Impure Nuptials and Sex as Work
A number of Talmudic passages, not specifically about virginity testing, buttress the claims made in the previous chapter. The Babylonian Talmud creates a legal culture in which wedding-night bleeding triggers a prohibition on any further sexual relations, thus discouraging sexual aggression. Similarly, the Babylonian Talmud’s discussion of first-time penetrative intercourse on the Sabbath focuses on divorcing the sexual act from acts of violence; this passage also connects a bride’s experience on her wedding night to that of a baby boy at his circumcision, the latter of which is explicitly marked as painful. Finally, an explicit discussion in the Babylonian Talmud tries to minimize descriptions of brides’ pain on their wedding night, in the process revealing Rabbinic male anxiety about their complicity in causing pain.