In the Beginning…

Curse: an utterance intended to invoke a supernatural power to inflict harm, punishment, and misery; doom - death, destruction, terrible fate

Desire: to strongly wish for or want to have something

Need: something that is required because it is essential or very important; necessary

I took this class once in my first year of college called "Philosophy of the Person.” In it, the argument was observed that the only thing that makes human beings unique from all other animals in the animal kingdom is our ability to tell stories and, specifically, lies. I don’t mean “communicate” or “think” or “plan ahead” or even “trick." We are the only creatures predisposed toward fiction.

I’d like to read you a page from my diary:

September 27, 2017 6:09a

Eve was made for Adam because HE was incomplete. Not the other way around. God saw Adam roaming about the garden, bashing into things, struggling to get his life together and decided he probably shouldn’t be left alone for too long. God looked at Adam and said “that boy needs some help.” And so Eve came along.

Woman.

Man 2.0.

The softer, thoughtful, perfected version of man made from the raw materials of the first model but then anointed with and assigned more than the 1.0 could handle on his own. Remember: no one was created for or after Eve.

Women do not need men. Men need women. And it’s because we don’t need them that men had to get strategic about impugning our more sophisticated, refined power in order that they may maintain relevance and position in our lives and in the world. (If you know ANYTHING about scripture, then you know that Genesis 3:16 says that God had to curse us - women - to desire men after that “wrong” done in the garden: The eating of the fruit/the questioning of God/the tempting of man toward his own poor choices. “You will desire your husband.” Which, for me, always begged the question of ‘Why is it a curse to desire a man?’ if we were made for him? You see, desire is not need. It is want. An emotional sensation we fixate on so intensely that it often ends up controlling us but is one we can control and regulate if we chose to use a bit of our lives to learn how.) Which would explain why the male ego is so fragile: Because it is built on lies.

The lie of “firstness.” And of superiority. The lie of territory and “this is mine.”

And so our intended purpose of HELP and SERVICE to one another was MANipulated into SERVITUDE of one to the other. Servitude being something one is whipped or forced into at first until it is adopted as duty or choice as a means of survival. (Stockholm Syndrome.) The result is the false-choice women have historically made to serve men with our bodies. And our looks. And the work of our hands. We teach ourselves to minimize and self regulate our intellect and wit, our funniness and ambition, and yield our emotional and sexual needs to accommodate his presumed capacity as to not offend or overwhelm a man lest our chances of being chosen by one compromised. With time this choice became habit and that habit is now expectation. And it’s this strange curse of desire and the manipulation of it that put women in direct competition with one another (competition being a "natural male attribute") when our natural instinct as women (again, the perfected version of men) is toward collaboration and compassion.

And so what we have is a pathology of a society that blames women for male weakness and then punished us with servitude to it.

But everything is built on lies. Lies of maleness versus femaleness. Blackness versus whiteness versus otherness. The lie of superiority versus inferiority. The lie of normal versus not. The lie of territory and ownership. And the confusion of desire versus need. Which is why humanity perpetually gets it wrong and remains in strife.

These lies we have been born into believing keep cloaked to the truth and salvation. The truth IS salvation (which answers my ever present question of what Jesus came to “save us” from in the first place. He came to deliver us from the lies from which we’d all been living: A misinterpretation of the patriarchy.)