Ten Tips for Raising Sexually Healthy Orthodox Daughters

WRITTEN BY TALLI ROSENBAUM
This article is reposted from The Times of Israel. It was posted there just over two years ago, and is just as relevant every day.
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/10-tips-to-raising-sexually-healthy-orthodox-daughters/
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As a sex therapist treating women and couples in the Orthodox community, I am confronted daily with the seeming paradox of messages regarding tzniut (loosely defined as modesty) and healthy sexuality.

Young couples that are socialized against premarital physical intimacy, and receive little or no formal sexual education, are expected to engage in, and hopefully even enjoy, complete sexual relations immediately after marriage. They may experience a cognitive dissonance around sex, leading to difficulties in sexual functioning.

I highlighted this conflict at a recent lecture to women in my own community, who gathered to learn more about how to enhance marital intimacy. I spoke about how sexuality is not just about engaging in physical relations but encompasses several domains of development which include, among many other factors, positive body image, confidence, and security. I suggested that while modesty in dress and behavior are legitimate values, they should not be taught in ways that shame, blame, objectify, or instill fear regarding male lust.

A few weeks after the lecture, I received the following query from one of the participants:

One issue that you mentioned when I heard you speak left an impression on me. You said that despite raising our daughters with a sense of tzniut and appropriate behavior before marriage, we also want to raise them with a healthy sense of their sexuality and, later, a healthy understanding of and attitude toward sex, before they are sexually active. This seems like a big challenge! If you could share some of your wisdom, I’m sure many would appreciate it.

Is this really a challenge? Must tzniut messages and values proscribing premarital sex result in dysfunctional sexuality after marriage?

This question comes up often, and most recently was re-visited in a passionate blog post by Dr. Elana Sztokman, who points out that “Orthodox women are socialized into constant, excessive pressure to cover and comport our bodies…Our bodies are a thing to be feared and covered and talked about.”

With all those negative messages, Dr. Sztokman ponders, how are women supposed to be sexually uninhibited and free once they are married? “All that obsessive cover is magically transformed into the secret kallah (bridal preparation) classes, where you learn that you’re going to be getting naked in front of your new husband and having sex.”

These are important and legitimate questions and it’s time to consider solutions. The first step is to dispel the expectation that sexual education begins with the kallah instructor. The road to development of healthy sexuality begins at home. Sexual development begins at conception and how we as parents raise our daughters from infancy can shape their sexual sense of self.

Here are ten tips to consider from early childhood through adolescence, and upon marriage:

Acknowledge what feels good: Validate your child’s senses. Whether its back tickling, bubble baths, the smell of a jasmine flower, or the warm sun shining down on a chilly day, point out how wonderful it is to feel physically pleasant sensations. Teach girls to experience and not just accomplish things. Do not stop or discourage your daughter from self-genital stimulation. It’s normal. When appropriate, you can explain that it’s a “private” activity.

Touch: Touch is a basic human need and the ability to receive and feel safe with touch is basic to sexuality. Hugging, cuddling, massages at the spa for her 16^th birthday, help prepare young women for sexual life. I was recently told that teachers at some ulpanot (religious girl’s high school) discourage hugs between students. Teaching girls to respect each other’s boundaries is good, but a completely touch-free environment is not. It is amazing how many young brides are unable to engage in sexual touch because they are not used to ever being touched at all.

Facilitate a positive body image: Do not disparage your daughter’s physical qualities, ask her if she really “needs” a second portion of dessert, or tell her she should lose weight if she wants to find a husband. Women come in all shapes and sizes, and health, not thinness, should be encouraged. Be a positive role model and never say, “I am so fat” in front of your daughters.

Exercise (and wear what you want in the gym): Girls need to know their bodies, feel strong and in control, and comfortable within their own skin. Don’t say, “don’t swing your hips that way, its not modest.” Say yes to Zumba, belly dancing, yoga, and let girls be comfortable in shorts and tank tops. All these activities are available in girls- and women-only settings. Discourage heavy outerwear or “modest pool wear” at women’s only swim. What for? Save the bathing skirts for family beach outings.

Let her primp: Be patient with your daughter’s need for personal space and time spent getting dressed and “primping.” Often, this behavior merely reflects teens’ attempts to maintain some sense of control over their rapidly changing bodies.

Talk about sex and genitals: When kids ask questions about sex, parents should provide open and honest answers at a level appropriate to the child’s age. If adults do not provide accurate information, children are forced to rely on their peers or other potentially inaccurate sources. And don’t whitewash body parts. You can say vulva and vagina and explain the difference. How else can she tell you if something hurts or itches if she doesn’t have the language for that body part? Acknowledge it, or it won’t exist for her. And don’t tell her that tampons are only for after marriage. This also sends the message that her genitals are currently irrelevant.

Use media as an opportunity: When you let kids watch violent scenes in a movie, but run to turn off the TV if there is a kissing scene, you send a negative message. Who was kissing and what was the context? This is a great opportunity to talk about values around sex, normative feelings of desire and arousal, as well as how to teach about boundaries. If you see an advertisement of a half naked woman selling a product, rather than “prutza* shame” the model, use the opportunity to talk about the objectification of women’s bodies in advertising.

Model healthy sexuality: Let your kids see that you and your partner love and are attracted to one another and don’t be afraid to kiss and hug when they are around. Even if they act averse, don’t believe it; deep down, kids love to see that their parents are affectionate. Lest you think this can only work in modern Orthodox households, even Haredi couples, who traditionally don’t show physical affection in front of kids, can send positive messages with affectionate words and behavior.

Encourage your daughters to “tell me what you want, what you really, really want”: To enjoy sex, one need to be able to say things like “this feels good” or “this is uncomfortable”. If girls do not learn the language of asking for, or anticipating that their needs be met, they will have a hard time experiencing pleasure.

Don’t frame Nidda laws as “protective”:  Dr. Sztokman states “You go from one extreme to the other without anything in between. …there is no such thing as affection which is not sexual — a man is not even supposed to pass the salt to his wife when he can’t have sex with her because you never know where passing the salt can lead to.” However, you wish to explain the “harchakot”**, let’s not attribute them to the need to make boundaries. That makes the perceived force of touch as turning immediately to sexual intercourse into something scary and uncontrollable, and can create anxiety in many young women, particularly as they return home from the mikvah.

Encourage autonomy: In order to say yes, you have to have the option to say no.If a woman is told that she must “provide” sex because her husband expects, wants and needs it, she will understand that her body does not belong to her, and this will affect her ability to view sex positively.

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* loosely,  the Jewish version of slut

**Rabbinic proscriptions against physical closeness during menstrual bleeding and 7 days thereafter prior to immersion in the mikvah

Girls Are Wasting My Time

If the person you are going out with isn't right for you, then tell them.
Don't "know about it for a while and finally say something".

Be honest. Be truthful. Be straightforward.

When you are going out with someone, the longer it goes on, the longer one side has to grow feelings of "like" or "disdain" for the other.

So you shouldn't drag things out if you've made a decision. It just isn't fair to all involved.

Minds Wandering

As I make my bi-weekly pilgrimage through reading blog posts, I realize that I haven't posted on here in a while, and I apologize.

I have had writing on other blogs taking up my time, but don't get me wrong...I haven't run out of things to complain about on here.

But after a while I would just start to sound repetitive, and voicing the same things over and over. And while I have issues, I just don't tend to vent myself often, and that is another reason why this blog has been long dormant.

Should I start things back up here? Will the minds come back to their home base? Will the one finally decide to say yes?

Those are all really hard questions, with no answers in sight.

Paranoia

I don't understand other bloggers.

They open up their private lives to the world in their blogs, yet they get paranoid over the littlest of things.

I don’t mean to pick on her, but she did bring it up yesterday, and as an example Single on the Scene had her piece yesterday about sending her shidduch resume to the wrong person. And she woke up at 1:30AM worrying about it...does she realize that she has so much of that information on her resume, on her blog as well? Info that can be accessed by anyone in the world, not just the one person that she emailed it too by mistake?

I mean, if I wanted to, I could figure out her age, height, weight and so much more info, if I cared enough too.

But don't worry SooS, I don't care to.

Just venting a pet peeve that had become common theme in my earlier posts.

"Paranoia is all I've got left" - M. Shinoda

SNL Thoughts and Bieber (BARF)

Monday's post kind of became a Wondering Woman's Wednesday post...so let's call it that, and today will be a Musing Monday.

Today I am thinking about Saturday Night Live, or SNL, and their digital shorts.

I'm sure you've seen some of them, such as "Dick in a Box", "I Just Had Sex", or the Grammy nominated song "I'm On a Boat".

They are created by a musical group known as Lonely Island, which is made up mostly of Jews, with the singers being Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone.

Two weeks ago they featured their 100th digital short, and to do so, they made a new song, featuring within it a montage of some of their other best works.

Personally, I loved it. I've loved the other work they've done before, and this was no different.

It had one difference, it was missing Akiva, and in his place was the Canadian-Ball-Of-Puke, Justin Bieber. And the song even referenced that Akiva was missing, with JB (can't even say the name) in his place.

Now, as usual, it was a filthy song, mostly featuring them talking about celebrating by, and I quote: "tonight, we are going to suck our own dicks".

And JB joking and saying "Wait, what?"...or was he being serious?

A few days later, a report came out saying JB was disgusted by the video. Is he serious?

Anyone who has ever seen any of the Lonely Island pieces clearly knew that it would feature at least one crazy feature. And if it is supposed to be a celebration of the best, then it is even more likely to feature the best of older clips.

Was this post-hating just more hype for the video, in which he feigned disgust? Or was it real?

And if JB didn't know that coming in...then I guess it really is true...he is just a teenage Canadian girl, and is too stupid for America, which frankly, is quite hard to be.

Video here for those that missed it...enjoy :) you can be sure I did!

Under the Weight of a Name

Thank you, WM for the gracious invitation to become a contributing author to the Minds. I hope to indeed live up to the name I was bestowed and touch some of you with my thoughts, whether they happen to be sensuous or not.

In the cyberworld, one can choose a screen name to project any image they desire. Their name might truly reflect an ideal or identity of theirs, or it might be embellished with an attribute they wish they could claim. As all of us bloggers know, there's a thought process involved in forming a blog/ger name. There are so many options to control the biases through which our posts are received, and it can be a challenge to be fair to yourself in how you are framing your writing.

The debate of how well ones online persona predicts how they conduct themselves in real life fascinates me, but that discussion is for another time.

What is presently on my Mind are the names that we do not choose for ourselves. Having been exceptionally popular when I was younger, and less outwardly popular but more respected for intelligence as I matured, I thankfully was never the object of derogatory nicknames. But consistently though throughout grade school, I was taught that the prohibition of ona'as devarim (torturing someone through words) includes calling someone a nickname, particularly one that they do not like. I could recite the pasuk from which we extrapolate this prohibition for years. It always seemed like a nice way of being sensitive, perhaps going an extra mile to avoid something that isn't really that mean. But the depth and insight that went into forbidding this action under actual torture only became clear to me a few weeks ago.

I tend to Touch, but on occasion I wrongly take my audience's acceptance for granted and push the limit into saying something inconsiderate. A long time ago, in a half-attempt to flirt and half-attempt to tease with a particle of truth, I called a boy who had a crush on me by a nickname. It was not a mean name at all; it was just a nickname. There was nothing inherently flattering or derogatory to the name I chose, but he was very hurt and I did not understand why. I took it back and apologized to him... I had a theory of why it upset him so much, probably because it was supremely neutral and borderline immature, while he was rightfully hoping that I would view him with more of a sexual appeal. I could understand that, but never would have anticipated this train of thoughts in time to switch the nickname I had chosen to one that would not be offensive to him.

In a similar twist of events, a colleague that I had reason to believe respected me (if not more, but at least he is not religious so there is nothing up for discussion) recently publicly proclaimed me with a new nickname: Giggles. I had laughed a few seconds before that and tend to laugh more than my peers in order to make everyone less neurotic. I also tend to laugh incredulously at things my superiors do, or at inside jokes when a comment is way too arcane for anyone else to find funny but I can actually reference. But apparently he was perceiving all this as immature, girl-next-door who Giggles, and the playing field between us so low that saying it in public held no ramifications as far as his own shame. It really got to me, even though I know that the rest of my colleagues find me talented and valuable B"H.

Perhaps the name I was given is neutral, but when you hold yourself to a higher standard that you've earned, even neutral is derogatory. I wasn't able to explain all this to the colleague, but after ignoring him for a while (he missed my laughs!) I told him that giving me a nickname like that was flat out douchey. He claimed he didn't mean it and that I should know him better than to take him seriously. Of course he didn't mean it mean it, and I know he is in full-realization of my other good qualities besides for being easy going. But there is truth behind every joke, and when an all-encompassing nickname does not line up with how a person wants to be perceived, it is painful. It is painful to hear what first comes to mind when others think of you, and likewise there is no way to anticipate how your neutral nickname will resonate with another person. The Torah incorporates human psychology all-knowingly when it forbids us from doing just this. I finally understood and fully regretted what I did to that boy so long ago... and with that I swallowed my medicine.

~Shomer Toucher

Attention Span of a Newt - Musings Monday

With a few blog posts in the books, I've discovered something about blog readers.

They have the attention span of a newt.

They'll read your blog for one post, maybe two or three, and disappear after that.

And unless you talk about specifically the right topic, they'll disappear.

My first few posts, talked about other people, their posts, and things that happen in their lives. And people flocked to them.

And then I went a little different, and wrote a random poem, and other thoughts, and just like that, they've lost interest.

And that's when I realized, the newt scenario.

So, consider Wondering Minds a marsh, and come flocking back, you silly newts!

Because silly newts, the presidency is for mitts!