This is a perfect illustration of Foucault's point that power/knowledge "penetrates and controls everyday pleasureall this entailing effects that may be those of refusal, blockage, and invalidation, but also incitement and intensification" (Foucault 1980, 11). The husband has certainly been taught, moreover, that respect and honor for his wife's desire and pleasure are integral to an appropriate conduct of sexual life, and that he will be rewarded for such consideration with the type of children that he desires. This discourse, however, and my reading of it, should not be misunderstood as a celebration of the gender relations that it presupposes and enforces.
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In studying the complex of texts around the subject of the speaking of female desire, we see a continuation of the cultural pattern of gender politics that we observe throughout this book. On the one hand, there is an enormous respect for women's rights to physical well-being, to an absence of male violence toward them, to satisfaction of their physical needs, including especially the need for sex, but on the other hand, they are always in an absolutely subordinated position vis-à-vis the dominant, if normatively considerate, male. A quintessential representation of this situation is the halakhic requirement (analyzed in the next chapter) that is addressed to men as to how frequently they must sleep with their wivesonly if, of course, the wife desires sex, the implication being, once more, that the man is in control and that the wife needs to be patronistically cared for. As patronistic as this is, however, it is in contrast with another mode of relating to women, which would propose simply that their needs are irrelevant. In the next chapter, a complex of texts will be read in which the concern for the fulfillment of female desire, and indeed for its legitimacy, is significantly weakened in one part of the rabbinic world, as it is seen to conflict with other values within the culture, namely, the complete devotion to the study of Torah. At the same time, we discover a vivid oppositional voice to that weakening of empathy for the needs, desires, indeed the subject-hood of rabbinic wives.
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