"I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children. Your desire shall be contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you."-- God to Eve, Genesis 3:16. This familiar Biblical phrase testifies to the ease with which many men and women in traditional cultures validated the discrepancy of power between male and female. Genesis never says anything about the possibility of men ruling simply because they have more physical power, or even that they should rule because they're the ones who sally forth to defend home and family from dinos and dragons and the like. Eve allowed the serpent to beguile her, and Adam transgressed as well because of her, so Eve's female children must defer to their husbands while her male ones will labor to "till the soil." After that the question of male and female power is dropped to get into the Cain story in Genesis 4. We don't read about any particular "contrary desires" on the part of wives-- who function mostly to breed-- until Genesis 21:10. There Sarah more or less orders her husband Abraham to kick out the bondswoman Hagar and her son by Abraham, so that Sarah's child will occupy the catbird seat. So Sarah takes primacy as the first post-Eden female to master the Power of the Nag.
Of course, there will be various other conflicts of "contrary desires" in various parts of the Bible, and I think it a fair generalization to say that a lot of them come about because of the conflict between "men of violence" and "women of sex," for which the narrative of Samson and Delilah stands as an archetypal example. On occasion, as with the tale of Jael and Sisera, the woman is able to use sex to once more beguile the violent male into lowering his guard. So at long last, I'm making the claims that from these "contrary desires" are the source of "the blues" I see rising from the exigencies of sexual dimorphism.
Even for those with a strong religious belief, the dimorphism of the sexes must seem a very arbitrary decree by God, especially since said decree is not expressly recorded in the Bible. It's even more so from the POV of the evolutionist, who can only argue that in their archaic development into homo sapiens, women remained smaller and less able to defend themselves because (say) their function of raising children remained paramount. Either way, archaic or modern, the physical inequity remains a foundational fact of life. This leads to psychological inequities rooted in compensation, with the woman being a nag to the man and the man being a bully to the woman. And yet, the history of religions does indicate-- as I argued in the SACRED AND PROFANE VIOLENCE series-- that human beings have sometimes been able to invert the expected roles, imagining the archetypes I termed "the Barbarous Woman" and "the Compassionate Man." I don't have any solution to any of the grievances that arise from the embodied inequities of the two sexes. But I will repeat, just to be clear, that mere representation and opposition to the "status quo" functions more to exacerbate the suffering than to alleviate it.
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