Shmuley Boteach: Women's Sensuality Guru

By Frimet Goldberger

Women, have your husbands snuffed out your libidos? Do you feel like you no longer need to pursue beauty, wit, insight, creativity and personal sensuality because your lazy-ass husband flips through the TV stations and stumbles into bed after his nightly dose of porn and afternoon office sex with his mistress? Do you feel that the vows you made with HIM to lust for each other in sickness and in health are violated now that you’ve left your parents’ loving home and your beauty isn’t overwhelming anyone?

If you or someone you know is experiencing similar sexual famine, look no further than the self-proclaimed guru of women’s sensuality, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, or as I like to call him, Shmuley Botox. Rabbi Botox is the world-acclaimed author of the New York Times Bestseller “Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy” and has now penned a profound and potentially earth-shattering essay on Huff and Post titled “What Women Really Want: A Rabbinical Guide to What a Woman Needs and Desires.”

“Women are not looking just for love in a marriage,” Botox wrote. “They are primarily looking for lust… This is what a woman thirsts to hear more than anything: ‘I desire you. I want to be physical with you. Your beauty is overwhelming to me. I cannot control myself around you. I find myself thinking about you constantly and I have to have you — I don’t care what the consequences are. I don’t care if we don’t go to sleep tonight and we have to get the kids to school in the morning; there are no physical considerations that can suppress my desire for you.’ That’s what women want and need to hear; that’s what will melt a woman, because it taps into her core desire. A husband who approaches a woman without wooing her is not likely to get much of a response, because he hasn’t addressed her core need.”

Spot on, Rabbi! Women get married because they want their husbands to lose control. Married women desire only men who know how to tap their cores and melt them. Women get married because they hate to sleep and want to be ravaged at every hour, as if by Christian Grey in “Fifty Shades of Baloney.”

American wives, Rabbi Botox Guru continues, are “relegated to the roles of caretaker, wage earner, housekeeper, and waitress… Many husbands subconsciously snuff out their wives’ libidos. They sexually extinguish their women, all but guaranteeing that the men themselves will have to turn to porn, affairs, or fantasy for their own erotic thrills. A man complains that his wife is no longer interested in sex, all the while transforming her from a woman into a maid and from a mistress and lover into the mother of his children.”

A woman’s sexuality doesn’t exist apart for her husband doing his part to awaken it. The proof is in the marital pudding: the day-to-day monotony of caretaking, housekeeping, parenting and wage-earning forces husbands to seek out other erotic thrills to quench their uncontrollable animalistic urges. Let’s be honest: wives who busy themselves with domestic nonsense like cooking and cleaning and tending to their children are less desirable to men, just like men who busy themselves with women’s work are less desirable to women. Which is why so many husbands married to such boring and domesticated wives turn to the computer and Google “MILF,” and why sensually famished wives look in the mirror and repeat – over and over – “where have my single years and sexual libido gone?”

It is heartening to see a rabbi speak for the ladies and dictate what they desire — or should desire.

Women around the world read your viral (not to be confused with vital) piece and exhaled a collective sigh of relief. They dropped their functional and domestic work, quit their jobs, stashed all the children into boxes labeled “functional” and took off to tap into their lost sensuality. One woman even bothered to annotate your essay, Rabbi Botox, before she joined the others in marital fairyland.

From the bottom of our hearts, we thank you for ending the sexual famine which threatened to kill us all and leave our sorry husbands flipping through the channels and stumbling into bed with the perfectly-nonfunctional Venus.

<Forward>

Lipa Speaks Out

By Frimet Goldberger

Hasidic singer Lipa Schmeltzer is a true exception in the Haredi world, both because of his music and because of his personality. Frimet Goldberger lives a few blocks away from Schmeltzer in the community of Airmont, N.Y., and she and her family are members of his shul. In this exclusive interview with the Forverts, Schmeltzer discussed the community he grew up in, the people who rejected him, and how the experience changed him. Listen to the whole interview in Yiddish here.

Lipa Schmeltzer: I was raised in the town of New Square, which is a small ultra-Orthodox community, and a significant part of my popularity happened because I am a strong critic. My reputation came to be that Lipa Schmeltzer is talented, but shunned by many. And this happened in part because I grew up in [New] Square. They contributed to this rejection, because they were hurt by the mere fact that I became a singer.

To them, singing is a problem — and the genre is irrelevant. An artist who will perform at concerts; a singer who will go out in the world and fans will clap with their hands and cheer loudly; they despise this.
But my talents prevailed and I continued on my way. I grew stronger within as a result of this, and I also healed a lot from my music. And all the pain, shame, and humiliation that I endured only served to strengthen me.

I had a very difficult childhood. I could not concentrate in heder [Hasidic boys’ school], I was spanked, and I was given nicknames — things I was never willing to discuss, until recently. But I am more willing now to go back to this pain, to look in the mirror and see what I have endured, and how I have to thank Hashem that I arrived to where I am now.

The most difficult time in my life was when 33 so-called rabbis signed a petition against me. Five or six called to apologize, and a few I recorded on paper saying that they were fooled. It’s interesting to note that on the signed rejection letter, you only see their printed signatures. But I do have the authentic signatures on paper from the few who said they were duped. But they did not allow me to publish it in the newspapers.
Today, if 500 rabbis come out against me, perhaps it will be uncomfortable, but that is where it will end. I will go on the radio to talk about it, I’ll write about it in the newspaper and on blogs, but I won’t run and hide in a hole the way I did back then.

Burekh Hashem, [thank God], God gave us a gift called the Internet. If I wanted to pay $10,000 back then for a Haredi publication to publish my side of the story, I couldn’t, because a rabbi warned them not to accept my story. These days I am able to express my opinions in different places. So it is a little easier now. But I still have endured a lot — and this was one of my most difficult periods.

Many of these trying times were when I lived in New Square. I wanted so badly to have the honor, the opportunity to sing for the Rebbe. This was my dream. They said they would allow it, but only if I commit to five conditions. After I signed their commitment paper, they canceled on me at the last minute, citing one dayan [a judge of Jewish legal matters] who said I am not yet 100% kosher. It really stung. I stayed home and hid for a few days.

I was once publicly thrown out of a wedding — off a stage; I was once thrown out of a sheva brokhes [post-wedding meals] where I was a guest; all because I sing with a wilder beat. And I have to believe God is bothered by all this. It’s silly to even talk about it.

Rejection is a very difficult feeling, and I suffered from it a lot in my life. So I will hopefully never do this to others — no matter what happens. Each week I receive calls here at my shul, sometimes from a dayan, a rabbi or just congregants: I shouldn’t allow this, I should tell him that, etc., and I never pass along the message. Because I know what it feels like to face a closed door and not to be accepted. I will never do this to others.

Sometimes I have to attend family occasions, or go back to places where they look at me with contempt. But instead of getting upset, I pity them, because I know that they don‘t know any better; it is not their fault. And maybe, one day, they will change, too.

We are one nation. Hitler did not differentiate between those [women] who did not cover their hair and those who did; Hitler did not differentiate between those who dressed in black and white or those who dressed in blue; Hitler did not differentiate between those who were Jewish or those whose grandfathers were Jewish; he wanted us all out. We need to come together. Am Yisroel Chai.

<The Forward>