By Rabbi David Eidensohn  

     The Gallup Poll ( May 23, 2003 ) announced that “Americans Heartily Endorse Annika Sorenstam’s Appearance on PGA Tour.” America, and of course the media, thus thrilled to another “achievement” by a woman, playing golf with men and scoring well! Gallup found that “83% of those surveyed–and 77% of golf fans–say they support the decision to invite Sorenstam.” Also, “85% of men and 80% of men approve.”

         I do not approve. I also do not approve of a culture and society that leaves women without children, without husbands, with a fifty percent divorce rate for first marriages, and a good chance of battling your ex for years in divorce court. Annika Sorenstam does not have the opportunities that my daughters in my community have. My daughters do not need to prove themselves among men. They are happy as women, as mothers, as wives. They have four (still-married) parents and a large extended family and supportive community to support them somewhat through life. A girl today has parents who may or may not speak to each other, years of study in public schools where girls are toys, and college where date-rape is part of life. What can girls do except try to become men? What a tragedy. Can a woman, even the strongest woman, really become a champion in physical sports? We set them up for frustration. The issue, therefore, is not whether Annika Sorenstam is right or wrong. In the secular world women are valued as toys or men, thus she has little choice but to compete with much stronger men. Some women are valued for acting like men, as when women box each other, trying to smash the other’s brain into oblivion.

        When Maureen Dowd of the New York Times complains that ABC television has only dysfunctional family and gay shows and that she has nothing to watch, we know that we are in trouble. I think that Ms. Dowd, who wrote about her single status and vulnerability in such touching tones, would appreciate seeing my daughters. My daughters never learned to hate men. When the two sets of parents, my daughter’s and their son’s, decided that this was the best match, we set things in motion, and did whatever we could do to encourage the marriage. There is such fear in a girl or boy to make a marital commitment, unless they are stupid. They need structure. They need the comfort of family bringing them to the wedding canopy. When we walk our children to the marital ceremony, and everybody watches us, believe me, we deserve the honor. We had a lot to do with this ceremony. There is, however, another aspect of this honor. We are responsible for the selection of the partner for life, and we are responsible to keep things going.

     I don’t like to compete with my wife about anything. If we have to compete, we are not going to do it married. The Talmud says that a husband and wife are really one body, one person. When the saint of Jerusalem , Rabbi Aryeh Levin, took his wife to the doctor, he said, “Doctor, my wife’s foot hurt us.” People come together as polarities, and if they are the same force, they repel each other. A woman/man can never be comfortable with a normal man. A man/woman cannot be comfortable with a normal woman.

     Girls know all of this better than I do, unfortunately. They see their mothers, their older sisters, their older friends, and see things that I can’t even imagine. And there is nothing they can do about it. Society has ditched them, and decided that they must become men. Secular girls are not only on the wrong side of the road in the gender wars, even biologically, it seems that germs prefer girls over boys. According to the US Government Center for Disease Control, in its Prevention News Update of 5/23/03 , “Girls are at High Risk for Sexual Diseases, Studies Say.” The Austin American-Statesman newspaper (15.19.03::Jeffrey Gilbert) quotes the Texas Department of Health and the Center of Disease Control that “Girls are seven times more likely to get Chlamydia than boys and 75 percent of infected girls have no symptoms.” A boy is infected and realizes that something is wrong and goes to the doctor. The girl has no idea that she is infected and the disease simply grows.

     The above CDC article quotes the CDC that “nearly half of US high school students surveyed in 2001 had experienced sexual intercourse.” Once a girl gives herself to a boy, she may or may notstop, but she has lost something precious. I just saw an article about a boy who found the perfect girl except that he was a virgin and she was not. He could not tie the knot. Even if he does, he will not forget. Such is the way America raises its daughters. Go to public school, give yourself to boys, and then, get married? The US Department of Education is suing Harvard because Harvard will not investigate a girl’s complaints about a date-rape or abuse just because a girl claims it unless there is some evidence. The girls are right, because the abuses don’t happen in public, and she is the only one around to know that she was raped or abused. But the boy is right as well, because why can he be accused of such a dastardly crime without evidence? If you have a college when young people are together, you have this. In my community, boys and girls are segregated from earliest times.

     I recently had a very rewarding discussion with a troubled person in which we discussed the Four Women. Who are the Four Women? In my community, a man and a woman have only one sexual partner and one close partner for life, unless divorce or death intervene. In other cultures, such as Western Europe , marriage was never taken seriously, and was done mainly for financial reasons, to protect estates, etc. Voltaire took someone’s wife and she left him for a third man. When she died, all three gathered around her casket in the most amicable way. Taking someone’s wife was fine, because your wife will leave you, too. A man needed four women. He needed a wife to have children and to establish heirs for his estate, and for financial reasons, if she was wealthy or if her family was well-connected. He needed a mistress for daily comfort and to discuss with her his problems and hopes. He needed a concubine, because a mistress was involved with his life and ideas, and was not thoroughly sexual. A concubine was a specialist in sex. However, even these three women were not enough. The man’s long-term relationship with these three women required that he treat them with some respect. A man therefore needed a fourth woman for his sexual abandon, a prostitute, or any available one-night-stand person. These four women, the wife, the mistress, the concubine and the prostitute shared the men of Europe for centuries, and they are also active today throughout the world, even America, although in America family is much more important than it is elsewhere.

     When a man marries, he may need four women, because even decent men have strong biological urges that cannot be readily denied. In biblical and traditional family communities, one woman must suffice, but it is not so simple. Therefore, in some American family communities, there was a ritual that when a boy reached a certain age, his father and elders of the community introduced him and his friends to prostitutes. By being inclusive, the elders of the community guided the young man to sow his oats and eventually to marry and participate in the community. In communities such as mine, when such is proscribed, a boy or man who slips can be so damaged that he may feel like leaving us completely. In those communities where prostitutes are not readily available, there is a great danger that married people will commit adultery. Of course, those who go to a prostitute don’t want to stop there, and if they can find a free married person, they are unlikely to refuse. Thus, there is no clear way to family propriety, unless, as in my community, you rigidly divide the sexes from childhood for an entire lifetime, and work very hard to make marriages work, something that sometimes involves many helpers in the community. Some societies, however, swing between their genes and their morals, like tennis balls.

     Speaking of genes, Time Magazine of May 25, 2003 , featured an important science article by Matt Ridley, entitled “What Makes You Who You Are: Which is stronger–nature or nurture?” Genes have coded instruction to form our bodies and our energies in certain fixed ways. How fixed? The latest scientific information is that the body has genes that tell us how to do something, but we can react to the genes, and our reaction will re-design the genes.

     The enormously powerful sexual genes tell us what to do, but we can refuse their message or modify it, and in the process, we revamp the gene itself! Thus, let us take two people, male or female. They enter puberty and the genes empower the reproductive faculties. One person heeds the call of nature and becomes profligate. The genes sense the message, and power on the call of nature until the person is completely tied into extreme schedules of sexuality. Another person senses the genes and their dispositions but refuses them. He sends the genes back to the drawing board to cool it, and they do. He keeps his sexuality in check until the right time, when the genes will be instructed to flow full force.

     Men and women have genes. Some respond to their sexuality by being active, even as children. Others abstain. Each of these people update their genes, turning them on or off or modifying their response through constant nurture and actions. Women have female genes and men have male genes. As women must become men in the secular culture and even in other areas, their nurture may change their behavior, their fantasies, their identity and arousal, and if so, are they still “women”? A woman who talks like a man, works like a man, thinks like a man, dresses like a man, identifies with many manly attitudes and behaviors, and has only a discredited female model to consider for her femininity is a poor excuse for a woman. When such a “woman” deals with a man, is this polar attraction or repelling of like charges? More and more, men are afraid to be men, women are afraid to be women, and they conflict because nowl male/female is not a polarity, so marriage is almost unthinkable. That is where we are going.

     The Gay Lobby thrives from this erosion of gender clarity. If marriage is “one man and one woman”, do we not declare that men are not women? Do we not defy the biological man or woman to have meaningful sexuality with the same gender/sex? How then can we erode the differences between male and female in business and sport?

     A man’s interest in a woman involves ego and sensuality. These may clash. For instance, there is a woman who can strengthen a man’s ego, but she may not be the right one for him sensually and of course, a sensual woman may not please a man’s ego. Sometimes, a woman can be both sensual and sexually arousing. Sometimes she is neither sensual nor pleasing to his ego. Maybe he married her for other reasons, to please his parents, for her money, because he wanted to suffer, etc.

     Thus, a man may marry a woman who has serious problems because they make him feel superior and his ego is stroked by her infirmity. Then, he gets to a point that he feels that this is not enough, and there are problems. The woman also marries for various reasons, and sometimes her perspectives change as she matures and divorce threatens. She no longer receives from her husband the satisfaction that she used to.

     Freud once said that since marriage cannot be of equals, someone must dominate, and it might as well be men. If Freud is right, and he is, that marriage cannot be the relationship of equals, how does equality for women affect marriage? It destroys it. We thus, in America, are powering women up the economic scale, training them to be men, even while we position them to lose the most basic needs of a natural female, a strong, masculine and caring husband, and children who live in a home of two parents. Two equal parents cannot live in the same home, usually.

     We can fool women into joining the army and finding out what war is really like. We can cheer women when they take on men in physical sports. We can tell women to become rich and powerful in the financial sector and sacrifice maternal need and children, even marriage. But if we do, our families will decline, as they are declining, and women will suffer as few generations of women in history have suffered. No society ever denied a woman her most basic womanly needs. We do this in America .

     In the Orthodox Jewish community, all marriage rituals are big deals and the community participates. The groom is told that he is a “king” and is serenaded into the synagogue down the streets of the community on the Sabbath before his wedding. The bride sits like a queen before the wedding, and dozens, even hundreds of people ask her to pray for so and so the sick one, so and so who can’t get married, etc. The wedding is wild with dancing, singing and swarms of people, even not family and close friends, who come to dance, sing and wish everyone well. Every day for a week after the wedding, the couple is feted and dined with speakers, music, levity and fine food. The parents are thereto assure that the first years are supported and without undo stress. My daughter just had a baby, which means that she went off to relax for a week (after the first week that she rested in my house) in the most relaxing environment. She deserves it, absolutely, and if she did not get such support, raising a large family would be quite difficult. When one child needs a rest, they just ship off the children to a sister, a parent, or a friend. It isn’t enough, but it is something, and it makes the difference.

     In our community, a person is a person, not a thing. We have no female toys. We have no gender “costume parties,” and faking it with drink and “fun,” unless they are for natural fun, such as on the holiday of Purim when people wear masks. America is a society of masks. Women pretend they are men, men pretend that they are not men, children pretend they are not little, parents pretend they are not needed to give structure to their children, and we wonder, what will be the result? We will have women swinging away on the golf course, and the cheers of the country will drown out the cries of the women without child, headed for the Nursing Home and oblivion, and the groans of single men who will never play ball with a son and never take a daughter to her wedding.

        Do you see that golf club swishing through the air, smashing a hard white ball? On the hard white ball rides a fragment of womanhood. If you listen carefully, you will hear it cry.  

D. Eidensohn's poem "The Wall" won an International Poetry Contest. His poems appear in
"The Best Poems of the Twentieth Century"

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