as it would in the modern West if someone looked into a church and found the women all wearing bikinis. The trouble is, of course, that Paul doesn’t say exactly this, and we run the risk of ‘explaining’ him in terms that might (perhaps) make sense to us while ignoring what he himself says. It’s tempting to do that, precisely because in today’s Western world we don’t like the implications of the differentiation he maintains in verse 3: the Messiah is the ‘head’ of every man, a husband is the ‘head’