Publications Represent The Ideal: My Response to Amy Davidson in the New Yorker

I received an email from a friend informing me that my Photoshopped Hillary post was mentioned in the New Yorker. Intrigued (and not a little flattered), I clicked on the link my friend provided. Well, turns out, I wasn’t exactly mentioned in a New Yorker article (*sigh*), but someone did recommend my post in the comment section on a piece called, “The Bin Laden Raid and the Vanishing Women,” by Amy Davidson.

Although it was quite deflating to find out no one at the New Yorker had noticed my lovely blog, I was actually glad I’d gotten to read Davidson’s short essay. Not because it was an enjoyable, funny little read—although it was!—but because I disagreed with a point she made and wanted to comment on it. Unfortunately, no matter what I tried, I couldn’t register with the site, and you have to be registered in order to comment. (If anyone knows how to go about registering, please let me know. My email to the mag went unanswered.)

Anyhow, luckily for me, I write a blog. And if I can’t comment at the New Yorker, I can simply air my viewpoint here.

So this is what Davidson said: “The silliness of Di Tzeitung’s reasoning makes it almost too easy a target, so I’ll stop, on a final note of absurdity: Di Tzeitung is based in Brooklyn. Women are pretty visible there, like it or not.”

Actually, I don’t think it’s all that absurd, and I sort of touched on the reason in my previous post when I wrote, “As is often the case, the ideal and the actuality are not precisely the same.” A publication that’s meant to represent a particular community or organization will follow guidelines that adhere to that community’s or organization’s ideal. If the publication is issued by, say, a Christian community of the Roman Catholic Church denomination, it will likely not publish a story that extols homosexuality or even write about it as if it were a normal biological orientation. It makes no difference that the individuals working for the publication, as well as numerous members of the Roman Catholic Church, may be welcoming and accepting of homosexuals in actual life. Since the denomination’s stance is that homosexuality is sinful, a publication produced by this group will not air articles that suggest that there is any beauty or normalcy in the queer lifestyle.  

Orthodoxy’s rules on sexual behavior include a proscription of premarital and extramarital sex. To make this achievable in contemporary times, Ultra-Orthodoxy prescribes a lifestyle where the sexes are socially segregated beyond a certain age. Because sexual desire is a human given (for most people), the community sets up certain gedarim (boundaries) to assist in the attaining of the ideal: a single sexual partner for life. One of these gedarim is the forbiddance of publishing images of women in their publications. (I haven’t studied the history of this particular boundary, but I believe it is a fairly recent phenomenon. Regardless, it is one of the current practices of the Ultra-Orthodox.)

It makes no difference that women and men in Brooklyn walk the streets freely, and can easily check each other out if they so wish. It makes no difference that men and women interact in business settings constantly. And it makes no difference that in reality, a number of Orthodox individuals don’t comply with the one sexual partner for life imperative. The ideal remains. And publications represent the ideal.