Peggy Kleinplatz is a professor in the faculty of family medicine at the University of Ottawa. I first came across her work via a book she wrote (with A. Dana Ménard) called Magnificent Sex: Lessons from Extraordinary Lovers. I have since come to learn that she has written many other classics in the field of sex therapy and edited a standard textbook on the topic (New Directions in Sex Therapy: Innovations and Alternatives). She is the sex therapist’s sex therapist, appearing in books and podcasts from leading figures including Esther Perel and Emily Nagoski. She has also studied Holocaust survivors and infertility, positing a compelling theory that women were fed synthetic steroids in concentration camps, which permanently affected their reproductive health. I had a wide-reaching discussion with her that was both entertaining and informative, touching on many aspects of Jewish life and sexuality.
As a rabbi who officiates weddings, I get a lot of questions about sexuality from a Jewish perspective. What are some of the benefits and challenges of talking about sexuality within a religious culture?
My impression is that all the religious traditions have a sex-positive and a sex-negative stream. In my teaching, I have the choice of focusing on the positive and the negative.
There are a lot of people, including some who consider themselves fairly learned about Judaism, who were not taught much about authentic, traditional aspects of sexuality within Judaism. The tradition, going all the way back to Abraham and Sarah, is fairly small-liberal. Judaism has always been a very sex-positive religion.
I have sources that I often share with couples about Jewish sex ethics. One of the things I like to point out is that there are trends in Jewish sex ethics that closely mirror what is going on in general society. When you are in a sexually permissive world, Judaism tends to go in that direction.
I would say you’ve just captured really accurately one side of the coin that comes from within Jewish traditions, and where they’re situated at a given point in time and history. The problem is that Jews have always been a small minority in wherever they’ve lived for the last couple of thousand years.
The other influences on sexuality have been non-Jews’ attitudes towards Jews and, in particular, antisemitism. So if we look at the 1900s and the period up to, we’ll say 1938 in Poland, the belief was that Jewish women were “nymphomaniacs” and Jewish men were not to be trusted around Christian women in a way that very much parallels attitudes towards Black men in the antebellum South.
We see the switch in 1960s American culture, when the “sexual revolution” occurred. We see antisemitism shifting to say that Jewish women were all “frigid” and Jewish men were unappealing, inexperienced, neurotic. There’s this huge shift between the 1930s and the 1960s in the context of the antisemitism that used sexuality as a pivot point, creating whatever stereotypes about Jews’ sexuality would most resonate with the dominant culture and succeed in othering Jews and keeping Jews marginalized.
I keep coming back to niddah (the halakhic status of a woman during menstruation). My thinking about this is that, historically, between nursing and pregnancy and malnourishment, women likely menstruated maybe once a year. Being separate from your husband for 12 days out of every 28 would have been very unlikely. Yet here we are in, the twentieth century, people are healthy, pregnancy rates are down, and as a result, women that keep niddah menstruate regularly. There are dozens, hundreds of examples of rabbis and rebbetzins and educators talking about how niddah and the mikveh are the best things that could ever happen to a couple, because they create a honeymoon every month: that pause in sexual relations keeps the marriage fresh. I think it’s really an anachronism. I have a hard time teaching about this because I don’t like ascribing emotional or psychological benefits to things that we’re required to do because of the law — things change over time, and maybe the psychological effects are different now than they once were. But is there research that shows periods of abstinence can be beneficial?
Isn’t it interesting what we choose to teach, and what gets left out of our teachings?
Whether it’s in secular, feminist contexts (such as when I’m at a university) or when I’m speaking to a Jewish audience, I find it remarkable that everyone has heard about what they interpret as sex-negative practices, such as niddah, but they have somehow managed not to have learned about onah [the Biblical obligation to sexually satisfy one’s wife] — which is, as far as I can tell, unique to Judaism.
When I cover the history of sexuality in Western civilization, students are always very surprised at the notion that sexuality is a husband’s privilege; the idea that it is a wife’s obligation really comes out of Christian teachings. Jewish teachings have always been quite the opposite: sexuality, and in particular sexual pleasure, is a wife’s privilege and a husband’s responsibility.
When I am asked to speak to groups of young, married, religiously observant women in my capacity as a sex therapist whose research has focused, among other things, on optimal sexual experiences, I’m often asked: Do you believe that niddah is a blessing for marriage? in the same way that Masters and Johnson were able to demonstrate through their research in 1966 and 1970 that focusing on intercourse can sap the erotic energy from a relationship. My answer is that I have no right to answer this question. In Judaism there are some laws that are to be followed because of their inherent value for communal life or interpersonal relationships — things such as thou shalt not bear false witness or thou shalt not commit murder. And there are other categories of laws that are not intended to be explained or followed for rational purposes, but rather as articles of faith.
I never answer the question about whether or not there is some marital benefit to following chukim [Biblical laws which are traditionally understood to have a meaning beyond human comprehension]. I do not have the right to answer that question. One is scientific and the other is a matter of religious observance. Either you do it or you don’t do it because it enriches your life as a practitioner of your religion. A chok is not supposed to be subject to justification.
There is a crossover every once in a while. If I think of the people I interviewed for my research on optimal sexual experiences, every once in a while, I’d be speaking to someone who would say, Thank G-d for Shabbos. This is how we make the angels sing. This is a time of uninterrupted union that is incredibly erotic and that we anticipate and savour as we look forward to time outside of time to do nothing but be with each other and bring the full kavanah to it. That’s not the purpose of observing Shabbat. But if that happens to work out, isn’t that wonderful?
What are some of the differences between how people talk about sex within contemporary culture versus how they experience it in private?
So in terms of contemporary culture in general, it’s the fact that there’s such a discrepancy between the ostensible openness about sexuality in the public domain and the inability to talk about sexuality openly in the private domain that keeps me in business. In the 1950s, when public discussion about sexuality was more taboo, if people had sexual problems they figured everybody else did too. They didn’t like it, but they probably didn’t think it was the end of the world, and they were going to somehow grit their teeth and make their way through it. In 2024, everybody assumes, based on the discourse in the public domain, that everybody else is having great sex except for them. They feel, Oh no, I’m not keeping up with the Joneses, I’m not having enough sex, I’m not having sex with the same frequency as everybody else, my sex doesn’t always seem easy and effortless, it doesn’t always end in orgasm. They walk into my office filled with shame and feeling defective. The first thing I need to do is deal with their sense of alienation from what they perceive as everyone else’s wonderful sex life.
I have documented that really wonderful sex will require effort. It shouldn’t feel like work if you’re doing it right, but it does require a measure of devotion, of intentionality, like anything else that’s worth experiencing in life.
I think the word that summarizes all of this from a Jewish perspective and was used occasionally by some of our participants who happened to be religiously observant Jews was kavanah [intention to perform a mitzvah]. It’s about the way we transform something that could be mundane into something that could be transcendent.
In my research, one of the questions we sought to answer is: How does one become an extraordinary lover? We literally asked: Were you born this way? Were you born under a lucky star? How did this happen? All of the people we interviewed, regardless of background, cracked up laughing at the question because it wasn’t something that happened naturally, it wasn’t something that happened spontaneously. It was something that took years of intentionality and effort; the average age at which people started to fulfill their erotic potentials and become the lovers that they only glimmered that they might be earlier on was generally somewhere in their 50s. That was true for the older, partnered people and for the kinky, consensually non-monogamous LGBTQIA+ people, etc. They all needed to have had a measure of devotion in order to fulfill their potentials as lovers. And that meant that they learned from each experience. I remember one participant saying that even the bad experiences are worth learning from.
What are some lessons that the Jewish community can learn from other faith traditions that are surprising? Is there something that Anglicans or Muslims can teach Jews about great sex?
No. In 2013, my research team at the University of Ottawa wrote an article saying that optimal sexual experiences are virtually identical, regardless of the demographic background of the participants. We all glow in the dark identically. There’s an assumption that men and women are fundamentally different sexually, or that old people or young people are fundamentally different sexually, or that people who are kinky versus people who are vanilla are fundamentally different sexually, or that people who are LGBTQIA+ are fundamentally different from people who are heterosexual. Our research has found quite the opposite.
What our research has discovered is that, regardless of the stereotypes, the fundamental character of wonderful, memorable — what we call “optimal sexual experiences” — are indistinguishable regardless of the background of the participant.
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
