Lilith

Stephanie hung a print of Lilith in her incall bedroom as a signal of female sexual empowerment. Lilith’s mythology is certainly saturated with sex.

According to the Alphabet of Ben Sira, a medieval Jewish text, Lilith (Hebrew לילית) was created from the dust after Adam to be his first wife. Adam wanted to have sex with her in the missionary position. Lilith refused to lie beneath him and flew away from the Garden of Eden. In Jewish mythology, Lilith was imagined as a demoness, a succubus. In the Zohar, a Kabbalistic text, Lilith was portrayed as a “harlot” who “commits fornications” with the “sons of man.” (The Babylonian Talmud had warned, “It is forbidden for a man to sleep alone in a house, lest Lilith get hold of him.”) If, as Judith Plaskow writes, “for the rabbis, a prime instance of the evil impulse was the sexual urge,” Lilith personified the depradations of untrammeled female lust.

Lilith’s defiance of patriarchy and her untamed sexuality has made her a modern feminist icon. “Lilith is the instinctual feminine, hungrily animating [female] sexual longings for the taste of primeval eroticism, seeking sex for its own pleasure without further obligations,” writes Karin E. Weiss. One feminist writes admiringly, “This is sex without love, without procreation, unpartnered, purely for the sake of pleasing the male sexual urge and not at all permitted within the Abrahamic ethos.” (Lilith is considered a patroness of prostitutes and is said to be summoned by black candles and sexual offerings.) Lilith represents the shadow feminine, symbolizing carnal desire and taboo sexuality. “With her legs open and her back arched, she writhes in orgasmic ecstasy, screaming out her pleasure, unashamed for all to hear” (Catherine Hale).

Lilith is both threatening and alluring to men. Kabbalist Ohad Pele says of Lilith:

She poses an erotic seduction that is very difficult for men to withstand. Men yearn for a woman like Lilith, a woman who is able to express the fullness of her unbridled passions, who is willing to be a sexual creature, to be active in bed, to be a woman who derives great pleasure from sexuality and is not one bit ashamed of it…. He will find her in the prostitute, in the courtesan, in the secret lover, in the dark romance….

In Lolita, Nabokov writes, “Humbert was perfectly capable of intercourse with Eve, but it was Lilith he longed for.”