Back in Brooklyn long ago, Rabbi Batshir Torchio remembers Shabbat afternoons when her grandparents would toast each other with shots of schnapps, excuse themselves from the table and then — wink, wink — announce they were off to the bedroom for a “nap.”
Jewish tradition considers sex on the Sabbath a mitzvah. “At this heightened moment of Shabbat, which illustrates harmony between the physical and the spiritual,” Torchio says, “it’s become the practice to be intimate on Friday night and Saturday.”
That memory resurfaced as the senior Jewish educator at the JCC of San Francisco reflected on “Uninhibited: About Sex,” the current series of lectures, performances and workshops that explore what Shakespeare famously called “the beast with two backs.”
“Uninhibited” kicked off at the JCC last month in sex-positive San Francisco with a burlesque show, a talk by sex columnist Dan Savage and an evening of bawdy storytelling led by Dixie De La Tour. The series, which is being presented with community partners including the Center for Sex & Culture, Lehrhaus Judaica and sex store Good Vibrations, runs through the end of May.
This is the latest of the JCC’s popular thematic series, which in the past explored topics such as Freud’s impact on the world, and the intersection of Jews and money.
“We were having a program meeting and talking about what series we should do for the following year,” recalls Barbara Lane, the JCC’s director of Arts & Ideas, “and our production manager said ‘sex.’ Immediately we understood it’s part of literature, art, music, politics. Every artistic, creative discipline has a connection to sex.”
Upcoming speakers include psychotherapist Esther Perel (sometimes called the new Dr. Ruth) and local film historian Peter Stein, who will explore what the cinema has to say about Jewish sexuality. There’s even a roundtable of Bay Area writers called “Red Light Lit” — for adults only.
Though presenters are covering topics from the physiology of the female orgasm to the promiscuity of pandas, “everything we present has Jewish value,” Lane says. “A good healthy sex life is a Jewish value. Part of what appealed to us is that we like to push boundaries. We don’t like to make people uncomfortable, but we do like to surprise them.”
Some of those surprises may come on Tuesday, April 5 during a lecture by Nicole Prause, a sexual psychophysiologist who trained at the Kinsey Institute, named for sexologist Alfred Kinsey, who wrote seminal books on human sexual behavior in the late ’40s and early ’50s.
Prause has studied the physiology of the orgasm and the impact of pornography on the brain. She is one of the few researchers in the country who still observes sexual response in live subjects having sex, just as researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson did in the 1960s.
“People still giggle when I describe an orgasm,” said Prause, who grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and lives in Los Angeles. “I think people are very interested, but not sure what to make of it.”
Like Masters and Johnson, who battled for scientific acceptance in a prudish academic and cultural environment, Prause, too, has had her work belittled and underfunded because of its explicit nature.
“Very little has changed,” she says of the squeamishness over the biometrics of sex. “There are still tremendous inhibitions. As with many scientists these days, there is limited funding [for sex research].”
Her research has refined sex metrics to the point where she can define female orgasm as “8 to 12 contractions in the vaginal and anal sphincter starting .8 seconds apart and increasing in latency until their termination.”
Despite the pioneering research of her scientific forebears, who gathered data drawn from thousands of subjects having sex in the lab, Prause says even today little is known about the deeper physiology of sex and orgasm.
Add in the mysteries of the mind-body-spirit connections among sex, relationships and society, and there remains much work to do and many myths to dispel.
“People just don’t give sexuality that level of importance in terms of their understanding of relationships,” adds Prause, who thinks sexual arousal may provide a healthy alternative to pain meds and sleep aids. “The way to argue for the importance of sex is in promoting general health.”
Lane agrees that American culture has always had a dissonant attitude toward sex, with the double helix of libertinism and puritanism explaining the simultaneous existence of explicit underwear ads and laws banning sex education in schools.
“It’s in our history,” she says. “Whatever we can do to be of service to bring the discussion in a healthy, respectful positive way, we’re happy to do. We’ve often said this is a place where uncomfortable conversations can take place in a safe environment.”
Not so safe an environment when it comes to sex is the Internet, where online anonymity, dating and pornography sites have altered the sexual landscape. While making it easier in some ways to connect with people, including potential sex partners, it has in other ways diminished the chances for real human connection.
Economist and New York Times columnist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a former Google data analyst, has been studying online searches and other analytics and has reached some conclusions about that altered landscape.
When it comes to sex, Stephens-Davidowitz concludes that people tend to lie when taking online surveys about it, while the deeper Internet data offers “a more honest view,” as he puts it.
He’ll be speaking at the JCC on May 2 in a presentation he calls “Googling Sex.”
“I am going to talk about many facts that the Internet reveals about human sexuality,” he says. “Sexual insecurity is a big part of it, but also what we can learn about both male and female attraction.”
He sought the more honest view in one of his New York Times columns last year, “Searching for Sex.” Stephens-Davidowitz examined data from the General Social Survey, which monitors American societal change. Results showed that on average, heterosexual men claimed they engaged in 63 sex acts per year, using a condom 23 percent of the time, while women reported 55 sexual encounters per year, using a condom 16 percent of the time.
Between the male and female respondents, the number of condom uses added up to 2.7 billion per year. The record shows, however, that fewer than 600 million condoms are sold annually.
Somebody’s fibbing.
“It suggests that both men and women are lying about how much sex they are having,” Stephens-Davidowitz says. “We don’t know if they are lying to themselves — or lying to surveys. But they are lying to someone.”
He admits the web provides an abundance of information, but cautions that much of it is just plain wrong.
“People in areas with lousy sex education can turn to Google and get accurate information,” he notes. “But in some ways, there is more misinformation. A lot of men and women are learning about sex from porn, which can be misleading.”
Torchio says she doesn’t know of any other JCC staging a similar series. She’s proud that her institution is tackling the subject and putting a Jewish spin on it where possible.
“It’s empowering,” she says. “The programming is about acknowledging the impulses and the beauty of the body, and how we engage our body with other bodies.”
She has studied the Jewish approach to sex from a rabbinical perspective, going back to the Torah and its talmudic interpretations. One constant she has noticed is an underlying respect for women and their physical needs.
“[Judaism] takes into consideration the valid needs of the couple,” Torchio says. “[Sex] is one of three basic things a man must provide his wife, as much nourishment as food and clothing.”
Torchio describes a rabbinic conversation about sexuality, desire and the role and function of the body. “The Talmud talks about intimacy between men and women. [Seder Nashim] is devoted in detail to the laws of sex and marriage, but mostly laws of sex,” she says, hastening to add that any sage moral prescriptions of old also apply to same-sex couples today.
Of course, some edicts from talmudic times don’t transfer easily to 2016.
Torchio says Jewish law forbids having sex if angry, drunk or thinking of someone else. It requires that a husband sexually satisfy his partner, obligating him to have sex with his wife daily, if that’s what she wants, and as long as he is of independent means. But if he’s a hard-working, hard-traveling camel driver, say, the required frequency drops from daily to once every 30 days.
As the series unfolds over the next two months, JCC organizers hope attendees take in valuable information that helps them not only better understand sexuality, but see how it fits in with the grander scheme of what it means to be human.
“We get caught up in God talk,” says Torchio, “but everyone has this sense of something greater than themselves. At some point people recognize that sex can bring you there in part — not just intercourse, but intimacy with one’s partner as well.”
‘Uninhibited’ events
“Uninhibited: About Sex” will feature lectures, performances, workshops and other programs through the end of May. The following is a listing of upcoming events at the JCCSF:
“The Big O: Women and Sexual Desire,” a lecture by Nicole Prause, 7 p.m. Tuesday, April 5.
“UnderCover Presents: Under the Covers,” a night of love songs featuring two local bands with dancing, art and other guests, 8 p.m. April 16. Ages 18 and older only.
“Red Light Lit,” an evening of poetry, prose, comedy and song from emerging Bay Area writers and comedians, 7 p.m. April 17. Ages 18 and older only.
“A Celebration of Animal Reproduction” with zoologist Jules Howard, 7 p.m. April 21.
“Googling Sex” with former Google analyst Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, 7 p.m. May 2.
Lecture by psychotherapist and sex educator Esther Perel, 7 p.m. May 15.
“Sex, Jews and Videotape: What Movies Reveal About Jewish Sexuality” with film curator Peter Stein, 7 p.m. May 31.
Several wellness workshops connected to the series will also be held at the JCC, including one April 12 on sex after 50, and another on April 30 on tantric yoga. For information, see www.jccsf.org/arts-ideas/uninhibited.