A Blamed E: Why Are We Still Expecting a Different Outcome?
When I read where women complain and stress about men not accepting responsibility or taking blame for something they did to hurt them, I don’t blink.
Not because I don’t feel or empathize with my fellow women, but I have come to the point where I have made peace with the fact that unless a man deliberately looks inward and takes the decision to be responsible for his actions, women should do themselves a favour by not having such expectations of men.
I’m not saying this to absolve men of responsibility or free them, it’s more like losing the expectation that you can force someone to meet the standards you have set for them. You can have standards, you can have boundaries, you can call out wrongdoing, but you cannot force another person to become accountable.
You know that story in the Bible after Eve was deceived and they both ate the fruit and found out they had been naked. If you don’t know it, let me quote the exact scriptures in Genesis 3:7-21 (Message Bible):
7 Immediately the two of them did “see what’s really going on”—saw themselves naked! They sewed fig leaves together as makeshift clothes for themselves.
8 When they heard the sound of God strolling in the garden in the evening breeze, the Man and his Wife hid in the trees of the garden, hid from God.
9 God called to the Man: “Where are you?”
10 He said, “I heard you in the garden and I was afraid because I was naked. And I hid.”
11 God said, “Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat from that tree I told you not to eat from?”
12 The Man said, “The Woman you gave me as a companion, she gave me fruit from the tree, and, yes, I ate it.”
God said to the Woman, “What is this that you’ve done?”
13 “The serpent seduced me,” she said, “and I ate.”
14-15 God told the serpent:
“Because you’ve done this, you’re cursed,
cursed beyond all cattle and wild animals,
Cursed to slink on your belly
and eat dirt all your life.
I’m declaring war between you and the Woman,
between your offspring and hers.
He’ll wound your head,
you’ll wound his heel.”16 He told the Woman:
“I’ll multiply your pains in childbirth;
you’ll give birth to your babies in pain.
You’ll want to please your husband,
but he’ll lord it over you.”17-19 He told the Man:
“Because you listened to your wife
and ate from the tree
That I commanded you not to eat from,
‘Don’t eat from this tree,’
The very ground is cursed because of you;
getting food from the ground
Will be as painful as having babies is for your wife;
you’ll be working in pain all your life long.
The ground will sprout thorns and weeds,
you’ll get your food the hard way,
Planting and tilling and harvesting,
sweating in the fields from dawn to dusk,
Until you return to that ground yourself, dead and buried;
you started out as dirt, you’ll end up dirt.”20 The Man, known as Adam, named his wife Eve because she was the mother of all the living.
21 God made leather clothing for Adam and his wife and dressed them.
Why does blame-shifting appear so quickly when human beings are confronted with their wrongdoing? The record we have begun here.
Notice how Adam pointed at Eve and transferred the blame as the one who gave him to eat. At the time of the blame-shifting, he called her “The Woman you gave me as a companion“. He hadn’t named her yet, formally distancing himself from her and, in a sense, from responsibility for what had happened.
Notice how Eve pointed at the serpent as the one who seduced her. The serpent did not have anyone to blame so the buck stopped there. Nobody deceived the serpent so the blame-shifts couldn’t continue beyond him.
But there is something else I find interesting about Eve’s response. Adam was the first human and made the head, and if we “accept” that order, then Eve was following someone who was “supposed” to be her “head”. Adam had already demonstrated the pattern of shifting responsibility when confronted, and Eve essentially did the same thing. She pointed away from herself to the next person in the chain.
I’m not saying this to make Eve more guilty than Adam. They both disobeyed, and they both tried to preserve themselves when confronted. I am simply pointing out that the person who was supposed to be the head was the first person we see shifting responsibility, and the person following him responded in much the same way.
God in dishing out punishment started with the person who had no one else to blame. Again, pay attention to how and where each person was punished.
The serpent received his punishment in his body. He was to “slink on his belly and eat dirt all his life”.
Where was the woman punished? Her body again. She will give birth to her babies in pain.
Where was the man punished? His body? Definitely not his body. Not his skin. Not his strength. Nothing in the passage says that his body was directly cursed in the same way. Rather, an external party that was not part of committing the crime was affected because of him.
The ground was cursed because of the man.
His punishment was connected to the ground he would have to work, the food he would have to struggle to get from it, the thorns and weeds it would produce, and the sweat that would accompany his labour. And eventually, he would return to the ground from which he came.
Why is Adam’s punishment directed primarily through the ground and his labour, while the serpent and woman receive consequences explicitly connected to their bodies?
Why?
I don’t know.
And I want to be careful here because I don’t want to make my theory sound like something the Bible explicitly says. The text tells us what happened, but it doesn’t tell us why the consequences were distributed in exactly this way.
Read Also: Building Female Legacies for the Modern Woman.
So, you see that your expectation of men taking responsibility and blame is in futility, if what you are expecting is that you can somehow make another person repent. You cannot make another person look inward. You cannot make another person admit what they don’t want to admit. You cannot force accountability into somebody who has decided that self-preservation is more important than responsibility.
I have another thesis that could be the reason. Remember that the Scriptures tells us about two Adams. The first Adam, the one through whom sin entered the world by eating from the tree, and the second Adam, Christ, who saved the world through his death on the cross.
My theory is that perhaps Adam’s punishment being directed toward the ground rather than directly toward his body has something to do with the biblical contrast between the first Adam and the second Adam. Was the first Adam spared that direct curse to his body to avoid interfering with the ministry of the second Adam?
I don’t know if that’s why God did it. The text doesn’t tell us. I’m simply wondering whether there’s something there.
But it does make me think about the kind of man we are dealing with when we complain that he refuses to take responsibility. If he has never learned to look inward, if his first instinct when confronted is always to find somebody else to blame, and if preserving himself is more important to him than admitting that he is wrong, what exactly are we expecting him to suddenly become?
So, unless the man you are dealing with has come to that old cross, and picks up his cross to follow Christ, you will likely not have a man different from the first Adam.
And maybe that is the part we wouldn’t like to hear.
You can have expectations of what a man should be, but you cannot manufacture the character required to meet those expectations. At some point, the man himself has to decide that he will stop pointing at Eve, stop pointing at the serpent, stop pointing at circumstances and look at himself.
He has to decide that when God asks, “Where are you?”, he will answer “Here I am, for I have sinned” without looking for somebody else to blame.
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So, what do you think? Or like my people will say, “Kedu ife iloo?“
