for enhancing intimacy between married lovers. Should they make love in full daylight, perhaps he would see some blemish on her body and she would not be attractive to him any more. Of course, here as always, the androcentric perspective is unquestioned, but nevertheless, one also finds clearly encoded again and again that the telos and enabling condition of proper sexual intercourse between married couples is harmony, desire, pleasure, and intimacy. We find the same theme repeated in another place in the Babylonian Talmud, where we are told that it is forbidden for a man to marry a woman until he has seen her to assure that she is attractive to him, for otherwise he will be violating the command to ''love his friend as himself" (Kiddushin 41a).
21
The emphasis on intimacy is, moreover, continued in the text with the analysis of the tradition regarding the rabbinic approval of the practice of the household of Munbaz. One of the interlocutors cannot believe that the Rabbis actually considered it praiseworthy to have intercourse by day, so he argues that they must have said [or meant] something else, to which the reply comes that it is indeed praiseworthy to have intercourse by day, for then he is not sleepy. If he has intercourse while sleepy, she may be unpleasant to him, i.e., he may do it out of duty and
not for pleasure,
and then the intimacy of the married lovers is destroyed. As Rashi remarks, "Since he is overcome with sleep, he does not desire her so much, and he has intercourse only to perform the commandment of regular intercourse or to please her, and then he is repelled by her,
and this is one of the nine categories mentioned in Nedarim
." Rashi's interpretation seems well justified here by the entire context and particularly by the cited topos of loving one's friend as oneself. Male sexual desire and pleasure are as crucial as female sexual desire and pleasure in the conduct of conjugal relations, for sex is only proper when it is the product and producer of intimacy. Over and over in these texts, the discourse of surveillance and control is placed into opposition with a discourse of intimacy and sexual pleasure and mutual desire, and surveillance is renounced in favor of desireto be sure, only the legitimated desire of husband and wife. Given the androcentric nature of the texts and the culture, we still need to ask further questions about the status of female desire.
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 | | 21. This is, incidentally, the reversal of a misogynistic topos repeated over and over in the Roman and Christian anti-marriage discourse that one should not marry, because one examines any purchase but that of a wife (Bloch 1991a, 20)
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