Everything You Ever Needed to Know About ‘Frum Porn’
By Anne Cohen September 24, 2015
Frum porn. It’s a thing.
A recent story published in Vice found no less than 74 videos tagged “frum fetish” on a porn site called clips4sale.com. Another 31 were tagged “frum lesbians.”
Most of these clips, Vice reports, come from a site called frumvids.com(click at your own peril), which specifically caters to an Orthodox Jewish audience.
Obviously, this brought up a lot of questions, which I’ve attempted to answer below.
What does that even look like?
Let’s all give a big hand of applause to Arielle Pardes, author of the Vice story, who watched the teaser for one of these videos, and reports back that “you can see a pair of women in ankle-length skirts and headscarves (a display of modesty) making out and then undressing each other. The whole thing gives off an amateur vibe, with poor lighting and bad video quality.”
The videos also include religious markers — a tallit katan for example — to signal to those in the know that they’re watching religious Jews doing the nasty.
But wait, doesn’t this flout all kinds of modesty laws?
Yes, it does. Orthodox Jews, and Orthodox Jewish women in particular, live their lives according to a set of rules: Legs and arms are covered. Women wear wigs to hide their hair from anyone other than their husband. In some cases, men and women do not even touch outside of their marriage.
So you can understand why porn, especially porn in which an Orthodox man paws at a long-skirted woman under fluorescent lighting, seems incongruous.
In fact, even the experts are confused. Nathan Abrams, who teaches film studies at Bangor University and edited the 2008 anthology “Jews and Sex,” told Vice he found the phenomenon a little baffling. “When I first came across [frum porn], I was skeptical that it was actually a real thing,” he said. “The film industry is market-led—as soon as something arrives, it caters to that taste. So if this is a thing, why has it only come about now?”
So, who watches this stuff?
Vice reached out to the moderator of frumvids.com, who answered: “frum porn is porn for religious Jews or people who have fetish f***ing religious Jews. Why? Because people like to see people who are like themselves. And I can assure you that religious Jewish people are people.”
Basically, unlike Nice Jewish Boy James Deen porn, where “the only thing that’s Jewish is the menorah on the background,” frumvids.com specifically targets an Orthodox audience, with a cast of Orthodox or Conservative actors, according to this unnamed representative.
A quick scan of frumvids.com’s Twitter account, @FrumSex, shows that they have just over 500 followers. Sample tweets include:
Super video is going to be on this page – Motzei Shabbos. 9pm. Be here!
— Frum Sex (@frumsex) February 14, 2014
Hello Pron Melech! You are the lucky 613th like of our page! Please contact us for your free month access to FrumVids
— Frum Sex (@frumsex) February 25, 2014
There’s no real way to prove that Orthodox Jews are the ones watching or acting in these videos — Frumvids.com doesn’t actually compile data on its users. But as the Vice story points out, the vast Craigslist community claiming to be “seeking frum” does indicate that there is a market for this sort of thing.
Hey, whatever floats your…boat.
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and the protests on college campuses.
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
Make a gift of any size and become a Forward member today. You’ll support our mission to tell the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
