THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510110074
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K1 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: HE SAID, SHE SAID
SOURCE: KERRY DOUGHERTY & DAVE ADDIS
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines
KERRY SAYS:
We were driving home from church last Sunday when I asked my daughter what she'd learned in Sunday School.
``We learned about punishment,'' replied my almost 7-year-old.
Oh?
``We were talking about Adam and Eve.''
Then the moment I'd been waiting for.
``Mama,'' she asked. ``Why do they always blame women for everything?''
Yeeessss. Out of the mouths of babes, and all that.
I tried to contain my delight. But I eagerly pointed out that, yes, indeed, if Adam had had any spine he certainly could have said ``no, thank you'' when Eve offered him the apple. But noooo, Adam chowed down and then blamed Eve when things went to hell in a handbasket.
Typical.
And it got me thinking, Dave. If in her short time on planet Earth my daughter has figured out that women get blamed for all sorts of things that aren't their fault, maybe there's something to it.
And she doesn't even yet realize that if her brother turns out to be gay I get blamed.
I admit I may have planted the seeds several months earlier when I was reading Hansel and Gretel to my children. Remember that one?
The down-on-his-luck woodcutter and his wife are in living in dire poverty. The stepmother has a brilliant solution - get rid of the kids. So the spineless woodcutter agrees and they take the children into the woods and lose them.
Terrible things happen to the siblings but eventually they find their way back and - joy of joys - the stepmother is gone. The children are happily reunited with their beloved father and they live happily ever after.
Give me a break.
What's with this creep anyway? He lets his wife talk him into leaving the kids for the wolves, then all is hunky dory when the kiddies come home?
I'd prefer a Menendez-style ending to this little tale.
Storytellers from Old Testament scribes to Shakespeare have blamed women for all sort sorts of things. There's poor Eve, of course, and Delilah (that business about the haircut never rang true to me), Lady Macbeth and Helen of Troy. What do you say about Pandora? I'd even toss Marla Maples in this group. The Donald could have stayed home.
Then there's poor Hillary Clinton. The woman the right-wingers love to hate. The lunatic fringe blames her for everything from Whitewater to bad weather.
Even Janet Reno is getting blamed for things she never did. She's catching heat for the Ruby Ridge massacre, which occurred while she was still living with her mother in Florida.
The blame game is ugly any way it's played. But on behalf of me and my daughter, I wish you guys would give women a break.
DAVE SAYS:
I don't know what they're teaching in Sunday School these days, Kerry, but the way I heard it God kicked both Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden.
I thought it was pretty harsh punishment for nibbling on an apple. I think I was about 23 years old before I figured out the metaphor.
Let's try to keep those neuroses in check, my friend. For every fairy tale you can find where the woman is a beast, I can name three more where a man is the source of all evil. And Mary Shelley created the nightmare poster-boy for all time when she dreamed up Frankenstein's monster.
As for Hillary Clinton, well, what's your point? Is the world supposed to go light on her because she's a girl? That can't be what you mean, Kerry. She jumped into that pond on her own, and so far she's proved she can tread water.
But your daughter raises an interesting point. Each of us is sensitive to how people of our type - whatever type that may be - are portrayed to the world at large.
I'll grant you there have been unfair portrayals of women, but I think that worm has turned. Look through the comics of our own newspaper and see how men and women are pictured. The man is usually some bumbling doofus who can't match his own socks, while the woman is bright, practical and universally competent. See Blondie, or the Fox Trot family, if you doubt that.
It's worse on television, where there seem to be two male role models in sitcoms and advertising: The guy is either a hopeless dweeb, or a beer-swilling Barcolounger baboon whose interest in life is marked by NFL football at one end of the pendulum and a bottomless bowl of Cool-Ranch Doritos at the other.
None of this is reality, Kerry, and we both know it. But your daughter, young as she is, might not. So teach her to latch on to the best role models she can find and turn blinders to the rest of it.
If you let her grow up believing that she's been born into a gender that gets ``blamed for everything,'' you'll just raise another little foot soldier for the cult of victimization.
We need to end that skid, Kerry, and there's no better place to start than with your little girl. by CNB