Several years ago, at a bar mitzvah party in a Moroccan restaurant/nightclub in Bat Yam, Israel, my then preschool-aged nephew, stood on a chair, covered his ears and screamed. We grown-ups empathized; the music in that room was loud.
But long after my ears stopped ringing, I continued to think about that party. Not yet a mother, I watched the 12- and 13-year old girls on the dance floor in their fancy clothes and high heels, and I felt uneasy.
Beyond their gowns and make-up, they wore a painted-on sexuality that came straight from television. They undulated and grooved in perfect MTV fashion. I could almost imagine them practicing their come-hither hip rolls in front of mirrors.
Those were the hip rolls not of girls in the know, but of girls in the fog of adolescence, when we learn by imitation and will do almost anything to gain approval. In the loud darkened room full of 12- and 13-year olds, those girls wore sex as a way to measure up.
Adolescence is difficult, I know. I remember needing, absolutely requiring, designer jeans and fearing social failure if I didn’t wear a particular pair of white leather Nikes with a pink swoosh. I remember locking myself in the bathroom with a bad haircut; and practicing my smiles or trying to catch myself off guard as I laughed.
I know that teenage years can be painfully awkward. But what saddens me is that sexuality (not to mention thinness) seems to have become one of the measuring sticks that young girls use to judge themselves.
Feminism has meant many things to many women. But to me, freed from high school, it opened up a world of big ideas. According to those ideas, sexuality comes from within, not from external expectations or images, and beauty is a word with many definitions. I believed that the world would only improve with women’s self-awareness and increasing comfort with power.
That night in Bat Yam, surrounded by girls trying to fulfill a television idea of sexy, I felt like standing on a chair, covering my eyes and screaming.
Providing a shelter
Ten thousand miles and almost 10 years later, I celebrated my third cycle as a bat mitzvah. This erev Yom Kippur, I reached the birthday that used to mark the end of women’s honesty about their age. (I think my grandmother was 39 years old for at least 20 years.)
Every several years, my birthday falls on Yom Kippur eve or day. And though people express sympathy that I’m not able to celebrate in the usual ways, I don’t mind. Our Day of Atonement pulls us inward; that seems a good place to be for one’s birthday.
Now, aged 39 (an age that I don’t plan to grip for longer than one year) and mother of two children, this struggle to carve a path of self-love and approval for our girls, has become even more personal.
At the gym, when I tire of watching the revolving tapes of news, I often try to watch music videos. And I usually can’t bear it.
Yes, there is still music that can get a groove on. And yes, there is still remarkable creativity channeled into those short films. But it seems that they’re all about sex.
How many curvy women in underwear can one see? Even the divas, the solo artists, the empowered ones are flashing the same flesh and mechanical sexuality. Is that all women can do on MTV and VH1? Rather than exciting, it’s depressing and deadening.
Who are these women? If they’re not hanging onto a man, they’re rolling in the sack with $100 bills. Whereas 10 years ago there were some troubling images, now, it seems, you can’t avoid them if you’re engaged in our culture.
I do not pine for the past but am vexed as a woman and mother.
We Jews have just finished our Days of Awe, when we are asked, where are we? In the packaging of our lives, where do we reside? Unfortunately, our culture teaches our daughters to ignore such questions and look outside themselves for answers.
I think of my young daughters and wonder: How will they learn to develop romantic relationships if these are the images (in television, in magazines, in movies, all over cyberspace and on the streets) that seem to define an appealing woman?
What will they have to do to learn the beauty of sexuality when they are bombarded by images that show a culture that at once seems obsessed with sex but seemingly can’t talk about sexuality in a realistic way?
How will they learn to dance — by watching an undernourished woman wearing underwear who’s grinding her hips on television or by closing their eyes and feeling the music roll through them?
How will they, and their neighbors and classmates and cousins, learn to love their perfectly imperfect selves? Particularly when they’re awkward, particularly when they might do anything for approval?
Our culture, with its paradox of permissiveness and Puritanism, is rich with choices. I do not propose that we shield our children from those options, from the world-at-large. Rather I think we should take our cue from the symbolism of Sukkot and provide a shelter for our children.
I hope, as we sit in our wooden sukkah and throughout the year, to provide a safe place from which to view the world and determine our role within it.
Perhaps the best we can do is to weave homes and communities of good, strong, open-eyed values and to educate our children to view culture critically and to check their intuition before acting. We would do well to fill our homes with discussions about ideas and identity and to teach our children to respect themselves and others and to judge on the quality of a person’s actions rather than the shake of their skinny hips.
May your Sukkot be filled with family and friends, and lively, challenging conversations.
Chag Sukkot sameach.
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