SEX: PROFESSIONALS AND LAY PEOPLE
NEILSHISTER
SEX: PROFESSIONALS AND LAY PEOPLE NEIL SHISTER Friday afternoon is normally a hectic time at The Pleasure Palace, a massage parlor on Manhattan's Lower East Side. But when I dropped in a few...
...The women, though, feel that it's wrong to touch the penis...
...The fullest awareness of God in the other person," Greenberg replied...
...Sexual literature and pornography," Talese believes, "are the most radical kind of literature...
...And I got a strong sense of the obligation of service to others from my Judaism...
...none is a virgin...
...It is also about millions of people gobbling up scores of self-help books, articles in respectable magazines, and other forms of guidance, therapy, advice...
...I think they must have a very straight, clean sex life...
...for all the inevitable junk in the field, there is quite evidently a genuine yearning for information, not to satisfy prurient urges, but to answer long-repressed questions...
...The Jews aren't macho...
...She and the others in the group reject the random assignations that characterize much of the singles' culture...
...They are on their way to dinner with friends...
...Neil Shister, a free-lance author, wrote "A Tale of Two Butchers" for our September issue...
...Reems is ruggedly handsome, introspective, an aspiring novelist and, these days, an actor with serious dramatic intentions...
...Sex surely has the capacity to be religiously meaningful—perhaps even sex between unmarried people—but such meaning depends on a sense of specialness, of mystery...
...Some people feel that Judaism produces sexual blocks, while others believe that it gives them a foundation for a more satisfying sex life...
...And Jews, it turns out, have also been willing to risk their personal freedom to make the public case for sexual freedom...
...The masseuses (four women in their early twenties) were lolling about, watching reruns of "I Love Lucy" and "Leave It to Beaver," drinking coffee, smoking...
...And it screws up their whole lives...
...She couldn't bring herself to say 'necking,' so she always told me, 'don't parlor date!' I got to the point where even holding hands would make me feel guilty...
...And while neither would claim that sexuality is a direct alternative to Judaism, they share the sense that the two are mutually exclusive...
...One of the things that led to the organization of the Chavurah movement was the absence, within organized Judaism, of any place for the unmarried young adult...
...Talese explains all this in terms of politics...
...I would tell my mother that I was in "junk movies," but I never let on the real nature of what I was up to...
...The gay community has its own places for sexual encounter, and almost no sexual proclivity is unattended...
...There are considerable risks that the journey will bruise, even wound, but there are also possibilities for extraordinary adventure, and even growth...
...And, for those to whom Judaism matters, the question of whether one can live a genuine religious life while "enjoying" the casual and uncommitted sexuality of the new era is a central question...
...Patients come to Pauline Abrams for a variety of reasons...
...Similarly, sex is pro- scribed during drunkenness, since love must be conscious...
...Most likely, Jews are not very different from others in their range of response...
...Reems and Abrams represent an extreme point on the sexual spectrum...
...There appears to be a direct correlation between involvement with commercial sex and rejection of religion...
...It does not wrench their souls to have sex in the context of a devel- oping relationship, but maintaining a sexual relationship does impose certain ethical requirements...
...How you feel about morality and about your rights to pleasure will often dictate what you do sexually...
...Being a Jew, says Goldstein, means being committed to honesty...
...Sex was never a taboo subject in his home, and it was his uncle, providing his own girl friends for the occasion, who initiated the young Goldstein into the rites of sex...
...I would be stopping all the time to analyze the moral consequences of what I was doing...
...A kind of wide-eyed innocence had led Ginzburg to publish artistic renderings of female nudes and excerpts from classics of pornography...
...And we never realized how frightened of sex the goyim are and how repressed they could be...
...That may be why those who have crossed the line, who have immersed themselves totally in the new sexuality, have seen their identification as Jews slip away...
...casual sex is not, in the main, their bag...
...The people in the Chavurah movement seek a genuine synthesis between the tradition and their sense of themselves as modern people...
...for the judge, this was perversion...
...We were tremendously rebellious," she remembers, "and sex was a way of acting out that rebellion...
...One of my customers told me that it took him two years to get his wife to do it...
...Pleasure," one told me, "is certainly an important aspect of life...
...In looking to herself, however, she finds limits and boundaries which she traces directly to her religious priciples...
...For traditional sources simply do not provide precedent or guidance for the contemporary sexual situation...
...He is also regarded as a respected teacher by many of the people I visited...
...After a while, I had to admit to myself that I was having fun, having a great time, in fact, while I was doing sex scenes...
...They're not very different from the others— except, of course, for the Chas-sidics (sic...
...I see what's there and what I see is real...
...And to think of another woman while lying with one's wife is equivalent to adultery...
...What used to be called the "new morality" is now pretty conventional stuff...
...While sex is not a constant preoccupation for them, as it is with the sex professionals, they are liberated people who feel the need to synchronize their modern sexual understanding with their continuing commitment to Judaism and to Jewish life...
...A sexual union that extends beyond a one-night stand is expected to have a depth of honesty and concern for the spiritual well-being of the other, and these people associate that concern with Judaism...
...Maybe it's a Jewish attitude...
...Tom, the manager, handled the phone, offering the essential information to the occasional caller: nine dollars for a half-hour topless rub, anything extra to be negotiated privately with the girls...
...Jews, pioneers in virtually every significant cultural change in Twentieth Century America, have also been prominent in the sexual revolution...
...This does not mean that they feel that only sex within marriage is compatible with religious faith...
...As men get older, cerebral fantasies don't arouse them very much, and they need direct, physical manipulation...
...Often, the synthesis is elusive...
...Two of the leading litigants have been Ralph Ginzburg (of Eros) and Al Goldstein (of Screw), who have both fought with the authorities to have the First Amendment's guarantee of a free press applied to sexually explicit material...
...All know unmarried couples who live together...
...Religion is responsible for a good deal of sexual dysfunction," says Pauline Abrams...
...SEX: PROFESSIONALS AND LAY PEOPLE NEIL SHISTER Friday afternoon is normally a hectic time at The Pleasure Palace, a massage parlor on Manhattan's Lower East Side...
...We were raised Jewish...
...My trail of inquiry eventually led me to Rabbi Irving Greenberg, an outspoken and thoughtful Orthodox leader who is widely regarded in the Chavurah communities and in liberal Orthodox circles as one of the few flexible and liberal voices within the Orthodox movement...
...Goldstein, whose original investment of $300 in Screw now nets him an annual income of $150,000, has been arrested (at last count) nine times on obscenity charges...
...I am in a helping profession, and for me the essence of religion is service...
...I'm Jewish, and I've gone the whole route...
...Some Jews have embraced the new freedom, and appear to flourish...
...She was 32...
...Once the possibility of awe is lost, so is the possibility of religious experience...
...They stuck to a formula life-style and never really expressed themselves in any form...
...But both are serious people...
...There are many people who think that even if what Goldstein sees is there, it still does not merit publicity or publication...
...I have many Orthodox patients, for example, whose wives don't understand the physiology of the aging male...
...He tells a story of how Lenny Bruce, hounded by the law and near the end of his life, called him one day to lament, "You know what our problem was...
...Of women under 25, fully 95 percent reported having had premarital intercourse, beginning—on the average—at age 18...
...To believe that and to intend, at the same time, to be a religious Jew is not possible...
...But Jews do appear to have a special need to understand the implications of the new sexuality...
...My feelings and perceptions aren't colored by Puritan filters...
...After several weeks of pursuit I finally caught up with Greenberg as he spoke to a college audience on the implications of the Holocaust...
...Business had been slow at The Pleasure Palace for a few days, and Sally, one of the girls, blamed it on the High Holiday season...
...And finally, the inevitable and tiresome climax: "I don't consider myself a Jew," says Harry Reems...
...They want to be pampered...
...In the Jewish view, sex is to be restricted to marriage...
...To us the sexual act is worthy, good, beneficial even to the soul...
...Some have resolved the problem by repudiating their religion...
...The power of sex to bias a relationship towards the physical and to lead one to perceive the other as an object of pleasure frightens many practising Jews who believe that normal human behavior should be invested with religious meaning...
...Yes," Tom says, "a fair number of our customers are Jewish...
...When I first decided to be an actor," Reems recalls, "my mother kept saying, 'oh no, be a doctor!' But when she saw the residual checks I was getting from my first commercial, she changed her mind...
...The promise of the "post-modern" era, with its limitless faith in human freedom and rationality, has led to excesses which, in turn, have led people to a new respect for tradition and form...
...I hated it, having to pray in a language that I didn't understand...
...But when I dropped in a few months back, I found that the bad weather had kept most of the regular customers away...
...While we're talking, Tom's wife—dark-haired, well-groomed, and stylishly dressed—comes to pick him up...
...The tradition seems to take it for granted that a person will marry shortly after puberty, and that sexual questions will somehow be worked out in the context of marriage...
...they want to know what it means before they do it...
...The wise men of the other nations claim that there is disgrace in the sense of touch," wrote the Eighteenth Century sage Rabbi Jacob Emden, "but this is not the view of our Torah...
...Greenberg's wait-and-see approach mirrors the cautious skepticism I heard frequently from Orthodox and Conservative Jews as they appraised the new sexuality...
...It's hard to conceive how a publication could reach any further lows in attempts to appeal to prurient interests," wrote a New York State judge in rendering a conviction (later reversed by the Supreme Court...
...Some feel that Judaism locks people into out-meded life-styles, others hold that it provides necessary limits to an otherwise hedonistic period...
...My loss of belief in God was directly related to sex...
...And to attack the family is to attack the whole social order...
...I think I have a healthy attitude towards sex," he says...
...One positive aspect of the modern temper, Greenberg believes, is its healthy regard for the physical aspects of life...
...regular intercourse is a woman's right and her husband's duty...
...By now, though, she knows—and she never goes to see the films...
...Although she still considers herself an "ethnic Jew," Ms...
...And Nada, the only WASP in the place, adds, "I can always tell if they're Jewish...
...Now a lot of them are getting divorced, and I think it's because they want to go out and get laid, but they don't know how to ask for it...
...I consider myself a human being...
...The Jewish tradition itself can be interpreted, depending on emphasis, as liberated or repressive...
...cracking open the sexual taboos requires the same kind of daring that's needed to argue any unpopular cause, and Jews are masters at unpopular causes, at fighting repression...
...Beginning in 1957 with the landmark Supreme Court case U.S...
...Greenberg, who in his younger days had taken radical positions on sexual questions, now thinks the culture is in a needed period of consolidation...
...The neighborhood is now primarily Hispanic, although some Jews have remained, and there is a yeshiva quite nearby...
...Until I was 20," Reems continued, "I had all sorts of fears, guilts, and blocks about sex...
...She was raised in London in an Orthodox home where Judaism was the focus of the family's life...
...Besides," he added, "the issue is to find out whether the new freedoms actually work...
...Although not Victorian in outlook, they approach sex with reserve and discretion...
...Others want to improve the quality of their sex lives...
...This is surely the most common response of those Jews who are actually in the sex business...
...And a large proportion are Jews...
...Unlike the full-fledged revolutionaries, these people do not see liberated sex as the vanguard of the Messianic era...
...The first, Harry Reems, is quite likely the world's best known male porno movie star...
...Most of the Jewish kids I grew up with in Westchester have gone the accepted route—marriage, family, career...
...Unlike classical Christianity, which placed a premium on celibacy and self-denial, the Jewish view of sex was always positive, and sexual conduct was defined with some precision...
...No consensus emerged out of my interviews...
...The girls find other differences...
...In a community of young Jewish intellectuals and professionals in Manhattan, members of the New York Chavurah come together to form an alternative to the traditional congregation...
...Like many other sexual professionals, Reems now regards religion with disdainful cliches...
...There are more alternatives to choose among than Al Goldstein's anything goes and the yeshiva bocher's repression, nor is Alexander Portnoy's schizophrenic solution the only way of dealing with the two worlds...
...words of tenderness are a prescribed prelude to the sexual act, and intercourse is forbidden during a state of enmity between husband and wife, for under such conditions the act is one of harlotry rather than conjugality...
...there are ways in which the understandings of Judaism and the understandings of the sexual revolution contradict each other...
...Pauline Abrams is a consultant on human sexuality and a sex therapist...
...But there is, as we have also seen, another valid response...
...Sally feels more tension in Jewish bodies, and Lisa remarks on the Jewish preference for oral sex...
...Every month I'd be terrified that I was pregnant, and I'd pray to God, 'If I'm not pregnant I'll never do it again.' Then one day I got a diaphragm and my religious life suddenly ended...
...But to sever the residual restraints of inherited culture and tradition means to believe that the brave new world is already here, that the wisdom of the past is obsolete...
...Jews, they are still the source of considerable tension...
...In an effort to plot the change, Redbook last year undertook a massive survey of American sexual behavior...
...I ended up following her to Puerto Rico and living with her for a year...
...Then I was playing third-banana in a night club and got involved with a Puerto Rican stripper...
...I lost my virginity when I was 22 and started having sex regularly without using contraception...
...Jews, of course, have always been the wanderers on the outside of established society, able to comment critically on its institutions and practices...
...when performed with pure and clean intention it is certainly holy...
...I probably wouldn't be the editor of Screw if I weren't a Jewish boy from Brooklyn...
...That's where I got my sexual education...
...But now, if I had a daughter, I'd tell her to do whatever she felt was appropriate in the situation...
...I even got a death tape with a guy on it yelling how he was going to strangle me because I was so vile, I was corrupting America, and only a Jew could stoop so low...
...the "new sex" fits easily into their world...
...You want to know about Jews and sex...
...With all its laws, I think of religion as a crutch, as something people use to pre-structure reality...
...That's important, Greenberg says, but immediately cautions that "the tradition assumes that authentic sex is possible only in the marriage situation, and the tradition does have a lot going for it...
...I talked at length with Gay Talese, the award-winning journalist who has been working for several years on a much-discussed book about sex in America...
...They seek to develop a sexual ethic that is true to their own needs, both spiritual and physical...
...Sipping coffee in his tastefully decorated office, Goldstein thought about my question regarding his Jewishness...
...For some Jews, taking the plunge into the deepest recesses of the sexual freedom represents a declaration of personal independence...
...While many of these injunctions are unknown to many (most...
...she asks...
...In consequence, one woman told me, "I don't look to Judaism to tell me what to do sexually...
...And all find that sex is the area where traditional Judaism has the least to offer them...
...In fact, it's astonishing for me to meet women now for whom sexual experimentation isn't associated with more general intellectual radicalism...
...But there are moments when the two can come together, and the search for those moments is in itself an exciting exercise in freedom and in growth...
...Est has taken the place of religion for me," she announces...
...Because of his stardom, he lives the life that Alex Portnoy could only dream about...
...She has become involved with est, a new form of humanistic psychology which teaches people to act on their deepest desires by ridding themselves of their inhibitions...
...Less than half the members I spoke with are married...
...They introduce approaches to life which undermine monogamous marriage and the sanctity of the family...
...When I started doing porno films I used to worry about the embarrassment, for myself, and my family...
...No other human activity compares with it...
...Two of the "professionals" with whom I spoke provide illustration...
...Those pious ones want to get in and out of here as fast as possible...
...others are far more cautious...
...Reems (not his real name) grew up in what he describes as "a typical middle-class Jewish family in Westchester...
...He is convinced that one of the reasons he was so assiduously persecuted in 1963 was because the material he was publishing—tame by present standards—triggered in the authorities a near-primal outrage...
...Yet, while he regularly makes love with beautiful women in front of the cameras, his sexual revolution has taken him through what he considers peculiarly Jewish hang-ups...
...Abrams no longer practices Judaism...
...The miniature cameras of Masters and Johnson and the line drawings of Alex Comfort offer a level of detail which is eagerly consumed...
...But it is only one aspect...
...I kept pushing him to talk about premarital and "promiscuous" sex, but he deftly skirted away: "Look," he told me earnestly, "I know that you want me, as a rabbi, to say it's alright, but I'm not going to do that...
...In the course of his research, Talese told me, he has come upon an uncommonly large number of Jews who are active as sexual theorists, therapists, writers, movie-makers, publishers, and sexual entrepreneurs...
...Linda Wolfe, whose book Playing Around examines extramarital sex, argues that the Jewish women of her generation who were graduated from college in the early 1960's considered sexual liberation an extension of other radical philosophies intended to free people from various forms of enslavement...
...Roth, which defined obscenity for the first time—thereby opening up previously forbidden territory to the arts and to publishing—Jews have been involved in many of the legal battles which have extended the boundaries of the sexually permissible...
...Ginzburg eventually went to jail because of Eras...
...One shudders at what a survey of Cosmopolitan readers would have found...
...It does mean that sexual relationships removed from all ethical and moral considerations are perceived as violations of the spirit (to say nothing of the letter) of the Law...
...Goldstein once told an interviewer that he receives death threats in the mail every week...
...But they are unsure, to say the least, about how it fits into their Judaism...
...And what, I asked, does the traditional approach real- ly offer...
...Those younger Jews with whom I spoke seemed intellectually comfortable with the sexual revolution...
...I look to myself...
...My exploration also brought me into contact with a very different group, for whom Judaism is of central concern...
...While it has, obviously, been many years since these assumptions held true, only now are the ramifications of their collapse coming to be felt...
...But the sexual revolution is not just about street sex, or pornography...
...But the Jew in me kept resisting for a long time...
...I went to shul every Sabbath until I was 16...
...The Jewish guys love it because they don't get it at home...
...Sex is no exception...
...One hundred thousand readers filled out questionnaires about their sex lives, and the results were astonishing...
...In fact, if I hadn't become involved in newspapers, I might have been a rabbi...
...In their lives, sex matters and religion does not...
...The demysti-fication of sex leads to a demystifi-cation of religion, and that is a price most are not willing to pay...
...There is great interest in what the tradition has to say about life...
...My mother was so protective and unwilling to talk about sex, it was unreal...
...In most large American cities, the willing customer can easily find a prostitute on the streets, walk into a "massage parlor," buy dozens of pornographic magazines at a newsstand, or spend days and nights watching hardcore porno films...
...It was never talked about in my family...
...Premarital sex and nonmarital cohabitation are now quite generally accepted, not only in society at large but also within such groups as the Chavurah...
...It kept me out of the flow of what was happening...
...Most of those I spoke with say "no," and say so resoundingly...
...Whether or not Goldstein and the other sexual entrepreneurs should be taken seriously, whether or not they have "redeeming social value," Goldstein's point on intellectual honesty is one that came up repeatedly in my conversations with scholars, rabbis, sexual professionals, and ordinary people committed to living Jewish lives...
...There are others...
...It is not clear whether there has been a specifically Jewish response to the sexual revolution...
...Abrams continues to view herself as a spiritual person...
...Ask me...
...They include women who have never achieved orgasm, and men who are impotent or who suffer from premature or retarded ejaculation...
...There are clubs for couples interested in swapping mates for a night, and clinics for those with sexual problems...
Vol. 2 • December 1976 • No. 3
