the imbalance of who is doing it to whom is worth noting.