The Importance Of Sex Education As Illustrated By Netflix's “Unorthodox”

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Written by Ariana King, Culture Editorial Assistant, and illustrated by Katie Herrick, Culture Editor

“Unorthodox.” It’s Netflix’s latest hit series based on the real story of former Hasidic Jew Deborah Feldman. The mini-series follows Esty Shapiro, a young girl living in a Hasidic Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York. While many may be drawn to the show to learn about what life is like as an orthodox Jew, I decided to watch it for other reasons.

Esty suffers from vaginismus, a pelvic floor disorder where the vaginal muscles spasm every time something—such as a tampon or a finger—enters (Web MD, 2020). As someone who is passionate about sexual health, especially for people with vaginas, I wanted to see how her condition was portrayed and what cultural lessons we can take away about sex, sexual health and how sexual disorders affect relationships.

For a bit of context, Esty has no knowledge of sex until she is about to be married to a near stranger at age 18. She is simply told that she needs to give her husband pleasure on their wedding night. Yet, she can’t. When she and her husband—Yanky—attempt to consummate their marriage, they stop because Esty is in a lot of pain.

As time goes on, Yanky and Esty are under increasing pressure from Yanky’s mother and the outside community to have children, something Yanky cites as the “first commandment of the Torah” (Karolinski, 2020). After months go by, Esty is finally given a diagnosis by the community women’s health expert and instructed to try different exercises to help the pain.

It is unclear whether or not her treatment follows the standard Kegel exercises and increased vaginal insertion techniques prescribed to relax the vaginal muscles (Web MD, 2020); however, the lack of social support she receives does little to decrease her anxiety, frustration or anger.

This all comes to a head about a year into their marriage when the couple gets into a heated argument. Yanky insists they have to have children whether Esty finds it “appealing” or not, while Esty retorts that even the Talmud, a religious text, guarantees some pleasure for the woman in making a family. After increasing pressure from her husband, Esty grudgingly agrees to have sex. The night culminates in the couple having intercourse with Esty groaning in pain but telling her husband to keep going.

It was a difficult scene to watch, but one of the most important ones in the entire series. While many people may dismiss Yanky and the community’s poor treatment of Esty as a flaw of orthodox Jewish society, I would argue that this scene presents important lessons for all of us. It shows the failings of a lack of sexual education and the persistence of the patriarchy, as well as the high cost this has for women all over.

To begin, consent. True consent is freely given permission for specific sexual activities with enthusiasm (Planned Parenthood, 2020). Consent in this particular scene is incredibly blurry because Esty “agreed” to have sex, but only after her husband pressured her. She told her husband to keep going but was in pain the entire time, her words saying one thing while her body said another. And her husband chose not to listen to her body screaming in pain. After what I just said, Yanky sounds like a total ass doesn’t he?

While what he did definitely wasn’t right, I would be hard-pressed to call him a rapist. The producers never have his character physically force himself on her, yet he ignores his wife’s pain and succumbs to the societal pressure to have children at a great personal expense to Esty.

Yet, I see Yanky’s insistence to have sex and create children as less of an individual failing and more of a community failure. How can we hold Yanky wholly responsible when no one in the community was ever taught what true consent is? I’m not saying what he did is okay—because it’s not—but his actions can be read as a structural flaw rather than individual abuse.

The community also failed Esty with its lack of social support. First and foremost, Esty and all of the other women in the community are treated as baby machines and nothing more. Esty’s value as a mother was the single most important thing to the community, to the extent that Yanky’s mother made him ask for a divorce when Esty couldn’t get pregnant.

She received absolutely no sympathy from other women in the community and was told only to suck it up. When we as a society succumb to patriarchal ideas of a “woman’s role” as only a mother, we dehumanize women and decrease their value as individuals.

While difficult, witnessing Esty’s emotional turmoil as an “unsuccessful” woman reminds us all that defining “womanhood” as “motherhood” has devastating individual costs for women who cannot or do not want to have children.

Even if the community didn’t insist Esty have children, the pressure she gets from her mother-in-law to make Yanky “feel like a king” in bed is absurd (Karolinski, 2020). Even if she didn’t suffer from vaginismus, the community’s stance on pleasure for women is clear when Yanky shuts down Esty’s plea that “the Talmud promises some pleasure from making a family” (Karolinski, 2020).

The idea that women should have to bow to the sexual whims of their husbands and get nothing in return does not motivate any woman to have sex—let alone a woman who suffers from a pelvic floor disorder like Esty. The devastating pain Esty goes through physically and emotionally makes us reconsider why this lack of pleasure for women is acceptable. Sex should be about a partnership, not just one person getting what they want. And it should never come at the expense of causing your partner physical and emotional pain.

At the end of the day, we can learn a lot from “Unorthodox”—and not just about life in a Hasidic Orthodox community. The patriarchal attitudes and beliefs surrounding marital relations and the woman’s role in sexual situations, as well as the lack of understanding about what consent is, are pervasive in mainstream society today.

While this may satisfy some people—mostly cisgender men—it leaves so many left behind and punished for asking for a more equal partnership in sexual relationships. We can no longer let these people’s voices go unheard or their experiences unseen. Let Esty Shapiro be a permanent reminder of the individual cost of a collective failure to teach proper sex education and resist patriarchal ideas about what a woman “should” be.

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