Genesis 3:16 — Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

Myra and I listen to NPR in the morning — because it is at least better than any of what passes for TV news. Today there was a segment that featured Hanna Rosin talking with Renee Montagne about the #emptychair “hashtag” that has been used by many people to comment on Twitter. It refers to a recent New York Magazine cover featuring thirty five of the women alleged to have been assaulted by comedian Bill Cosby — and one empty chair.
M/s. Rosin’s commentary struck an interesting note:

“It serves so many purposes. First, it’s a rebuke, like a classic rebuke. You know, here … history, America, the patriarchy, whatever you want to call it, has made it difficult for women to speak their truth. So there’s a chair that represents silence, something that didn’t happen. …”
It’s not surprising that M/s. Rosen should look at the hashtag that way. She is one of the current generation of feminist thinkers. In 2012, she published a book called “The End of Men: And the Rise of Women”. In it she described a view of American society in which gender roles are reversing with multi-competent “Plastic women,” dominating institutions of higher education and taking over corporate America and increasingly irrelevant “Cardboard men,” seeing their jobs disappearing to less expensive labor markets and not able to find a place in and economy that values brains over muscle.
It’s hard to deny M/s. Rosin’s thesis — but it’s important to understand what lies beneath.

When Satan tempted Adam and Eve, God laid a curse on the serpent, the husband, and the wife. The woman was cursed with pain in childbirth and with frustration — “thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee”. The “desire” is a desire for dominance … a glorious partnership became a never-ending struggle for primacy in marriage. Paul gave the great counsel as to how the struggle should be handled — ““Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. …Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it;” — Ephesians 5:22, 25. The relationship between man and woman, husband and wife, should be a balance. Sadly, as the end times rush upon us and spiritual warfare intensifies, the balance is increasingly disturbed. Not the end of man, nor the rise of woman, but the undermining of yet another of the foundations of our society.