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Myth and misogyny: how male representations of the female form have changed the way women are viewed
This article is more than 8 months oldMyth and misogyny: how male representations of the female form have changed the way women are viewed
From tales of ‘toothed vaginas’ to gods with breasts, men have spent millennia vilifying and controlling representations of women. Here, Mineke Schipper reveals why she set out to reclaim the female body as a source of power.
Emma Beddington
Sun 25 Aug 2024 08.00 EDT
In the beginning was woman. The oldest representation of a human we have – the 40,000-year-old “Venus” of Hohle Fels – is an exaggeratedly fertile woman, the first in a series of Paleolithic statues emphasising breasts, broad hips and the vulva. In the earliest stories, the Earth was female and humanity was created by women, from the Chinese creator goddess Nüwa to the Colombian Kagaba “Mother Creator”. But soon, male creators muscled in. Nüwa became the sister or wife of male creator Fuxi, while in North American stories, an Old Man creator appeared, sitting on the female Earth. “He’s trying to pluck little bits from her, and then he decides to make them alive,” explains Mineke Schipper, gesturing excitedly over Zoom. Schipper is the author of The Shrinking Goddess, a fascinating and enraging account of how the female body has been viewed and treated – essentially, minimised and feared – in myths, legends and spiritual texts from around the world and throughout history.
“When you are comparing more and more of these stories, you see something striking, and that is the independent female creator is gradually becoming the god’s wife,” Schipper says. “Even if God is invisible and no one knows what he looks like, he’s addressed as He, as a father.”
In some places, male figures defiantly created life themselves: in a southeastern Congolese legend, creator god Bumba vomits up humanity; the Egyptian sun god Atum masturbates into his hand, then puts his semen into his mouth, spitting it out as new life. “He insists remarkably much on the fact it’s all his own work,” laughs Schipper.
Schipper has a pantheon of downgraded goddesses, elbowed-out female creators and second-grade Eves at her fingertips. “The first created human being is often a man, then the second one is a woman, and what you’ll notice sometimes is better quality has been used for the first one,” she says. “The wife is created from a small body part of the man. Or God creates the man with the right hand and the woman with the left.” She sees these stories as an attempt by early civilisations to redress what they saw as the essential unfairness that only women had the power to give life. “It has to do with the lack of balance with what women can do – it’s already too much.
Snip...more...
”https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/25/myth-and-misogyny-how-male-representations-of-the-female-form-have-changed-the-way-women-are-viewed
From tales of ‘toothed vaginas’ to gods with breasts, men have spent millennia vilifying and controlling representations of women. Here, Mineke Schipper reveals why she set out to reclaim the female body as a source of power.
Emma Beddington
Sun 25 Aug 2024 08.00 EDT
In the beginning was woman. The oldest representation of a human we have – the 40,000-year-old “Venus” of Hohle Fels – is an exaggeratedly fertile woman, the first in a series of Paleolithic statues emphasising breasts, broad hips and the vulva. In the earliest stories, the Earth was female and humanity was created by women, from the Chinese creator goddess Nüwa to the Colombian Kagaba “Mother Creator”. But soon, male creators muscled in. Nüwa became the sister or wife of male creator Fuxi, while in North American stories, an Old Man creator appeared, sitting on the female Earth. “He’s trying to pluck little bits from her, and then he decides to make them alive,” explains Mineke Schipper, gesturing excitedly over Zoom. Schipper is the author of The Shrinking Goddess, a fascinating and enraging account of how the female body has been viewed and treated – essentially, minimised and feared – in myths, legends and spiritual texts from around the world and throughout history.
“When you are comparing more and more of these stories, you see something striking, and that is the independent female creator is gradually becoming the god’s wife,” Schipper says. “Even if God is invisible and no one knows what he looks like, he’s addressed as He, as a father.”
In some places, male figures defiantly created life themselves: in a southeastern Congolese legend, creator god Bumba vomits up humanity; the Egyptian sun god Atum masturbates into his hand, then puts his semen into his mouth, spitting it out as new life. “He insists remarkably much on the fact it’s all his own work,” laughs Schipper.
Schipper has a pantheon of downgraded goddesses, elbowed-out female creators and second-grade Eves at her fingertips. “The first created human being is often a man, then the second one is a woman, and what you’ll notice sometimes is better quality has been used for the first one,” she says. “The wife is created from a small body part of the man. Or God creates the man with the right hand and the woman with the left.” She sees these stories as an attempt by early civilisations to redress what they saw as the essential unfairness that only women had the power to give life. “It has to do with the lack of balance with what women can do – it’s already too much.
Snip...more...
”https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/25/myth-and-misogyny-how-male-representations-of-the-female-form-have-changed-the-way-women-are-viewed
❤️ pants
RESIST!! ✊️
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