Thread by @Doc_RPS

There are two things that I think are inapposite about this response, even as it is meant to help. (Akiva is a sensitive and thoughtful person and this is not ch"v an attack. I'll try to make sure it doesn't sound like one.)

https://twitter.com/MisfitTorah/status/1478123591199772674

1. @btzelemelokim was talking about, as I understood it, the experience of growing up in the frum world and hearing this taught. (Responding to my general point about what we are teaching, and how it shapes the context in which victims come forward and abusers act.)

He was sharing a painful personal experience that illuminated yet another way in which teaching Torah--accurately!--might convey messages that we don't think we're conveying, or want to convey, and that we have to figure out how to explicitly address that.

If I'm a 6th grade girl abused by her older brother (I'm not; I don't have an older brother), and I hear a teacher teach about the 3 chamuros, I don't know what the gemara says it. I may know, as @btzelemelokim said, that I sinned grievously. And that I should never tell anyone.

(There's also the very real possibility, in much of the frum world, that that 6th grade girl doesn't know exactly what intercourse is, what the vague words her teacher is using apply to, what words describe what her brother did to her. That is a different issue to address.)

The point is precisely to be attentive to the audience and the hidden curriculum. That a more knowledgeable student of the sugya would know how much the 6th grade girl is misunderstanding here is true, and not relevant to what anyone who teaches 6th grade needs to consider.

2. I know that men are well-meaning and well-intentioned and want to expand the discussion (well, mostly.) But I want to make something clear to you: I, and the army of frum women like me--all of the charedi world, much of the centrist world, even some of the MO world--

HAVE NEVER LEARNED A GEMARA INSIDE.

NOT ONE.

EVER.

(That's no longer true about me, because of my rebbe Devorah Zlochower, and a remarkable @OhrTorahStone learning program that I don't talk about because I'm only a few months in, but will have to go soon because my chavrusa will be waiting at 5:15. It was true of me past 35.)

You know how I knew the Gemaras about David and Batsheva? I learned them, by heart, from my teacher, and I still know them, by heart. When I wanted to find them to copy-paste into my tweet, I searched @SefariaProject and Bar Ilan responsa.

So when someone tells me "that's not what the gemara means" or "the context" or the next line in the sugya, that not only doesn't help with the messages that 6th grade girl is getting, or I got. I never learned the sugya.

Instead, it reinforces on me a profound power dynamic of imposed ignorance.

I really think that men should think about that more before they respond to women #actually, the Gemara says.... Most frum women today still don't have that knowledge because you didn't let us have it.

I understand, of course,#notallfrummen. Some of you are deeply involved in teaching women and girls Gemara, and I am deeply grateful (including to Rabbi David Brofsky, who's teaching me.) But the system/structure in what is numerically the vast majority of the Orthodox world.

So when you add Talmudic nuance to a discussion of messages sent and received, that may land very differently with an audience that never got *and never was permitted to get* access to said nuance.

In case you think this is a thing of some grim and unenlightened past: yesterday, I posted about learning mishna. This is a soft landing in TshB"P, and is considered fourth-grade boy learning.

I got a response from some guy quoting the gemara about melamed bito Torah is like he taught her tiflus.

Telling me that this is a misunderstanding of the Gemara, that it is not referring to a woman learning on her own, would be seriously missing the point here.