"Women are badder than men."

“Women are badder than men.”

I glance back in the rearview mirror to my 6 year old daughter, who has just causally said this. I’m driving my kids to school; how does so much happen in a 4 minute drive?

We just listened to a song that my 9 year old son requested. The song is about a breakup, a girl who cheated on her boyfriend. I remarked on one of the lyrics, saying that it was a Biblical allusion (listen, I’m a former English teacher from a family of English teachers). The lyrics said, “You were my Garden of Eden, I’m leaving” and my 9 year old pointed out another line that said, “Guess my lover was a snake.”

From there we started to talk through the narrative of “the Fall” found in Genesis 1-3. Of course, most of us know how the story goes. Eve eats the apple and all of humanity suffers because of it. 

Click to read what I wrote in August about the Barbie movie being a feminist retelling of the Genesis narrative. It’s hard for me to understand why it seems like according to this story, God would create a circumstance where a human is bound to fail. In the midst of this conversation, it was wild to hear my 6 year old daughter, the daughter of an extremely outspoken feminist mother, name a belief she had absorbed somewhere else:

“Women are badder than men.”