Consent Is Sexy: A Haiku

When I was younger, an overpriced local photo studio used to sponsor a "Readers of the Week" corner in the New Jersey Jewish Standard. The photographer would choose a family she had recently worked with and publish their photo and a brief blurb about their life. Without purporting to draw comparisons between this blog and North Jersey's preeminent Jewish weekly, I hereby bestow upperwestlaw's "Readers of the Week" honor to the Ripps-Kogen family.

The reasons for this honor are manifold. Firstly, it is in gratitude for Linda's readership and comment -- quite arguably the highlight of my week. Secondly, it recognizes Navah's multifaceted inspiration -- in format, in content, and in the theme of today's post. At this point, I'd like to direct your attention to Navah's particularly saucy comment in reference to my most recent post. In said comment, she invites me to "violate [her] honor code anytime." While I appreciate the latitude, she better hope that her former colleagues at the Rape Crisis Center are not reading this. They may find her flaunting of the seriousness of their cause more offensive than my labeling it as a certain poly-syllabic poetic device. Well played. I am no longer the only offender.

Speaking of offenders, one of my pet peeves has resurfaced this week with a vengeance. Honestly people, if you do not know your friend's fiancee's name, one of two things must be true. (1) The couple has not been dating long enough to get engaged. (2) You are not close enough friends with this person to be posting them on OnlySimchas. There are few things as irksome as the "Shaindy Rosenbaum and Chosson" posting. If you don't know the names of both parties, just wait it out. Someone who does will get there.

As many of you know, this is not the only issue coloring my love/hate relationship with OnlySimchas. As such, I am posting the quasi-notorious OnlySimchas article below. This is the short piece. If anyone wants to read my longer research paper on the subject, I'd be happy to forward it along.

Re-reading the opinions that my twenty year old self felt so passionately about, I find that little has changed. While I no longer care enough about OnlySimchas to damn it as fervently as I did then, I still carry reservations about the ideals that it espouses. (Haha, "espouses" - I love a good pun.)

Let me know what you think and, as always, comment away. I live for validation.
Let's go Yankees,
Y

L’Chaim! To “Pseudo”-Life - March 8, 2007

Have you ever walked into a restaurant convinced you know a fellow diner but unsure of where you recognize him from? It happens to my friends and I more and more these days and I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint the culprit – a little website called OnlySimchas.com. OnlySimchas is an online version of the society pages catering to the American Orthodox Jewish community. It is a site announcing engagements, weddings, births, bar-mitzvahs, et al, but in the five plus years since its founding it has become so much more. With its online guest books and photo galleries, OnlySimchas, like Facebook and MySpace, has become a venue for voyeurism of the highest degree. While the site features sections highlighting all sorts of celebrations, the Engagements and Weddings pages are by far the most frequently visited. OnlySimchas has found a way to objectify and commodify relationships in a way that places marriage on a pedestal and forces the site’s users to forget what relationships are really about.
Upon its inception, OnlySimchas was meant as a way of publicizing good news throughout the small but geographically and ideologically diverse Orthodox Jewish community. It was envisioned as a venue where one could find out that their one-time bunkmate from summer camp had found true love and provide a forum through which to wish them well. Truthfully, the public that is being catered to does not require this kind of service. In a community where everyone knows everyone else’s business, it is infrequent that one does not receive this kind of news through the grapevine, many times even before an engagement becomes official. The news that OnlySimchas provides is redundant. So what purpose does the site truly serve?
In a rapidly growing image obsessed world where seeing is believing, OnlySimchas serves as a venue to help its users grasp the lofty notion of a successful relationship. In recent years, even Modern Orthodox Jews have backpedaled into a situation in which young women are only as valuable as the husbands they procure. It is a sad but true reality that many educated young women care more, or equally, about getting married young than about completing an advanced degree.
Engaged couples are revered by the OnlySimchas set as individuals who have attained the Holy Grail of human relationships and have thus procured a higher level of being. OnlySimchas turns these couples into celebrities. Rather than leafing through People magazine, young Orthodox girls scroll the pages of OnlySimchas critiquing wedding dresses and bridesmaids’ gowns the way that Mr. Blackwell analyzes Hollywood stars. This cannot be the effect that the creators of OnlySimchas intended.
The site and its unfortunate influence are prime examples of Walter Lippman’s notion of the “pseudo-environment” that consumers of modern mass media find themselves living in. According to Lippman, human beings are incapable of accurately processing certain events that are beyond their intellectual grasp. In his damning critique of American democracy, “Public Opinion”, Lippman writes, “The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event.” OnlySimchas provides a forum in which the not-yet engageds can get a fix of what it feels like to actually attain that state of higher being. They use the mental images of happy couples and white silk gowns to try to understand what it takes to create a successful relationship. It is an unquestionable high. Like a drug, the site is addictive and tough to quit. And like drug users, many OnlySimchas surfers get high in secret. Many do not admit to their addiction to the site, scrolling through it furtively, only in the comfort of their own homes.
The repercussions of this addiction are clear. It provides an unhealthy and inaccurate view of what it means to share a life with another. Lavish receptions and exotic flowers do not a happy marriage make. As Lippman explained, OnlySimchas users, unable to understand the admittedly complicated world of interpersonal relationships, oversimplify the world and trust the mental images in their minds in order to create a functional life as an unmarried individual. By visiting OnlySimchas, they are biding their time as single, waiting for Prince Charming to sweep them away to the Glatt Kosher wedding hall of their dreams.
In the years since OnlySimchas hit the web, the average marriage age of Modern Orthodox Jewish women in the Diaspora has dropped significantly. The moment that they graduate high school, many young women enter a race to the chuppah. Not surprisingly, the numbers of young couples divorcing has skyrocketed as many come to realize that marriage is not all about the photo gallery icon on their OnlySimchas page. Many lives are irrevocably ruined and self-esteems crushed. The environment that has been created is not only “pseudo”, but undoubtedly destructive.
Like most things in Judaism, OnlySimchas is a terrible misnomer – there is no denying the trouble it has wrought.