Fluke, Mutterperl, and the Politics of Jewish Male Sexuality

The revelation this week: the boyfriend of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who testified before congress about contraception and then was viciously attacked by Rush Limbaugh on radio, is Jewish. Sarah Seltzer offers an excellent post in the Forward this week about an interesting new right-wing uproar stemming from a blog post by Brooks Bayne, who suggests that the boyfriend, Adam Mutterperl, isn't only Jewish, but ultra-liberal, from a bona fide socialist family. Bayne really shouldn't get any more links to his blog, but, ok. Marc Tracy initially broke the story in Tablet, looking at Bayne's screed-like attempt to connect Jewishness ipso facto to socialism and spinning an image of a conspiracy-like web of rich socialist Jews up and down the East Coast.

Seltzer and Tracy point out some of the obvious hogwash in Bayne's argument, while noting very much correctly that the conservative concern to link Fluke to a vast lefty conspiracy has some deep-seated anti-Semitic threads at its core (or at least, that it takes very little to connect those anti-leftist sentiments to latent antisemitic sentiments when the opportunity arises). As Tracy writes, "What makes it, in the final analysis, anti-Semitic, is that Jewishness proves certain things." To tie Jewishness to modes of economic thinking that one is seeking to discredit is one of the oldest tricks in the political playbook.

But it's not just the Jews-as-socialists theme we should be calling attention to here, however, though indeed that is a long and rich trope. There is also the implicit relation to a longstanding trope of male Jews compromising the sexuality of Christian women by being at once hypersexual (i.e. having sex with unmarried women, as in this case) and insufficiently or deficiently sexual, a charge that historically has been connected to charges of Jewish male homosexuality.

It is only too fitting that the culprit in this case has among the more effeminate names that have graced members of the Jewish people: Mutterperl.

Mutterperl, a less common variant of the far more common Perlmutter, is a typical Jewish last name, meaning "mother-of-pearl." Though several Jewish last names are constructed from the first names of mothers (many names ending with -kis, -kin are matronymics: Mirkin, belonging to Mirka; Malkin, belonging to Malka), this is one of the few that actually has the word 'mother' in it. It's very feminine-ness led at least one major Hebrew writer to change it. Yehiel Perlmutter was the original name of the Hebrew poet better known as Avot Yeshurun, a name that means "Fathers of Jerusalem" (Yeshurun being one name for Jerusalem) or "Fathers are Watching us" (Yeshurun being also a form of a verb meaning "watching"). In changing his name, Avot Yeshurun changed a feminine reference to a clearly male one, as Naomi Seidman points out in her book A Marriage Made in Heaven: The Sexual Politics of Hebrew and Yiddish.

Seidman quotes an interview from the mid-1970s with Avot Yeshurun about his choice to change his name, in which he reveals that he made this change just before entering the Israeli army in a symbol of new masculinity, erasing both a feminine, Yiddish-sounding name that refers to the Diaspora past and evocations of mothers in general and his mother in particular. Her analysis, including of his memories of his own mother's lullabies, goes into further detail about this substitution.

But Adam Mutterperl, name unchanged, presumably, is marked as the archetypal diaspora Jew, with his archetypical feminized name. Of course, to point out the obvious twist, it isn't the Christian right that would pick up on this irony, it is the American Jewish readership, grown up on the dysfunctional Jewish sexuality captured in Portnoy's Complaint as well as Philip Roth's continued obsession with impotence, and generally sensitive to stereotypes of effeminate Jewish maleness (especially in cases where Jewish men are dating non-Jewish women). Brooks Bayne is totally fixated on the Mutterperl family's socialism (and their wealth) in his post (rather than the son's sexuality). But the picture he posts of the guy, in a flamboyant-looking green spandex outfit, certainly suggests otherwise. In the title of the post, Bayne refers to Mutterperl as "Cutie Pants." And he implies towards the end of his rant that having liberal politics on red-blooded heterosexual sex, the kind a woman can get pregnant from and therefore needs contraception during, is really ultimately about sexual deviance. "[Fluke] ultimately has her sights set on requiring insurance to pay for gender-reassignment surgery," he claims, implying that her appeals on behalf of contraception coverage are only the beginning of a much vaster and far more deviant sexual agenda. This sort of male-bashing has been picked up by some of those who have re-posted Bayne's observations. On a right-wing forum called gold-silver.us ("a forum for gold, silver, and liberty") a poster called "General of Darkness" comments, "Maybe Adam could produce a biopic titled, “Beta Males and the Progressive Chicks Who Dig Them." Case in point: underneath the critique about leftist politics is, indeed, a critique about an imagined deviant leftist sexuality.

Much of the conservative bashing of deviant sexualities in this rendering of the Fluke story is below the surface, and I don't want to claim that even the writers themselves are aware of it. It is precisely the mix of sex and economic ideology that has made the Sandra Fluke story and the politics of contraception so compelling in the first place. To discover a Jewish man in the middle of it invites reflections—including sordid, historically loaded ones—not only about the economic deviance of Jewish men, but also about the presumption of their sexual abnormality.


(The picture of Adam Mutterperl posted on Brooks Bayne's blog)