The Western World Fears Pain More Than It Values Life

A gritty Advent essay on our culture's nihilistic shot at escaping Eden's curse.

Author N.D. Wilson has a tradition of returning to gritty Bible stories each Christmas season to remind himself and those around him that the Savior’s birth isn’t sentimental kittens. These gritty stories include incest, deception, and murder.¹ So, in the great Wilson tradition, here’s a gritty Advent essay.

A Cursed Blessing Is Better Than No Blessing

In the Biblical story of The Fall, God ensures that whenever humanity experiences pain, it also experiences life and hope.

In 2020, during the pandemic lockdown, I took a landscaping job with my friend Anna Grace. It was a hard job. My first day, I found myself floundering in man-sized hipwaders as I wrenched up handfuls of grasses blocking drainage to a stream. As we worked the land, we faced resistance. It reared up against us, sending in squadrons of angry, stinging wasps and thistles that reached our shoulders. The sun beat down on our shoulders, blistering them before we turned brown, and our arms grew hard like tree limbs.

Poison ivy grew alongside virginia creeper, a benign vine with a similar appearance. Anna Grace and I learned to heed the proverb: “Leaves of three, let it be; leaves of five, let it thrive.” When the summer was up, Anna Grace and I had grown as close as those two vines. Our friendship had been strengthened by hard work. She sewed me two pillows embroidered in elegant script: “Like poison ivy and virginia creeper, they grow together. Where you find one, you’ll find the other.” 

That has stuck with me. Blessings and curses, friendship and toil, shrubs and weeds, all grow together. Where you find one, you’ll find the other. This principle of the mixed bag has become a guiding principle in my life, and because of it, I can’t help noticing that our culture is running in a different direction—idolizing pleasure and desperately trying to eliminate anything that causes discomfort or pain.

In the Biblical story of The Fall, Adam and Eve disobey God’s instructions on how to steward Paradise. Some people read God’s punishment of the guilty couple as sadistic fire and brimstone. But a close reading shows the opposite. As a consequence of mankind’s disobedience, God curses the two domains of human activity that ensure the continuance of life on earth: work and childbirth.

If we believe Biblical wisdom, then the world as we know it is designed on a mixed-bag principle. By cursing life-giving activities, God ensures that whenever humanity experiences pain, it also experiences life and hope. Men sweat in the fields, but at the end of their labor, they eat their fill of delicious food. Women groan in the birth room, but at the end of their labors, they hold a baby in their arms.

A demonic triumph it would be, were both sexes to abdicate their two most important tasks simply to avoid the pain involved. But that, I believe, is exactly what is happening in the Western world today. 

From Eve to Sterile, Sexless Women

Woman’s goal is to regain power and control over her body, to escape her vulnerability to subjection and pain. She gains this power at a cost: the destruction of her own sex.

After Adam and Eve disobey God’s instructions, God assigns them each a separate curse. He curses Adam’s land (“cursed is the ground because of you; in pain shall you eat of it”). But he doesn’t curse Adam directly. Eve’s story is different. God curses her body. Is it surprising to see then, throughout history, a pattern of female body dysmorphia? 

The fourth century epidemic of the Holy Anorexics is perhaps the most vivid historic expression of female body hatred. One Blaesilla, under the direction of St. Jerome, fasted herself to death at the tender age of twenty. We have records of at least thirty women who attempted to subsist solely on the wafer of the Eucharist. 

Of all mental illness, anorexia has the highest rate of death. Although it can affect everyone, male or female, just as in medieval times, it is primarily a female phenomenon. Women are three times as likely as men to develop the desire to starve themselves. In conditions of starvation, they lose their breasts and their fertility. Their bodies lose their femininity, collapsing into an asexual bag of bones. 

It is perhaps this power of anorexia to destroy sex characteristics that causes puts transgender teens at risk for developing the disorder. According to a 2013 study, transgender teens are much more likely to restrict eating and use diet pills and laxatives to “suppress secondary sexual characteristics.”²

Although both transgender men and women may use starvation to alter their sexual appearance, far more transsexual surgeries are used to eliminate female bodies than to create them. An analysis of transgender surgical data from 2016-2019 estimates that 82.1% of chest surgeries were “masculinizing,” while only 17.9% were “feminizing.” 

Why do women hate their bodies so?

Female bodies, for one thing, are frequently objectified.

In an essay for Perishable Goods “On Trans( )ism,” I wrote:

When I was seventeen, I wished I had no body. I wanted a meeting of minds. “My body is simply something that must be,” I wrote. “There is no way to greet it with celebration.” … I didn’t want to be seen as a woman (which in my mind meant “sex object”). I wanted to be seen as a person (which in my mind meant an intellect). 

But this fear of being sexually objectified is subsidiary to the fear of losing control. The male leer is disturbing not so much in its sexual implications as in the woman’s lack of control over her body in the situation. This lack of control is endemic to her lifelong relationship with her body.

Following puberty, the woman’s body never seems to give her a break. It is strong and reliable one day, afflicted by menstrual pains the next. Her hormones wax and wane in a lunar cycle, affecting her appetites, appearance, behaviors. When she wants a baby, she miscarries. When she doesn’t, she conceives. She is enslaved to her body’s caprices in a way that men do not experience. It delights her one moment; betrays her the next. Woman is enslaved to her body’s caprice.

Anorexia and top surgery are the most extreme ways a woman can try to end the curse.³ Whether woman accomplishes it by starving her breasts away or by surgically paring them down, her goal is ultimately to regain power and control over her body, to escape her vulnerability to subjection and pain. She gains this power at a cost: the destruction of her own sex—and all the hope and life that come with it.

If anorexia, self harm, and sex-change surgeries are not good responses to the female’s cursed body, what is? The body positivity movement is well-intentioned, but a woman who struggles with embodiment will not find consolation in repeating, “I love my body,” if she does not consider some aspect of it inherently valuable. 

Hate your female body? Think it’s cursed? (It is.)

Childbirth may change your perspective. When the cursed body brings a new life into the world, breasts shift identity from sex objects to miraculous milk-makers; wide hips become an asset in labor; hormones usher in fierce and euphoric feelings of love.

All of the things that woman hates about her body enable childbirth. Though the female body is cursed with particularly burdensome pains, childbearing renders those pains productive and life-giving, where they would otherwise lead to despair. In this way, the curse is covered by a larger blessing, rendered holy. 

From Adam to Machine Men with Machine Hearts

What if pleasure is not actually the result of leisure but a byproduct of doing hard things?

Although most Americans have never tilled a field, most still know the curse of toil. Although we needn’t fear Nature’s droughts and blights as much today, we live within an economic system that simply isn’t fair. Instead of a plague of locusts, we get the ‘08 Recession. Someone can work grueling days and take home just enough to survive. 

If woman tries to escape her curse by altering her biology, man⁴ tries to end his by altering the earth. When undertaken in harmony with Nature, both endeavors are good, taking the form of cultivation. Woman has developed reams of techniques to make pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing as smooth as possible. Medicine, social support, good character, and ancestral wisdom go a long way towards tempering the curse. Likewise, crop rotation, pest management, and tractors make farming much easier, as does good public policy and fair wages. 

But just as woman can go too far when she refuses to respect the natural characteristics of her body, man goes to far when, instead of working with the natural patterns of the earth, he brutally violates them. If woman’s Babel is sexless sterility, man’s is the exploitative machine of economic greed. 

Man’s greed for easy money destroys the earth, not only by polluting oceans and razing old growth forests, but by exploiting weaker humans. The oldest method around for escaping painful labor is slavery. Work is much easier when you don’t have to pay for it. Plantation owners and pimps operate the same way—by forcing others to bear the pain of toil and stealing the blessings that result.

In the United States, we seem increasingly bent on outsourcing all labor-intensive work to other countries. Let enslaved Uyghurs sew our clothes and construct our MacBooks, so that our dollar stretches farther and we can spend more time at play. Meanwhile, we encourage our promising youth to enter what Matthew Crawford calls “ghostly” work—as managers, administrators, office drones. We seem to think that the less we physically do, the more playtime we have, the better off we will be. But what if pleasure is not actually the result of leisure but a byproduct of doing hard things?

Chemically speaking, happiness is a byproduct of goal-pursuit. The neurotransmitter dopamine regulates our pursuit-reward system by giving us feelings of satiety and pleasure when we do something enjoyable. In cases of addiction, the brain gets so used to a base level of dopamine that it requires increasing quantities of the substance to attain satisfaction, and becomes stuck in a loop of craving. 

In order to escape this eternal state of dissatisfaction, we must engage in activities that deplete our brains of dopamine. In other words, we must experience pain. Coming out of this trough of depletion, pleasure is once more made possible. 

Aldous Huxley describes this physiological principle in the form of a story. The citizens of his Brave New World live in a mild sort of homeostasis, high on drugs and sex, never experiencing the polarities of discomfort or euphoria. 

When an outlier called The Savage begins to spend his days crafting primitive clay pots, society thinks he’s gone mad. Why would he put so much effort into making objects that are easily mass-produced in factories? They cannot see what The Savage is experiencing within:

“To fashion, to give form, to feel his fingers gaining in skill and power—this gave him an extraordinary pleasure. […] He worked all day, and all day he was filled with an intense, absorbing happiness.” 

Skilled work may be demanding, but it is meaningful by very virtue of its difficulty.

Woman escapes the cursed body only when she leans into it and experiences the beauty of its design through motherhood. Similarly, man escapes cursed work only when he leans into and experiences the satisfaction God designed his body to experience following intense effort.

Pain is mixed into pleasure, and pleasure into pain. It’s a feature, not a bug.

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“The carpenter, as he measures and saws, builds a home for Christ. And in the birth room, each mother echoes the song of Mary.”

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We—Adam, the worker of the “red earth” (Hebrew: adamah), and Eve, the “mother of all the living”—know the assignment. It’s written into our biology. We are made to take pleasure in the sweat of hard work and to give birth to new life.

The only way to escape the pain of these tasks is to give them up. To give them up is suicide, black hole diving. Christians and the non-religious alike can see that sterility and laziness lead to death.

Let’s not go this way!

Our painful labor is honorable. It’s what God chose to deliver the One who delivers us. The carpenter, as he measures and saws, builds a home for Christ. And in the birth room, each mother echoes the song of Mary.

1. That’s why a Utah school district banned the Bible in 2023 for containing vulgarity and violence.

2. Janine Averbach, MSW, LCSW, senior primary therapist at Princeton Center for Eating Disorders quoted by Penn News.

3. Other less extreme ways include hysterectomies, lesbianism, some forms of feminism, hormonal birth control, and other social and technological products of decadent society.

4. I should note here that both men and women have always contributed to the economy. I use “man” and “woman” archetypically in this essay to evoke a sense of universal pattern. Despite our shared humanity and considerable overlap in desires and abilities, men and women are different. Men are the ones who have contributed by far the most to technological and artistic innovation. So, while you can read this section as applying to all people, it is somewhat more applicable to men.