Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
The Real Oldest Profession
The world’s oldest profession is giving bad advice to women. The serpent in the Garden of Eden invented it and found an easy mark in our First Mama, Eve. Being a biblical scholar and expert on myth and culture, I suspect it went something like this:
Serpent: Look at you collecting all those wonderful herbs and berries. Does Adam appreciate all you do for him?
Eve: Of course he does. He says I am the best part of all creation.
Serpent: But he is off all day naming animals, plants and even stars, obsessively getting to know things. He spent most of yesterday afternoon walking with God and watching bees. Bees! Seriously, shouldn’t he be spending that time with you?
Eve: Learning and affirming all of nature is his job, silly.
Serpent: But why not learn it all in one fell swoop. Isn’t that what the fruit of that one tree is for?
Eve: We are forbidden. It would be wrong and selfish to try to gain such power.
Serpent: But you would not be doing it for yourself but for Adam. You are the least selfish creature in the whole garden.
Eve: Oh, Stop it. You’re embarrassing me.
Serpent: You know Adam is obviously too hung up on his big-deal mission to properly think about you or what is best for both of you. Maybe you need to be the one to do it for the both of you. What could be more loving, especially if done by someone like you who never wants anything for herself and only thinks of him and of the power you both deserve? Together, of course.
Cue the angelic flaming sword SWAT team to stand by because that apple is coming down…
Why do young women accept the sheer barbarism of hook-up culture? Or the post-Roe world where a baby is just her body/her problem rather than a miraculous moral and personal connection to a father, families, and community? Our sexual mores and culture seem as if they were imposed for the convenience of Harvey Weinstein, Bills Clinton and Cosby, and lounge lizards everywhere.
And the scope of American female suckerhood is widening. Boys who “identify” as girls are winning track meets while feminists still don’t seem to get that the identity politics they promoted eventually comes for us all. Victimhood celebrations in the wake of #MeToo also mean that male CEOs will have nothing to do with, much less mentor young women for fear of accusations. The decision by women to privilege the rantings of male-hating harridans in academia and literature poisons possibilities of intimacy, commitment, and sanity.
Women also appear to be more suspectable to the political rhetoric of fear and protection. Political operatives study and scheme about whether “soccer moms” can be made more afraid of terrorism, economic collapse, crime, or catastrophic climate change but the choice to deploy a fear/protection pitch is the constant. Young single women, trained to be terrified of commitment, trained to crave ‘safe spaces’ and feeling pressured to delay reproduction indefinitely out of fear of financial stress over and above tuition load debt are being groomed for fear/protection politics for life.
We have dystopian anti-communities in the inner cities largely because the federal government aggressively and successfully sought to outbid poor working men for possession of women and children. Upscale white women now increasingly vote for the same deal: guarantees of income and health care, guarantees of job security, and assistance of all kinds in lieu of the more uncertain adventure of building a life and family with a man.
The fruit on that tree now claims to be security, safety, job satisfaction, and the promise of uninterrupted material well-being. An awful lot of women don’t seem to have learned much since that first bogus sales pitch that got us all into the current mess. Thank God, for the spectacular exceptions to that tendency and if there was ever a time for them to rise to the forefront, it’s now.
Published in General
Good stuff! People are still asking themselves (or is someone asking them?), “Did God really say…?”
Then things are twisted into whatever one wants them to be.
This is an amazing and thought-provoking observation. I have never seen it put this way before.
Would love to take credit but I recall lots of people more or less putting it this way in debates about the Moynihan Report decades ago.
<oops wrong thread>
The natural desire to be safe and secure is a given. In most eras and places, it was obvious that tyrants generally cannot be trusted to deliver safety and security. The expansion of technology, the desensitization to bureaucratic overreach, and the language games about caring and compassion now make the surrender of liberty much more seductive.
Good Sir, this comment was mistakenly posted here; it was intended for the fear thread.
It was very considerate of you to respond!
Um…, I’d like to hear what the women of Ricochet have to say about this.
As would I.
I was going to say something, but a few days ago I decided that people need a place to say silly things sometimes. I do too. :-)
The one generalization I find to be very accurate is that guys have a much better sense of humor than women do. I was looking at my Facebook Cape Cod Gardeners news feed where the subject the past two weeks is the burgeoning bunny population, and amidst all the hand-wringing and pictures of plants eaten to the ground, one guy wrote, “I name them now: Stew, Soup, and Fricassee.” :-)
Many of the women of my acquaintance have picant wit, deployed mostly with intimates and female friends. my impression is that women do not feel the same compunction to try to make men laugh the way men often feel compelled to make women laugh which is the basis for the unfounded belief that women have an inferior sense of humor.
:-)
It’s much like peacock feathers – have to have a way to show off. If you don’t have looks, money, or good breeding but can make her laugh, you’ve still got a shot.
Not much of one, but hey, that’s where you have to scale up your efforts. It’s all a percentages game.
And they said my time spent watching 3 Stooges, Monty Python, Looney Tunes, and Beavis and Butthead would be wasted. Hah! Women LOVE just that kind of humor.
I like movies where tall runway model beauties fall for short nebbishy guys who are funny. It is my favorite category of SciFi.
Humor can be a form of self-deprecation without trashing your own status, and a way to reduce tension without being touchy-feely. When I talk with my guy friends about problems, they mostly express sympathy and then either offer to help or try to use humor to lighten the situation.
Also, when my dad was disappointed in me, he would reach for his wit, rather than his belt. Puns and other dad jokes are the safety guard over a serrated diamond cutting sense of sarcasm, honed over decades of investigations.
That they were forbidden to eat; in Eve’s conversation with the Serpent she asserts that they were also forbidden to touch.
One Midrash has it that the Serpent then shoved her so that she fell against the tree—and didn’t die. So her subsequent actions were because she’d rather be mortal than admit to having done wrong.
I love titles that contain “the oldest profession”
Isn’t the oldest profession slave trader?
Objectively speaking, the story of the fruit of the tree of knowledge is one of the most immoral and evil stories in the Bible. Imagine a people who really believed and wrote a story to convince people that obtaining knowledge is bad. But after multiple eons of being taught this, people no longer question it. We are a curious species. It must be so easy to control people once you convince them that the pursuit of knowledge is wrong. Fortunately, no one thinks that applies to their pursuit of knowledge, just someone else’s.
Old Bathos,
This is a fantastic post !
There is something valid in that the need-for-protection accusation against liberal women, for all their claims of wanting equality. I don’t think many want the equality of risk and failure. They want to pay their dues in college or other training for a GUARANTEED outcome, and they don’t mind higher taxes and more regulation if it yields that result. It can be a virtue to care about the underdog/oppressed/underprivileged….but it in liberalism, it turns into the notion that anything less than equal outcomes is “unfair,” as if life could be reduced to an elementary school recess game. Socialism definitely feeds on and encourages this. The curious thing is that only inside that mindset do some women seem to become shrill harpies. There are a few who are just mean to get what they want, but I think the ranks are much larger who need to be lured into a “cause,” or sort of a convoluted caretaking instinct. I’m not fond of liberal men, but liberal women always seem a little more grating.
Liberal women don’t only want to reach the equalization/safety goals of socialism; they want BELONGING all the way along during the ride there. Liberal men seem to accept that ideas are a battlefield but liberal women seem to be behind most of the aghast pearl-cluching over words, need for safe spaces lest their tender ears hear an alternative thought, etc. Or maybe I’m exaggerating. Thoughts?
What’s to say? Old Bathos speaks the truth. Women want security. It’s right there in Genesis in Woman’s punishment for sin: “I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children. Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.”
Now why would woman desire her husband when the, ahem, fruit of their union is pain? Severe pain. This speaks to female nature both in her procreative role and her vulnerability. Women need men and what they need from them is to be cherished and protected.
For men, “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life” clues us that male nature is deeply caught up with men’s work. And men want from their wives to be respected and honored for their toil.
These punishments have been devastating to men and women in our secularized, “feminized” culture. Women have been marrying themselves off to government (who’s your sugar daddy?) and men have been so disrespected as to fall into despair and never leave their parents’ basements. It’s all of a piece with our Stupid (foolish) Age.
Actually, not being a biblical scholar or expert on the Garden of Eden saga, but being familiar with William Bolcom’s “Garden of Eden Suite,” I suspect that before he successfully tempted Eve with the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, he unsuccessfully attempted to whoo Eve into giving him a kiss. That attempt is portrayed in “The Serpent’s Kiss,” a rag fantasy composed by William Bolcom in 1969.*
(*There are more recent recordings, but I only just today discovered this recording by the composer in 1972.)
I think the post has it correctly. First giving bad advice, then seagoing warrior, then once you have depleted stocks of available men, you get prostitution. But you have to build up stocks of defeated men and women from losing nations, so you can have people who can be bought and sold into slavery. But! Before you can have a slave trade of humans who are expensive and messy to travel with, you have to develop trade routes, those are plied by merchant traders on trade routes that developed after having been pacified (or not) by the seagoing warriors. So even though the institution of slavery is very old, as a profession or trade, a few other professions would have come about first.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I think slave would be an older profession than slave trader, by a long shot.
The oldest profession is gardener.
That’s real Truth versus my truth and your truth.
At the same time forcing the men out of the job market.
My thought is that women are almost always more hardwired than men are for effectively using the pearl-clutching method to silence dissent.
I would say they want ease. Unencumbered ease. Safety and affluence and nice things and plenty to eat. Physical pleasure on demand. Without responsibility. Even respect, all come second. Maybe after ease, which I would identify as power over their own life and their own environment, people want power over others. Ease. Power. Then stuff.
You mean like Christy Brinkley and Billy Joel. “For pete’s sake, sing!”
I didn’t really think it taught someone not to try to gain knowledge, especially now that the cat was out of the bag so to speak, but that by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil humankind fell out of grace.
So, kind of the difference from me (preferred pronoun beefcake) between being friends with the pretty girl in 2nd grade, and wanting to be ‘friends’ with her again in the 10th grade. Two different mental states.
But I’m a very lapsed Christian who has realized recently that I don’t think I’ve read the complete Bible all the way through even once in my life, so all of the above could be horribly wrong.