On beauty, and other things

Today's post is a bit of a hotch potch of things that have been simmering gently in my mind, on the back-burner, some about life here in Jerusalem and some about life in general.  I just finished reading And The Mountains Echoed, the latest book by Khaled Hosseini, he of The Kite Runner fame.  It's a book about loss and longing and hope, about family and what that means and how it's played out over many years.  The book takes the central story of an Afghan brother and sister, called Abdullah and Pari, then weaves a whole web of narrative around it involving various different characters.  One of the threads tells the story of a girl who was left permanently disfigured by a dog attack at the age of five (don't worry, no spoilers here) and there were a few sentences in the book that have really stayed with me.  One was this: "Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly."

This, it seems to me, is bang-on.  I've been thinking about this because for some reason I've been reading a lot of feminist literature of late (in particular  http://vagendamag.blogspot.co.il/ which I cannot recommend enough, and Laurie Penny in the New Statesman) and some of the women have been writing about issues surrounding beauty and gender and physical form.  I read a series of weekly article in The Times by a woman called Melanie Reid, who broke her back three years ago in a horse-riding accident, and in a recent one she says: "There are some things you don’t learn until it is too late. One is that a woman’s relationship with her own body image is a totally unnecessary war."  I love that quotation.  I printed out the article and gave it to all the girls in my homeroom, many of whom struggle with this issue even though they're all gorgeous and special and unique.  I took some of them out to lunch at the start of term - they'd been constructing IKEA furniture in the senior lounge, or common room I guess we'd call it, and were clearly in need of energy - and two of the girls turned down pizza in favour of a big bucket of juice from a smoothie bar.  I wanted to tell them to ease up, to eat a slice of pizza from time to time, and most of all to make the most of the fact that they are young and healthy, but one of the boys had already made that point.  If I can give my girls anything to take with them in life, one of the main messages would be that the sooner you learn to love your body as it is, warts/stomach-flab/cellulite and all, the happier you will be.

The issue of female self-worth as related to looks is one I've spent a lot of my life working through.  If you didn't know, I was born with one side of my face much larger than the other, a random congenital deformity called lymphangioma-haemangioma, a fairly rare condition where essentially a big pile of abnormal lymph and blood vessel tissue lands somewhere on your body whilst you're in the womb.  Mine landed on my face and was not the easy-to-remove kind, so I've been in and out of hospital my whole life having plastic surgery and now most people who meet me can't see anything different about my face at all except the rather splendid scar running down my right cheek from my nose to my chin (and which I like to tell people I got in a knife-fight/shark-attack/climbing-through-barbed-wire incident, depending on the mood and audience).  It's interesting to me because so much of my character and personality has been formed by this in utero abnormality - what on earth would I have been like without it?  My brilliant, amazing mum who has been the constant support and lifeline through the many ups and downs of life with 'my face' says that it made me who I am, not least because she always encouraged me not to hide it by sitting in a corner, and not to let it hold me back.

It's not been an easy ride and it's still a pain (literally and metaphorically) from time to time, but looking back on my life I don't think, given the chance, that I would change it - it has helped me to understand more fully the truth that often the most beautiful people are the ones who like themselves as they are, difficult though it can be to get to that place.  One of the things I like so much about Israel is that women here seem to be so much more confident and happy with themselves and the way they look than they are back home.  They wear whatever they want, whenever they want; their hair is long and flippy and shiny; they know that they are gorgeous and they're not afraid of it.  I don't want to generalise; I'm sure there are pressures and issues and tears the same as there are back home.  But in all honesty, women here just seem happier with themselves.  It's liberating.  It's like walking out of a hot house into cold, fresh air.  It's helping me to appreciate what God gave me and remember that we are all His creations, fearfully and wonderfully made regardless of our shape and form.  Not everybody hits the genetic jackpot and ends up with classically beautiful features and a flat stomach.  Not everybody can be Angelina Jolie, or Miranda Kerr.  Although if you're lucky, you might get serenaded by Jermaine from the Flight of the Conchords because you're just beautiful enough to be an air hostess from the 60s, or a high-class prostitute, or a even a part-time model.

On a slightly related but less introspective note, if one more Israeli man hisses at me as I walk past I might actually lose it.  I appreciate the openness of men here in appreciating women and letting them know about it - like the young man who stopped me in the street on my way home one night to tell me that I'm beautiful - but I draw the line at outright lechery (as I'm sure all women do).  There's one alley in the shuk that I walk down a lot, due to its location between my favourite bakery and the place where I buy hummus and tahina, and every time I walk through it both the guys at the fish stall and the old man at the fruit stall stop what they're doing and stare.  Even on days when I've basically schlepped out in my pajamas to pick up some essentials.  (Actually, yesterday I did schlep out in my pajamas and got told off by an Orthodox guy for what he clearly considered inappropriate dress.)  On Monday the old guy hissed at me as I walked past and I nearly turned around and decked him.  I swear, if he does it again, I'm going to start shouting, make an enormous scene and hopefully embarrass everybody enough for him to bloody well stop doing it.

And on another slightly related note, connected to making scenes, now that I've been living here for over two years I'm getting bored of the multitude of ways people try to fleece tourists here, which impacts me because, being blond and western, a lot of people think I'm a tourist.  The cardinal sin in Israel is being treated like a fri'er, or sucker since it's a badge of shame, indicating that you're stupid enough for people to take advantage of you.  Well, I have been working my hardest to make sure that people don't think I am a fri'er and this has been a worthwhile, if very un-British endeavour.  I got a cab to East Jerusalem one afternoon and the cab driver tried to persuade me to accept a fixed price of 50 shekels for what was clearly just a 25 shekel journey.  I refused and told him to put the meter on; he lectured me for five minutes on how I was going to end up paying through the nose because the traffic would be bad; there was no traffic and I handed over 28 shekels.  Brunskill 1, cab driver 0.  I made a massive scene at a bar in town recently, rather unusually for me, to the point where I'm now slightly embarrassed to go back there if the same manager is on duty.  Basically, the Hebrew menu says that happy hour runs until 8 whereas the English menu says it goes until 9 and of course the management go with the Hebrew version and the bar-staff never remind you of that, which means that hapless tourists get over-charged.  I'd pointed this out to the manager in July, then completely forgot and got stung when I was back there a few weeks ago.  I should have known better but I was outraged that they still hadn't changed the menus and were trying the same trick.  I made such a fuss that I have a feeling, though I can't be sure (it was late, I was a bit het-up and angry), that they took quite a lot off the bill, not just the beers I thought I'd been overcharged for.

Last, but by no means least: vindication.  I've been trying to convince my friend Charlie for about a year now that Israeli men in crowded environments like clubs or gigs make their first move by grabbing a woman's hand and twirling her around in an attempt to get body-to-body contact.  Two weeks ago we went to see the Swedish DJ Avicii play a gig in Tel Aviv, an utterly blinding night out, one of the best yet in Israel.  Looking back on it there are so many highlights but one of them, for me, was the point where Charlie turned to me and said, "You're right.  They all do it."  Yes, yes they do.

Another hot, sweaty night in Tel Aviv - totally, utterly brilliant

So, to sum up: Israeli men can be sleazeballs but mostly are refreshingly honest about finding a girl attractive, even if you cannot get them to let go of your hand for love nor money; I will go to any lengths to avoid being treated like a fri'er even if it means embarrassing the people I'm with (sorry, Allison...); and real beauty, true beauty, is about more than how you look.  It's partly about your body - about staying healthy and happy, about appreciating what you've got and making the most of it.  But it's also about how you think and act and treat others; it's about the quality of your character; it really is about kindness and honesty.  I think more than ever now I'm starting to understand the value of the verse from 1 Samuel: But the LORD said to Samuel, "Do not look at his appearance or at the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for God sees not as man sees, for man looks at the outward appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart."  I wonder what God sees when he looks on my heart.  And I leave you with An Epilogue, by John Masefield:

I have seen flowers come in stony places

And kind things done by men with ugly faces,
And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,
So I trust, too.