During the 1980s, Israeli filmmakers were preoccupied with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 1990s, they explored the dynamic between Israel's urban centers and the country's periphery. The past decade has witnessed a rise in films that seek to portray the experience of communities previously considered marginal to Israeli cinema. Avi Nesher's latest drama, The Secrets (Israel/France, 2007), joins a host of recent Israeli films, both feature-length and documentary, which explore Israel's ultra-orthodox community.

Ultra-orthodox Jews were mostly absent from Israeli filmmaking until the 1990s. This is no surprise, because Israeli cinema has historically reflected the identity of the Israeli establishment, promoting secularism and criticizing religion as a sign of ethno-nationalism rather than as a cultural facet of everyday life. From the late 1990s, however, the religious experience moved to the center of stage of Israeli cinema.

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Imagine going to the doctor for a morning after pill or an abortion, and being told that you can't have the prescription or the procedure because of the doctor's religious beliefs. Sounds kind of absurd, right? Well, pretty soon it might be the norm. The Bush administration has launched a proposal that would deny federal funding to any hospital, clinic, health plan or other entity that doesn't enable employees from opting out of providing care that runs counter to their personal convictions. This means that it could get a lot harder to get birth-control pills, IUDs, the Plan B emergency contraceptive, and of course, abortions.
Christian Doctors: tough decisions
The Washington Post reports:

Conservative groups, abortion opponents and some members of Congress are welcoming the initiative as necessary to safeguard doctors, nurses and other health workers who, they say, are increasingly facing discrimination because of their beliefs or are being coerced into delivering services they find repugnant.

But the draft proposal has sparked intense criticism by family planning advocates, women's health activists, and members of Congress who say the regulation would create overwhelming obstacles for women seeking abortions and birth control.

There is also deep concern that the rule could have far-reaching, but less obvious, implications. Because of its wide scope and because it would -- apparently for the first time -- define abortion in a federal regulation as anything that affects a fertilized egg, the regulation could raise questions about a broad spectrum of scientific research and care, critics say.

"The breadth of this is potentially immense," said Robyn S. Shapiro, a bioethicist and lawyer at the Medical College of Wisconsin. "Is this going to result in a kind of blessed censorship of a whole host of areas of medical care and research?"

Apparently there are numerous reports of health care workers having to violate their conscience “by providing or assisting in the provision of controversial medicine or procedures,” and the Department of Health and Human Services wants to ensure that there isn’t discrimination against those with strong religious convictions in the health care profession.

Is it me, or is the answer to this problem just that Conservative Christians shouldn’t go into gynecology? Or, if they do, they need to make it clear to their patients that there are certain procedures they won’t perform, and if the patient needs an abortion, or the morning after pill, she’ll just have to go somewhere else to get it.

Being religious means making some sacrifices. As someone who keeps Shabbat, I know I can never run a night club, and while that’s sad for me, it’s not like there aren’t any other options out there. A Conservative Christian doctor can easily choose to be a pathologist, a urologist, or an oncologist without having to compromise his or her religious priorities. If you can’t perform the duties of a certain job it’s not discrimination when you don’t get promoted.

I’ve always been a champion of religious freedom, but in this case I don’t see much of a conflict.

A young boy is called up to his teacher’s desk in a yeshiva grade school.

“Stay after class, Shmuley. I want to talk to you.”

Shmuley stays, frightened that he has done something wrong and his teacher will punish him. Once the other boys have gone, his teacher – a rabbi – places Shmuley on his lap and uses his tiny, warm body to stroke his erection. When the rabbi is finished pleasuring himself, he tells Shmuley to leave. “But you be quiet. You don’t tell anyone what we did. It’s lashon hara, and it will hurt you and hurt your parents.”

Shmuley leaves, frightened and confused.

Later, after the fifth molestation or the fiftieth, after months or years have passed, Shmuley tells his parents.

His parents tell the school’s head rabbi, who responds by denying the boy’s report. He sternly warns the parents not to “talk lashon hara” (gossip) about Shmuley's teacher or about the yeshiva.

This is not the first time the yeshiva head has heard allegations about Rabbi X, and he knows how to effectively respond.

“It is lashon hara to do so,” the yeshiva head says. “And it will only hurt you.” Your other children will have difficulty finding marriage partners, the rabbi says, and Shmuley – well, Shmuley will be “damaged goods” – no one, except a girl who is also very damaged, will ever marry him. This is far from an idle threat in a community that thrives on arranged marriages and rabbinic control.

The parents leave, frustrated and frightened. Their eight-year-old son is now “damaged goods.” They approach another rabbi, powerful in their community, and ask his advice.

“Your son is a minor. his testimony would not be accepted in beis din (religious court). It is his word against Rabbi X – and Rabbi X is a very well regarded teacher. And, from what you tell me, even if what Shmuley said is true – and I doubt that – no violation of Torah law took place. Shmuley was not violated.

“So, my advice to you – my legal judgement, in fact – is to listen to what the head of the yeshiva told you. Do not speak lashon hara against him, or against his school – and most certainly, not against Rabbi X.”

The parents go to another important community rabbi and get a very similar answer.

Without community support to back them, and with the very real prospect of “destroying” their children’s lives by branding them “damaged goods,” the parents stay silent.

Shmuley isn’t given counseling because the stigma, if revealed, would be too great. The family lives with this terrible secret, an elephant always in the room but never spoken of, the tarnished Elijah’s Cup of every meal, every celebration, every enjoyment they will ever have. Rabbi X continues to abuse young victims from his desk in the yeshiva, protected by a presumption of innocence belied by the facts, by the silence of Shmuley’s family – and by a Jewish law.

This nightmare scenario has allegedly been repeated multiple times in Brooklyn, Monsey, Bnei Brak, and other ultra-Orthodox communities worldwide. How did this happen? How did a law meant to protect people from gossip become a club used by rabbis to beat defenseless children and their families into submission?

There is a long answer and a short answer to that question, and both can be summed up in same three words: The Chofetz Chaim.

Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan is the iconic figure of today’s ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Kagan wrote many books on Jewish law in his long life. The first – and what may in retrospect prove to be his most controversial – was the Chofetz Chaim, a compendium of the laws of lashon hara.

Nothing that Kagan wrote in Chofetz Chaim was really new. What Kagan did – to the dismay of a few prescient rabbis – was compile laws scattered is disparate sections of the Talmud and in codes of Jewish law, and publish them for the first time as an organic whole with his commentary woven in. Kagan wanted his “little book” to be studied by the masses. He lived his entire long life firmly believing the messiah was literally coming any minute. Legend has it that at one point, he went into training for the “event,” running the stairs in his home to keep his aging body in shape for the blessed day. He thought the study of these laws would speed the messiah’s coming.

But Kagan’s book did bring these disparate laws out of the shadows and into the spotlight of Orthodox observance. And that, by and large, has been a bad thing.

Kagan’s idealism surpassed his realism. And, because Kagan’s book contained no dissenting opinions, that idealism became the baseline Jews were expected to follow – without nuance, without shades of gray, without real compensation for corrupt judges, rabbis, and leaders. It was Jewish law written in a vacuum but enforced in real life, law without context and without soul.

Kagan was a founder of the Agudath Israel movement, whose American branch recently campaigned against mandatory background checks for religious school teachers and employees, and would itself be linked to inaction in the face of rabbinic sexual abuse.

He urged Jews (with a few notable exceptions) to remain in Eastern Europe rather than settle in Palestine or America, and would go on to write twenty more books on Jewish law and ethics before he died in 1933 at the age of 95, in the shadow of the Holocaust that took so many of his followers and townspeople.

Kagan’s reputation as a saint survived nonetheless, and he and his books serve as totems worshipped with almost childlike veneration by ultra-Orthodoxy. He is often cited as the posek acharon, the final decisor and codifier of Jewish law, and his name and works have been preserved by the New York-based Chofetz Chaim Heritage Foundation. His books are found in almost every Orthodox home, library, shul and school – and in quite a few non-Orthodox settings, as well.

Orthodox Jews would be quick to point out that Kagan’s laws of lashon hara are misapplied by the rabbis in Shmuley’s story. Orthodox Jews are correct – the law is misapplied. But, like Kagan, what they miss is the inevitability of that misapplication, and the certitude of it.

The ultra-Orthodox community is not a democracy. It has no system of checks and balances, no ombudsman to press the case of the powerless, no campaign finance laws or transparency. It has no elections and no governance. It is a loosely joined series of potentates run by pashas dressed in black frock coats, fedoras and shtreimels, who owe allegiance to no one but themselves, and who are answerable only to God. And, as history and common sense tell us, God doesn’t often demand answers from those still here on this earth.

Until ultra-Orthodoxy adopts a fully transparent form of governance with a working system of checks and balances, laws meant to protect reputations will instead often be used to destroy lives – especially the lives of the smallest and the weakest, especially the lives of children like Shmuley.

I'll Take an Order of Online Dating: with a side of genetic matching The incessant human search for love has led us here, to these embryonic days of the 21st century, where "chemistry" is no longer a colloquialism for attraction but rather a method for matchmaking. Would-be lovers for whom personality profiles fall short can now try gene matching--specifically, matches that are "based on the correlation of genes that express the HLA (human leukocyte antigen) molecules."

DNA dating comes to us courtesy of Gene Partner, a genetic research services company based in Switzerland. Their tag line happens to be "love is no coincidence", and the Gene Partner website actually explains that "sensing and classifying the HLA genes is something our bodies do automatically and subconsciously," which raises a question for me. Namely, if our bodies are already doing this "automatically and subconsciously," why should I pay $199 ($299 after the launch offer expires in December) to have Gene Partner do it for me?

Of course, Dr. Tamara Brown, Gene Partner co-founder and expert in molecular biology, is one step ahead: the service is being marketed as an accessory to online dating. The idea is that DNA matching can help internet daters avoid wasting their time meeting people with whom they might seem to have lots in common, but won't have good old chemistry. All that daters have to do is provide a DNA sample, with which the company creates a "GenePartner ID."

When GenePartner members meet, for example on a dating website, they can exchange their GenePartnerIDs and then log on to their own personal accounts on www.GenePartner.com. There they enter the other person's GenePartnerID to run a compatibility match and immediately receive the analysis results of the mutual genetic compatibility test while still online.

It sounds sensible, but also a bit presumptuous. After all, a huge number of people are going to have to sign up for the service to make it even close to worthwhile. Besides, only going out with your DNA "matches" could arguably limit your possibilities. What about the happy accidents that the universe is so good at orchestrating? The friends you make along the way that you might otherwise miss? The chance that while you might not vibe with one suitor, he or she might know someone else you'd dig. And what about the people you might have fantastic chemistry with, but absolutely nothing to talk about?

Welcome to the Jewcy Guide to Breaking Up, where you'll be ushered through a universally difficult experience. Not sure how to handle the end of your relationship in a world of email, IM, and blogs? Looking for the right book to help you understand what went wrong? Desperately seeking a cure for those psychosomatic symptoms? We've got you covered, and we even included a soundtrack for your misery. But before we go any further, are you sure it's the end? Before you pull the plug, here are a few questions to consider:

1. Look Familiar?: It might be time to cut your losesHave you calmly discussed the issues?
2. Do you ultimately have the same goals and desires for your relationship, the same idea of what "happily ever after" means?
3. Can you still laugh together?
   
4. Can you still really kiss each other?
   
5. Do you lust after your significant other (SO)?

If you answer YES to two or more of these questions, there could still be hope. On the other hand:

1. Do you look forward to time away from your partner?
2. Do you crave attention from attractive others?
3. Are you already cheating, or even just regularly fantasizing about it?
4. Do you find yourself obsessing over what's wrong with, or what drives you crazy about, your mate?

If your answer is YES to any of those questions, you have most likely arrived at the intersection of Taking Off and Moving On.

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High school girls in the Israeli town of Kiryat Gat are being warned not to become romantically involved with Bedouins, via a program run by a social worker named Chaim Shalom. A 10-minute film called Sleeping With the Enemy cautions girls that Bedouins may shower them with gifts and then leave them pregnant and alone, or refuse to allow them to return to their families after ending the relationship. Single Bedouin Men: like kyrptonite for Jewish girls?

Despite a message that smacks of racism, Bedouins seem happy to have the Jewish girls stay away. Bedouin mayor Talal al-Krenawi had this to say:

"It hurts our families just like it hurts the Jews. It causes a lot of difficult problems and internal conflicts which often end in violence…If there are children as a result of these relationships, it becomes a burden on our society. The difference is that we oppose this just like the Jews, but we never used racist expressions...a person is allowed to live with whomever he wants. In any case, one can oppose something without presenting racist opinions."

Classic case of bad spin? The Jews and Bedouins actually seem to agree on the issue, but somehow the Jews haven't been able to present their case in inoffensive terms. Here's an idea: Teach girls about unhealthy relationships in general, and offer them good skills for dealing with men and dating, instead of just saying, “don’t date Bedouins.” Need I remind people that not all Bedouins seduce girls and then leave them alone and pregnant?

Learn more about Bedouins in Israel here. 

I so want to be in love

To believe monotheistically in you,

that you are my tender, most tender love

and give to you my sense of wonder --

worlds captured in words

- Abraham Joshua Heschel, "Youngest Desire"

Falling out of love is never easy, especially after a three-year relationship with someone you hoped to marry, raise children with, and be parted from only by death. For me, the last several months have been like a period of grief; some days are fine, some are filled with shadow, and most are a little hollow. But as the winter has given way to spring, and spring begun to hint of summer, the silver linings of the clouds have begun to reflect more light.

In that light I've seen how the way I am in relationship often undermines the best parts of me. Emotionally, I tend to fall in love, as Heschel wrote, monotheistically. I wanted my partner to be my primary source of love, affection, companionship, and support. I wanted to turn to him whenever I needed help, and hold him when he did. Although I maintained many friendships, some of them quite dear, I loved that my partner was my best friend, my secret-keeper, the one who was dear to my heart.

I know I am not alone in regarding my beloved in this way, and I am sure that for many people, it poses no problems at all. But in the months since our separation, it's become clear to me that all this monogamy of affection came at the price of my love for other people. For all my deep friendships and erotic connections, I was cut off. People would come up to me after a workshop or retreat, for example, and tell me how inspired they were, how grateful, how I'd changed their lives. And often, I'd be unable to take it in. I'd try; I'm neither so famous nor so arrogant as to simply shrug it off. But sometimes, the words would almost bounce off of me, like so much small talk.

Or, I'd have lovely gatherings of friends, on special occasions like a birthday or book-launch party, and barely feel the love and affection they were offering me. Again, not always. But often, there would be an invisible disconnect between us. No wonder that, when things were difficult with my partner, I felt so alone. I had multiple offers of support, listening, and aid -- but I felt unable to embrace them. I had been so emotionally monogamous for so long that I'd cut myself off from the love being offered to me by others.

Even more damaging than this alienation from the love of others, though, was my alienation from my own capacity to love. It's been observed before that perhaps the most joyous aspect of loving relationship isn't being loved by someone else -- it's being able to love them. To feel love, not just loved. Love feels delightful; warm, energized, buoyant; all the cliches turn true. And of course, it's possible to feel that love not just for one's partner, but for oneself, and for other people, even for God and trees and breath. Yet I was so monotheistic in my love that two paths were interrupted. First, I focused my love almost entirely in one place; even my love for spirit often felt like a misdirection, let alone that for other people and things. Second, I came to rely so much on the love I received from my partner that I stopped relying on myself to generate it.

This, I suppose, is what dependency (co- or otherwise) is about: relying on someone else to provide something you ought to provide yourself. Even in ordinary circumstances, it can turn into a neediness, a clinginess. At its worst, it can lead to jealousy and rage. In my own case, it was a kind of self-impoverishment. I had seen, in contemplative and shamanic settings, how important it was for me simply to love -- to love myself, others, God, the world. And yet it was almost impossible for me to do that, so accustomed I had become to receiving love from someone else. Indeed, trying felt like yet another betrayal: what if, by generating love for myself, I cut myself off from the love of my sweet partner? What if I had no need for him?

Fate intervened I suppose. Not fate, of course, but the mutual choices of two people no longer fresh in their love, and at least one impelled to take the next steps on his journey alone. Unable to risk the relationship in order to love myself, I was forced back on myself when the relationship ended.

I'm not one to look for the "reason" these sorts of things happen in our lives, or be sure to learn whatever lessons these kinds of circumstances offer. Usually, such talk strikes me as infuriating, insipid, or just plain annoying. But slowly, over the last several months, I have begun to open my heart a bit more to other people, other things, and myself -- and new growth has emerged from the branches. I find my friends all the more beloved. I want to speak to my house, to the woods, and even to God in the sing-song lovetalk once reserved for one person only. And I have learned -- been forced to learn -- some of the capacities of my own heart, to generate love like a furnace.

No doubt much of this seems simplistic, or perhaps banal, New Age, or sentimental. But to me it is, above all, truthful. As the Baal Shem Tov said, and as I've quoted more than once in these pages recently, "there is nothing so whole as a broken heart" -- because in its brokenness is openness, in its fractured state a wholeness which transcends the individual. I have experienced that over these spring months, an awakening from a beautiful dream that was nonetheless a slumber. I am even, at times, grateful.

As the title of this essay suggests, and as my religious mind inevitably would consider, I have noticed a parallel between this process of de-monogamizing my affection and the years-long process of opening in my religious life. For some time now, I have been drifting away from orthodox, then traditional, then mainstream, then exclusive, and then even non-heretical Judaism. I don't fancy myself a heretic, exactly, but I do recognize that some of my beliefs and practices may be considered heretical by others: preparing to spend several months in a Buddhist monastery, participating in 'pagan' rituals like Beltane, having intimate visions of Christ, Ganesh, and the Goddess. For many, I'm sure (and I've been told by plenty of commenters), all this is so far beyond the pale of normative Judaism that for me to hold myself as a Jewish teacher, as I sometimes do, is utterly unacceptable. I understand that, and accept the judgment. But in my experience, none of it has undermined my love of God, and of the Jewish God in particular. Quite the contrary. By gradually opening to these other forms and other manifestations, my capacity to love has increased. And so mysticism -- by which I mean the direct, loving experience of ultimate reality -- has flourished.

The analogy to earthly love is, presumably, obvious. YHVH, we are told in the Torah, is a jealous god. He wants exclusive, monogamous, monotheistic fidelity -- and elsewhere in the Bible, Israel is repeatedly referred to as a harlot, a slut. The traditional Jewish faithful today take this demand quite seriously, and comply with missionary zeal. They reject not just the idols of the nations, but their customs, their languages, their clothes. These latter-day Jewish pietists are, indeed, more faithful to their God than I am, and I know from my own past experience and their present testimonies that they experience love in return.

But that love is a kind of dependency (co- or otherwise). In its exclusivity, it shuts down other openings to sacred eros, and in its dualism, it endangers the capacity to generate love of oneself. I see in my own past Judaism the same pattern as I see in my past relationship. For years, I feared that if I stepped outside the bounds of Jewish exclusivity, the intensity of my commitment to the Jewish God would wane. And I didn't want it to wane; I couldn't articulate it at the time, but it gave me a sense of connection and security and love. It was mother's breast and father's strong arms all wrapped up in one. And so I guarded those boundaries.

Gradually, though, I succumbed to temptation. I danced at Burning Man. I sat (though didn't bow) before a statue of the Buddha. I stopped worrying about whether sacred sexuality was idolatry or not, because I felt the Divine presence within it. Throughout, I "checked in," committed to being faithful to the One I loved -- and throughout, the One was still there. In the depths, I called to God, and God answered me. I raised my eyes to the mountains, and asked where my help would come from -- and my help was there, from God. No longer "God" in any traditional sense, no longer just Yahweh, just male, or just transcendent. Now nondual, now seemingly atheistic, now a motion and a spirit that impels all thinking things, now feminine, now queer. At times this "God" seemed to melt away entirely, into a mere mindstate, a pattern of the brain. But no matter; the knowing remained; and consciousness itself; and love.

I still maintain many of the old forms of faithfulness. I don't eat forbidden foods, I rest on the seventh day. As I've written about before in this magazine, though, I do so not out of fear of retribution but simply as acts of love. The other day, I sat around waiting for Shabbat to end, wanting to go out, and while I questioned over and over why I was adhering to these Pharisaic restrictions, the answer of love remained. That is why I do it, I admit. I wish others would admit it as well.

So while I am not a polytheist exactly, I do no longer believe that there is but one avenue to the holy -- not even one per person. I follow many paths, and like to see where they lead. I have come to trust in the same salvation being at the multiple ends of the roads, as long as when I get there I can still say hinei, here, and trust and not fear.

And of course, while this essay is about emotional, rather than physical, monogamy, I wonder at the causal nexus between monotheism and monogamy in all its forms. Traditional Judaism, obviously, has demanded physical monogamy for the last thousand years, largely following the lead of Christianity. (Given the powerful homosocial bonds in traditional Jewish community, the question of emotional monogamy is more complex.) And today, our fiercest religious battles are not about ethics and social justice (of paramount importance to the prophets) but sexuality, pleasure, and gender. Today, to question physical and relational monogamy is to question "traditional values," that is, religious values. To delight too much in sensual pleasure is often labeled pagan, polytheistic, or worse. I wonder at the coincidence: are traditionalists worried that if one form of faithfulness is abandoned, others will follow? That if we yield to, rather than repress, our hearts, they will, as our ancestors feared, wander outside the bounds of propriety, safety, and tribe? That as we learn that love is available in many forms and faces, that we might think the same of spirit as well?

None of this is to argue for a particular model of intimacy -- indeed, not even for me personally. Just as I still look wistfully, even enviously, at my friends whose relationships have endured where mine did not, I admit that I sometimes regard the traditionally religious in this way. Their monogamous monotheism has made it, where mine has not -- and I know that in any committed relationship, there have been valleys as well as peaks, doubts as many as reassurances. I don't commend my path to others.

But if there is a salvation to be had, I am grateful that mine has been one of inner knowledge as well as outward generation. That is, in the same way that being forced back into aloneness has enabled me to cultivate the capacity to love, so too finding myself outside the communal and relational bonds of Jewish religious life has caused me to turn inward, to the unitive, the nondual. Perhaps the skeptics are right that when believers say, "I love you, God," they are really saying "I love." In my experience, there is no significant difference.

I was both amused and irritated by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's recent article at the Shmuley Boteach's Vision Of FemininityHuffington Post about single-sex education and its relationship to sexual polarity and eroticism. His basic argument is that going to school with the opposite sex from an early age desensitizes the two genders towards one another, which disposes people not to marry, and if they do, dulls their erotic intimacy. It also has the effect of making boys seek out the more beautiful girls - and vise versa - which creates a hierarchy of beauty.

Noble sentiments: fairness for ugly people; more marriages; more sex for married people. Unfortunately, all of these sentiments then rest upon Biblical gender essentialism. Here it is:

This is why the Bible insists on certain incontrovertible differences that must forever remain between men and women. It says that men cannot wear a woman's clothing (Deuteronomy 22:5) and men are not to uproot the hair on their faces (Leviticus 19:27) (yes, that is the reason we Rabbis have such undeniably sexy beards). Even in external appearance, men and women are supposed to look different. In the Jewish religion, men and women sit separately in the synagogue, with a literal divider down the middle, all designed to heighten, while never overdoing, the sexual divide.

Now, if an Orthodox Jew (or an orthodox Muslim who believes the same kind of stuff) wants to think that increasing the gulf between men and women is the best way of advancing their sex lives, hey, by all means, feel free to do so. What they can't do, though, is to get past the simple fact that for great parts of history --- and in the Muslim word even today --- gender essentialism has been the essential backbone of oppression.

A while back I wrote a piece on Jewcy about honor(less) killings among Muslims. It's a subject that I've confronted frequently in my life (largely because it really messes me up). In my piece, I tried to suggest that not just patriarchy, but many varieties of oppression itself, are historically rooted in Manichean readings of gender:

At this point I started to wonder: how did the idea of "I am better than you" originate in the first place? More importantly, how is that idea perpetuated? The only thought that I kept coming back to, one that I am starting to believe very deeply, is that somewhere along the way every system of inequality and supremacism justifies itself by positing the existence of a purportedly "natural" inequality between man and woman, the original dualism. Man equals strong, woman equals weak, and thus lordship, supremacy, mastery, control, power, all become tied to this purportedly "natural" difference.

Now, people like the good Rabbi, Christian priests, and Muslim clerics, have had thousands of years of attempting to prove that gender essentialism doesn't engender gender supremacy (always the supremacy of males). They have utterly and thoroughly failed.

I am not sure why, then, they should get another chance, even if they are now able to repackage their gender essentialism with 'hip' terms like 'sexual polarity.' Give me a break.

What we should be really focusing on is trying to emphasize the shared humanity of men and women. Why should we believe that a man's desires or fetishes are any different from a woman's? Just because our parts look different? Again: we tried looking at the world like that, and all we did was alienate women --- and excise them from legal, literary, social, and cultural spheres of society.

There is something even more pernicious in the Rabbi's comments, though, and since he's focusing on the Jewish-American community he probably doesn't realize it, but the argument he's advancing is precisely the argument used to advance the burqa.

Just in case we don't know what a burqa is --- it covers a woman from head to foot in a cloth, often even covering her eyes. It's that thing everyone from the Huffington Post to ultra-right Evangelicals and Jews are always trying to "save" those "poor Muslims" from.

I was talking to a prominent Muslim cleric a few years ago and we were discussing Islamic modest dress, specifically the hijab and niqab. He is a very honest and learned man and is always willing to accept multiple readings of scripture. At the conclusion of our conversation, he conceded that there were multiple ways of reading the Quranic Arabic upon which veiling is premised.

Lacking any further scriptural support for his position, he proposed the Rabbi's argument: "If my woman is covered, it makes me more wont to have sex with her when we're alone."

At which point I proceeded to lose respect for him.

Nevermind how pathetic it is to rest one's religiosity --- or salvation --- upon one's groin; the fact is, if you accept the idea that men will find women more arousing when they are not always in front of their eyes, you will very soon have men who will say a) remove these women from places where us men hang out or b) if they must be around then cover them up in black so its like they are not here.

The world has seen enough of that.

The rabbi no doubt has good intentions, as do the many Muslim leaders who espouse similar sentiments. However, the way to create more warmth and empathy between men and women isn't to separate them, but to cultivate and raise and rejoice in them as if they were essentially --- here's where that word is useful --- the same creature.

God is one. So should be us humans.

Monday, June 16, 5:01 p.m.: Robin Tyler and Diane Olsen, who wRobin Tyler And Diane Olsen: Harbingers of the Obama Antichrist Kingdomon their California Supreme Court case to get married, are the first gay couple wed at the Beverly Hills Courthouse. The mayor of San Francisco officiates at the wedding of a lesbian couple in their eighties. (The ceremony was delayed because one of the octogenarian's dentures was stuck in the other's birth canal. Surgeons arrived promptly.) In heaven, Jesus cries and contemplates suicide, but settles on slashing his wrists in the bathtub with a Gillette Venus Vibrance Soothing Vibrations Razor for Women.

Tuesday, June 17, 8 a.m.: According to Agence France Presse (which is, let us not forget, French, and therefore will be referred to henceforth as Agence Freedom Presse), courthouses and clerks across California issued a "tidal wave of marriages" to same-sex couples, including Star Trek actor George Takei, who commands his new husband to immediately "beam up—you know where." Elsewhere in Hollywood, William Shatner contemplates facing the forbidden, sultry truth that resides—has always resided—at the bottom of his soul and the center of his loins, but concludes, "I can't do it, Captain... I... just... don't... have... the... power."

9:30 a.m.: Thousands of gay couples are now officially married. Experts suggest that half of the couples in state will wed, along with nearly 70,000 from other states. Right-wing radio personalities shriek that heterosexual marriage will cease to exist due to the "gay agenda," whatever that is.

9:37 a.m.: Heterosexual marriage ceases to exist. Millions upon millions of Californian adults file for divorce and commence sodomizing one another. (According to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, this turn of events is "inexplicable and vicious." He then paused to wipe his semen-drenched beard with one hand and give Anderson Cooper a reach-around with the other; Lou Dobbs masturbated while videotaping his colleagues, although he was unable to focus due to having Larry King's shriveled member inside of him) A homosexual orgy of biblical proportions stretches from San Diego to Santa Cruz, winning the Guinness World Record for "consecutive leapfrog train." Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who enters his Junior costar Danny DeVito, proclaims himself "the Terminator—of your ass."

10:55 a.m.: The California State Senate dissolves the California Supreme Court, which is promptly replaced with the Rules Committee of the North American Man-Boy Love Association. (In unrelated news, former Malcom in the Middle star Frankie Muniz dies of severe rectal bleeding. He should have never agreed to literally become "Malcolm in the Middle.")

12:46 p.m.: No longer satisfied with their newfound addiction to homosexual lovemaking, Californians turn their sexual attention to household pets, exotic zoo animals, seagulls, livestock, and Robin Williams. The entity formerly known as the California Supreme Court legalizes human-beast marriage, but only for same-sex humans and beasts.

2:19 p.m.: Every pregnant woman in California secures an immediate abortion, no matter how many months their fetus has had to develop, because procreation is a symbol of the Time That Once Was and Must Never Be Spoken Of. Everyone under the age of 60 is sterilized, either by chemicals or blades, which isn't actually necessary considering that everyone is exclusively fucking those of their own gender, but you can never be too safe.

3:39 p.m.: The American Family Association challenges the California Supreme Court decision; the U.S. Supreme Court immediately takes the case, but the plan backfires on the social conservatives when Justices Scalia and Alito realize that Justice Roberts is a pretty handsome guy for 53. (He's no John Edwards, of course, but somehow he is both rugged and boyish, which drives Clarence Thomas absolutely insane.) The Supremes rule that Christianity is illegal and shall henceforth be replaced with the Temple of Phallus.

3:45 p.m.: Sen. Barack Obama announces that he is the Antichrist, made flesh by the devil seed of Lucifer and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had tons of gay sex. Sen. John McCain bows to Obama's awesome Satanic power, pledges all of his delegates to the Democratic nominee-in-waiting and then desperately suckles upon the younger black man's scrotum, which tastes like a combination of honey and rose petals.

5:26 p.m.: The United Nations acknowledges King Obama as Supreme Leader of the World.

5:27 p.m.: The white race is enslaved. Islam owns the earth.

5:28 p.m.: Jesus Christ returns from the astral plane, defeats the Kingdom of Beelzebub with his Majestic Sword of Glory, liberates the captives, raises the dead from their graves, and reigns for a thousand years of tranquility and light. (The scrapes on his wrists have healed. He didn't really want to die anyway; he just wanted the girls at school to notice how much they hurt his feelings when they ignored him.) Nobody ever has gay sex again, because heaven on earth is gay enough already. Seriously. You remember the last five minutes of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King? It's just like that. Only gayer.

The most popular article at the NYTimes.com right now is about Muslim women in Europe getting their hymens surgically re-stitched so as to simulate virginity.

Why Go Under the Knife: when you can be a born again virgin?

Gynecologists say that in the past few years, more Muslim women are seeking certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

“If you’re a Muslim woman growing up in more open societies in Europe, you can easily end up having sex before marriage,” said Dr. Hicham Mouallem, who is based in London and performs the operation.  “So if you’re looking to marry a Muslim and don’t want to have problems, you’ll try to recapture your virginity.”

First of all, the idea of “recapturing” virginity is a little silly. Makes it sound like the virginity ran away of its own accord, which is clearly not the case.

Beyond semantics, the whole idea is depressing. Is faking virginity really the best way to deal with a young woman’s sexuality? And perhaps more importantly, why are Muslims placing such a high price on virginity? Not that this issue is a particularly Muslim one—an article in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago addressed the procedure in the context of a spa and cosmetic-surgery center in Queens. That article talks about New Yorkers getting the procedure to spice up their sex lives (doctors say it probably won’t work), and women from South America getting it because their Catholic upbringing places a high premium on marriage to a virgin.

Traditionally, virginity is associated with virtue and modesty, though I can name twenty friends who are virtuous, modest, and sexually active, and I know more than a few virgins who are horrible and slutty. In Jewish law, being a virgin means you’re worth more in your ketubah, but the text of a ketubah generally refers to the woman as a betulah, a virgin, unless she has been previously married. And since ketubot are rarely—if ever—used to sue for money, it’s a moot point.

I know of at least one Jewish text that seems to separate sexual experience and a broken hymen. There is a question as to whether one can have sex with a virgin on Shabbat, because it is assumed that during the act of sex the hymen will be torn, and it is forbidden to tear on Shabbat. The rabbis mention that there are some who are “precise in their positioning.” That is, they can have sex with a woman without breaking her hymen. These people, in theory at least, can have sex with virgins on Shabbat. (Ketubot 6b) This implies that an intact hymen wouldn’t necessarily mean that the girl in question is a virgin. Which makes the whole idea of hymen replacement pointless in the eyes of Jewish law.

Nishmat, the Jerusalem Center for Advanced Jewish Study for Women, addresses the issue of hymen replacement and Jewish law more fully here. A nice highlight:

On a purely theoretical level, it would also seem that a return to virginity is not to be strived for. Breaking of the hymen within the framework of marriage is viewed as a completion of the woman and the contract between the husband and wife, not a detraction (see for example, Encyclopedia Talmudit sv Be'ilat Mitzvah).

It’s frustrating that some women see lying to their communities and spouses at great personal expense as the only way to deal with their pasts. If only we spent more time teaching people to make good choices, and value honesty, and less time coming up with ways to get around the rules. In that vein, evangelical Christians may have beat us to the punch—they’ve been promoting a kind of mental revirginization for a while. Instead of a surgical procedure, one just re-declares him or herself a virgin. It’s a little flimsy, but somehow better than needlessly going under the knife.

Fleet Week in NYC: tattoos, booze, and...jews?My mother recently learned how to text-message. She’s addicted now, and several weeks ago, I received the following message: “JUST RAN INTO SUSIE FEINSTEIN @ SUPER-MARKET. JACOB ENGAGED TO GENTILE! OY VEY!”

Mr. and Mrs. Feinstein are a couple of conservative Jews, long-time friends of my parents, and Jacob is their oldest son. I met Jacob when I was five, so now—almost twenty-five years later—I know a lot about him: I know he’s got a taste for buxom blonds with Southern accents; I know he likes a lady with a tiny gum-drop of a nose. I also know his parents would rather lose a limb than watch him date a gentile.

It’s a familiar situation: Jewish parents spend a lifetime configuring Marriage To Another Jew as the end all be all accomplishment, all the while counter-productively setting the stage for their child’s Shiksa-rebellion. They station us Jewish gals up on the pedestal of proper dating and, in so doing, nuzzle the rest of the female world into the seductive corner. If I had a quarter for every time I’ve had a Jewish boyfriend parade me around at some Briss or Bat Mitzvah and then later, behind closed doors, ask if I wouldn’t mind a little Catholic school girl role-playing action, I’d have, well, a dollar. It’s happened with disconcerting frequency, and I’m getting exhausted.

We Got Married in a Fever, Hotter Than a Pepper Sprout: we've been talking 'bout Jackson, ever since the fire went outI want to be the manifestation of rebellion for once! But for whom is a Jew Gal a novelty? Is such a thing possible if you live in New York City?

Well, it is if it’s Fleet Week. Which it was in New York, just two weeks ago.

In humiliating and unrestrained anticipation of the ‘Sex and the City’ movie, and in pathetic homage to the T.V. episode wherein the four characters celebrate fleet week by attending a sailors’ party off Chelsea Piers, I decided to celebrate two weeks ago by trolling for sailors myself. I met one, goy-lifically named Jackson, in a West Village bar. Jackson was 6'3", from West Virginia—“they might both have ‘west’ in ‘em,” he’d drawled in reference to both the village and his native state, “but they ‘sho different!”—and in an effort to keep our belabored conversation afloat—HA!—I tossed off this numb-skulled hypothetical: “Alright Jackson, so let’s say this. Let’s say you’re on your ship and it’s sinking—God forbid!—and you end up stranded on a desert island and you can only take three items with you. What would they be?”

Jackson didn’t seem bothered by my insensitive mention of a sinking ship; it was the equivalent, I later decided, of someone saying to me, “Alright Sara, so let’s say this: you’ve just been diagnosed with Melanoma. Who do you tell first: your mom or your dad?” Jackson considered my question for a moment, then answered, “Well, there’re only two things I’d need, really: a twelve-pack of cold beer, and a good woman.”

“Interesting,” I replied. “And what constitutes ‘good’?”

“Well if I had my pick,” he said, “I guess I’d like a lady with tattoos.”

Sinking Ship: vs melanomaI have no tattoos, of course: I want at least the option of a Jewish burial. (Also, tattoo parlors instill in me an unmatched sense of fear – I can’t handle the idea of people strapped in chairs or the voluntary puncturing of human skin. The by-product is fine—even sexy, as Jackson suggested—but when I see the reality of where the magic happens, I get queasy.) Jackson praised tattoos and all they tend to connote, and I felt disappointed. West Virginian Sailor struck me as being one of the more exotically attractive types I’d ever get the chance to meet (Eskimos or Tibetan monks notwithstanding), and I’d banked on the feeling being mutual, but apparently not.

Or so I thought. See, I told Jackson I was sans tattoo, offered up the aforementioned reasons as to why, and he said, “Jewish, huh? That’s cool. I never met no Jewish gal before.” Then he inched in closer and put his hand atop my knee. I’m not sure this meant I was his forbidden fruit per se; and frankly, I didn’t care to probe lest I unearth some genuine strain of anti-Semitism on behalf of his parents. Instead, I reveled in the moment, this chance to act as someone else’s novelty.

An hour later, Jackson invited me back to his ship, but I declined. I mean, I’d won my Rare Bird status and shouldn’t that suffice? Did I want to chase after the prize of middle-bunk sex in addition? Didn’t that seem greedy? I thought it did. I felt reinvigorated, after all, and so decided: quit while you’re ahead.

This way, when I get Jacob Feinstein’s notice telling me to Save the Date, I’ll have the strength to listen.

Prenuptial Agreement: think of it as a time saving gestureRabbinic Courts in Israel are looking at a new possible solution for the problem of Agunot, or women whose husbands won’t grant them a divorce. The controversial fix-it: A prenup.

It’s funny that this should garner any controversy at all, since an integral part of a Jewish marriage, a ketubah, is already one big step towards a prenup. A ketubah is basically an insurance statement for a woman, making sure she won’t be left penniless if her hubby runs off or drops dead. If we’re already talking about unpleasant stuff like abandonment and death at the wedding, what’s a little financial negotiation?

A Jerusalem Post article summarizes some of the anti-prenup feeling in the Orthodox world:

The use of prenuptial agreements to facilitate the divorce process is a controversial issue among Rabbinic Court judges. Some rabbis oppose the use of most prenuptials, claiming the agreements make it too easy for one side to end a marriage. They are concerned that making divorce too easy will endanger the Jewish family institution.

They also argue that the use made in prenuptials of monetary incentives to encourage a recalcitrant partner to acquiesce to divorce is really a form of coercion prohibited by Jewish law.

Bullshit and bullshit, as far as I’m concerned, and I’m not the only one. Rabbi Eliyahu Ben-Dahan, administrative head of the Rabbinic Courts, is on board for prenups, and so is Marc Stern, who wrote an article called ‘A Legal Guide to the Prenuptial Agreement for Couples about to Be Married’ published in a book called The Prenuptial Agreement - Halakhic and Pastoral Considerations by Rabbi Basil Herring and Rabbi Kenneth Auman.

Prenups aren’t romantic or fun, but neither is being stuck in a marriage you can’t get out of. Let’s save everyone some grief and legal fees down the line.

Addendum: Check out this post on the Hatam Soferet blog about a woman scribe writing her own get.  Simultaneously sad and empowering. (Hat tip, Jewess).

At least she's not a perpetual teenager: Carrie Bradshaw“We still live vicariously through Carrie,” says one woman in this New York Times video about the movie’s premiere.

“Well, that used to be us in our twenties,” says her friend.

And therein lies the hands-down weirdest thing about the Sex and the City madness. Carrie isn’t in her twenties. Carrie is in her thirties. By the era of the movie, she’s 40. It feels almost rude to point this out, as if I’m suggesting that Carrie is old and therefore unsexy, or uninteresting, or unhip. I don’t think any of those things – I just know, objectively, chronologically even, that 40 is not the same age as 20.

Sex in the City is very much about age -- about how to be an adult woman when for most of the history of civilization female adulthood meant becoming a mother and a wife. The women of SATC variously chase, embrace, and reject those roles. Mostly, they agonize about them. But alongside the painful awareness that they’re still living ostensibly youthful lives comes delight in the fact that they’re old enough, and therefore rich and established enough, to live glamorously. When the ladies go to parties, they know everyone there. Carrie may have spent all her savings on shoes, but she can certainly afford dinner; Miranda’s been out of law school so long she’s a partner in her firm. All four women have paid their New York dues, presumably during the previous decade, and now their lifestyles are all about access.

The show believes firmly that it’s better to be 35 than 25. When twentysomething female characters do appear—even in the form of the heroines in flashbacks—they’re always depicted as irritatingly clueless children. The show doesn’t treat twentysomething men much better, though it does occasionally promote them from brats to boy-toys. (Samantha’s so well-established that she can establish a relationship with Smith Jerrod’s cock, which I think is the only character in the story who’s the same age I am.)

So why do twentysomething women embrace the SATC women as their—our—peers? Why does sex columnist Julia Allison, at 28, think she’s Carrie? Pop culture usually glamorizes youth, so in a way it’s nice to see the fetish run in the opposite direction. It's just that, as with so many other things, the show's mythology doesn't fully connect with objective reality in the lives of its fans.

Muslim women: in search of believersNothing highlights the difference between the Muslim and Jewish attitudes about marriage better than this article in the Washington Post. There are some new resources in the Muslim community devoted to helping new couples get to know each other before and after they’ve married, and the expected matchmaking services. That stuff is nothing new to Jews. But I was fascinated to hear that Muslims share the problem of way more single women than men in their community, and the reason is that Muslims are allowed to intermarry as long as the spouse is “a believer.”

Interfaith marriage is a huge topic with wide cultural ramifications. Because Islamic tradition, not law, holds that a Muslim man can intermarry but not a woman, a substantial gender gap in the dating pool has opened as children and grandchildren of immigrants have grown up.

The Koran says for Muslims to marry "believers," the meaning of which has long been the source of great debate but has been widely interpreted to include Christians and Jews. Although the Koran does not address the gender issue directly, tradition has held that women are more easily subjugated, and therefore a Muslim woman in an interfaith marriage could be forced by a Christian or Jew to live and raise her children outside of Islam, while a Muslim man in an interfaith relationship would be able to control the household's faith.

Of course, intermarriage in Islam doesn’t have the pall of death that it has been given in Judaism because there are a billion Muslims in the world, and no one’s worried that they’re dying out. Still, it’s fascinating that in both communities it’s the men that are marrying out, and the women who are mostly staying in. 

Clearly both the Muslim and Jewish communities are waking up to the realities of dating challenges, but I wonder if it’s too little too late. What’s going to happen to the hordes of single women left at the end of the dating game? Something tells me they won’t be running to the synagogue or mosque for comfort.

...And The City Women all across America may be planning their big girls’ night out to watch the new Sex and the City movie being released on May 29th, but the women of Jerusalem and Petach Tikva will probably be doing something else, for the simple reason that many of them won't even know the movie is in theaters.

That's because officials in the cities of Jerusalem and Petach Tikva don’t want the word “sex” to be on display, and have forbidden Forum Films (the Israeli distributor of the movie) from hanging advertisements or posters promoting the flick. The poster – which has a simple black background, the name of the movie in pink letters, and an image of Carrie Bradshaw in a fuchsia dress – does not include any nudity or pornographic messages. It simply states the name of the film.

Forum Film responded by stating that they “did not wish to advertise nude women or messages that may offend the feelings of the public in general and specifically of the orthodox population. That is the name of the movie, and we think that it is ridiculous to advertise the brand without the brand name.”

Maximedia, the company responsible for outdoor advertising, suggested a compromise. Their idea?  Advertising a movie called “… and the City”, which could actually be considered more suggestive seeing as how it leaves room for interpretation. At least with a name like “Sex and the City” you know what you’re getting.

This is not the first time that advertising has been censored in Israel due to the sensitivities of the orthodox population, but it is the first time that a word – and not an image – has been considered too provocative.

Spot the differences... An image of Sarah Jessica Parker was altered in a Lux soaps campaign in Israel in 2004 because her dress was considered too revealing. Billboards, which originally flaunted images of the Sex and the City star in a short spaghetti-strap dress, were "frumified", and long sleeves were literally added onto her image after an angry call from a prominent rabbi.

The censorship is not limited to sultry women like Parker. Apparently Disney’s Tarzan is too hot to handle as well. When the Tarzan animated movie came out, Forum Films was forced to take down posters that had already been hung in order to add pants to the wild jungle character. Where he’d even get pants in the jungle is beyond me, but obviously we’re not dealing in reason here.

For all those Jerusalem and Petach Tikva ladies out there who still want to watch the fabulous four on film – have no fear. The movie may not be advertised, but it’s still coming soon to a theater near you.

Say 'Virgin!': Creepy, right?Is it just me, or are purity balls really creepy? The New York Times has a crazy story this week about a big purity ball in Colorado Springs at which more than 60 girls and their fathers dressed up and danced late into the night to celebrate their purity. The girls do a dance (in tutus with a huge wooden cross), the fathers stand up and recite a covenant, and then two men walk up to the cross and hold swords in an arch over their heads.

Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross.

I’m all for fathers spending quality time with their daughters and being a good influence on their kids, but something about this seems a tad overzealous and inappropriate. For one thing, what about the sons? Every time I turn around I see a newspaper or magazine article about how boys these days are doomed. But I’ve never heard of any mother-son galas, and while these fathers all pledge to guard their daughters’ purity none of them seem to acknowledge that if their girls are at risk for surrendering their purity it probably has something to do with how boys are being raised as well.

And it bothers me that men are the ones entrusted with these girls’ purity. Shouldn’t some of this be coming from the girls’ mothers? Aren’t they better suited to warn the girls against the perils of the ‘hook-up culture’? Why aren’t the girls being empowered to make their own good decisions about sex and purity, rather than allowing that authority to be taken over by their dads?

I’ve never been crazy about the Orthodox community’s stance on relationships, but at the very least they have women talking to women, encouraging them to make good decisions, and helping them to see the values of modesty and dignity.

In contrast, purity balls seem to infantilize the girls and inflate their fathers with a false sense of authority. Because what we need more of now is girls who can’t grow up, and men with oversized egos.

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Well, this is it, I guess. What started as a series of un-furtive, semi-intellectual, vaguely thematic exchanges between relative strangers has totally....well, stayed that way. Yet it has been anything but a zero sum game. No, I have learned that I lack two of the three essential qualities necessary to date Elizabeth Wurtzel and Elizabeth Wurtzel, in short order will, if there is a Christ in Heaven, receive a $60,000 purse.

I can’t answer your last questions, because if I do, it will mean I will be telling you things I haven’t even told my wife. And I read somewhere, perhaps in a magazine, or in a manual of some sort, that this is wrong.

All I will say is this: For the better part of my existence I was convinced I would not get married. Even when I got engaged and planned an entire wedding, it still didn’t feel real. I observed it from outside my body. Outside my element even.

I basically snorkeled through the entire process, feeling nothing, until the moment I walked up the stairs with my father to the place where the ceremony was happening. It was just he and I. And then I just started crying. Like, hard. Not from joy, nor sadness. Momentousness hit me with one giant punch – the kind that knocks the wind out of you and makes you think you will never get it back. It was a bright day in May, so I was able to hide behind sunglasses. But I truly worried I would not be able to stop crying. Not before the ceremony, nor ever. That was the best day of my life.

Ben

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

Hey, sorry I've been a bit slow to reply. It's been a weird 24 hours.

First, someone posted a really quite funny joke on the Yale Law School electronic bulletin board that was a mock-up of a Harvard Crimson article that said I had been hired as a professor at Harvard Law School. Some people thought it was actually serious! I guess April Fool's Day was a while ago, but I am, as anyone can tell you, not particularly a legal scholar, so it seemed an obvious lampoon. But crazier things have happened.

Then I had to figure out if I was actually going to write this op-ed piece which could be really bad for Obama, who I like. The problem is, it could be bad for me too, because it's about his friendship with the leaders of the Weather Underground, and I think unless I condemn them utterly I look like a bad person.

Then some other things happened, but I can't remember what they are.

Life never really stops being high school, which is worrisome, though I suppose I've made an effort to never quite escape college.

So, back to your question: What am I looking for? I am not going to say that old trope that I'd like someone with a sense of humor, because EVERYBODY says that, and what does that even mean? I'm afraid the answer really is tall, handsome and smart, everything else is just extra. I really like the standard good things. All my boyfriends have been the theme, with very little variation on the theme. They've all been kind of obvious choices, except that they have been terribly difficult, given me a hard time, made my life unmanageable--and I think I've had enough of that.

What's your wife like? How long have you been married? Do you like being married? Someone I know who is happily married recently described the whole thing to me as kind of tawdry, and he didn't mean it in a bad way. I think I know what he was trying to say. Just getting through the day is kind of tawdry.

Did want to mention, by the way, that they've come a long way toward treating psoriasis, so there's no reason you should have to live with the condition. But imperiousness--not so much. I mean, the only treatment is meeting someone who knows how to handle it.

From: Ben Karlin
To: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Posh Spice plus Birkin: Is it better to be known, or loved? Or does having a really expensive purse trump both those things? The words in your last e-mail all make sense. And they all seem true and heartfelt. But to me, everything boils down to simple want. Every word human beings speak is laden with desire. The engine of socialization coats our language and teaches us moderation and technique, but we are animals striving to survive and thrive.

I started out these exchanges with you pleading for you to like me. That was laid out in the form of a joke, but it was fundamentally true. I didn't plead for you to "know" me. Because ultimately, I don't think that's what most people want. It's why we dress up to go out. It's why we hope and pray that a person has fallen for us before they find out some of the dark, unpleasant shit. Could you imagine leading with, "Hello my name is Ben. I snore, have psoriasis and can be simultaneously imperious and childish"?

I haven't figured out anything about life or love. I really haven't. But my overwhelming suspicion is that is a lot simpler than 99% of all people make it. Unfortunately, simple does not mean easy. And honesty isn't always the best policy. Would that it were.

So the natural question is, what do you want? Besides that bag, of course.

From: Elizabeth Wurtzel
To: Ben Karlin

I agree with you the that Birkin bag situation amounts to madness. It's not like it brings you pleasure, like absinthe or cocaine, and yet it's being dealt with as such. Crazy! But women are crazy. And bags are cult objects. See?

As for boyfriends, I gave your interrogatory considerable thought. I must explain that my relationships amount to these rather rambling affairs with no real beginning or end, and what goes on in the middle is pretty indefensible. Pretty much, the way it always goes is it starts by, I meet some guy, sparks fly like shooting stars and fireworks and every other pyromaniac's delight--until things cool off of their own accord. Then usually he realizes he just doesn't want to get involved, which I know is code for doesn't want to get involved with me. And logically, that should be the end.

But it never is. Somehow, I just don't or won't go away, and there's enough good energy to keep things going, sometimes in fact years will go by in this middling state of no relationship, but here we are. I am very good at the bad dynamic. And I've managed to derive a reasonable amount of pleasure and satisfaction from it, or I suppose I would have recovered from this sickness by now.

At any rate, the way these relationships usually end is that finally, one fine day, I can no longer bear the pain of what's not happening, or I meet someone else who I defy technology with, or my friends give me an ultimatum because they can no longer stand to listen to me complain, or we just drift apart. Someone moves to another city or another continent, somehow I am saved by the bell.

Not that I haven't had my share of cohesive relationships that have ended with screaming matches in the TWA terminal in the Saint Louis airport (all right, so that was many years ago) or by exchanging cross words across Barrow Street. And a couple of times, I've even told someone he's just not what I wanted, or I've had that said to me. But mostly, it's all just slipped away. For a Jewish girl, I am shockingly mellow, and have really failed to hold out for a ring or anything solid. What can I say? I'm a little mutant.

The poet laureate of not regretting anything: Edith Piaf And then, with all of them, time goes by, and they turn up again, there's either a reason to be in touch or there's no reason not to. Sometimes it seems like no sooner am I out the door before the guy realizes, Oh fuck! Should have never let her go! And by then it's too late. Men don't get this: When women are done, they are DONE.

But I'm always happy to keep up. I'm really not a bitter person. Which is truly a character flaw: bitterness is a self-protective trait that alerts us to when enough is enough, and I just have no sense of that. I'm just too interested to see what will happen next, and bitterness doesn't figure into the plot twist. I don't really have much use of it in any part of my life, frankly. After all, everyone who has ever hired me has eventually fired me. But then they've usually found a way to get me to work for them again, later on. Time goes on, you're up, you're down, it just doesn't seem worthwhile to be bothered about what someone did to hurt you years--or even days--hence.

My old boyfriends are like my whacked-out family at this point. I loved every single one of them so completely and truly that I just can't see fit to lose them now. I never compromised on love, I never forced myself to love someone because he seemed like the right idea or to fit the bill, I really fell hard for every guy I ever loved. You know, it's like, je ne regrette rien. I guess this is all very corny, and the result is that I'm alone now, but it's never been dull.

Your love life has led you to a more natural outcome, so for you having exes hanging around is just a pain, it's ghosts of Christmas past. But for me it's still an ongoing story. I'm waiting to see how the plot thickens--or thins...