Garth George: If it weren't for her, I could have had a life of leisure

Having knocked together the heavens and the earth, daylight and darkness, the sea and the land, the sun, moon and stars, the plants and the trees and the animals and birds and fish, God decided the world needed a higher being with whom he could have fellowship.

So he made us. It happened like this: "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth'.

"And God created man in his own image ... male and female he created them."

Now you couldn't get more equal than that. In order to make us in his image he had to create two human genders - a male and a female - fully equal in all respects but quite different, yet revealing, together, the full nature of their maker.

And so pleased was he with them that he housed them in a perfect garden in a perfect climate in which there was everything they could possibly need to live a perfect life.

But God - and I really think he should have known better - told them there was one tree in the garden from which they must not eat, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

"That's fine," said the man and the woman. But lurking in the background was Satan, disguised as a serpent, spiffily dressed and oozing plausibility.

"So God says you can't eat from any tree in the garden?" he says to the woman.

"Oh no," she says, "it's only the one in the middle we're not allowed to eat from, or even to touch. If we do we might die."

"Oh, come on," says the serpent, "there's no way you're going to die. In fact, God's pulling a fast one on you because he knows that if you do eat from it you'll be like him, knowing good from evil."

And he had her. It's the ultimate temptation, isn't it? You'll be like God. The woman fell for it then and men and women have been falling for it since, always wanting to have complete control over our lives and to live forever.

So she took some fruit from the forbidden tree and ate it - and talked her man into eating some, too. And it all turned to custard, so much so that instead of idly lounging about in a perfect environment in which everything is supplied, I'm sitting at a computer terminal writing this column because I need the money.

And as I look about me at all the equally paid women who slave away in the newsroom of the Herald - some 40 per cent of the editorial staff - I think to myself: "It serves you all right. If it hadn't been for your ancestral prototype, none of us would have to be working."

Because when he discovered what they had done, God became exceedingly grumpy.

He punished the serpent by decreeing that serpents would thenceforth crawl on their bellies and be loathed and despised by mankind, so he slithered away to colonise Australia.

The woman he punished by decreeing that she would suffer great pain in childbirth yet would still desire her husband. "And," said God, "he [the husband] shall rule over you."

That's where the trouble really started and it's not finished yet, because it if were, this newspaper wouldn't be devoting square metres of space to the well-worn - nay threadbare - subject of how confused and hard done by so many women seem to be these days.

God's punishment on the man was the severest of all and that, too, set a precedent - in any differences of opinion between the sexes, men are always to blame, even when they aren't.

The man and the women were thrown out of the Garden of Eden and he was told that he would have to fight the weeds and the thistles to scrape a living out of the soil so that "by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread". And we men are still damn well doing that.

But the worst of it is that the man seriously misinterpreted God's words to the woman that he should rule over her. From that time on, women became chattels of men, a sad and sick state of oppression that survived through thousands of years of Judaeo-Christian history until, in human terms, just the other day.

I have no doubt that God is delighted and relieved that women, at least in the Western world, have begun to emancipate themselves from the bondage to which they were condemned by millenniums of male ignorance and arrogance.

Some real progress has been made, but there's a long way to go. It would pay a lot of people - men and women alike - to acknowledge that thousands of years of misunderstandings will take a very long time to put right.

Meanwhile, women remain what they have always been - the wondrous, mysterious epitome of God's creation.

* garth_george@nzherald.co.nz

Read the rest of this series:
nzherald.co.nz/nzwomen