Every Woman Is Eve

The way a person views the most important woman in their life is the foundation of how they will treat every woman they encounter. That foundation is usually set in childhood, shaped by the primary female parental figure, most often a mother or a grandmother. If the relationship was built on genuine respect and love, if the child felt genuinely loved by her and loved her in return, then that becomes the internal model. He knows how to treat his mother. It is with care, with protection, with a refusal to disrespect her under any circumstances. From that core, every other woman becomes a reflection of her, and he will extend that same baseline of respect outward. He will treat women with decency until, perhaps, a specific woman demonstrates that she is not worthy of that grace and that keeping distance is the only way to preserve his own balance. But that baseline respect is the default, and it was installed by the first and most important woman he ever knew.

If that early relationship was toxic, the foundation cracks. A boy who grows up hating his mother, or feeling abandoned by her, or being hurt by her in ways he will spend the rest of his life trying to forget, will make every woman a mirror of that maternal wound without ever knowing that is what he is doing. He will see his mother in every woman he meets, and he will treat women accordingly. He will handle them with the same distrust, the same aggression, the same need to control and punish, because on some deep level he is still trying to resolve a childhood injury that no stranger can ever mend.

From our earliest relationships with primary caregivers, we build internal templates. These are mental models that become active in every relationship that follows. A child who experiences his mother as trustworthy, present, and responsive builds a template that tells him people can be trusted, women are sources of safety, and emotional closeness is good. A child whose earliest experience of his mother is one of abandonment, inconsistency, cruelty, or conditional love builds a template that says the opposite. Women are dangerous, love is a trap, and closeness leads to pain. That template goes with him everywhere. It is working in every romantic relationship, every friendship with a woman, every interaction with a female stranger who reminds him, in ways he cannot consciously name, of the woman who first shaped his world.

The only way out of that cycle is healing. He has to acknowledge the wound, do the work to understand where it came from, and encounter enough examples of healthy love and genuine respect that his internal model can be revised. That takes a great deal of consciousness and sustained effort, and it is a threshold many never cross. Instead, they carry that unhealed wound into every interaction, and the toxicity bleeds outward. It ruins friendships, it ruins romances, and it creates men who lash out at women the moment those women remind them of a pain they have never faced.

What applies to the maternal figure applies equally to the paternal figure. The way a person relates to his father, or to whoever served as the most important male parental figure in his life, sets the template for how he will relate to every man he encounters later. If that figure was present, respected, and genuinely loving, it becomes the model for relating to men with trust and decency. The son learns that men can be allies, that strength does not require domination, and that vulnerability between men is not weakness but the foundation of real connection. If that relationship was broken or harmful, the same dynamic of projection and unhealed pain gets transferred onto every man who enters his life. A boy raised by an abusive father learns that male power is something to fear or to imitate. A boy raised by an absent one learns that men cannot be counted on, and he will spend his adult life either searching for a father figure in every room he enters or refusing to need anyone at all. He will struggle to trust male peers because trust with men was the first thing taken from him. He will read competition into cooperation, dominance into disagreement, and threat into the ordinary presence of other men. In professional spaces, in friendships, in communities, he will either submit to authority figures with the same instinct he used to survive childhood, or he will fight every structure that reminds him of the power he could not challenge as a boy.

For many men, what emerges from this wound is not simply distrust or aggression but a consuming belief about what manhood itself requires. If the only model of masculinity a boy ever witnessed was one built on control, on the subjugation of others, on financial dominance and the enforcement of hierarchy, then he will come to understand power not as one possible expression of strength but as the definition of it. He will believe, at a level beneath conscious examination, that a man who does not dominate is not fully a man. That respect from other men must be commanded rather than earned. That financial wealth, influence, and authority are not tools but proof, proof of worth, of legitimacy, of the right to exist without apology. And women become the primary arena in which this proof is sought, because the subordination of women is the oldest and most accessible form of male power available to him. A man who controls the woman in his life has something to point to. He has evidence. It does not matter that what he is pointing to is a person he has diminished. What matters to him is that he has demonstrated, to himself and to the world, that he is capable of dominance. Many men organize their entire lives around this pursuit. Every relationship becomes a hierarchy to establish. Every room becomes a space to own. Every woman becomes a measure of how much power he has accumulated or how much he still lacks. This is not an aberration. It is the logical end point of a belief system that teaches boys, through the behavior of the men around them and through the culture those men move inside, that power over others is what separates men from boys, and that a man without dominance is a man without standing. Both templates operate simultaneously, shaping the entire interpersonal landscape. These wounds are not private bruises that stay contained. They become the architecture of how a person treats half of humanity, and in some cases both halves.

Before religion enters this picture, there is one more thread that must be named. Women are not only the primary targets of this system. They are also among its most effective enforcers. A mother who has absorbed the belief that women are subordinate, that female ambition is a form of arrogance, that a good woman serves and yields and does not demand, will pass that belief on to her children. She will teach her daughter to be small. She will teach her son that this smallness is what women are supposed to look like, and that a woman who refuses it is doing something wrong. She does not do this because she is cruel. She does it because it was done to her, and she came to believe it was love. The mother who tells her daughter not to outshine men, not to speak too loudly, not to want too much, is transmitting a wound she herself received and never examined. The mother who defers to her husband in all things while her son watches is teaching him, without a single spoken word, what he should expect from women and what he should expect from himself. This is how the system sustains itself across generations without requiring constant external enforcement. The belief does not need a preacher in every household if there is a mother who already believes it. Patriarchy is not held in place only by men who benefit from it. It is held in place by everyone who absorbed it early enough that it stopped looking like a belief and started looking like reality.

But when religion enters this psychological landscape, the damage deepens in a specific and difficult way. Religion does not merely reinforce personal wounds. It provides divine justification for them. It transforms a psychological injury that can, in principle, be identified and healed into something that feels not like damage but like the natural order of things. I am talking specifically about Christianity, because I was raised in a society drenched in it, and because it offers one of the clearest examples of how a religion can encode a toxic gender hierarchy and pass it off as the eternal word of God.

Christianity tells a story about Adam and Eve. In that story, Eve is the one who is deceived by the serpent and then gives the fruit to Adam. She is the instigator of the fall, the reason humanity was cast out of Eden, the reason we are born into sin. Before accepting that interpretation, it is worth reading the text carefully. The serpent, whom the text itself describes as the most cunning of all creatures, approaches the woman. Eve is deceived by a being specifically designed to deceive. Adam is standing beside her when she offers him the fruit, and he eats without protest, without deliberation, without being tricked. Adam was not deceived. He chose. Yet the theological tradition that grew from this story placed the overwhelming weight of blame on Eve, on her curiosity, on her susceptibility, on what it framed as her inherently corruptible feminine nature. The man’s deliberate, uncoerced choice received far less scrutiny. That asymmetry in interpretation was not accidental, and it was not inevitable. It was made by men with specific interests.

The early church fathers made their positions on women explicit, and those positions shaped Christian theology for centuries. Tertullian, one of the most prolific and influential theologians of early Christianity, writing at the end of the second century, addressed women directly. “Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway.” The devil’s gateway. Not a full human being made in the image of God, but the entry point through which evil reaches the world. This was not a fringe position. Tertullian’s writings shaped mainstream Christian thought in the Western tradition for generations.

Augustine of Hippo, writing in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, formalized the doctrine of original sin and embedded within it a thoroughly gendered account of human corruption. For Augustine, sexual desire itself was the mechanism through which original sin was transmitted from generation to generation, and the female body, as the object of that desire and the source of reproduction, became the site of spiritual danger. The woman was simultaneously the symbol of humanity’s fall and the vehicle through which sin continued to enter the world. That theological framework did not stay in manuscripts. It became the lens through which the entire Western world, through its centuries of Christian governance, understood women. You can trace a direct line from Augustine’s theology of the corrupting female body to the expectation, still present in contemporary evangelical communities, that women must dress modestly so as not to cause men to sin, as if the man’s response to a woman’s body is her responsibility rather than his.

The Adam and Eve story is far from the only passage in the Bible that encodes the subordination of women as divine command. Paul writes in his first letter to Timothy that women are to learn in silence and full submission, that he does not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man, and that she must be silent. He adds, as explicit theological justification, that Eve was deceived while Adam was not, as though the original sin of the first woman is the permanent disqualification of every woman who follows. This passage has been used for two thousand years to exclude women from religious leadership and from positions of teaching authority in churches and in households where the Bible is treated as governing law.

In First Corinthians, Paul writes that women should remain silent in the churches, that it is shameful for a woman to speak in the assembly, and that if she has a question she should ask her husband at home. In Ephesians, wives are commanded to submit to their husbands in everything, as to the Lord. In Deuteronomy, the law governing rape of an unmarried woman specifies that the rapist must pay the woman’s father and marry her. The woman does not appear in the legal equation as a person with standing. She appears as property, transferred from one male owner to another. Taken together, these passages do not describe women as equally valued human beings who happen to occupy different roles. They describe women as spiritually second class, more prone to sin, more in need of male governance, and legally subordinate. You can read every word yourself. The text is there.

And if you are going to follow a religion, if you are going to build your life on a book and allow that book to govern how you treat people, how you structure your family, how you understand right and wrong, then it is only logical to actually read that book in its entirety. Not the verses selected for you on Sunday morning. Not the passages that have been softened by centuries of pastoral interpretation. All of it. A person who accepts the authority of a text without reading it fully has not made a faith choice. They have made a trust choice, and they have placed that trust in whoever decided which parts they would and would not see. While you are at it, I recommend reading the Apocrypha as well, the collection of texts that were excluded from the canon of most Protestant Bibles despite being part of the broader scriptural tradition for centuries. There is a great deal in those pages that complicates the official story. I will be addressing them directly in another essay.

The common defense, and it will come, it always does, is that those passages are not meant to be taken literally, that the Bible must be read in its historical context, that a thoughtful reader understands which parts are prescriptive and which are descriptive, which carry eternal weight and which reflect the limitations of their time. This argument is not without merit, and it is not new. But it sidesteps the actual problem. The question is not whether every verse in every congregation is followed to the letter. The question is what portrait is being painted across the whole of the text, and what happens to the minds of people who absorb that portrait from childhood before they have any framework for critical examination.

Christians do select which parts of scripture to emphasize. A congregation that preaches love your neighbor may quietly leave untouched the passages about slavery. A church that celebrates the radical mercy of Christ may enforce dress codes for women based on a single verse from Paul. This is not exceptional. It’s how religious communities have always operated. The selection itself is not the issue. What matters is which passages get selected for emphasis and which get buried in silence, and more tellingly, which passages are buried without being condemned.

There is a category of biblical text that most modern Christians neither preach nor denounce. They simply do not speak of it. Deuteronomy records Yahweh instructing Moses to take possession of the land of the Amorites, resulting in the destruction of the males and the taking of women, children, and livestock as spoil. In First Samuel, Yahweh commands Saul to attack the Amalekites and destroy everything that belongs to them, men and women, children and infants alike. In Joshua, the Israelites destroy Jericho under divine instruction, killing both men and women, sparing only Rahab and those in her household. These are not obscure passages requiring interpretation. They are explicit commands attributed directly to God, recorded in the same text that believers cite as the foundation of their moral lives. The average Christian congregation does not preach these passages on Sunday. But neither does it stand up and say that what is described in them is wrong, that a God who commands the slaughter of infants is not a God worth worshipping, that these passages reflect the moral imagination of the men who wrote them rather than the will of anything divine.

What is rarely asked, and almost never answered, is the question that sits underneath all of it. If God is all-loving, why would an all-loving God ever give such orders? The question is not a rhetorical provocation. It is a serious theological problem that most believers never confront directly, because to confront it directly is to risk the entire structure. And so it is avoided. But avoidance does not dissolve the problem. It preserves it. When a believer accepts the text as divinely inspired without condemning the commands recorded within it, they are accepting, on some level, that those commands were acceptable. That the capture of women as spoil was acceptable because God ordered it. That the killing of children was acceptable because God ordered it. That violence against women and the treatment of women as property were not moral failures but divine instructions, legitimate acts carried out in the name of God by people following God’s direct orders. This is not a fringe interpretation arrived at by extremists. It is the logical consequence of treating a text as sacred while refusing to apply moral scrutiny to every part of it.

The belief that gets internalized is not always articulated. It does not need to be. A man does not need to consciously quote Deuteronomy to carry the residue of its logic. What he absorbs is the underlying principle. There are circumstances under which the domination, capture, and abuse of women is not only permissible but sanctioned by the highest authority he recognizes. That principle does not stay in the past. It travels forward. It surfaces whenever it becomes useful, whenever a man needs justification for something he already wants to do. The text does not create the impulse. But it provides the cover. And when the cover has been woven into the fabric of a civilization for two thousand years, it stops looking like cover and starts looking like truth.

The silence is not neutral. To selectively ignore a command without condemning it is to leave the door open. It is to say, implicitly, that the command still carries authority, that it simply does not apply here, now, to us. That same logic, apply what is convenient and quietly set aside what is not without ever questioning the source, is precisely how passages about women’s silence and subordination have survived in communities that would otherwise claim to believe in the dignity of every person.

Yes, we do have to acknowledge that a tradition of progressive Christianity exists, and it has grown in visibility over the last century. Some denominations have ordained women. Some theologians have built readings of scripture that emphasize liberation, equality, and the full dignity of every person regardless of sex. These communities are real, and the people in them are sincere. But they remain the exception, not the architecture. The majority of the world’s Christians still worship within traditions that restrict women from the highest positions of religious authority, still preach male headship within marriage, and still read the Pauline passages not as historical artifacts but as living instruction. And there is something more telling still. Even the most progressive Christian communities, the ones that have genuinely wrestled with these passages and moved toward equality in practice, still overwhelmingly refer to God as “He”. They call God, Father. They have revised their reading of the text’s social commands while leaving untouched the fundamental image at the center of their theology. That image is a masculine God, a Father-God, an exclusively He-God, and it continues to do its work regardless of how progressive the sermon sounds on a given Sunday morning.

The cumulative portrait does not require every passage to be followed to the letter to leave its mark. When a child grows up in an environment shaped by a book that describes women as the entry point for sin, as more susceptible to deception by nature, as spiritually subordinate and requiring male governance, that portrait settles into the mind before the mind has any tools to examine it. It does not arrive as doctrine. It arrives as assumption. A girl learns to apologize for taking up space before she can name why. A boy absorbs the sense that female authority is slightly off, slightly suspect, before anyone has quoted him chapter and verse. The text does not need to be recited in every household for its architecture to structure those households. It only needs to have been the founding document of the culture that built them.

The theological encoding of this hierarchy goes deeper still in the language people use for God. So many people who will claim that God is beyond human gender still refer to God exclusively as He, Him, and Father. That is not a neutral linguistic habit. When you assign the male pronoun to the creator of the universe and address divinity as Father, you are making a theological statement. The supreme authority is gendered male. And if the supreme authority is male, then maleness becomes associated with divinity itself. Men are made in God’s image in a more direct and complete sense. Women become associated with Eve, with the body, with temptation, with the point of entry for sin and death. Every woman becomes a daughter of Eve, carrying that ancestral stain, while every man carries the potential image of God. This is the architecture that shapes entire communities, entire nations, entire civilizations. It enters a child before they are old enough to examine it critically, and it becomes the water they swim in for the rest of their lives.

This pattern is not universal across religious traditions, and the contrast is instructive. In Arabic, the divine name Allah is grammatically gender-neutral. Islam’s theological tradition, though it has its own patriarchal elements, does not use a male pronoun for the divine in the way that English-language Christianity does. In Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalistic tradition, the divine has both masculine and feminine aspects, with the Shekhinah representing the feminine presence of God. Many indigenous spiritual traditions around the world placed female deities and feminine principles at the center of their cosmologies. Christianity, particularly in its Protestant and Evangelical expressions, is unusually insistent on the exclusive masculinity of God, and that insistence is not an innocent convention.

Some who use exclusively male language for God will try to sidestep this implication by claiming that God is not a man in the human sense, that “He” is merely a grammatical tradition with no real content. But they still use the male pronoun. They still call God their Father. They still structure their entire religious imagination around male authority and male precedence. The contradiction is not harmless. It’s precisely the mechanism through which the belief in female inferiority is sanctified. If God is He and Father, then He-ness and Father-ness are what ultimate authority looks like, and everything that falls outside that category is, by implicit definition, less authoritative and less divine. The theological position and the social position move together. Religious language is never just language. It shapes thought, and thought shapes behavior, and behavior shapes the conditions of people’s actual lives.

This distortion did not spread across the globe through the quiet power of its truth. Christianity, in most of the places where it now dominates, was spread by force. We have to acknowledge and truly understand how this was done. Conquerors would arrive in a new land and demand that the local leader accept their God. When the leader refused, they would execute him in front of his people. Then they would demand that the survivors convert. Some converted out of terror. Those who still refused were killed. This pattern was repeated from one people to the next, from one continent to the next, across centuries of conquest. The Spanish Requerimiento, issued in 1513, was a document that colonial officers were legally required to read aloud to indigenous people before attacking them, in a language those people did not understand, theoretically offering them the chance to submit to the Christian God and the Spanish crown before the violence began. It was a legal and theological formality that provided cover for murder.

The missionaries who followed the soldiers did not bring Christianity alone. They brought its specific vision of gender. Indigenous traditions that honored female deities were declared demonic. Matrilineal systems of social organization, in which lineage and inheritance passed through the mother rather than the father, were identified as primitive and actively dismantled. Women who held spiritual authority in their communities as healers, as diviners, as keepers of sacred knowledge, were redefined as servants of evil. The spiritual colonization and the gender colonization were the same project, carried out simultaneously, by the same people, for the same reasons.

In Europe, this project took a particularly explicit form in the witch trials. Between roughly 1450 and 1750, somewhere between forty thousand and one hundred thousand people were executed across Europe and the early American colonies on charges of witchcraft. Approximately eighty percent were women. The primary theoretical document used to justify these prosecutions was the Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches, published in 1487 by two Dominican inquisitors. The text does not obscure its reasoning. It states that women are more susceptible to witchcraft, because of their lesser faith, their carnal nature, their inherent weakness of mind, and their tendency toward deception, a tendency they inherited from Eve. The entire framework for identifying, prosecuting, and executing witches was built on the theological premise that women are, by nature, closer to evil. These were not primitive practices confined to ignorant villages. They were conducted by educated theologians using systematic methods, with full institutional support from the church, representing centuries of accumulated theological argument about the inherently dangerous nature of the female.

When I step back and examine the full picture across time and geography, the pattern looks less like cultural drift and more like a strategy for control and domination. The degradation of women did not fall from the sky. It was pushed, encoded into laws, religious texts, cultural norms, and child-rearing practices, repeated and reinforced until it felt like common sense, until it felt like nature itself. I believe that encoding was deliberate, and understanding why it was deliberate matters.

The structural answer is direct. The emergence of private property created a specific problem. How do you ensure that accumulated wealth is passed to your biological heir? You cannot be certain of paternity unless you control the sexuality and reproduction of women completely. The subjugation of women, in this light, is not a product of male nature. It’s a product of inheritance law. When land, wealth, and power needed to pass reliably from father to biological son, women’s bodies became sites of economic control. The subordination of women was the institutional solution to a property problem. That solution, once encoded in religious and legal systems and reinforced across generations, stopped appearing to be what it was, a man-made arrangement in service of a particular kind of wealth and power accumulation, and began to appear as the natural and even divinely ordained structure of reality. The story was told so many times and for so long that the storytellers were eventually forgotten entirely.

The concepts of man and woman as we have constructed them are not natural laws. They are inventions. Everything a society attaches to being a man, the dominance, the authority, the right to governance over others, is constructed. Everything attached to being a woman, the submission, the presumed inferiority, the assignment to serve, is constructed. These are stories told long ago and then passed down as facts. But they are not. Anthropological and archaeological evidence makes this visible. Pre-agricultural societies show very different patterns of gender organization. Many were matrilineal, tracing lineage and inheritance through the mother. Many had female-led spiritual traditions and feminine divine figures at the center of their cosmologies. The shift toward rigid patriarchy accompanied, across multiple cultures and regions, the shift toward agriculture, surplus, and property. Patriarchy is not ancient in the sense of being eternal or inevitable. It had a beginning, it served specific interests, and because it had a beginning, it can have an end.

Look at what happens when this belief in female dispensability goes unchecked. In China, for generations, the cultural preference for sons was so extreme that families killed their infant daughters at birth. When the government instituted a one-child policy in 1980, the situation worsened catastrophically. Families limited to one child disposed of daughters through abandonment, sex-selective abortion, and infanticide, and tried again until they produced a son. By the time the policy formally ended in 2015, China had an estimated thirty to forty million more men than women, an entire generation with no partners, no prospect of family formation, a demographic wound that will take decades more to repair. The government has reversed course entirely, now actively encouraging multiple births and offering financial incentives to have children, even facilitating men traveling abroad to find wives. The entire crisis was manufactured by a single belief, the belief that a boy’s life is worth more than a girl’s. That belief, in different forms and different intensities, runs through every society shaped by patriarchal religious tradition, including the one we live in today.

It’s what makes a man switch from calling a woman a queen to calling her something degrading the instant she refuses him. It’s what makes a man feel entitled to harass women and girls of any age, because he has absorbed the belief that his desires take precedence over their dignity. It’s what allows a man to batter a woman and feel righteous about it, because something in how he was taught tells him she exists in a category that requires his governance, his correction, his control. It all connects. The personal wound and the maternal template that was damaged in childhood. The religious programming that told him women are more corrupt by nature, that their body is the devil’s gateway, that their silence is godly and their submission is scripture. The historical strategy that encoded this subordination into law and custom and child-rearing until it stopped appearing to be a strategy and started appearing to be truth. These threads braid together into a rope that has been tightening around women for millennia, and the fact that most people cannot see the braid does not mean it is not there. It means the system is working exactly as it was designed to work.

I want to see the day when this belief is completely eradicated. Not reformed, not softened, not given gentle vocabulary and sent back out into the world wearing a more acceptable face. Gone. Torn out at the root. And that will require more than just identifying the problem, though identification is where everything starts. It will also require families raising sons whose baseline for how to treat women was set in childhood by a relationship with their mothers built on genuine love and genuine respect, and reinforced by fathers and paternal figures who demonstrated that same respect through their own behavior. A father who tells his son to respect women while treating the boy’s mother with contempt has taught nothing except that words and actions are permitted to contradict each other. Children do not learn from what they are told. They learn from what they watch. A son who grows up watching his father speak to his mother with care, who sees his father listen to her, defer to her judgment, and treat her as a full person whose inner life matters, absorbs that template the way he absorbs language. It becomes the grammar of how he understands relationships. A mother who carries herself with self-respect teaches her son that women have boundaries worth honoring. A father who models respect for women teaches his son that honoring those boundaries is what men do. Neither is sufficient alone. The restructuring of this belief requires both sexes to participate in it, and to understand that they teach most powerfully not through what they say but through what they do in front of the children who are watching.

It will require communities that stop handing their children ancient stories of female deception and male divinity without critical examination, without asking who wrote those stories, when, and in whose interest. It will require religious people confessing that referring to God exclusively as “He” is not a harmless convention but an active theological claim, one that places half the human race in permanent proximity to divinity and the other half in permanent proximity to subordination. It will require a global refusal to let patriarchal power pass itself off as nature or as the will of anything divine.

And until that day comes, every single one of us who sees the truth is obligated to share it without apology, because remaining silent is what allows the wound to keep bleeding into every generation that follows.

My name is Saipher Zureti. I am a visual artist and writer. All of the calligraphy in my essays is my original artwork, created specifically for the writing it accompanies.

This Substack is a body of philosophical essays on manipulation, identity, psychology, and the systems that shape how we see ourselves and each other. The essays build on each other deliberately. Each one extends, complicates, or deepens what came before, because these subjects cannot be understood in isolation from one another.

If you want to continue reading and thinking through these systems with me, please subscribe. Thank you for being here.

Until next time, Namaste.

Read this essay on Black Radical Reflections →
Back to the catalogue