A few weeks ago, a very nice Jewish lady asked me, “how are you ever going to find a nice Jewish boy?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell her the truth. I’m not sure I’m ever going to find a nice Jewish boy.
I’m not sure that nice Jewish boys exist. I think well-intentioned Jewish mamas like her ruined them all.
There is such a thing as loving somebody too much. There is most particularly such a thing as loving your son or grandson or nephew too much. There is a particular kind of pride mixed with envy that the older generation directs towards the Jewish boy when he is born. He is met with expectations fully formed. The idea that a Jewish boy can grow up to become either a doctor or a lawyer, and nothing else, is no joke.
He cannot grow up to become a poet or a journalist, a director or a salesman. Not if he hopes to reflect well on the family. And a Jewish boy’s obligation is to reflect well on the family.
What is a Jewish girl’s obligation? To marry.
Still, even in this day and age. Her obligation is to marry, and to marry well.
I was not raised to find a full-time job. I was not raised to pursue a graduate degree, though I did, with both family and religion like lead weights around my ankles during the entire process. I was smart, competent, confident, and well-spoken as a child, and then I became an adolescent who, like most girls in this country, questioned most everything about myself.
Some girls turn to culture or tradition for grounding, for comfort. Some girls turn to community to reassure them that they have innate value, in the face of a white supremacist society that tells them their value lies in the pursuit of a body they will never possess. My community, however, told me I was worthless unless some nice Jewish boy found me attractive.
What was he to find attractive about me, so I was told? My submissiveness, my stupidity or my ability to feign it, my numb sexless modesty, my cow-eyed prettiness shoved into some frilly lace thing that suggested femininity but not breasts. Only sluts had breasts.
I was intelligent, and somehow that made me a slut. I got my period early. I had big tits and I did not hide them behind uncomfortable layers of clothing. I was sexy and I did not punish myself for it. The girls acted like I must be an idiot, like I must not know the rules, and the boys..
The boys of my own community threw me under the bus. The boys of my own community needed to have not-so-nice Jewish girls on the menu, girls who were fuckable or rapeable or somewhere in between, girls who had bodies that did not matter. Girls who “had no self-respect” and “did not bother to care for ourselves” because we did not shave our pussies or paste on false eyelashes and we did not pretend to hate sex either. They tortured us for it, those boys. If they could catch us. Those nice Jewish boys were our sworn enemies.
We didn’t swear it, see. They did.
As I grew up, I figured out the truth. I figured out there was nothing I could do to reclaim the status of nice Jewish girl once it had been stolen from me by a combination of nature and personal choice. I realized that making nice Jewish boys see me as a good girl would require adherence to a set of principles which suggested women are subordinate to men by natural law. That, I simply could not do.
Instead, I became more myself than ever before, and walked away from the entire false paradigm of equating modesty with being a lovable woman.
I changed.
I was a feminist, I attended a creative writing program in which writing and speaking publicly about sex was normalized, I once sold sex toys for a living..and each of these things brought me one step closer to who I really am.
I made mistakes. I made them wholeheartedly. I made them while trying to be the very best version of myself. I am not sorry.
Nice Jewish boys are taught to expect the impossible from nice Jewish girls. They are taught to believe that women ought to allow ourselves to be owned, or else we do not deserve to be loved, romanced, proposed to, married.
Nice Jewish boys are taught to remain boys forever. They are taught to fear sexuality as the enemy of God’s will, and so they seek out women who will agree to similarly remain childlike and submissive for eternity. They are taught that boys should take the lead in every way, and so they fear women who are assertive, women who speak our minds, women who have strong opinions, women who do not exist to be merely helpmeets.
When we ignore these norms, these poor Jewish boys feel helpless, powerless. They feel as if the world has turned backwards on its axis. This is not the world they were promised. This is not what they were told romance would be.
I blame the mothers for passing on a tradition that modern Jewish girls ought not live up to, and modern Jewish women cannot live up to. We now have real self-respect, as opposed to false modesty. We now have real empowerment, as opposed to the false ‘soft power’ of the separate domestic sphere.
We know better now than to allow a paternalistic god and a patriarchal order to dictate our lives or manage our bedrooms. Yet we are having a hard time convincing our nice Jewish not-quite-men that it is time to give this up.
They are afraid to give up their power, true. They are afraid to give up their worldview which for generations has been based on placing themselves at the top of a pyramid beneath which all other life sits, including women. Mostly, I think they are perhaps afraid to admit that they have always been wrong. No amount of Torah study has ever felt nearly as good as good sex does, and sacrificing the one for the other was always a really shitty bargain.
They have always been wrong. I sincerely hope that they recognize that in this lifetime, because being nice was boring, but being anything other than a Jewish woman is beyond my reach. I still love Jewish men. I would really like to meet one someday.
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Previously Published on medium
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