Is “Adam and Eve” About Victimhood Mentality?
Adam and Eve is the story of man’s fall from grace. God instructed the first man and woman not to eat anything from the giant tree in the middle of the Garden of Eden, but after a serpent appears and talks to Eve, she eats a fruit, then hands one to Adam. God punishes them.
The story of Adam and Eve is often portrayed in modern society as misogynistic, since it seems to blame women for man’s folly. It seems to suggest that women, represented by Eve, are sirens, seductresses who entice men to their downfall. It could also suggest that women are straight up stupid or gullible. It’s true: plenty of pastors and men use this as evidence that women are not to be trusted, let alone with important decisions.
But what about Eve’s responsibility in all this? Is she really a guileless victim of the serpent?
I’ve copy-pasted the relevant Bible verses below so you can read for yourself, but upon further inspection, I found that Eve might be the first example of the toxic feminine, someone who weaponizes her victimhood mentality.
First, the serpent never offered Eve anything
The serpent never touched the fruit. He never even told Eve explicitly to eat the fruit. He just alleviated her main reservation by challenging her assumption about why it was bad: he says God doesn’t want her to eat the fruit because it will open her eyes and make her as powerful as God. The Bible makes it clear that Eve chose to eat the fruit, albeit based on what the serpent said:
When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. — Genesis 3:6
She took the fruit because she wanted to be like God. This is an act of hubris. It’s often said that pride is the most deadly of the seven sins.
Did the serpent even say anything to Eve?
More importantly, no one saw the interaction between Eve and the serpent — not even God. When God arrives and sees Adam and Eve clothed in fig leaves, he interrogates them. Eve says, “the serpent deceived me, and I ate” (Genesis 3:13). God condemns the serpent based entirely on her summarial testimony.
God does not ask the serpent directly. Adam blames Eve but doesn’t ever mention the serpent.
Did Adam even witness any interaction between Eve and the serpent? Some argue that Adam’s inclination to blame Eve instead of the serpent highlights man’s folly in his inability to resist temptation and, moreover, his inability to accept accountability. How despicable of him to blame his partner when he was the one who chose to eat. Even this interpretation suggests we should hold Eve similarly accountable for her double folly of 1) not being able to resist temptation, and 2) for not being able to take accountability.
But more importantly, it begs the question: did Adam not even consider it an option to blame the serpent because Adam never saw the serpent saying anything to Eve?
Is Eve the origin of toxic femininity?
Toxic femininity, like toxic masculinity, is the toxic parts of femininity. Toxic femininity is when characteristics and traits that are neutral and even good are taken to an extreme and/or bastardized for selfish, harmful, and/or malignant purposes.
One aspect of toxic femininity is the victimhood mentality — which is different from genuine victimization. Anyone can be victimized — but not everyone chooses to stay in a victimhood mentality.
I define victimhood mentality as choosing to portray, to yourself as others, yourself as a victim without taking any action to try and improve your situation beyond ranting. All aspects of this definition are important. There are plenty of people who use their victimization as fuel to propel themselves to great heights, e.g. victims of bullying who go on to because movie stars or great athletes. They stay in that mentality of being an underdog, but because they actively work to better their situations, they’re not stuck in the victimhood mentality.
There are others who can’t physically move, but who still do what they can to survive. This can be found in quiet moments of rebellion, like Dr. Edith Eger. As a young Jewish girl in Auschwitz, Dr. Eger rebelled against the Nazi regime in her mind by imagining herself eating lavish dinners and dancing with her childhood love. Others, like women in abusive relationships, do what they can to get by with minimal interruption, but take quiet steps to leave their partners, or at least shepherd their children through childhood until they can leave their chaotic home environments for college.
There are others who don’t look like they’re rebelling but they are, namely Asian immigrant parents who put their heads down and work their fingers to the bone to give their kids a better life. You can argue whether or not you agree with their strategy to keep their heads down, you can complain they’re not doing enough to oppose and overthrow systems of oppression — or you can have some sympathy and recognize that that’s exactly what they’re doing: aiming to change the system from within, by playing it so well that they can climb a ladder that’s stacked against them. Even if you don’t agree with this approach, you can recognize and even respect it.
Victimhood mentality is sitting around and complaining. It’s refusing to take any accountability, refusing to empower yourself to improve your situation besides cloying for attention, or blaming others in your smug sense of false moral superiority. Victimhood mentality is one symptom of what Brene Brown says is empathy without boundaries, which is not empathy at all but emotional dumping, peacocking, or something else.
Just by virtue of being generally smaller, weaker, and kinder, women, on average, are susceptible to being victimized by men. Due to systemic and historic inequalities in access to education, careers, and legal resources, women are generally in lower positions of power, which also makes them more susceptible. Women suffer genuine victimization: the women who were assaulted by Harvey Weinstein, other women in the music industry who were assaulted as young rising stars (Duffie, Kesha, Lady Gaga), the U.S. gymnastics teams — and those are only the high profile cases.
But there is a subset of women who are not only stuck in victimhood mentality but weaponize it. Emmett Till’s teenage face was pulverized because a white woman claimed he flirted with her. Birdwatcher Christian Cooper had the police called on him because he dared to ask a white woman to keep her dog on a leash. A group of women assaulted a waitress at Carmine’s in New York City when she dared to ask them to show their vaccination cards as was the stated policy. Days later, these women claimed the waitress assaulted them first and called them the N-word, both of which were debunked by CCTV footage and interrogations of everyone else present at the scene, respectively.
I have no idea what happened between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp — no one does besides the two of them, despite hours of recorded testimony. But at least one of them is lying at least sometimes. It’s entirely possible that at least some of the allegations Amber Heard leveled against Johnny Depp are false, and that some of the “defensive actions” (taking the fruit) she took against his alleged abuse (serpent) were not justified at all because there was no abuse in the first place. Worse, some of her “defensive actions” could have provoked counteractions which subsequently look like abuse to outsiders who can’t tell cause from effect, before from after. All of this holds the other way, of course: maybe Johnny was the instigator.
But the point is no one knows except Eve herself. And we shouldn’t so easily accept her testimony.
The relevant Bible verses
Here is the tail end of Genesis 2 and the entirety of Genesis 3, so you can inspect it yourself:
8 Now the LORD God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed.
9 And the LORD God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground — trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
10 A river watering the garden flowed from Eden; from there it was separated into four headwaters.
11 The name of the first is the Pishon; it winds through the entire land of Havilah, where there is gold.
12 (The gold of that land is good; aromatic resin and onyx are also there.)
13 The name of the second river is the Gihon; it winds through the entire land of Cush.
14 The name of the third river is the Tigris; it runs along the east side of Asshur. And the fourth river is the Euphrates.
15 The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
16 And the LORD God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden;
17 but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die.”
18 The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”
19 Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found.
21 So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh.
22 Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.”
24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh.
25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, `You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden,
3 but God did say, `You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 "You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman.
5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden.
9 But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me — she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this, “Cursed are you above all the livestock and all the wild animals! You will crawl on your belly and you will eat dust all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; with pain you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, `You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.”
20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
22 And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.
24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
