One year, Yosef decided to take me with him to the Consumer Electronic Show, or CES, a huge trade show in Las Vegas, since his company had a booth there. There were so many frum Jews attending that a generous man had even started a Shabbos meal plan for those who wanted it. There were hundreds of men at the Shabbos table. I think I was one of only three women sitting there. While Yosef went to the show, I walked around with giant eyes and looked at the gondolas in the Venetian (where we were staying). Everything looked so interesting and so foreign.
That’s another question people always stop and ask me: Do yeshivishe Jews travel? Yes, they absolutely do. They just make sure that they bring their own food with them, and that there will be a minyan, and that none of the restrictions ease up. You’re still looking at the outside world from a far, far distance, even if you’re standing in the middle of it. I mean, think about it: Monsey is less than an hour and a half away from Manhattan. Chasidic women shop at Bergdorf and Saks, but they’re still totally separate. They don’t make friends with the goyim. They can’t sit at the restaurant and have a bite. You have no idea how that divides you from the rest of the world. Imagine going to Spain and not being able to taste Spanish cuisine at all, and eating cans of tuna fish that you brought from New York City. You don’t understand the culture or truly experience a place if you speak to no one and eat nothing. It’s a marvelous lesson in the success of brainwashing. Even when you’re away from the fold, you’re so sure that Hashem is watching you, so busy policing yourself, that you actually see nothing, and you experience things only tangentially.
But that trip to Las Vegas was a mind-blowing one for me, in more ways than one. One afternoon, I was resting in our hotel room when a rerun of a TV show called Sex and the City came on. Now, that sounded too risqué even for me, and I balked at the title, but then this incredibly well-dressed woman came on the screen—Sarah Jessica Parker—and I was fascinated. I watched the whole thing.
These women were living unimaginable lives just a few miles away from my door. I was swept away. I downloaded the rest of the episodes and proceeded to gorge myself on a life I couldn’t ever dream of having. A life that seemed so exotic and exciting: living alone, choosing your lovers, supporting yourself. And then came the episode about a mystical device called a “Rabbit.” I watched as Samantha pleasured herself repeatedly with this magical thing, a vibrator. I’d never heard of one. Here I was, with four children, in my midthirties, and I’d never once had an orgasm. Not once, not ever. I was determined to go and find myself a vibrator that very day.
I wandered the streets of Las Vegas until I found a sex shop that had vibrators in the window. I sauntered in, outwardly calm, as if visiting sex shops was a normal Tuesday for me. On the inside, however, I was scared s***less. I was wearing my usual uniform of buttoned-up blouse and long skirt and sheitel. I was aware of the incongruity, but my desire to experience an orgasm overcame my discomfort at being in the store. Rabbit vibrator in hand, I walked back to the hotel room feeling exhilarated, daring, and very frightened all at once.
The first few times I tried it, I peed myself. I’d never experienced that level of physical release, and it scared me. I kept coming close to orgasm and then stopping because it was too intense. It took a bunch of tries before I managed not to pee and had my very first real orgasm. I lay there in bed, drenched in sweat, heart pounding, body liquid and lethargic, and felt like I was alive for the very first time. Quickly, I became obsessed.
It wasn’t easy hiding the vibrator when we got home, as it was quite large and made lots of noise, but I managed and would only use it during the day, when the kids were at school and Yosef was at work. It was the most pleasurable thing I’d ever experienced, and what I loved about it most of all was that I was pleasuring myself. There was no man involved. The idea that I could please myself, that it was in my power to give myself this much joy, felt like a brand-new kind of freedom.
Excerpted from Brazen by Julia Haart. Copyright © 2022 by Julia Haart. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Brazen: My Unorthodox Journey from to Lingerie is available from Amazon and Bookshop.