Considerations

Tenth in an ongo­ing series

RISHON LEZION, Israel — So I was start­ing my first day at my first full-time job in Tel Aviv where I was an English-language mar­ket­ing writer for a high-tech com­pany. I was sit­ting in a room with two other employ­ees, and the depart­ment head came inside to wish every­one a good morning.

After the usual pleas­antries, the 40-ish boss turned to my coworker, a 19-year-old stu­dent from Canada whose father is Israeli, and made a com­ment that shocked me: “Hey, your breasts look big­ger today.” I did not know what to expect. My col­league gen­uinely laughed. “Yeah, I’m wear­ing a dif­fer­ent bra today,” she said with a smile and a shrug. Then every­one started talk­ing about the day’s work as if noth­ing strange had hap­pened. If the boss had said some­thing like that in the United States, he would have faced law­suits and termination.

Israel has var­i­ous cul­tural norms regard­ing sex and rela­tions between the gen­ders that shock new arrivals from the West­ern world, and this was my first intro­duc­tion to them. Later, the same boss asked me if I had spo­ken with “the MILF” in human resources. I laughed and shrugged it off.

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Back in Boston

Before I moved from Bean­town to Illi­nois and then to Israel, I worked briefly as a mar­ket­ing man­ager at a Mass­a­chu­setts hos­pi­tal. Dur­ing the day­long ori­en­ta­tion, a group of twenty new employ­ees had to meet with human resources, lis­ten to var­i­ous speak­ers, and watch a series of videos. (Obvi­ously, the job did not work out.)

I was sit­ting next to the only other guy in the room since all of the other new recruits were female nurses. Soon, the HR man­ager pre­sented a video on sex­ual harass­ment in the work­place: A woman ran to a female col­league to com­plain that the guy who refills the vend­ing machines had asked her out. “I felt so akward!” she whined to her friend. “I feel so uncom­fort­able, and I don’t know what to do!”

The friend advised her to talk to her boss or make a com­plaint to human resources. At this point in the film, the other guy and I started laugh­ing to our­selves. It was com­pletely absurd — God for­bid that a guy tries to ask some­one out on a date! The woman could have sim­ply told him, “No, thank you.”

I think about that video when­ever I observe the dif­fer­ences between Amer­i­can and Israeli women. In such a sit­u­a­tion like the one in the video, an Israeli girl would have turned him down, prob­a­bly very rudely. If he per­sisted, an Israeli woman would have hit him or kicked him in the crotch. No one here would run and cry to management.

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Tough Cook­ies

Israeli women are rough. They drink, smoke, and curse. They yell and argue. They are ruth­lessly blunt and usu­ally cyn­i­cal. They know how to fix cars and fire weapons. Part of the rea­son is that life is harder here, espe­cially dur­ing the first sev­eral decades since Israel was founded. Every­one pitches in equally. Every­one — men and women — serves in the mil­i­tary for a few years. Every­one works in the fields, sta­bles, and fac­to­ries on col­lec­tive farms named kib­butzim. I know sev­eral women who have turned down Israeli guys whom they deem to be “too sen­si­tive.” A bar­tender friend of mine, a woman, once gave me advice on meet­ing Israel women: “Don’t be so Amer­i­can!” (“Amer­i­can” is the code word that peo­ple use for “nice” when they talk to me.) An Israeli woman will work hard all day, then make din­ner and clean house at night.

Israel is far ahead of the West­ern world in terms of the sexes being treated equally. But as I have always writ­ten, every­thing in the Mid­dle East is a para­dox. In other ways, Israel is far behind the West as well.

Part of the rea­son is that Israeli women are very “macho” is that they need to defend them­selves against many Israeli guys. Men here, like many of their Arab cousins in other Mid­dle East­ern coun­tries, are not very nice to women in gen­eral. Men through­out the coun­try act like guys on a con­struc­tion site when­ever they see a beau­ti­ful woman. Men have no shame when they are try­ing to get into a woman’s pants. Israeli guys think that I am a “friar” (the Hebrew word for “sucker”) when I refuse to try to pick up girls who are extremely drunk in bars. Israeli guys have no rules in the pur­suit of — well, you know. A later boss of mine at a dif­fer­ent job told me not to recruit any female can­di­dates for a posi­tion because “they get sick more often, and they get preg­nant.” Women need to be tough to suc­ceed in such a society.

Israeli, in many respects, is a con­ser­v­a­tive coun­try. Women are gen­er­ally expected to do the cook­ing and clean­ing. When­ever I am a guest for din­ner, I always offer to help with the dishes or the clean-up, but the woman of the house will threaten to hit me unless I go watch tele­vi­sion with the other guys. And she will only be half-joking.

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Dif­fer­ent Views of Sex

The impor­tant thing to remem­ber about Israel is that it is a Jew­ish coun­try, and Judaism is more than just “Chris­tian­ity with­out the Jesus.” It is an entirely dif­fer­ent mind­set and cul­ture — and one impor­tant dis­tinc­tion is how peo­ple here view sex.

Chris­tian­ity orig­i­nally viewed sex as a nec­es­sary evil. The Apos­tle Paul, who expected Jesus to return soon and whom some his­to­ri­ans believe to have been a misog­y­nist, wrote that a chaste life is bet­ter in prepa­ra­tion for the Sec­ond Com­ing and that mar­riage is the less-ideal option (1 Corinthi­ans 7:1–2, 8–9, 32–34):

It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nev­er­the­less, to avoid for­ni­ca­tion, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own hus­band… I say there­fore to the unmar­ried and wid­ows, It is good for them if they abide even as I [celi­bate]. But if they can­not con­tain, let them marry: for it is bet­ter to marry than to burn… He that is unmar­ried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is mar­ried careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. There is dif­fer­ence also between a wife and a vir­gin. The unmar­ried woman careth for the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit: but she that is mar­ried careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.

In addi­tion, the Roman Catholic Church still cel­e­brates the eter­nal vir­gin­ity of Mary (some­thing that I doubt Joseph had allowed to remain for their entire lives). Later, Euro­peans and later Amer­i­cans changed their view: sex was some­thing not to be acknowl­edged or dis­cussed in pub­lic and polite company.

These opin­ions on sex did not come from Judaism. Sec­u­lar and reli­gious Jews view sex as some­thing beau­ti­ful and as nat­ural as eat­ing and drink­ing. To them, it is a fact of life — so why make a fuss about it? Jew­ish peo­ple are immensely blunt and practical.

When the mother of Avivit, a female friend of mine, intro­duced me to Avivit’s seven– and three-year-old nieces, I mis­tak­enly told them that I was a “haver” (boyfriend) of Avivit. The mother cor­rected my Hebrew: I was a “yedid” (male friend) of Avivit. Then, Avivit’s mother told the girls the dif­fer­ence: “He is a boy-friend who does not sleep with Avivit.” And the girls under­stood what she meant!

When­ever fam­i­lies eat or visit together, the topic of sex always comes up because some­one is always try­ing to set some­one else up on a date, and par­ents always want their chil­dren to get mar­ried and have grand­chil­dren. But they will always end up talk­ing and jok­ing about sex — in vul­gar Hebrew — even if chil­dren are around. It is just part of a cul­ture that has few hang-ups about sex, regard­less of the time and place.

You can imag­ine what peo­ple my age say among them­selve at bars and clubs. I was told my bar­tender friend that I always liked it when she worked rather than another male bar­tender. Her joke in response: “Yeah, I have breasts!” And that is a tame example.

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Reli­gion and Sex

Israel, how­ever, is not one big brothel. As a half-American friend of mine told me, Israeli girls tend to lose their vir­gin­ity at 18 or 19 — not 16 or younger as is typ­i­cal in many parts of the United States. The rate of teenage preg­nancy is also lower — in addi­tion to Israelis hav­ing sex later, I imag­ine it is also because birth con­trol is not viewed as immoral as many Chris­tians believe it to be. Still, Israelis tend to be either very lib­eral or very con­ser­v­a­tive on pre-marital sex. As I wrote in a prior let­ter, an 18-year-old girl whom I had just met asked me in blunt Eng­lish: “Do you want to fuck tonight?” (I politely declined.) On the other hand, many girls I know will wait months to have sex with their boyfriends (even if they talk bluntly about sex all of the time). Just like every­thing else in Israel, there is not a lot of mid­dle ground.

Even among Ortho­dox Jews in Israel, sex is not viewed in the same way as many Chris­tians. Most Ortho­dox Jews observe the law of “shomer negiah” — that no two adults or teenagers of oppo­site gen­ders are allowed to have phys­i­cal con­tact, not even a hug or a hand­shake, unless they are either mar­ried or close rel­a­tives. Still, this does not mean that sex is a for­bid­den sub­ject. Tra­di­tional Jew­ish law dis­cusses dat­ing, mar­riage, and sex at great length. Ortho­dox Jews talk about sex as bluntly and frankly as sec­u­lar Jews — even if they are very obser­vant and will do noth­ing until they are mar­ried. As I heard one per­son put it: Reli­gious Jews are mod­est; they are not prudish.

(Inter­est­ingly, some Ortho­dox girls dis­creetly exper­i­ment with les­bian­ism before mar­riage because a lit­eral read­ing of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, bans only male-male sex — it says noth­ing about female-female. Ortho­dox rab­bis dis­cour­age this behav­ior, but they can­not ban it.)

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A Sex­ual Paradox

When it comes to sex and fem­i­nism, Israel is lib­eral and fem­i­nist, yet con­ser­v­a­tive and misog­y­nis­tic. Israelis are blunt and vul­gar when they dis­cuss sex, yet many of them will not even touch some­one of oppo­site sex until they are mar­ried. Israeli women are tougher than most Amer­i­can men because many Israeli men act like “bar­bar­ians,” but they turn down men who are too “nice” or “sen­si­tive.” Sec­u­lar girls will either have sex the same night they meet some­one, or they will wait for months.

Sex is a para­dox in Israel — just like every­thing else in the Mid­dle East.

Prior let­ter: The Gaza Conflict

Related posts:

1. Let­ter from Israel: Sto­ries from the Desert I
2. Let­ter from Israel: The Ultra-Orthodox
3. Let­ter from Israel: The Great Reli­gious Divide
4. Let­ter from Israel: Me and the Israeli Arab
5. Let­ter from Israel: The Bright Side of Life