January 26, 2021 by admin

Safety—and Desire

Researchers at the University of Windsor, in Ontario, are working to deliver a “Flip The Script” program to women in high school…. The conversation moves beyond consent to sex—pleasurable sex, at that. The young women talk about female sexual anatomy, masturbation, desire and a persistent phenomenon known as the “orgasm gap”: Time and again, researchers find women are significantly less likely to masturbate to orgasm or climax during
partnered sex than men. “The more comfortable we are with being able to talk about sex, the more assertive we will be in communicating what we want, as well as what we don’t want,” the exercise reads.

“Part of this is, if I know what my own sexual desires and values are, then I can know that when someone is pressuring me, they are wrong to do so,” said Charlene Senn, a University of Windsor psychology professor who originally designed Flip the Script for women in first-year university.

Slowly, sexual health educators are beginning to go beyond disaster prevention to encompass healthy, positive sex lives, in line with the World Health Organization’s definition of sexual health: “pleasurable and safe sexual experiences, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.”

Perhaps the bleakest portrait of neglected female desire comes from journalist Peggy Orenstein, who interviewed young women aged 15 to 20 about intimacy for her 2016 book Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape. Most of the young women had come to view sex as a performance, not a “felt experience….The concern with pleasing as opposed to pleasure was pervasive.”

—
ZOSIA BIELSKI, from “The pleasure gap: How a new
program is revolutionizing sexual health education
for young women,” The Globe and Mail, December
5, 2020.

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October 23, 2020 by admin

Jewish. Feminist. Canadian.

A new novel from Nessa Rapoport, 30 years after her debut novel Preparing for Sabbath, is both deeply Jewish and (wait for it) deeply Canadian. There’s very little feminist fiction worthy of this claim.

The taut story of Evening (Counterpoint Press, $26) centers on two sisters, one marking the shiva of the other in their family’s home in Toronto. Eve, the survivor, fled the chilly (in every sense), WAS Py Ontario city to find her way in New York, very slowly completing a Ph.D. dissertation and teaching at a community college (“night school” a relative calls it), and carrying on a deliberately distanced relationship with an academic so brilliant that he wasn’t even bullied at the British boarding school where his English Jewish parents sent him at age seven.

Eve returns home to observe the seven-day ritual mourning period for her sister, Tam. For the week that’s the span of the novel, the household also includes Eve’s divorced parents, her remarkably accomplished grandmother, Nana, and a constellation of characters mostly spinning out from the tight circles of Eve’s childhood and adolescence. Prominent among these is her ages-ago boyfriend Laurie, whose presence at the shiva pulls Eve into a magnetic field that’s simultaneously charged, familiar, stifling and alluring. An old ad for tourism to Canada described Quebec, the province just east of Ontario, as “friendly, familiar, foreign and near.” That line came to mind as an apt description both for Laurie and for Simon, that quiet, witty, genius professor Eve has been keeping at arm’s length for three years in New York.

The interplay between the lives of the sisters is at the core of this brief novel. Tam had been a determined, high earning, famous-in-Canada television personality, happily married with two young children. (“All the things Jewish parents revere,” Rapoport commented to Lilith in a recent Zoom call.) The cancer that ravaged Tam’s body and took her life moved slowly enough that she had time for a deathbed argument with Eve about their seemingly very different paths, an exchange so fierce that, despite their decades of sisterly closeness and understanding, there was no emotional space left in which Eve could reach out to connect again before Tam died.

None of this is a spoiler, nor is the fact that after the funeral Tam’s husband hands Eve a sealed message from Tam; even the book’s advance publicity leaks this much. The single cryptic sentence in that envelope hints that Tam’s life hadn’t been quite the carefully mapped journey Eve had always considered the obverse of her own uncharted, halting career and love life.

Rapoport’s carefully told story is about the power of family role models we emulate or resist whether we understand them accurately or not—including Nana’s own remarkable life as a Jewish woman in an Anglo-Saxon stronghold, a woman with a Ph.D. in science, a pilot’s license, a passionate attachment to her late husband and a lifelong aptitude for self-definition.

Susan Weidman Schneider

To hear more about the ideas motivating its author to spend 30 years crafting Evening, Naomi Danis and Susan Weidman Schneider invited Nessa Rapoport, herself the oldest of four sisters, for a Zoom chat along with her daughter Mattie Kahn, culture director at Glamour. Here are some highlights from that conversation.

Nessa: There’s a culture and a chemistry in a family of daughters… In the book, I wanted these two sisters to have lives of both sensuality and intellect. I also wanted to show, through Tam, the working life of successful women—that world of accomplishment and fame. Yet Tam was limited, despite her success.

I’ve been told that in AA there’s a saying, “Never compare your insides to someone else’s outsides.” The family’s assumption was that Eve would envy her sister, and I knew from the beginning that she didn’t. Actually, Tam had a lot to envy in Eve. I wanted to reveal the complex interior lives of these sisters, not that Tam’s the accomplished one and Eve’s the blurry one.

Naomi: Your book title, Evening, evokes the evening of the score between two competitive sisters and also as the end of a day (and more poignantly the end of a life), as well as the character Eve’s becoming herself.

Nessa: You saw all three meanings of the title!

Mattie: Mom, your opening sentence says: “One loves, the other is loved.” I found that very provocative.

Nessa: You can still find relationships— whatever the power dynamic— where that is the operating assumption. In the end, the book is a refutation of the opening line. Eve’s myths about her family are all upended. And Simon becomes a real human being, which is, to Eve, unsettling.

Susan: The women in this novel are already real. You describe your own grandmother in your memoir, House on the River: A Summer Journey. She bears a close resemblance to Nana in Evening. Deliberate?

Nessa: My maternal clan was a unique amalgam of being practicing, committed Jews and Anglo-Saxon Canadians. My grandmother had a patrician pity for people who didn’t see that you could be observant and also be anything you wanted to be in the world. She and my grandfather invented this confident, unparochial way of being Jewish in the 1930s, a great act of audacity at a time when Canada was extremely anti-Semitic. In everything I write, there’s a grandmother who was a pioneer professionally and Jewishly.

Susan: You once wrote the script for a short film about the ritual of not leaving the house for a full week of mourning, and Evening’s framework is a shiva. Why?

Nessa: For a while, while I was writing Evening, I thought a lot about loss and trauma. I keep on my bedside table a copy of Judith Herman’s stunning book, Trauma and Recovery. Trauma limits your emotional range. It’s a very physical, limbic state. Grief, too, lives in the body. I’m now in my 60s, and I understand that our relationship with the people who have died continues. We are not who we were when they left us. We gain amplitude and insight; we can see and change even what seems to be fixed in the past..

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January 14, 2020 by admin

Winnipeg Jews & the Garment Industry

 A STITCH IN TIME! Winnipeg, Manitoba in the 20th century was a hub of the garment industry, and Jews were involved in its manufacturing, retail and union organizing, as the sector moved from a cottage industry sewing farmers’ work clothes to factories of high fashion. Historians of this prairie city note that the shift was driven in part by the success of the movement for women’s suffrage. As women’s presence in the clerical workforce became more accepted, women needed clothing for these new roles. An online exhibition explores the history of Winnipeg’s garment industry

and its relation to the city and its Jewish community. It also describes the industry today, and how it has changed since its beginnings at the end of the 19th century. Integrating photographs, documents, oral histories, and artifacts with interviews with factory owners, workers, and labor personali- ties, this modest Canadian exhibition considers itself a starting point and welcomes the addition of your stories, photos and memorabilia. The Jewish Heritage Center of Western Canada. jhcwc.org

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