Three’s company too: A midrash on everyday misogyny,Leah,Rachel,Jacob,and the comedy of errors of this Hebrew Bible dysfunctional family

Abstract

Misogyny, like other forms of hatred/oppression, is patently unspectacular, mediocre, and relies completely upon unearned, systemic, and patriarchal privilege. In this piece, I attempt to weave together disparate narratives connected together by what I call “everyday misogyny.” Common in each of these narratives is that two or more women swarm around one man, who then becomes the center. The contextualization of misogyny, whether in Genesis 29 and 30, the story of Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, Bilhah, and Jacob (five’s company), or in the utter banality of the American 1970s sitcom Three’s Company, is violence against and humiliation of women in everyday clothes. This guise gives misogyny a harmless appearance, nothing graphic, just the mundane way in which women’s stories/lives/bodies/value are measured through a filter of cis hetero maleness. Naming everyday misogyny in the stories of women is a way to reclaim our bodies and to proclaim that violence does not have to be graphic to be real.