Origins of eating disorders among religious teens

This NY Times article about eating disorders among Orthodox Jews raises some theories about the origins of eating disorders in this population, but I think there are some other possibilities.

Modesty may make it harder to dress well for women who are even slightly overweight. Thin women look fine in a wide range of clothes, but slightly overweight women need to be creative in ways that don't always work with modesty restrictions --- showing cleavage is a good way for men not to notice extra fat elsewhere.

Also I suspect that being sexually involved is helpful for overweight women and their partners to feel good about their bodies. For religious women, that reinforcement isn't available. Religious men who have no experience either way may assume that thin women are better in bed. Alternatively, thin partners are more socially valued, and the social value may bring gratification pre-marriage. Likewise, religious women cannot feel sexy or sexually empowered by sexual activity. They may feel sexually empowered about how thin their bodies are, so they may seek thinness as their primary form of feeling sexy.

Because these alternative outlets for feeling desirable are not available to Orthodox teens, they need to find other ways of feeling good about themselves. I wonder whether the types of exercise that are incompatible with anorexia, such as weight lifting where it's important to eat minimum amounts of protein (0.5-1 g protein per pound of body weight) and to be moderate in quantity of exercise (every other day, at most), would be helpful. Gymnastics, dancing, rock climbing, and other ways of using that strength could also be helpful in helping teen women feel confident about their bodies, and also staying healthy.

Meanwhile, teen males also need to change their attitudes and how they perceive women of different sizes. That's harder, especially if they do not interact much with the opposite sex.

Vows, oaths, and pledges

Rabbi Marc Angel explains why virginity pledges don't work, although he's talking about loyalty oaths in Israel, and why they are a bad idea: "To those who are loyal to Israel, oaths are not necessary. To those who are not loyal, oaths won't help."

The 5 year pregnancy and other religious methods of dealing with deviance

One of the recurrent issues with religious restrictions on sexuality is how to deal with sexual transgressions. If a married woman's husband away has been away for 12 months, and she gives birth, how does a religion address this? The rabbis of the Talmud 1500 years ago declared that the length of pregnancy was 9 months, but birth can sometimes be delayed by 3 months, resulting in a 12 month pregnancy (Yevamot 80b). Apparently Muslim authorities made similar declarations, saying that a pregnancy can last 2, 4, or even 5 years. Likewise, I've heard of writings that a first pregnancy can be only 3 months long and yield a full-grown baby.

The source in the linked article is decrying this unscientific thinking, but it seems like the best alternative in a religious society that denies a high prevalance of transgression. Everyone knows that pregnancies are 9 months long (+/-), and much less than this will result in a small infant and much more than this is impossible, but declaring that reality fits the moral order rather than admitting the frequency of immorality is definitely more humane than calling people out on transgressions and treating them poorly. Which the editorialist seems interested in doing:

from a moral perspective, how can I provide a jurisprudential loophole for a woman who was probably promiscuous after the death of her husband and then presented her baby, conceived in sin, as a baby of her dead husband by relying on the [notion] of a hidden pregnancy or on a fatwa issued by some [cleric] or religious school? This is what happened on December 14, 1927 at a shari'a court in Mecca. The qadi... ruled that the baby was conceived by the woman's dead husband who had died five years previously.

Obviously the best option is to recognize that it's normal for healthy people to have sex, sometimes when it's against their religion's rules, and to provide a structure so that the best outcomes can prevail: sex ed, contraception, reasonable expectations. When that's not an option, a 5 year pregnancy seems like a great alternative.

Open letter to Senator Lieberman

Dear Senator Lieberman,

As a Harvard Health Policy PhD and Jew, I am sad to hear that you are weakening health care reform.

As a Health Policy PhD, I refer you to my professors in the Harvard Health Policy program, who say the original Senate health care bill is the best available solution.

As a Jew, I remind you that the Rabbinic Sages teach us not to be like the men of Sodom who would say שלי שלי ושלך שלך "What is mine is mine and what is yours is yours." The Sages taught that justifying inequality is not just negligence, but actually evil.

The present US system could be a model for Sodom: discounted prices to the rich/insured/healthy and inflated prices to the poor/sick/uninsured. Any solution that perpetuates inequalities between privileged/healthy and poor/sick perpetuates the health care system of Sodom.

Strong health care reform is a policy and Jewish imperative.

Janet Rosenbaum, Ph.D. Health Policy, Harvard 2008
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Bar mitzvahs as the Jewish Rainbow Party?

Brandeis sociologist Shulamit Reinharz writes in 614 magazine, the magazine of the Brandeis women's research institute, that Jewish girls are giving oral sex as a bar mitzvah present, a topic people have been speculating about since at least 2005 (for instance, this 2005 David Brooks column is skeptical of what sound like old rumors even then.) Without better substantiation than the vague assertion from an unnamed Brandeis student that oral sex at bar mitzvahs is "common", it sounds like another rainbow party urban myth.

As head of a research institute, I'm surprised Professor Reinharz couldn't spare even a work study undergrad to investigate whether this claim has any basis whatsoever before raising alarms about it, much less publishing it under the name of an institution that might be considered an authority on "Authentic Judaism."

Evangelical Christianity and self-selection

Evangelical Christians have the goal that everyone within their fold adhere to norms such as abstinence from premarital sex. Clergy and active congregants adhere to the norms most of the time, but many evangelical teens have sex lives only slightly more conservative than the average American or European teenager. I've long wondered whether the reason for this discrepancy is that evangelical Christianity includes many people who, for whatever reason, are unlikely to adhere to all the norms.

Comparing religions can only be done in the spirit of "All models are wrong, but some are useful", so with that in mind I thought about religious self-selection in the context of some youtube videos making their way around some progressive Jewish blogs with enthusiasm and modern Orthodox blogs with hesitant, tepid approval, apparently spurred by an article in the Forward, a US Jewish newspaper.

This is a fantastic video of a secular Israeli girl band called "Woman of Valor" (Prov. 31) singing "Open our eyes to your Torah, cause us to cleave to your commandments, and unite our hearts in love and awe of your name" a line from the liturgy repeated over and over*. They also sing "On the rivers of Babylon" (Psalm 137) and "The angel who saved me" (Genesis 48). In the US, I would guess that this would be fairly standard evangelical Christian popular music, but in Israel it is Tel Aviv secular, performed at the Gay Pride parade, and so extremely exciting and outrageous**.

If the evangelicals are including the equivalent of the Tel Aviv secular who obviously connect to some aspect of the Bible and yet for whatever reason are not interested in some of the religious norms, programs like virginity pledges may reach only the Jerusalem religious who would abstain anyhow.

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(*) It begins "That we shouldn't ever be bashful or ashamed or stumble." There's also a rap segment in the middle that isn't a text also about connecting with the divine.

(**) Comments on the video are outraged. My translation of some of them:
- If they really believed what they sung, they would dress differently and they wouldn't dance like that and they would seem even slightly like daughters of Israel. G-d should have mercy on us, what a desecration of G-d's name.

- When someone sings to open our eyes to your Torah and be caused to cleave to your commandments when she is, pardon me, half naked is really not respectful. It's like going to the synagogue to pray in a bathing suit. Does that seem right? It's like the Maimonides's example of going into a ritual bath holding an impure reptile, doing something good but in an improper manner.

- I don't understand the connection between the meaning of the text and the clothing. They say they want to be open to G-d's commandments and they are not fully dressed.