Our Hairy Jewish Bodies, Ourselves - Page 2

The negativity corroded my confident body image like battery acid on ice cream. When I turned 50 I suddenly noticed I was afflicted with “hobbit ears,” with their feathery outcroppings. Gazing into a mirror, I saw not a jolly, bald, Jewish guy with glasses and a goatee, but a Hebraic Quasimodo, scorned by the elegantly cruel Esmeraldas of the shtetl called JDate. I finally bought a Conair ear/nose/eyebrow trimmer to keep my ears in check. Even after that, the ads in the Village Voice took on new urgency. Dare I revise 40 years of acceptance for a buttery, post-millennial look?

I thought, “Surely other men deal with these issues.” Online, however, I found little serious discussion of male body issues. The articles sounded vague and forced, ruminations on Brad Pitt envy, men with eating disorders and steroid use to get that ripped look. I read nothing compelling or even particularly relevant.

I did discover The Men’s Seder, a project of the Men of Reform Judaism that nods toward the unexplored land of Jewish men and their bodies. Topics for the Seder include “What enslaves us as men?”,  “How do we evaluate success?” and “What are the plagues of being a man?” According to one review, the new plagues include “prostate cancer, weight gain, hair loss and impotence.” I can imagine the discussion: “On this night we are all like unleavened bread, because we cannot rise. Farewell, my shankbone.”

In my research, nothing I read about men and body image even approached the agony found in the books, articles, seminars, and conferences on women and body image. While I’m content to muse fondly on my hirsuteness, I learned that women strategize, rage, fret, and commiserate over their bodies at great length.

The intensity spirals upward when Jewish women raise the issue. As one contributor on the Jewish Women's Archive website wrote on "Love Your Body Day":

I've watched incredibly talented, beautiful, intelligent, and critically-thinking girls and women locked into an eternal struggle with their bodies to conform to an arbitrary and unreachable standards. For Jewish women especially, the tension between a rich food culture, contradictory ideals of the zaftig and the rail-thin, and the constant confusion of being accepted into mainstream (read: white) culture while trying to maintain a unique ethno-cultural identity is one that leads far too many people to unhealthy and dangerous relationships with food and the mirror.

Blogger Rachel Lucas struck a less academic note when she wrote, after flipping through an issue of Maxim magazine:

Are women not feeling shitty enough about ourselves? Are we not as hyper-critical of our looks as we should be? Do you desire that we have it kicked into our heads as much as possible that we can never ever FUCKING EVER live up to your expectations of what women should look like? Do you wish to ensure that once we reach a certain age or pass that threshold of 115 pounds, we accept that we are ‘unsexy’? Thank you sir, can I have another?  And guys wonder why we don’t like having sex in bright light, why we’re afraid to prance around in lingerie, why we take an hour to put on makeup and do our hair.

As painfully relevant as such reflections are when I think about the Jewish women I’ve known and cared for, they don’t give me much to chew over on male issues. Since men don’t dare talk about these matters outside the Men’s Seder (“Hey, how’s your prostate hangin’ these days?” or “Still hitting the Viagra for Shabbat afternoon?” are not questions that come naturally to our lips), I’m on my own to decide how I relate to the “mainstream (read: white) culture” and its standards for men.

Article Author: Van Wallach

Van Wallach is a writer in Connecticut. He is a native of Mission, Texas and a graduate of Princeton University. His interests in Judaism and languages such as Spanish, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and Portuguese often color his essays, so keep your dictionaries at hand. …

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