Maybe our desire to blame women for everything that goes wrong goes all the way back to the beginning. To Genesis, 3:12, when God got mad at Adam for having eaten the fruit from the tree of knowledge. What did Adam do? As the old feminist saying goes: “The first chance he got, Adam blamed a woman.”
“And the man said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”
It wasn’t me, God, it was her.
(But in fairness, the story does say that Eve was in fact involved. The serpent seduced her into trying the fruit, and then she passed the fruit on to Adam. What seems much less fair, however, is that Eve – and all women after her – should, according to the Bible, be punished for Eve’s misdeeds by having to face painful childbirth.)
The USA is not a woman. Unfortunately, blaming women for bad things did not end with the expulsion from the Garden. In 1970 the Canadian rock group The Guess Who released a song called “American Woman” that quickly went to number 1 on the music charts. Its lyrics read, in part:
“American woman, stay away from me/American woman, mama let me be… Don’t come hanging around my door/I don’t want to see your face no more/I don’t need your war machines/I don’t need your ghetto scenes.”
(For those who don’t know the song, it can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8z1EzDouNs&feature=fvwrel)
It is of course utterly misguided and terribly unfair to hold the American woman – who, after all, only won the right to vote in 1919, and who remains grossly underrepresented when it comes to exercising any real political power in the United States – responsible for America’s “war machine” or “ghetto scenes.”
It is still men who by-and-large run the political, economic, and military life of the United States. And yet it is America-as-woman who gets the criticism.
Not chauvinist? When interviewed about this song much later, band member Jim Kale said: “The popular misconception was that it was a chauvinistic tune, which was anything but the case. The fact was, we came from a very strait-laced, conservative, laid-back country, and all of a sudden, there we were in Chicago, Detroit, New York -- all these horrendously large places with their big city problems. After that one particularly grinding tour, it was just a real treat to go home and see the girls we had grown up with. Also, the war was going on, and that was terribly unpopular.”
His words imply that the band was freaked out by U.S. scenes of big city poverty and by the Vietnam War. And that they couldn’t wait to get back to the more innocent “girls” of their home country. To me his scattershot argument sounds a lot like a bunch of afterthoughts that simultaneously say too much while explaining nothing.
Automatic misogyny. Despite Kale’s subsequent defense of the song, his description of its genesis suggests that it was actually just an exercise in thoughtless misogyny: "It started as a jam… We were playing a two-set situation, and for one reason or another we were late getting back onstage for the second set. In order to dispel the ominous air that was hanging over the place – as we raced on the stage, one by one we picked up on just this simple rhythm. Cummings came up, ad-libbed some lyrics, and it worked. We recorded it just like that. It was an accident -- completely spontaneous.”
His interview can be found here: http://www.superseventies.com/1970_2singles.html
So it turns out that the song was actually not planned at all. It was a spontaneous riff… on America as a troubled place. As a woman. As a troublesome woman. The notion that bad = woman just flowed right out of the lead singer’s mind in a stream of consciousness. It was automatic. He did not even have to think about it. And that’s just what happens in a culture where disparaging women comes so easily that we do not even have to think about it.
It goes on and on and on. But isn’t this all just ancient history? The Guess Who wrote that song over forty years ago! Haven’t we moved beyond this? Unfortunately, no. In 1999, the singer Lenny Kravitz re-recorded the song “American Woman” and won the Grammy for best male rock performance. (Sigh.)
And the totally unwarranted use of woman as a metaphor for bad things continues even today. In the June 2011 issue of Vanity Fair magazine, journalist Sebastian Junger memorialized his close friend, war photographer Tim Hetherington, who was recently killed by shrapnel while covering the rebellion in Misrata, Libya. I am sorry that this talented photographer was killed in the prime of his career. And I am sorry that Sebastian Junger lost a friend. I just wish that Junger hadn’t used the image of a woman in order to describe the chances that he and his fellow male war correspondent chose to take in these danger zones – these battle grounds, which, like nearly all others since time immemorial, were created and perpetuated by men.
“You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right?” Junger writes to his friend. “The one who made us feel the most special, the most alive? We were always trying to have one more dance with her without paying the price… We were terrified and we were in love, and in the end, you were the one she chose.”
War = woman. Danger = woman. Death = woman.
It all sounds so familiar…
“And the man said, ‘The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat.’”
Isn’t it time we stopped blaming women for the world’s ills?