story to paint womankind as “second in creation, and first to sin.” That tagline brands our culture—it’s our DNA, it informs our daily lives, it lives in our bodies.

There’s a painting of Joan of Arc by Jules Bastien-Lepage that hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Every now and then, when I’m in New York City, I like to drop in on that painting, as if it were a distant relative I enjoy seeing from time to time.

Remember that many of the creation myths from our earlier ancestors—the indigenous, pre-colonized peoples from cultures around the world—painted a different picture of the origin of women and men, and their worth and roles. In many of those stories, neither sex was created to dominate the other. Both men and women shared the responsibility to help

From these texts, and from observing my parents, I drank the cultural Kool-Aid. I metabolized the preferred range of human behaviors. The noble characters in the books we read had qualities like quick thinking, curtailed emotions, rugged individualism, and a competitive nature.

the old stories haunt us still: religious tales where the women are fickle, or weak, or cursed; fairy tales where the men are white knights and swashbuckling saviors, bad boys and lone wolves, warriors and kings. And where the women are ugly hags and scullery maids, or sleeping beauties and girls locked in towers.

It’s time to tell stories where no one is to blame for the human predicament and all of us are responsible for forging a hopeful path forward.

To mankind he sent a different punishment: woman.

When you make a study of a wide range of the old stories, it is stunning to see how many of them serve as warnings against women doing “unfeminine” things, like speaking, or claiming autonomy over our bodies and sexuality, or being gallant.

Imagine how many stories are hiding under the cover of prehistory, and how many lifestyles, organizing principles, and value systems have come and gone since the real beginning of time.