Object of Affection or Possession

Posted by Cynical Sarah on March 22, 2007

A news story spread itself across the worldwide Web this week about a girl in Pakistan whose father lost her in a poker game when she was 2. He couldn’t pay his debt, so he offered up his daughter instead.

That was 15 years ago, and now the man is trying to collect on the bet despite the father dying and the mother paying the dollar amount in full.

There’s a similar story about a girl in India, and a few weeks ago there was a story about a woman in Russia whose husband lost her in a poker game. Though in her case, she ended up being happier with the guy who won her and married him. Can you really blame her for giving up a guy stupid enough to wager her in a game?

Another story in Pakistan was of a woman who recently learned that her husband had sold one of her kidneys a few years ago when she had to have surgery for something else.

These sound like stories from the Stone Age when women were considered property. Fifteen years may seem like a long time like in the case of the daughter lost in a poker game, but when I stop and think about it, I was in my early teens when that happened – not exactly age ago in a different era. It’s not exactly a regional thing or cultural thing either. I’ve seen plenty of examples in our “enlightened” society of women that are treated as possessions or as a lesser part of a relationship.

How did it get that way? What was it in history that set us down that path so that we women have had to work our way back to equality?

Some would argue that it’s always been that way. It’s just a part of our evolution. Males were the hunters and protectors while females were the gatherers and homemakers. But even that should be looked upon as an equal division of labor not as one gender having a superior or inferior role.

I somehow doubt that our Neanderthal ancestors put that much thought into the division like that. A hunter may have had superior strength but gathering and homemaking were just as important to survival in the relationship. It was later in our human history that value was placed on these jobs, adding another dimension to the gender roles.

Researchers have even found that during biblical times, men and women still had fairly equal standing. Jesus and Mary Magdelaine may have actually preached his word together. And a Jewish friend of mine said Abraham and his wife were thought to have passed on the word of god together, equally as well.

So it’s interesting that the actual bible stories show it so differently now. It seems that as the good books have been re-written in the past, women’s roles have been changed. It’s easy to blame the Romans and their meddling ways when they re-wrote and decided what should and shouldn’t go in the New Testament.

But what was it that made them want to change the roles of women and make us the “weaker” sex?

My theory: money. Money has turned us all into greedy bastards, and increased the divide between cultures, races and ultimately the genders as well.

I think that when money was introduced into the dynamic, that’s when people started giving values to different jobs and deciding which were superior to the others. The big strong men who could perform tasks that not everyone could do were suddenly valued at more. People were willing to pay more for their services.

On the other hand, the things that were “female roles” were things that anyone could do, so people were less likely to pay someone else to do it for them.

So we evolved from hunters and gatherers to money winners and money losers pretty much, with the money loser jobs tending to be the typical female jobs. From there it just naturally became women getting paid less even when they were doing the same jobs as men.

That in turn affected how women are treated in relationships. Men had to be willing to take on the extra responsibility of supporting a woman with his superior job and paycheck when they got married. Women were a “burden,” and when someone takes on something they consider a burden that they are responsible for, it’s much easier to start thinking of them as possessions rather than as something you have affection for.

Really, the root of many, many problems with the world today is money. We all want that life of luxury and ease (with as little effort as possible) but it takes a lot of money to achieve that. People aren’t happy because they don’t have the money to do the things they want to do. Nations aren’t happy because they don’t have the money to be in power positions in the world or to take care of its citizens. People are willing to steal for it, fight for it, kill for it.

Show me the money, and I’ll show you the root of all the world’s problems. But if money is the way the world has gone wrong, I don’t want to be right because I want that life of luxury too.

- Sarah L. Polson

Filed Under: Blog - Comments: Be the First to Comment



top