The Orthodox Sex Guru

In one of her early sessions with the patient, Bat Sheva Marcus, an Orthodox Jewish sex counselor, drew up a list. The patient, who was in her 20s, wore the uniform of her rigidly devout sect: a dark suit with a shapeless skirt reaching well below the knee, dark stockings, a plain blouse buttoned up to the neck and both a wig and a crocheted hat covering her head. She had come to Marcus’s offices in Midtown Manhattan from a cloistered community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, because she had been recoiling from sex with her husband. There was pain, and, more problematic for Marcus, there was no desire. The pain, Marcus and her staff deduced right away, was a result of muscle constrictions stemming from childbirth; this could be treated effectively with dilators — and without objection from the patient’s rabbi. But the deeper aversion was more complex. Talking with the woman at a round table in a room decorated with still lives of pears and berries, Marcus wrote a list of ways that the patient and her husband could make sex, for her, more appealing.