Hole in One?

Since I've left the cloister (aka, all-girls yeshiva) and entered the "secular" world, I've occasionally found myself as an ambassador for the Orthodox to the rest of society. Over the years, I've fielded many different questions, such as:

Has kosher food been blessed by a rabbi? (Answer: No)

How is flicking on a light switch considered working on the Sabbath?

And my last, and favorite one:

Do Orthodox Jews really have sex through a hole in a sheet?

Sarah Silverman's invitation to Orthodox penises.

Most recently I was asked about the mating habits of Orthodox Jews by a fellow Heeb and b-person. When he asked if it was indeed true, I was tempted to smirk and say, "Well you gotta try everything at least once." But instead I told him the boring truth- no, my former coreligionists do not have sex through the bedding. That there's nothing between genitalia with the exception of a condom (but only if there's rabbinic dispensation).

This most recent inquiry got me thinking. Where did this myth, that Orthodox Jews fornicate through their bed linens (of course not linen mixed with wool)- come from?

I went in search of answers. I looked online. One site posited that it was a joking reference to ultra-Orthodox weddings, where the dance floors are gender segregated and separated by a partition that is sometimes breached by a child passing from one section to the other. (I don't totally get how going through the mechitza morphs into putting a penis through a bed cloth, but anyway).

A friend I asked said it had to do with the tzitzit, a ritual four cornered garment with strings that men wear under their shirts (I promise you it's less weird than the special Mormon underwear).

They look like this:



"What must've happened," she said, "is that some people saw these things that kind of look like sheets with holes drying on a line and thought that Orthodox people have sex through them."

While that is much more plausible than the mechitza response I found on one site, and is probably at least part of the origin of this shtetl legend, it still leaves me with at least one question. The hole in the tzitzit tends to be pretty big. After all, they have to fit over a Jewish man's head, which tends to be inflated and disproportionate to his often scrawny body. What must have these Gentiles wondered about Jewish male member size when they gazed on the dangling tzitzit and believed them to be a sex? Did they think that the wives were merely stroking the ego of their men folk by cutting an extra large sex portal?

Foreplay.

But as hilarious as this "the sex through a hole in the sheet" question is, it still does not beat the inquiry made by one of my fellow grad school students a couple of years back. After class and a few drinks, she asked me, "Do Orthodox Jewish women wear a merkin?"

"What's a merkin?" I asked. I was still pretty innocent having just begun a grad program in Creative Writing. After two years of reading about gay and tantric sex, and on occassion, crabs and other STDs, I would lose most of my wide eyed innocence.

"A pubic wig," she responded. I spritzed my white wine in surprise. This writer, having heard about the tradition among Orthodox women to cover their hair with a wig, thought they covered all of their hair. No, I told her, they do not.

But if they did, I'm sure some rabbi would complain that the merkins look better than the woman's real pubic hair and is therefore not an acceptable covering according to Jewish law.