The Kibbitz
“Jewish teachings have always held that sexuality, and in particular sexual pleasure, is a wife’s privilege and a husband’s responsibility.”
sing. This is a time of uninterrupt- ed union that is incredibly erotic and that we anticipate and savor as we look forward to time outside of time to do nothing but be with each other and bring the full kavanah to it. That’s not the purpose of observing Shabbat. But if that happens to work out, isn’t that wonderful? What are some of the differences between how people talk about sex within contemporary culture versus how they experience it in private? So in terms of contemporary culture in general, it’s the fact that there’s such a discrepancy between the os- tensible openness about sexuality in the public domain and the inability to talk about sexuality openly in the private domain that keeps me in busi- ness. In the 1950s, when public dis- cussion about sexuality was more ta- boo, if people had sexual problems they figured everybody else did too. They didn’t like it, but they proba- bly didn’t think it was the end of the world, and they were going to some- how grit their teeth and make their way through it. In 2024, everybody as- sumes, based on the discourse in the public domain, that everybody else is having great sex except for them. They feel, Oh no, I’m not keeping up with the Joneses, I’m not having enough sex, I’m not having sex with the same frequency as everybody else, my sex doesn’t always seem easy and effort- less, it doesn’t always end in orgasm. They walk into my office filled with shame and feeling defective. The first thing I need to do is deal with their sense of alienation from what they perceive as everyone else’s wonder- ful sex life. I have documented that really won- derful sex will require effort. It shouldn’t feel like work if you’re doing it right, but it does require a measure of de-
potentials and become the lovers that they only glimmered that they might be earlier on was generally some- where in their 50s. That was true for the older, partnered people and for the kinky, consensually non-monog- amous LGBTQIA+ people, etc. They all needed to have had a measure of devotion in order to fulfill their po- tentials as lovers. And that meant that they learned from each experience. I remember one participant saying that even the bad experiences are worth learning from. What are some lessons that the Jewish community can learn from other faith traditions that are sur- prising? Is there something that Anglicans or Muslims can teach Jews about great sex? No. In 2013, my research team at the University of Ottawa wrote an arti- cle saying that optimal sexual expe- riences are virtually identical, regard- less of the demographic background of the participants. We all glow in the dark identically. There’s an assump- tion that men and women are fun- damentally different sexually, or that old people or young people are fun- damentally different sexually, or that people who are kinky versus people who are vanilla are fundamentally dif- ferent sexually, or that people who are LGBTQIA+ are fundamentally differ- ent from people who are heterosexu- al. Our research has found quite the opposite. What our research has discovered is that, regardless of the stereotypes, the fundamental character of wonder- ful, memorable—what we call “opti- mal sexual experiences” — are indis- tinguishable regardless of the back- ground of the participant.
votion, of intentionality, like anything else that’s worth experiencing in life. I think the word that summarizes all of this from a Jewish perspective and was used occasionally by some of our participants who happened to be religiously observant Jews was kavanah [intention to perform a mitz- vah ]. It’s about the way we transform something that could be mundane into something that could be tran- scendent. In my research, one of the ques- tions we sought to answer is: How does one become an extraordinary lover? We literally asked: Were you born this way? Were you born under a lucky star? How did this happen? All of the people we interviewed, re- gardless of background, cracked up laughing at the question because it wasn’t something that happened nat- urally, it wasn’t something that hap- pened spontaneously. It was some- thing that took years of intentionality and effort; the average age at which people started to fulfill their erotic
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
28 SPRING 2025
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