The Politics of Misogyny is About Real People

Twenty-five years ago I met a woman, who changed my life and my ministry. I was leading a training on How to be a Real Friend or Visitor for People in Crisis. The training was originally for church deacons, who visit church members and others in crisis, but we decided to open it up to anyone on Wrangell, who wanted some training or coaching for helping people they knew.

For some reason I decided the opening devotion for the first training would be from Genesis 2:4b-25, which includes the passage where God takes the rib from the first human and creates the woman. I knew that at least one of our deacons had been victimized by sexual abuse, so I worked my way through the Hebrew version to translate the passage very carefully. In Hebrew, atham (we usually pronounce it adam) simply means the human creature. So that is how I translated that passage. The first time that terms for male or female occur is after God has changed the human creature into a male and female. At that point the man finally says, “This, at last, is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, and she shall be called woman, for she was taken out of man.” Throughout the rest of the scripture reading, every time the Hebrew said atham, I translated it as the human creature. For example, verse 18 read:

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the human creature should be alone; I will make a helper as the human’s partner.”

At the end of that day’s training a young woman I hardly knew approached me. Her face had numerous piercings which, in the 1990s, was a much bigger statement of rebellion than today. Frankly, by her reputation I was surprised she came to an event held in a church. 

She waited until everyone else had left before approaching me. Then, with tears suddenly running down her face she asked me where she could find the translation of the Bible that the devotion had come from. This was the first translation she had ever seen, where women were shown as being created with equal validity as men as “creatures created in the image of God (Genesis 1:27).” Then she told me this:

Every other man in my life has sexually abused me: my father, my brother, and even a teacher. I have been so mad at God that this happened to me. I need a God who believes women like me are as important as men.

As we talked about her experiences, I also ended up in tears. We cannot witness the wounding of others without feeling pain ourselves. If we have any compassion in our hearts, we must take seriously the need for healing that so many, many women have.

But situations like this also raise the question of how to improve the lot of women (and men) throughout our society. Although we have made important strides in improving women’s legal rights in this country, online pornography, sexual harassment, sexual assault, sex trafficking and even incest, are huge issues in Alaska and across America. I am therefore not a bit surprised that misogyny is such a huge issue when it comes up regarding our presidential candidates. 

But a paragraph like the previous one doesn’t begin to get at what I’m talking about. It is when you get to know real people, the women who have been victimized by such events that the importance of such issues become so apparent. The ripples of woundedness spread wide in from each event, affecting the victims, the perpetrators—but also all of their relationships.

If we have our eyes open, it turns out the victims and the perpetrators are our friends, neighbors and family members. We need leadership that knows full well that these attitudes and actions have consequences. We need leaders, who intend to lead for an improved society for women which, by the way, will turn out to be an improved society for men, too.