For centuries, the figure of Eve has been a subject of great interest in Western art, literature, and philosophy. Upon her naked body man has projected his most visceral fears and desires concerning woman, so she is presented as both seductress and mother, noble savage and domesticator, deceiver and the deceived. The Portal of the Virgin at Notre Dame Cathedral includes a stone temptation scene in which the crafty serpent bears the breasts and face of a woman, nearly a mirror image of Eve. This motif repeats itself in medieval iconography, betraying the commonly held view that woman alone was the source of original sin, Eve a sort of biblical Pandora who cracked open the box and brought perpetual shame upon her sex.
“You are the devil’s gateway,” the theologian Tertullian told Christian women. “Do you not know that you are each an Eve?” The sentence of God on your sex lives on in this age; the guilt, lives on too.”
What we read into the Creation narrative often says as much about us as it says about the text. And for women emerging from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the vilification of Eve has been disastrous. A passage that might challenge readers to aspire to the love and mutuality of Paradise has instead been used for centuries to justify the perpetuation of the curse by forcing women into subordination, with theologians from the apostle Paul to Martin Luther noting somewhat begrudgingly that women are nonetheless necessary for procreation.
And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughter’s veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new — perhaps something better — into this world.
In a sense, Tertullian was right. We are each an Eve. – Rachel Held Evans, A Year of Biblical Womanhood
It was a sunny spring day, the day that I became a feminist. I was in the seventh grade and was hanging out with my friends outside of school during our lunch period. We were a coed group of jostling, self-conscious, thirteen-year-olds just beginning to explore our sexuality. Like any self-respecting coed group of middle schoolers we were flirting in that painfully, awkward way that middle schoolers do. We were trying on identities to see which one stuck, and at the moment my friend Julie was playing the part of the dumb blond, although that wasn’t who she was in actuality. She was being giggly and flirtatious in a ditsy, come-hither way, and it was earning her a lot of attention from the boys in our group, who were playing along with the act.
I was standing on the outskirts, leaning against a warm, sun-baked, brick wall . . . watching. Julie was literally the center of attention, a small circle of boys surrounding her. And then it happened. One of the boys in the circle turned to me and asked me a question. I can’t remember what he asked, but I remember the tone he used. He was talking down to me, treating me as if I were stupid. And why not? It was the game Julie was playing.
This was a major crossroads in my life. It was almost as if time stopped, and I was being given a strange suspended moment of clarity about what was actually happening. This boy — whoever he was, I can’t remember now — was issuing me an invitation. He held it out to me like the crafty serpent offering forbidden fruit. I was being invited into the circle, and all I had to do was play dumb. . . .
For a kid like me who never really fit in, and yearned for belonging in an almost visceral way, it was an incredibly seductive invitation. And I confess, there in that suspended moment where time had stopped, I seriously considered taking that boy’s hand and walking into the center of that circle. But I knew even then, at the age of thirteen, there was a price to pay, and that price was my soul. That’s what it felt like, anyway. This was the moment where I would decide whether I was going to allow myself to be shaped into an object that existed for the gratification of men, or chose to be myself. There was much to be gained by stepping into that circle: A false sense of belonging, but belonging none the less.
Still, something like, “Hell, no!” went through my mind. I shot up erect from where I had been slouching against the brick wall and said something biting to the boy.
“Bitch,” he said and turned back to Julie who continued to practice her fake-ditsy, come hither looks. She was a much more appealing package than an angry, newborn feminist. Together they made up an archetype easily and comfortably slipped into like a pair of well-worn jeans.
Later that year, I was cornered at a school dance by two boys who mockingly asked me to dance. (I was mocked a lot in middle school for not being what I was supposed to be, particularly by boys. Particularly by “the popular” boys.) When I said no, sensing that I was about to be the butt of some joke, one of them grabbed me and held me in place while the other pulled his thin cotton shorts tight to reveal his erect penis. Then he ran it down both of my bare legs as he gyrated, striptease style to the music like he was giving me a lap dance. It lasted no more than two minutes, and for them it was a lark of masculinity, done perhaps to put me in my place. Boys will be boys, you know. But I felt used and dirty and would be recounting the incident to my therapist years later. . . .
My sophomore year of high school I was on an auditorium AV crew for a youth conference in Colorado. My crew mates and I communicated with each other over head sets. It was a lot of fun, but we had been working hard, putting in fourteen to sixteen hour days, and not getting much sleep. There was a lot of slaphappy banter and joking around that went on over the headsets, and it was during one such round of merriment that out of the blue another member of the team, a guy, made a comment about my breasts for everyone to hear. I remember distinctly the icy wash of immediate shame, and what it felt like to go from being an equal and valued part of a team, a human being with God-given gifts and talents, to a sexualized object. I felt about an inch tall, and I wanted to hide.
Then my brain went into hyperdrive, wracking itself to try to figure out what I had done to cause this situation. Surely it was my fault. Had I been too flirtatious? Were my clothes too revealing? Something. I must have done something.
Luckily, I was raised by parents whose vocation was working with abused, abandoned, and neglected kids. And actually, I mostly credit my father with raising me a feminist, which he did with great intentionality. It’s not that my mother didn’t have a hand in that, but my father is more of what you might call . . . an angry feminist, which is funny since he’s 1) a man and 2) a man who spent his career in the South working for the church. So, I had good stuff to pull from as I sat there blaming myself for the shame I was feeling.
My dad will tell you that no kid wants to be removed from his/her home no matter how bad the abuse is. Every kid wants to be with their parents. So they rationalize the abuse by blaming it on themselves: If I were better behaved, my mom wouldn’t hit me; If I was better about doing my chores, my dad wouldn’t drink; If I hadn’t provoked her, my mom wouldn’t have burned me with her cigarette; If I’d kept my door locked, my dad wouldn’t have molested me. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. It’s my fault. On a side note, when I was just out of college and volunteering on a rape crisis hotline at a battered women’s shelter, I found the same thing and learned that blaming oneself for abuse is something particularly ingrained in women.
As I sat in the auditorium with my crew mate’s comments ringing in my ears, I realized what was happening. It was sexual harassment pure and simple, and in one swift second it had utterly robbed me of dignity.
I was standing at another crossroads. I could choose to let it slide, or I could take back my dignity. In the calmest voice that I could muster, I said over my head set, “Don’t ever talk about my breasts or any other part of my body again. Do you understand?” There was silence on the line and then he said, “Yes.”
In the church, feminism remains, largely, an ugly word. A lot of Christian women won’t claim it, in fact many think it’s antithetical to Christianity. So, it’s important to me for people, young women in particular, to hear me call myself a feminist, and I think perhaps it might be time for me to begin blogging about some of the Biblical stories as interpreted through feminist theology. As Rachel Held Evans says in her book, A Year of Biblical Womanhood, “For women emerging from the Judeo-Christian tradition, the vilification of Eve has been disastrous.” Tragically, there is a connection between the culture that patriarchal interpretations of the Bible have helped to create, and the misogynistic slings and arrows that women endure daily. It’s an Eve as temptress, responsible for the downfall of man, mentality. It’s so ingrained in us that even women nod and say, “yes, yes it was my fault”, or point at other women to denounce them as sluts and whores.
I’ve been watching this play out in the recent rape case in Steubenville, Ohio where two high school boys were convicted of sexually assaulting, multiple times, an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl. They took her body to several parties where witnesses saw what they were doing. Some witnesses even participated by taking pictures and videos and tweeting about what was happening. So, there were a whole lot of teenagers standing around doing absolutely nothing while this girl was assaulted. Not only doing nothing, but documenting it through social media. One of the boys convicted even took pictures of her naked body (which they had undressed) and circulated them among the teenagers of Steubenville. Yet both boys claim they didn’t realize there was anything wrong with what they were doing at the time. They didn’t realize it was rape.
Obviously this is not a new story, it’s one we’ve seen played out again and again and again throughout history. In fact, this particular case actually reminded me of something similar that happened to a friend in high school, but was never reported. We see this story reflected in political discussions about what constitutes rape. We see it when we hear a politician say, “It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s [being impregnated by a rapist] really rare. If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.”
Rape, sexual assault, and harassment happen with alarming frequency. Most of it goes unreported and unnoticed. The victim goes through that age old litany: My clothes were too revealing; I shouldn’t have been drinking; I shouldn’t have provoked him . . . And society with its culture of rape goes right along with it: She was drinking; Well, she was always kind of slutty anyway; She shouldn’t have been wearing that revealing top; She shouldn’t have been walking in that place . . . Woman is always responsible for the fall of mankind it seems.
It’s the “Virginal Nice Girls” myth of Christianity, which is that if you are female and have had sex or engaged in sexual activity before marriage, you’re not a “nice girl” you’re not “pure”, therefore you are damaged goods, sister. Sullied. Less than. If you’re not a “nice girl” well . . . then . . . you might be “asking for it”. The weight of this wretched purity is placed entirely on the female.
This is what we’re seeing in the conversations surrounding the Steubenville case. People are mourning the tragic fate of these two promising young men who got a whopping three years of jail time between them, while brushing aside the victim who is being called a slut and a whore, and receiving death threats. Several times now on social media I’ve seen the phrase “lady like” used. As in, if the victim had only been engaging in “lady like” behavior instead of drinking, those poor boys wouldn’t have been tempted to drag her unconscious body from party to party sexually assaulting her numerous times over the course of an entire night i.e. good women, virtuous women don’t get raped. The weight of purity and the fall of mankind is chained around the ankles of women like a stone chained to a sixteenth century witch undergoing trial by water.
Is there hope? Right now, for me at least, it’s hard to feel. This Steubenville case has dredged up the painful, uncomfortable memories of my past, and forced me to face them again. It’s made me afraid for my daughter. It’s made me angry for every sexual assault victim I’ve ever known and worked with. It’s made me grateful for the feminists in my life, many of whom are men. But for me hope often comes from stories, and I’d like to revisit the story of Eve from a feminist perspective next week. In the meantime, that Rachel Held Evans quote at the top gives me a lot of hope. There’s a sense of movement in it as if it were sort of saying, “Okay. Well, we’ve got a lot of baggage here, but we’re not stagnant. There’s a lot of work to do. So, let’s get started right away, shall we?”
And so, at least symbolically, the blood of Eve courses through each one of her daughter’s veins. We are each associated with life; each subject to the impossible expectations and cruel projections of men; each fallen, blamed, and misunderstood; and each stubbornly vital to the process of bringing something new — perhaps something better — into this world.
In a sense, Tertullian was right. We are each an Eve. – Rachel Held Evans
We are each an Eve, and as such I think it’s time for women to thrust the crushing weight of sexual purity back onto mankind saying, “Here. Take responsibility for your own damn purity, I refuse to be defined by it anymore.”
