Reactions to Jobnik (and particularly the abundance of sex)

I well tell you the first thing that I really appreciated in Miriam Libiki’s graphic novel Jobnik. On page 4, at the very beginning of the story, the author tells (or rather shows) us immediately that this will not be some sort of sugar-coated ego boosting attempt to make her life something more than it was. While it may have its faults, Jobnik is an honest account of Libiki’s experience serving in the Israeli Defense Force, as a woman and as a person who didn’t necessarily fit in with her fellow soldiers. The effort on her part to portray the reality of her experience with such candor is certainly something to be applauded. For, when telling a story such as this, what can be more crucial to understanding that experience, but the truth. This book examines many themes, self-identity and self-image issues, military service, religion, and more, but for the purpose of this blog I will mostly be reflecting on the “sex theme” that dominates the story.

The opening confession, through the use of drawn Polaroid snapshots of her own sexual encounters,  which was certainly a dominant theme of her service in the Israeli Defense Force, is a topic I would guess that most auto-biographers would shy away from, especially in such a graphic nature. Yet, she doesn’t glamorize her sexual experiences by pretending that she isn’t at times a bit ashamed of it, nor does she pretend that these casual experiences had no affect on her. She reflects on her feelings of “being used’ by the men she had these sexual experiences with in several ways. In fact, the ways in which the author draws herself and her expressions to portray how she is feeling about herself at certain points during her time of service will be probably be the topic of my next blog post. Anyway, while it would be incredibly easy to paint these experiences in a light that would push all of the blame for these, at times negative, experiences to the man rather than herself, the author continually recognizes that she is partly to blame for her own heartbreak that occurs as a result of these encounters. Her first “boyfriend,” Shahar, as Miriam admits through inclusion its inclusion in the story, immediately discloses he doesn’t want a relationship,  yet Miriam continues to pursue him, not realizing that their sexual experience together didn’t necessarily mean that Shahar wanted to be her boyfriend.  Her second sexual partner, during her service, is Asher, with whom she seems to end up making out with simply because they are often hanging out in the same room (his room) and otherwise unattached. Their “friends with benefits’ relationship continues until Asher attempts to cross a line and “sodomize” her. Shortly after she becomes aware that Asher is pursuing another woman, Hila, but he is clearly looking for a girlfriend in Hila, and Miriam realizes that he never pursued her in this way, that he never pretended to actually be interested in her for anything other than fooling around. Again, illustrating that she allowed herself to be treated in a way that led to her own heartache. There are also a few separate incidents in which the author depicts her rendezvous with another man, Roi, where any sort of relationship is never implied, and yet they continue to fool around from time to time.

While the author claims to have maintained her virginity throughout these sexual experimentation, the reader is, at least at first, inclined to think that that her actions were, well, slutty. Not that this is wrong, a woman is free to do what she wants and I am not attempting to judge her actions. On the contrary, I am merely questioning the reason for such widespread promiscuity, both evidenced by the author’s behavior as well as the implied behaviors’ of others around her. This is a military base after all. I don’t have any personal first hand experience of life on a military base or in a combat zone for that matter, but I find it pretty astounding that these types of activities would be so commonplace. My only guess, is that in such a group as this, where everyone is separated from friends and loved ones and for many, home in general, combined with the stress of being in the center of a volatile conflict, essentially a constant war zone, that many people cope with this reality by finding comfort through human contact, and in this case, sexual contact.  I guess you can’t really blame someone for trying to distract themselves with sex in this situation. I mean, with bombs going off, and friends getting shot/killed, and constant bombardment of news reports of brutal fighting and death and destruction, sex seems like a pretty reasonable method of distraction. I would also argue that the LACK of sexual encounters during her break from service, during which she attends a concert event with a group of friends, is evidence that under less stressful/distressing circumstances she doesn't feel compelled to seek comfort through sex. Therefore, her sexual experimentation during her military service was in fact a defense mechanism, a method of comforting herself during a tumultuous experience, and NOT simply just a "promiscuous" phase.