What do fear of snakes and men’s fear of women have in common?
An annihilating creation story debasing women and snakes!
American Fears 1998-2001: Snakes Top the List
Women and the snake are blamed for man’s first sin—sex!
Men feel women have sexual power over them!
“If women wanted a vote, I agreed they had a right to vote, for I regarded the franchise in our Republic more as a right than a privilege;…What I secretly felt…was that, so long as the serpent continues to crawl on the ground, the primary influence of woman will remain indirect…”—Ellen Glasgow from The Woman Within, p. 187. [Bold type mine]
The Biggest Coverup in History:
Denying the importance of sexual pleasure.
The tree at the core of the Adam and Eve story in the Garden of Eden is the tree of knowledge—the knowledge of good and evil. Disobey God and bite the apple from the tree of knowledge, and good and evil become separate: sex for pleasure becomes evil, bad. Sex is only to bring forth children. Man and women have been cast out of the pleasure garden. Now we must cover up our genitals in shame and always be ashamed of our nakedness and our desire for sexual pleasure. Life on earth must be hard.
Only man and woman must hide everything to do with sexuality. Not animals. In fact, hiding our sexuality is supposed to separate us from animals in a good way, make us civilized.
Before the Fall in Eden, animals all got along, were peaceful. As soon as man has knowledge of good and evil, animals start warring with one another. God’s answer is to curse one and all for daring to disobey him. God casts down the snake, sexuality itself—now it must forever crawl on its belly on the ground; men will look down upon the snake and women’s sexuality as evilness itself.
“Is not the clutch of a reckless woman like the embrace of a snake?”
—Harun from The Golden Blade film (1953)
This idea of women’s sexual desire as a catalyst for unleashing destructive forces has been underscored many times in film. For example, in the 1958 film Forbidden Planet, Altaira, the only child and daughter of the mad scientist Dr. Morbius on the planet Altair IV, is pictured in a sci-fi Garden of Eden as Morbius and the commander from an Earth spaceship look on. The deer come to nuzzle Altaira’s hand. Then a tiger enters who becomes docile as a kitten when she pets him.
Not long after, the visiting commander chastises her for wearing a too-short and revealing dress (she says she has designed herself) because his women-starved men will find her beauty too tempting. She storms out, but the next day shows up in a long, white goddess-like gown. The commander approves. To make sure she is not shown as the seducer, she is now dressed as woman who must be the civilizing influence and control the lust of men. In a later scene, she kisses the visiting commander. Suddenly, looming from a tall rock, the tiger growls and lunges at them. The commander shoots and vaporizes the tiger, saying he’s sorry that he had to do it. The woman agrees, but can’t understand why her friend the tiger suddenly wanted to kill her.
These scenes underscore the undermining creation story that women and society have been told for centuries. Women must wear clothes not of their own design, but clothes that do not stir men to lust. In the film, Altaira is a good, civilizing influence on nature and animals until she expresses her sexuality, and her act unleashes the rage and destructive energy of the wild beast (the tiger) inside her. Similarly, after Eve disobeys God and bites the apple (presumably meaning she has sex with Adam), the lions and tigers start attacking other animals. Adam and Eve are thrown out of paradise, men will have to work very hard to survive, and women must deliver children in pain. After that, a woman’s job was to be a civilizing force on everyone—men, children, pets. A woman can never get angry, or she is called a shrew or a bitch. After the snake and Eve are cursed by a God, humans will now link all strong emotions with animals and consider these emotional qualities base:
Above: An allegorical image depicting the human heart subject to the seven deadly sins, each represented by an animal (clockwise: toad = avarice; snake = envy; lion = wrath; snail = sloth; pig = gluttony; goat = lust; peacock = pride)
Sexual pleasure is a healthy part of our our animal nature.
God casts down shame upon the women, the seductress. Women will be seen as weak, giving into temptation as well as being sexual temptation itself—little better than the snake. Men would be wise to fear her just as he does the snake. She must be punished, and now she must bring forth children in pain. God curses the man and lays upon him the curse of forever seeing work as a burden. This is not a what-color-is-your-parachute, follow-your-bliss world.
From now on, we as humans are to deny our animal natures of which sex is a part—to define the animal part of us as bad because it has possibility of destruction—of tearing us and each other apart. We must now separate good from evil —the evil animal from the good non sexual obeyer of God. Yet, good and evil are part of a continuum—opposite sides of the coin of what it is to be human—to have the possibilities of both good and evil inside of us.
Our animal nature also contains our essential drives—our passions, our zest for life, our inspiration, the uniting of our human nature with divine mystery.
“Desire is the theme of all life. It’s what makes a rose want to be a rose…”
— Charlie Chaplin, Limelight
One million species under threat of extinction because of humans, biodiversity report finds
“We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide.”
Many animals on the planet are endangered and becoming extinct because of our actions. Denying the diverse qualities of the animal inside us is a metaphor for denying importance of animal diversity on our planet and offering it our protection—just as denying importance of human diversity—every color, race, religion, sexual preference of humans—denies the riches diversity brings to Democracy and to understanding the complexities of truth. It is no coincidence that the Trump administration‘s policies have been the greatest assault on truth, diversity, and the environment that the U.S has seen.
Of course, Genesis and Garden of Eden story is not the only creation myth to blame and degrade women. Joseph Campbell says he knows of no other except for Pandora. Pandora’s curiosity led her to open a box and unleash all kinds of plagues and troubles on the world, which Campbell implies isn’t as condemning as the “original,” mother-of-all sins ascribed to Eve; however, he neglects to point out that in Greek mythology, Zeus first created women to punish Prometheus for loving men more than the gods.
Zeus creates Pandora the first woman —
a great evil to punish men.
According to Edith Hamilton in Mythology, “[Zeus] the Father of Men and of Gods was not one to put up with this treatment. He swore to be revenged on mankind first and then on mankind’s friend [Prometheus]. He made a great evil for men, a sweet and lovely thing to look upon, in the likeness of a shy maiden, and all the gods gave her gifts, silvery raiments and a broidered veil, a wonder to behold, and bright garlands of blooming flowers and a crown of gold—great beauty shown out from it. Because of what they gave her, they called her Pandora, which means ‘the gift of all.’ When this beautiful disaster had been made, Zeus brought her out and wonder took hold of gods and men when they beheld her. From her, the first woman, comes the race of women, who are evil to men with a nature to do evil”( 88).
So clearly the Greeks like the first Hebrews wanted to blame all the evil in the world on women; however, the Greeks at least in this creation story don’t denigrate animals and (by extension) our animal natures or human sexuality. This omission is significant and lays shame-of-body blame and negation of primal sexual pleasure more fully at the feet of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Pandora opening the box
Pandora means the gift of all.
Several things are clear in Hamilton’s retelling of this story: one is that a wonder took hold of men when they first looked upon the first woman. That is, men felt powerless when in the thrall of a beautiful woman. This powerlessness simultaneously awakened their fear and hate of her for holding them in her power. Second, that woman is a gift of all—for all. Men need to honor her and be thankful for the wonder she instills in them. What a sad, dismal planet our world would be without women—an endlessly year-after-year cloudy day!
The question is this: how do second-millennium men need to honor women? Surely not by considering them property and putting them back on the pedestals in their Victorian parlors! Men need to let women be themselves, need to truly share decision-making power with them, and need to more fully share the tasks of living and homemaking. Finally, men and women together need to actively root out the sexual double standard from their thoughts, speech, and actions.
(From movie Adam’s Rib directed by George Cukor; writers Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin)
Amanda: What do you think of a man who is unfaithful to his wife?
Grace: Not nice, but...
Amanda: All right, now what about a woman who is unfaithful to her husband?
Grace: Something terrible.
Amanda: Aha!
Grace: Aha what?
Amanda: Why the difference? Why the difference? Why 'not nice' if he does it and 'something terrible' if she does it?
Grace: I don't make the rules.
Amanda: Sure you do. We all do.
That we includes women who do more than their share of shaming other women for their sexual behavior:.
Example below is from a (2016-2019) TV series: A divorced mother is talking about her son’s girlfriend to her female friend:
These films I’ve mentioned are just a teeny few of those where the double standard is thriving on the screen. References to how much trouble women have been since Adam and Eve abound, and certainly the ones I’ve chosen are not the most egregious examples.Three of these films I saw on TCM in just a 48-hour period. In fact in the last century, it is hard to find a film where women are shown as equal to men in almost anything—sex included. Shaming of women for showing their sexual desire and not debasing men for theirs is alive and well in films and TV programs in the second millennium too. I chose these films primarily to show that the Adam and Eve story, the resulting double standard, and the whitewashing of women’s sexual animality is so common that these tropes become almost invisible if your not looking for them as I was. Or, we shrug and say, “I don’t make the rules. Some things will never change.” I’m glad Ghandi didn’t say that or Susan B. Anthony, or Mandela, or Martin Luther King, or Karen Silkwood, or Malcom X, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, or Betty Friedan, or Gloria Steinem, or John Lewis, or Elizabeth Warren.
