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THE JEWISH JOURNAL
April, 2002
Sex Ed for Parents
When it comes to your kids, practice what you preach.
By Wendy Mogel
Somewhere in America, a few high school students made a porno video, they said by accident, starring themselves. Whatever it was, a couple of kids were fooling around, and someone else had a camera. They showed the tape in the locker room and what followed was, of course, a big scandal. Somewhere else in America, there was an eighth grade party, Mom or Dad took pictures, and when they came back from the lab, in the background of one of the shots, you could see two partygoers having oral sex near the shrubbery. What upset the parents most was that the students weren’t even trying to hide.
Let’s blame someone. Okay, it’s our commercial culture, the one that pays our bills. No, too close, it’s MTV (unless you work for it) or lascivious billboards or the movies. Let us stand for the declaration of our faith, “Our children are bombarded with overstimulating images, we are powerless to save them from casual, numb, sex.” We try to solve the problem by offering absurdly cold and clinical sex education classes in school using scare tactics and statistics: just one careless drunken act at a party and “YOU”LL DIE FROM AIDS! DEAD, DEAD, DEAD!” At home, when our children ask us about our own histories we stand tall and tell the truth: “Times have changed… the pot wasn’t as strong then… sex wasn’t as dangerous… and I never did anything anyway. There are other ways of having fun.” And then we direct our trophy children to the approved list of acceptable leisure activities; for example, we make them play difficult, bleating musical instruments. In my part of town it’s difficult to rent anything with a double reed because parents push bassoons and oboes on their middle schoolers since offering yourself as first chair oboe is the ticket to Cornell. Ooh, but catch your kid spending her allotted time on the frivolous—a crush, going to the Santa Monica Pier when she said she was staying at her friend’s, getting into the mildest trouble instead of conjugating French—we see all of this as a personal betrayal.
In a discussion about the fallout from the video scandal, I asked the parents about their own sex lives. One mother said, “Sex life? Are you kidding? We’re too tired. We cart the scholar-princes around all afternoon—from practices, to SAT prep, to band rehearsals. Then we come home and fall asleep catatonic by 9 PM.”
We are creating our own ascetism and abstinence through exhaustion and anxiety. And this goes against Jewish law, which has the wisdom to know that to have pleasure you have to learn and practice pleasure, and if we don’t teach this to our children, how will they learn?
Here we find Kahana, in the Talmud, hiding under the bed of Rav, his teacher, because he wanted to learn the right way to make love. Rav and Mrs. Rav went to bed and as the 2000 Year Old Man said about the couple who discovered sex “during the night, they were thrilled and delighted.” Except that they were watched. Kahana was so shocked by what he saw that he poked his head out and scolded Rav, “You appear to me to be like a hungry man who has never had sex before. You act with such frivolity in your lust.” Rav looked down at him and said, “Kahana, get out of here!” Kahana didn’t apologize, “This too is Torah, and I must study!” We don’t know what the rebbetzin said.
I’m not suggesting you leave the bedroom door open, but the air of pleasure has its own energy in a house. In the Mishneh Torah, Maimonides describes the mitzvah of “onah”, a husband must not deny his wife pleasure, in the first year of marriage it’s his responsibility to learn what she likes. The wife has her own obligations to provide pleasure to her husband. She is forbidden to “delay immersing in the mikveh in order to afflict her husband.”
As Rabbi Avraham Friedman writes in his beautiful and profound book, Marital Intimacy: A Traditional Jewish Approach, a full sex life is so important that a husband cannot change careers without his wife’s consent because the change might hurt them in bed. So a camel driver (a convenient but low paying job), can’t become a donkey driver (higher status, better money, but more out-of-town trips) without approval. The higher income is no justification if it damages the couple. “A woman prefers one measure of prosperity, as long as it is accompanied by intimate lightheartedness, to nine measures of material wealth and abstinence,” we read in the Talmud.
In the fallout from our hyperparenting we have failed to make adult life alluring. To many children adulthood looks like no more than an opportunity to resolve complex scheduling conflicts, lose seven days a year standing entirely still in freeway traffic, periodically unfreeze the computer and fall asleep catatonic by 9 PM. In a high school survey, one student recently wrote, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up, but I know what I don’t want to be. I don’t want to be like my mom and dad. They seem so sad and scared and stressed.”
Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, in his book Jewish Wisdom, tells a story about a rabbi who informed his congregation that he was planning a trip to Switzerland. ‘Why Switzerland?’ they asked him. What reason could you have for traveling so far?’ The rabbi replied, ‘I don’t want to meet my maker and have Him say to me, ‘What? You never saw My Alps?’”
So for the sake of your children and their future, set an example. If you want them to play a double reed, play the damn oboe yourself. You need music. And then take your partner and go to your bedroom. Shut the door, and light some candles. Perform a mitzvah. Just remember to turn off the video camera.
April 18, 2002