Like the words of Genesis 2:24, these words have a future-oriented character. The incisive formulation of Genesis 3:16 seems to concern the whole complex of the facts that in some way came to light already in the original experience of shame, but were later to become clear in the whole inner experience of “historical” man. The history of human consciousness and human hearts was to confirm repeatedly the words contained in Genesis 3:16. The words spoken at the beginning seem to refer to a particular “reduction” of woman in comparison with man. But there is no reason why one should understand this reduction as social inequality. Rather, the expression, “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he will dominate you,” immediately indicates another form of inequality that woman was to feel as a lack of full unity precisely in the vast context of union with man to which both were called according to Genesis 2:24.

The words of God-Yahweh “Your desire shall be for your husband, but he will dominate you” do not speak only about the moment of union between man and woman, when both unite so as to become one flesh (see Gen 2:24), but they refer to the wide context of relations of conjugal union as a whole, including indirect relations. For the first time the man is here defined as “husband.” In the whole context of the Yahwist narrative, the words of Genesis 3:16 signify above all a breach, a fundamental loss of the primeval community-communion of persons. This communion had been intended to make man and woman mutually happy through the search of a simple and pure union in humanity, through a reciprocal offering of themselves, that is, through the experience of the gift of the person expressed with soul and body, with masculinity and femininity —“flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23) —and finally through the subordination of such a union to the blessing of fruitfulness with “procreation.”

It seems thus that in the words addressed by God-Yahweh to the woman, there is a deeper echo of the shame that both began to experience after the breaking of the original covenant with God. Here we find, moreover, a fuller motivation for such shame. In a manner that is very discreet but nevertheless decipherable and expressive enough, Genesis 3:16 attests how that original beatifying conjugal union of persons was to be deformed in man’s heart by concupiscence. These words are directly addressed to the woman, but they refer to the man, or rather to both together.

…Genesis 3:7 [shows] that in the new situation, after the breaking of the original covenant with God, man and woman did not find themselves united with each other, but rather more divided or even set against each other because of their masculinity and femininity. By highlighting the instinctive impulse that had made them cover their bodies, the biblical account describes at the same time the situation in which man as male or female—before then it was rather male and female—senses himself more estranged from the body as from the source of original union in humanity (“Flesh from my flesh”), and more set against the other precisely on the basis of the body and of sex. This antithesis neither destroys nor excludes the conjugal union willed by the Creator (see Gen 2:24), nor its procreative effects; but it confers on the realization of this union another direction that was to be the one proper to the man of concupiscence. This is precisely what Genesis 3:16 speaks about.

The woman, whose “desire shall be for her husband” (Gen 3:16), and the man, whose response to this desire, as we read, is to “dominate [her],” form without any doubt the same human couple, the same marriage as in Genesis 2:24, even the same community of persons, but nevertheless they are now something different. They are no longer only called to union and unity, but are also threatened by the insatiability of that union and unity, which does not cease to attract man and woman precisely because they are persons, called from eternity to exist “in communion.” In the light of the biblical account, sexual shame has its deep meaning, which is connected precisely with the failure to satisfy the aspiration to realize in the “conjugal union of the body” (see Gen 2:24) the reciprocal communion of persons.

All of this seems to confirm under various aspects that, at the root of the shame in which “historical” man has become a participant, there lies the threefold concupiscence about which 1 John 2:16 speaks: not only the concupiscence of the flesh, but also “the concupiscence of the eyes and the pride of life.” Does not the expression about “domination” (“he will dominate you”, about which we read in Genesis 3:16, indicate that third form of concupiscence? Does not domination “over” the other—of man over woman—essentially change the structure of communion in interpersonal relations? Does it not transpose into the dimension of this structure something that makes an object out of a human being, an object in some sense concupiscible for the eyes?

These are the questions that spring from reflection about the words of God-Yahweh according to Genesis 3:16. Spoken on the threshold, as it were, of human history after original sin, these words reveal to us not only the external situation of man and woman, but allow us also to penetrate into the interior of the deep mysteries of their hearts.