Men, hit your wives; wives, cover your bodies, submit to your husbands

“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.” Ephesians 5:22

That verse from the Bible never did sit well with me. I remember having discussions about it with women in the Bible study groups that I used to attend and with friends who were married.

Being submissive, they said, was about respecting your husband as the head of the household. That too was another bone of contention. A marriage is a partnership – a covenant between two people who have decided to commit to each other.

Partners in a marriage (or any relationship for that matter) are just like hands – you need two to clap; each with the limited functions it can perform.

True, one hand might be more dominant, but there is no universal law that says only the right hand can be the dominant one. Some people are left-handed, some are right, and then you have the ambidextrous who can use both hands just as effectively.

The idea of submission, within this framework, is highly problematic. There are too many variables to factor in to even justify the constant of being submissive.

In her article, fellow The Malaysian Insider columnist Syerleena Abdul Rashid wrote, “It is after all, a question of interpretation, whether it is correct or false, whether it is in line with universal value or contradicting, is something human beings must understand.”

Syerleena was, of course, talking about a somewhat similar issue, in response to a certain someone saying, “husbands can cane their wives to train them”.

While the aforementioned biblical quote has no reference to caning or even physical punishment, the interpretation of “wives submit to your husband as you do to the lord” can take any form, subjective to the individual.

For one set of followers, it could mean wives following the lead of their husband while for another it could simply mean that wives are properties of their husbands. The scope of which the interpretations can take are broad. And that broadness can cover all multitudes of sins.

A couple of days ago, my sister-in-law shared with me an article that was trending online. “Christian blogger stops wearing leggings because they cause men to have 'lustful thoughts'” read the headline.

She asked me what I thought of it. I tried to find the right words to express myself but I only got more agitated. Why was this woman forgoing her right to dress the way she wants just to stop men from tripping?

Were men not responsible for their own lustful thoughts? Are they not capable of controlling themselves?

Are they really that weak-willed that you, a grown woman who can make her own choices, chose to forgo donning a certain type of attire so that men would not leer at you and think unholy thoughts?

When did another person’s actions and thoughts become another person’s responsibility? Or, to be more precise, since when did women become responsible for the thoughts, behaviours and actions of men?

But then again, this begs us to look at the underlying cause – women ARE raised to believe that their bodies are shameful and they are the cause of men’s downfall. We have a term for it now: slut-shaming.

And women internalise this, unaware that they themselves are perpetuating the patriarchal oppression of women. I remember a story related by a friend. We were still in primary school at that time.

Her parents were fighting that morning – her father had once again came home at sunrise. Demanding that he stopped whatever he was up to, her mother was in tears and a fit of rage.

When her father raised his hand to hit her, my friend’s grandmother chimed in, urging him to hit his wife for she had crossed her line.

In her grandmother’s perspective, a man is entitled to do what he wants to do and is allowed to have more than one family.

You see, she herself was a second wife and her son was the product of that. Somehow, this grandmother had accepted that philandering was not only permissible, but also a right.

That day, my friend and I gathered a new revelation: women need to break the cycle as much as the men have to.

We need to ask ourselves why, for all the blame and weight we as a species place on women, are we not channelling time and effort on educating men to check their actions, to respect women and to be responsible human beings?

Why are we not admonishing men who abandon their families and shirk off their responsibility when they move on to their new families?

Why do we not teach our sons that regardless how a woman is clothed, she is still a human being, deserving of respect and he, as a fellow human should never reduce a woman to a mere object? That women have just as much autonomy as men?

When we are not policing what men wear, why then do we go to extremes to dictate what women should and should not wear?

If the logic is that women need to be hit to teach them the right way, should the same logic not apply to men? Should wives then not have equal rights to “educate” their husbands? – February 1, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.