But then, of course, life happened . . .
Dan’s Journal
October 9, 2010
It’s like I have a trump card. I don’t know how I feel about it. For the last decade our relationship has been built on mutual understanding. If disagreements come up, we work through the issues on a level playing field. I’ve always felt respected by Rachel, so I’ve never felt the need to have a final, conversation-stopping, decision-making catchphrase. In many ways, our relationship is continuing as usual . . . but just knowing that I have in my possession a “you’dhave-to-if-I-said-so” trump card makes things seem a little out of balance. It’s kinda like having a hidden weapon in my possession that only Rachel and I know about. It may not change how other people view me, but I still know it’s there. Not sure how I feel about that. I can see why a person would feel powerful having it, but I’m not sure that makes it OK. I don’t generally walk around with hidden weapons in real life; I just don’t feel that insecure.
As wives, our life’s work should be to perfect how we may please our husbands.8
—DEBI PEARL, CREATED TO BE HIS HELP MEET
In the second Creation account of Genesis, after God formed man from the dust of the earth and placed him in the garden of Eden, God says, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him” (2:18). The phrase “helper suitable,” rendered “help meet” in the King James Version, comes from a combination of the words ezer and kenegdo.
Ezer appears twenty-one times in the Old Testament—twice in reference to Eve, three times in reference to nations to whom Israel appealed for military support, and sixteen times in reference to God as the helper of Israel. It means “to help,” connotes both benevolence and strength, and is a popular name for Jewish boys both in the Bible and in modern times.
Kenegdo literally means “as in front of him,” suggesting that the ezer of Genesis 2 is Adam’s perfect match, the yin to his yang, the water to his fire, the Brad to his Angelina—you get the idea.
Unfortunately, all the color of its original meaning is lost in most translations of ezer kenegdo. After the King James Version rendered the two words “help meet,” poet John Dryden came along and hyphenated them, describing his wife as his tireless “help-meet.” Over time, the expression bled into “helpmeet,” an independent term applied exclusively to the role of wives to their husbands, and to this day, the myth that Genesis 2 relegates wives to the status of subordinate assistants persists . . . as is painfully evidenced by Debi Pearl’s Created to Be His Help Meet, a book that has sold more than 200,000 copies since its publication in 2004.
“God made us women to be help meets,” says Pearl, “and it is in our physical nature to be so. It is our spiritual calling and God’s perfect will for us . . . God didn’t create Adam and Eve at the same time and then tell them to work out some compromise on how they would each achieve their personal goals in a cooperative endeavor. . . . God gave [Eve] to Adam to be his helper, not his partner.” To serve as a helpmeet, she tells women, “is how God created you and it is your purpose for existing. You were created to make [your husband] complete, not to seek personal fulfillment parallel to him.”9
Sprinkled with old-timey illustrations of Victorian women reading, picking flowers, carrying bread baskets, and tending to children, the book reads like an intimate advice column on everything from housekeeping to child care to sex from a fundamentalist perspective. It includes several Q&A-style sections in which Pearl addresses specific domestic scenarios. At one point, she encourages a young mother whose husband routinely beat her and threatened to kill her with a kitchen knife to stop “blabbing about his sins” and win him back by showing him more respect.10 I threw my copy across the living room a total of seven times.
According to Pearl, “God set up a chain of command” that places women under the direct authority of their husbands. “You are not on the board of directors with an equal vote,” she says. “You have no authority to set the agenda. . . . Start thinking and acting as though your husband is the head of the company and you are his secretary.”11
I’d been exploring biblical womanhood for nine months now, incorporating into the project the religious practices of a diversity of women, from the Amish to Orthodox Jews to contemplative nuns, even when those practices didn’t particularly suit my interpretation of the text. So against every good instinct in my body, I decided to try submission Debi’s way.
The first thing I did was make a flowchart as per Pearl’s “chain of command.” I found a photo of God from Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam and printed it at the top of a piece of paper, with an arrow pointing down to a picture of Dan, followed by an arrow pointing down to a picture of me. I stuck the flowchart on the refrigerator, ensuring that the few friends we had managed to retain to this point in the project would be frightened off for good.
Next I wrote up a job description for the executive assistant to Dan Evans:
The Executive Assistant to Dan Evans will serve as his helpmeet in all areas of life, assisting him in both home and business endeavors at his discretion.
Responsibilities include:
• running errands
• completing paperwork
• making meals
• doing chores
• assisting in home maintenance
• providing a supportive atmosphere in the home
• assisting as directed with Dan Evans’s business endeavors (Wylio, Chapter 2 Studios)
• providing food and support to business partners during meetings
In addition, the Executive Assistant to Dan Evans will yield to his preferences and wishes in all areas of life, including but not limited to:
• social events
• daily schedule
• entertainment
• errands
• household maintenance
• menus
• sex
• dress
• family decisions
To ensure that the Executive Assistant to Dan Evans meets or exceeds his expectations, the Executive Assistant will submit to him a daily schedule and will be subject to a once-weekly performance review.
I drafted a performance review template, which, along with a job description, Dan stubbornly refused to sign, saying the whole thing had gotten a little too “weird” for him. (Great. I’d spent all afternoon working on this and suddenly—after we’d babysat a computer, subsisted on matzah, observed three-thousand-year-old menstrual restrictions, and feasted with the Amish—Dan thought things had gotten a little too “weird.”)
“But I could definitely use some help writing copy for the Wylio site if you want to do that,” he offered, seeing a cloud of dejection spread across his poor help meet’s face.
Wylio.com is Dan’s web start-up. I like to take some credit for its existence because it was my whining about what a pain in the butt it is to incorporate creative commons photos into a blog that inspired Dan and his programming friends James and Matt to create a Web site in which you can find, resize, attribute, and embed free, creative commons licensed photos into your blog in just a few steps. Wylio had been featured on TechCrunch.com back in November, generating thousands of users, but the guys were about to launch a new version to spawn some revenue, and they needed to update the site.
I was a copy editor in a previous life, so taking a red pen to the first drafts of the new web copy proved therapeutic for me and helpful for Dan. Of course, I would have helped him with this task anyway—it had always been Dan’s job to keep our businesses in sync with the IRS and my job to keep them in sync with subject-verb agreement.
I felt like I needed to do more to make this month of submission stand out from the others. Debi Pearl provided just such an opportunity with her checklist for “How to Be a Good Wife Today” in Created To Be His Help Meet.11
The list, which she claims came from a 1950s home economics textbook, includes a list of do’s and don’ts befitting the stereotypica
l 1950s housewife.12 Pearl praises the list as “more Biblical in perspective than what the churches teach today,” so just before Dan came home from his part-time job tech job, I set about preparing for his arrival like a “good wife” should.
“Prepare yourself,” the instructions said. “Take 15 minutes to rest so that you’ll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your makeup, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people. Be a little gay and a little more interesting.”13
I went to the bathroom to wash my face and put on some makeup. Then I slipped into a brown pencil skirt, white blouse, and canvas pumps, before wasting a full thirty minutes in front of the bathroom mirror in a vain attempt to wrestle my forest of hair into a pretty floral headband I’d picked up at J. C. Penney’s back when I was feeling a bit more optimistic about growing out my hair, as per the apostle Paul’s instructions. It was a quarter to five when I finally gave up and pulled it all back into a lopsided ponytail. If there was a ribbon in the house, I didn’t have time to find it.
“Clear away the clutter,” the instructions continued. “Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives, gathering up school books, toys, papers, etc. Then, run a dust cloth over the tables. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift, too.”14
I took “run a dust cloth” rather literally in this case and did a slap-bang dusting job in the living and dining rooms, after which I shoved all the clutter in the house into the guest room down the hall and closed the door.
Haven of rest and order? Check.
“Have dinner ready,” said the list. “Most men are hungry when they come home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.”15
Martha Stewart’s chicken piccata was on the menu that night, so I pulled my frilly, blue and brown polka-dot apron over my blouse and skirt, broke out four chicken cutlets, and dredged them in a mixture of four, salt, and pepper. I heated some oil and butter and threw the cutlets into the skillet until they cooked through, then set them aside in the oven to stay warm. By the time I’d deglazed the pan with some cooking sherry, sending a greasy plume of steam into the air, I could hear the garage door opening.
Of course he had to come home early today.
“Minimize the noise,” the instructions said. “At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of washer, dryer, dishwasher or vacuum. Try to encourage the children to be quiet. Be happy to see him. Greet him with a warm smile.”16
I could hear Dan’s heavy footsteps ascending the stairs as I rushed to whip up a sauce of lemon juice, capers, butter, and parsley. In my hurry, I dropped the wooden spoon, sending sticky brown sauce all over the counters, floor, and my white blouse. Dan was nearly through the kitchen doorway when I swallowed down an expletive, pulled off my apron, conjured up a sweet smile, and shouted over the still-sizzling skillet, “Welcome home, sweetie! I’m so glad you’re here!”
Dan walked in and looked around. “Is everything okay?”
“Don’t greet him with problems or complaints,” said the Good Wife instructions. “Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or suggest he lie down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.”17
“Why don’t you go sit down in the living room and put up your feet?” I offered, with the perky intonations of a Stepford Wife.
Dan went back into the living room and sank somewhat hesitantly into the La-Z-Boy.
“Can I get you some cold water?” I asked.
“Um, okay. You sure everything’s all right?”
“Yes . . . It’s for the project,” I said.
Enough said.
I dashed back to the kitchen to survey the damage induced by my frenzied completion of the chicken piccata. The spoon still lay haplessly in a puddle of sticky brown liquid on the floor, and the sauce had thickened more than I would have liked, but otherwise the situation appeared manageable. I took the cutlets out of the oven, swirled the sauce around a bit, and poured it over the chicken. At that point I realized I’d forgotten to make a vegetable, so I threw a frozen veggie mix into the microwave and toasted some wheat bread.
I think I could hear Martha Stewart sighing all the way from Bedford.
“Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes,” the Good Wife instructions said. “Speak in a low, soft, soothing and pleasant voice. Allow him to relax and unwind.”18
I glided back into the living room, and in a saccharine voice that was not my own, sang, “Dinner’s almost ready, sweetie. Can I take off your shoes?”
“Uh, no, I’m fine, thank you . . . Weren’t you going to get me some water?”
“Oh, of course! Sorry!”
I ran back into the kitchen, poured a glass of ice water, and brought it back to Dan, who by that time had taken off his own shoes and powered on the Roku box. He seemed relaxed enough to me, so I went about setting the table and lighting a pair of white, long-stemmed candles in the center. Then I turned again to the list of Good Wife Rules.
“Make the evening his,” it said. “Never complain if he does not take you out to dinner or to other places of entertainment; instead, try to understand his world of strain and pressure, his need to be home and relax.”19
“His world of strain and pressure,” I muttered back in a voice much closer to my own.
“Are you talking to me?” Dan shouted from the living room.
“No, just talking to myself, sweetie. You ready to eat?”
It was like a scene from Mad Men. In a matter of minutes, we’d become the model of marital repression.
“You know you don’t have to do any of this to make me feel more like a man,” Dan said at the dinner table as we dined on Martha’s chicken piccata and Wal-Mart-brand mixed vegetables. “In fact, treating me like a baby is a little emasculating.”
“I know,” I said. “This all feels kinda fake, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it does.”
We ate in silence for a while.
“So what would happen if I ordered you to stop submitting to me?” Dan finally asked, a mischievous grin spreading across his face.
“Well then, I guess I’d have to obey you,” I said.
“Then I order you to stop submitting to me,” he said. “Or at least stop submitting to me like this. It’s awkward.”
“But what about the Good Wife Rules?”
“Nope. No more.”
“But . . .”
“I have spoken!”
So that settled that.
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
—EPHESIANS 5:21
Growing up evangelical, I learned to do inductive Bible study before I learned to balance an equation. Inductive Bible study is a method for reading Scripture which, as I remember it, involves three steps: (1) observation, (2) interpretation, (3) application.
One of the most useful tips for inductive Bible reading goes something like this: When you bump into the word therefore when reading the Bible, ask yourself, “What is the ‘therefore’ there for?” This usually sends you turning back a few pages to get the full context of the passage and a better sense of what the author is trying to say. The same applies to other conjunctive adverbs, such as “however,” “likewise,” “also,” “finally,” and “for example.”
So as I was looking at one of the three Bible verses that instruct wives to submit to their husbands—the one from 1 Peter that says, “Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands” (3:1 UPDATED NIV)—my inductive Bible study skills kicked in, and I dutifully looked back a few verses to see what Peter meant by “in the same way.”
To my surprise, the preceding paragraph had nothing to do with the relationship between men and women, but was instead about the relationship between masters and slaves!
“Slaves, in reverent fear of God submit yourselves to your masters,” Peter wrote, “not only to those who are good
and considerate, but also to those who are harsh . . . Wives, in the same way submit yourselves to your own husbands” (1 Peter 2:18; 3:1 UPDATED NIV).
A little more research revealed that all three of the passages that instruct wives to submit to their husbands are either preceded or followed by instructions for slaves to submit to their masters. Right after the apostle Paul encouraged Ephesian wives to submit to their husbands as they would to Christ and Ephesian husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church, he instructed Ephesian slaves, “Obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ” (Ephesians 6:5). The pattern repeats itself again in his letter to the Colossians, where Paul wrote:
Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them. Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord. Fathers, do not embitter your children, or they will become discouraged. Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything; and do it, not only when their eye is on you and to curry their favor, but with sincerity of heart and reverence for the Lord. . . . Masters, provide your slaves with what is right and fair, because you know that you also have a Master in heaven. (3:18–22; 4:1 UPDATED NIV)
The implications of this pattern are astounding. For if Christians are to use these passages to argue that a hierarchal relationship between man and woman is divinely instituted and inherently holy, then, for consistency’s sake, they must also argue the same for the relationship between master and slave.
I kept digging, and as it turns out, Peter and Paul were putting a Christian spin on what their readers would have immediately recognized as the popular Greco-Roman “household codes.”20
A Year of Biblical Womanhood Page 22
