The metaphor of sex as eating clearly serves as a significant means for rabbis to think about and structure their Torah of sexuality and sexual practices—and of gender and gender relations. Although it is not exclusively applied in a gendered manner, it can be, and is, mobilized to think about and construct gender as well. Rabbis acknowledge that women (or their “limbs”) may experience sexual hunger and may satisfy that desire by “eating.” Yet when the metaphor is extended to designate a sexual partner as food, it is almost always women who are explicitly objectified in this way.
In the most extreme applications of the metaphor, women become the vessels out of which men “eat.” Particularly in the realm of marriage, rabbinic men use this metaphor to construct women’s permeability and usefulness to themselves, both discursively and in the material act of consummating the marital/sexual relationship. As in so many other areas of Torah, women do not participate in the shaping or transmitting of the Torah of sexual “eating,” but instead remain the objects of male rabbinic observation and activity.
Gail Labovitz, “Is Rav’s Wife ‘a Dish’? Food and Eating Metaphors in Rabbinic Discourse of Sexuality and Gender Relations”, in Studies in Jewish Civilization, Vol. 18; Love – Ideal and Real – in the Jewish Tradition from the Hebrew Bible until Modern Times, ed. Leonard J. Greenspoon & Ronald A. Simkins (Omaha: Creighton University Press, 2008), 162-163.