Authors: van Wallach
Tags: #Relationships, #Humor, #Topic, #Religion, #Personal Memoirs, #Biography & Autobiography
Maybe I was lucky. I discovered Jewish women completely afresh, with no wonder-years negativity to distort the view. I never bought into the stereotypes or found them personally relevant. Most important, I never felt the revulsion that poisons how many Jewish men and women regard one another. Perhaps my experiences can provide an outsider’s view of how to break through the barriers that keep our hearts divided.
My gentile lust ended in the fall of 1976 when I was a freshman at Princeton University. Beginning with my crush on a Jewish classmate on a pre-Freshman Week camping trip, I turned my attention, as if drawn by an irresistible Yiddish magnetic-estrogenic force field, toward Jewish women.
Adios,
Christian maidens of Mission,
shalom aleichem, shayneh maydelehs
Deborah and Janet and Sharon, Ellen and Amy and Eileen, Susan and Sarah and Shayla, Laura and Lauren and Laurie. The names tell the tale: the instant that Jewish women glided into view, they overwrote my interest in gentiles.
What’s the deal? Why, after zero exposure, did I turn to and stay with Jewish women? Something about them clicked with me on a deep level. I once described a woman as “smart, vulnerable and
shtetl
-lovely.” That’s my highest praise for the appeal of the Jewish woman’s mind, heart and body. They are all allure, and if they freshen their lipstick over a sushi dinner, I’ll follow them anywhere. A Jewish man who dismisses such women as a group is, in technical terms,
meshuggenah
(Yiddish for “crazy”)
.
So, I read Pickus from the point of view of an ardent fan of Jewish women in all their urgent, restless wonder. I see that her male friend has serious concerns about Jewish women, finding them pushy, demanding, materialistic. Sure, some women have the traits that Pickus’s friend abhors. So what? Speaking man-to-man, I’d tell him: If you don’t like who you’re meeting, change your search criteria. Must your prospects fall within a narrow range of body types or careers? Is young, skinny and chic all that you seek? Pickiness may be the problem. Be open to the great range of Jewish women and you could be pleasantly surprised.
If you’re not clicking with personality types in your area, look further afield, especially if you’re young and footloose. Women in New York, Texas and Latin America can differ enormously in degrees of edginess, expectations, lifestyle and accent.
After years of pounding the online pavement, I’ve learned what works for me and what doesn’t. For example, lawyers and real estate brokers are a poor fit, romance-wise. They aspire to another breed of man, an alpha male/Zohan beyond my income and, at 5’ 5”, my height. On the other hand, I’ve enjoyed friendships and more with graphic designers, teachers, film-makers, psychoanalysts and rabbis. They see the value of a man with creativity, a Jewish identity, archaic Southern manners and a passion for everything Jewish women are.
Jewish women are not perfect. Some are angry, and their fury often plays out as self-directed and self-destructive. I’m haunted by how one woman described herself while shoving me down a flight of emotional stairs: “I’m replaceable.” Their anger eases when they feel accepted and desired for who they are. And they can push my buttons, too. Sometimes I wanted to quote my favorite line from the cable series
The L Word,
“You are a fucking heartbreaker.”
What about the other issues Pickus raises? I’ve attended my share of raucous family Thanksgivings and seders. They can be a strain for an outsider, but if you connect with the woman, then the family comes with the package; just watch out for what you share with relatives with borderline personality disorders. If I can handle these Northeastern Jewish families—coming as I do from a Texas clan where dinner conversations focus on hunting, the Dallas Cowboys, Republican politics and ancestors who belonged to the Daughters of the Confederacy—then anybody can.
Now, about Jewish mothers. Pickus’s friend says Jewish women remind men of their mothers. Another friend blames Jewish mothers for the problems of Jewish men. In my case, I beg to differ with the problem part. Any
mensch
-like qualities I have reflect my mother’s influence. My mother, who died at sixty-three in 1984, was a thrifty, straight-talking insurance-agency secretary who successfully raised two sons alone, made a fantastic banana pudding and loved watching
The Dean Martin Show
. Her motto: “Be friends with everybody.” To this day people fondly remember Mom as a loyal friend who knit afghans as wedding presents for every young bride in our border-town social circle. Jewish women with those traits do fine by me.
Finally, I learned first-hand how matters of appearance gnaw at potential Jewish matches. The one time I tried to set up a friend with a spirited and attractive woman, his first question was, “Is she tubby?” For the record, I sent him photos I had taken of her that showed, definitively, that she was not tubby. And I was slapped down for not being tall enough by women who exclaimed, “Oh, I couldn’t date you, I’m 5’ 6” and I love to wear high heels!” Okay, that was their choice. When I thought about appearances, the more Jewish-looking, the better. I just melted for what I call the “straight outta Moldavanka” vibe, Moldavanka being the Jewish quarter of Odessa. Jewish hair, Jewish bust, Jewish nose, Jewish women—I wanted it all. The call of the tribal DNA cannot be denied.
And for any woman who frets about what Pickus dubbed her “Jewish thighs,” I can only quote my mother’s trenchant observation on this matter: “There’s more to love.”
In the photos on my various dating profiles, I was always upfront about my appearance. I never tried, or even wanted, to look like anything other than what I am.
Let’s not beat around the bush. I’m that hairy Jewish guy—built more like Esau than Jacob—comics and cartoonists love to lampoon. While I’m bald on top, genetics compensated me with swirls of fur everywhere else: arms, legs, shoulders and back. I’d be a terrible criminal because I would leave curly DNA evidence everywhere I go.
The look has pleased me ever since a line of hair first ran down my chest as a teenager. I still delight to see the hair poke up at the top of my shirts, like a wash of black foam on a beach of skin. At real beaches, I shuck my shirt to stroll about in my barrel-chested Russian-Jewish glory. At my health club, sleeveless t-shirts display my shoulders and their halo of hair, which I view as a living tattoo of shapes, shadows and textures.
I grew up with positive images of body hair in the media, such as Sean Connery in his Agent 007 days and Burt Reynolds with his April 1972 Cosmopolitan centerfold. The hippies of the 1960s, who let their freak flag fly, gave me confidence with my own evolving body. That’s just who I am, man. Impending baldness rankled me, since I knew, as the latest in a long line of bald Wallachs, I’d lose hair on top in my twenties. But that happened so gradually that I barely noticed and hardly cared.
Then, over the past twenty years or so, a new look emerged in media images, favoring shrunken-chested Euromen with less body hair than a Chihuahua. Advertising taunted my curl-enclosed physique. Ads in the Village Voice celebrate hair removal via laser and other technologies. The pages of GQ and Esquire glisten with images of young men of marbleized features with nothing on their hard but hairless abs and chests. A recent cartoon in The New Yorker by Roz Chast—an updated version of the ten plagues in Exodus—showed a girl on a beach recoiling from a man with a hairy back, under the title, “Unwanted Body Hair!”
And I’ll never forget the derision heaped on the poor “40 Year Old Virgin” for his hairy chest, which drove him to a salon for a wax-and-rip treatment. Actor Steve Carell, who really did undergo this painful procedure on screen, got big laughs with his outbursts of yowls and curses, but the obvious message made me wince: male body hair equals social handicap.
The issue resurfaced recently with the furor over former New York Representative Anthony Weiner’s photos to Twitter pals. They show what must be a waxed bod—nobody with Jewish ancestry naturally looks so smoothly Scandinavian.
The negativity ate away at my confident body image like battery acid on ice cream. When I turned fifty, I noticed that I was now 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 online dating. I finally bought a Conair ear/nose/eyebrow trimmer to keep my unseemly growth in check. Even after that, the ads in the
Village Voice
took on new urgency. Did I dare abandon forty years of self-acceptance for a cleaner Weiner look?
I thought, “Surely other men deal with similar insecurities.” Checking online, however, I found little serious discussion of male body issues, at least among straight men. The articles I did find sounded vague and forced. They concerned Brad Pitt envy, men with eating disorders, steroid use in pursuit of that ripped look; I read nothing compelling or even particularly relevant.
I did discover
The Men’s Seder,
a project overseen by the Men of Reform Judaism that nods toward the unexplored land of Jewish men and their bodies. Topics for the Seder include
According to one review, the new “plagues” include “prostate cancer, weight gain, hair loss and impotence.” I can imagine the Seder 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 heart-rending agony found in the books, articles, seminars and conferences on women and body image. While I’m content to muse fondly on my hirsuteness, women strategize, mourn, rage, fret and commiserate over their bodies at great length.
And the intensity spirals upward when Jewish women raise the issue. Lily Rabinoff-Goldman wrote in the blog of the Jewish Women’s Archive about women struggling “to conform to arbitrary and unreachable standards,” resulting in negative attitudes toward themselves and food.
Writer Rachel Lucas reacted with rage after flipping through an issue of
Maxim
magazine. She wondered about the relentless and brutal self-scrutiny women apply, and how social expectations warp their self-respect and image. Women’s avoidance of “having sex in bright light” flows from the insecurities.
As painfully relevant as such reflections are with regard to Jewish women they simply don’t apply to men. 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 assess my status and decide how I relate to the mainstream culture and its standards for men. Would I shrivel in the white-hot presence of Brad Pitt or George Clooney? Would the Chihuahuas of
GQ
hammer me into a state of depression over my height, my baldness, my general lack of resemblance to “The Situation” on
Jersey Shore
?
I am pleased to report: no on all counts. Other than my indulgence in an ear-hair trimmer, I decided to keep accepting myself as I am. I successfully fought the urge to call one of those
Village Voice
advertisers for a wax-and-rip. My hairy Jewish body is—my physical self. I’ll never deny that. I get positive reinforcement of this attitude by watching lots of Israeli movies. They’re enjoyable because they show bald hairy Jewish guys doing cool things (e.g., driving tanks,
shtupping
) without a dollop of irony or self-loathing.
And lately, hairy guys are winning more respect. My self-confidence has bounced further back, Hobbit ears be damned, or, at least trimmed regularly. A friend on Facebook posted a link to a blog posting about actor Hugh Jackman and his fuzzed-up chest. I commented, “Fausta—you can rest even easier after looking at some of my profile photos. Hugh Jackman is a Euro-girlie man compared to, well, me.” Men’s fashion magazines show more natural, fuzzy models.
Often, I revel in the presence of men with the same look. At my gym, I’ve checked out other guys and vice versa, in a silent but friendly male competition to see who’s got the biggest, hairiest—whatever.
I’ve felt deep kinship with a Chasidic man who exercises at the same time I do. Off come the black hat and suit, on go the gym clothes. Once we stood in line for a shower and I marveled at the tribal similarity. While he was heavier and older, our backs and shoulders looked identical. We never spoke but in that silent fraternity of the shower line I knew we were hairy-brothers-in-arms
.
We both come from the same Eastern European stock, two guys whose families crawled out of the mud of Ukrainian
shtetls
to eventually deposit their hirsute offspring in the United States, where we unashamedly maintain our burly physiques. Here are two Yids who’ll never get a back waxing. Roz Chast may find us horrifying, but that’s her problem, not ours.
The most satisfying and surprising affirmation of my look came way back in May 1987, when somebody went beyond furtive looks to poking me in wonder. I was attending the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival then. The fun, the sun, the music and the crawfish made me groggy by mid-afternoon, so I stretched out on the ground, shirt off, hat over my eyes.
I had dozed off when I felt a finger jabbing my chest. “What on earth,” I thought as I opened my eyes. I saw two young women kneeling next to me, staring.
“
Why you are just the hairiest thing Ah’ve ever seen,” exclaimed one of them, a black-haired woman who gave her name as Mona. They had come to the festival from Mississippi with a male friend for the music and to see the sights. Well, they got a sight to see in me. Mona, the chattier one, kept running her finger down my chest. I didn’t mind her frisky explorations. “I bet you moan,” I told Mona, but Mona was too sloshed to get my drift. I had my camera so I snapped a picture of her demonstrating what looked like a drunken Cajun-Caribbean limbo dance move. We listened to music for a while under the pounding New Orleans sun. Finally I handed the camera to their male buddy and he captured my special moment with Mississippi Mona and her friend, our arms around each other.