The Shrinking Goddess: Power, Myth and the Female Body

INTRODUCTION

A PRECARIOUS HOUSE

OF STORIES

The eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.

Ecclesiastes 1:8

OVER THE PAST five decades I have researched proverbs, art, myths and other verbal genres that magnify the differences between men and women. These sources – many of which are thousands of years old – shed light on our conversations around gender today. For the most part, our myths are mainly concerned with justifying, or establishing, a patriarchal, hierarchical order. However, other genres, such as proverbs, art and folklore, struggle to address the precarious gender balance of power in society.

Comparing the cultural legacies of widely different people from around the globe, I discovered similar ideas and cultural messages – often with the same meaning and (mostly) similar form – expressed through different metaphors:

Women are like banana leaves: they never come to an end in the plantation.

(Ganda, Uganda)

Women are like shoes, they can always be replaced.

(Rajasthani, India)

Women are like buses: if one leaves, another one will come.

(Spanish, Venezuela)

Women are like frogs, for one diving into the water, four others turn up to the surface.

(Spanish, Peru)

This is one of many examples. Such similarities cannot be due only to globalisation, as they originate from times and cultures without demonstrable contact. How is this possible? Our common patterns as human beings have to do with the shape and functions of the human body and its basic needs, such as food, shelter, safety and procreation, and with emotions such as fear, longing, joy and sorrow, experienced by us all.

I have always told my students: if you look only for differences, you will find only differences. If you look for similarities, they are in front of you. Instead of looking for what we share, conversations around human identity are inclined to blow up our differences. Today’s global order goes back to a house of stories, built on mythical foundations, by influential storytellers, who established a strong belief in the differences between sexes.

Since the beginning of time, human beings have devised images of themselves and embedded them in stories, songs and other forms of artistic expression. The nature of how human beings present themselves through such images has varied according to the interests of those involved and the contexts in which they lived. One of the main tasks of my field is to study the similarities and differences of how humankind presents itself in oral and written traditions.

Looking into the worldwide harvest of cultural legacies helps us to put our local views into a wider picture. To make sense of a patriarchal structure, and the ways in which it is sustained, we need to understand its foundations. This book takes a wide-ranging look at our global house of stories and ideas around gendered body parts and the power they wield. Awareness is a modest first, crucial step towards questioning our established views of the self and the other.

Humanity is divided by an ongoing history of exclusion, with devastating consequences. Nonetheless, small miracles happen. In spring 2004 I had a totally unexpected experience. After my book Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet came out, The Times invited me to write about the how and the why of this book. Titled ‘Beware of women with big feet’, the article went into my extensive travels and conversations with a large variety of people, first in Africa where I lived several years in DR Congo, later in other parts of the world. Following my travels, I spent years working on the collected material of more than 15,000 proverbs about women (and men), studying how proverbs have helped impose restrictions on women’s place and role in contemporary society.1

Two weeks after this article appeared as the leading Times Weekend Review article, a huge, mysterious airmail package arrived for me on the doorstep of my Leiden University office. It contained a number of impressive books of Arabic proverbs and a letter from the generous Saudi sender, living in Riyadh. He had read my article and assured me in his letter that, had he been in Leiden, he would have loved to have had a long conversation. Instead, to express his appreciation for the article, he had sent me this gift. This encouraging gesture from the other side of the world convinced me that patient research may build cross-cultural bridges.

The power of myths

Myths deal with crucial issues that affect society. We are enmeshed in traditions passed down from generation to generation, which connect us more closely to our ancestors than we may realise. They lay the foundations for human existence. As long as people believe in their own stories, the established order depicted in their traditions persists.

In this book myths, proverbs, popular culture and past philosophical and medical perceptions tell a pregnant story that throws new light on the female body, with the help of illuminating pictures. Cultural traditions from around the world reveal a desperate need for control over ‘her’, leading to extraordinary beliefs and practices, from fanged wombs to the so-called island of menstruating men. Similar patterns make us ask to what extent the male wish for dominance over the female body has been successful.

The first part of this book goes back to the enormous impact of myths, even today. It shares a history of creation goddesses, and how they slowly and surely made way for male creators. Part II goes into the enlightening wealth of stories and comments on the mysteries of the female body, from the hospitable breasts praised as the ‘hills of paradise’ to fear of the hymen, and the awesome power of the womb’s life-giving capacity.

In the third and final part of this book we are confronted with the consequences of globally developed hierarchies in human history: the continuing violence of physical power inspired mainly by mental insecurity and fear; the ongoing demonstrable preference for sons over daughters in many societies; and the vulnerability of those declared subordinates who risk ending up in contempt of their own appearance, thanks to compelling commercials and other influential media. Finding out how today’s widely held views came into being, and what they tell us about society in the past and present, will help us in taking new roads into the future.

Myths explain how, over millennia, female power had to be curbed. This was done through stereotyping women as capricious, unjust and demanding. Myths justify the notion that men were better positioned – and able – to run the world. Men’s theft of female power, also called the theft of ‘women’s secret’, is a striking motif in several parts of the world.

A Gikuyu story I was told in Kenya describes how women were once in charge. They were cruel, ruthless, and ruled like tyrants. The men did everything for them – they hunted, worked the land, cooked, cared for the children (in some versions they even breastfed the babies) and protected their families against enemies. The women handed out orders and did nothing. But no matter how zealously the men did their best to meet the women’s demands, they were exploited as slaves. The female rulers were never satisfied. No wonder the men resorted to a ruse: they agreed among themselves to impregnate all the women at the same time. And while the women were giving birth, their unjust regime was overthrown. ‘The men created a new order and strengthened their grip on society. Since then, justice and peace have reigned in Gikuyu society.’

This story gives the impression that matriarchal power was superseded by patriarchy; but matriarchy has never actually existed as a societal order. The existence of matriarchies, societies in which women are dominant, has been certain feminists’ stubborn wishful thinking. Convincing proof has never been found – though there are many (mostly negative or threatening) stories about societies that in the past consisted of women only, or in which women reigned.2

In his bestseller Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari concludes that biology makes lots of things possible which culture then restricts or forbids. That male dominance has developed almost universally cannot be a coincidence, he says, but he is unable to explain why this hierarchy remains so widely in force today:

Maybe males of the species Homo sapiens are characterized not by physical strength, aggressiveness and competitiveness, but rather by superior social skills and a greater tendency to cooperate. We just don’t know.3

Disappointing, really. In spite of the claim in the subtitle of his book – A Brief History of Humankind – the author is blind to the revealing light that myths throw on the origins of gendered inequality.

Myths devote a great deal of attention to the body, and link messages about sexual hierarchy in a community to origin stories about gods and the first people. Over time, the basic creative and life-giving functions of mythical goddesses have been taken over by gods imagined and addressed as males. Various deities are themselves more than one sex, or create for themselves supplementary bodily functions they missed for the purpose of creating life or to nurse their babies (the Hindu god Shiva did this, as we will see), something the monotheistic religions were keen to move away from. Many stories have been recast over time so that the male sex is elevated over the female, usually ignoring non-gendered and intersex humans. In some stories the new divine leader radically eliminates his primeval mother in a dramatic battle.

Thousands of years ago, the female capacity to produce life became associated with an uncontrollable nature that had to be tamed. Many myths tried to muzzle this frightening life force by introducing a reassuring male supreme god or ancestor as the creator of all life. In an Egyptian story, the primordial ocean god Nun bears the sun god Atum, and this second male creator subsequently copulates with his own hand. He masturbates and puts his semen in his mouth and, by spitting it out, he creates his children, Shu and Tefnut. In an ancient Egyptian tomb text, he manifests himself as an autonomous procreator:

Before heaven came into being,

Before earth came into being,

Before the ground and the reptiles had been created here.

I was the great one who came into being out of myself,

All alone I fulfilled all my desires,

I considered in my heart and planned in my head

How I would shape and create myriad forms.

So it was I who spat forth Shu and vomited up Tefnut.

This happened when I was still alone …

I masturbated with my fist, I copulated with my hand,

I spat from my mouth, out of myself.4

In many traditions, a male god creates life by uttering a powerful word, or by using his own hands and mud, dust or other materials, including from his innermost body. An innate lack of male birth-giving power is transformed into success stories about a divine masculine order that overcomes and regulates female chaos.

Myths present a desired social order – for some. Most myths confirm an order in which men are in charge, even though they remain dependent on women for offspring. This dependence has not only led to control over female sexuality, but also to an ostentatious male need for compensation in political, cultural and religious terms, and to a striking propensity to territoriality – excluding women from positions in which gender differences are totally irrelevant. On top of mythology and popular culture, philosophers and theologians have frequently warned that the female body disrupts the prescribed order and causes disaster.

The bias of a male perspective was safeguarded in societies where any who were not men were not allowed to recite or comment in public on holy texts, myths, epics, sometimes even proverbs, stopping all those who did not have the required physical features from contributing to the shaping of traditions. In many cultures and religions, it is still only men who are permitted to engage with sacred texts or lead religious services.

The study of the female body

Male fascination with the physical anatomy that they do not have has always been great, not only in storytelling and other verbal genres, but also in artistic depiction of the female body, from statuettes to cartoons. Appraisals of women range from delight to insecurity, distrust and fear. Contact between the sexes has been complicated by male fear of the vulva – a place in which, in cautionary tales in many cultures, the desire to devour is said to lurk. The power of this primal gateway spurned the delusion that a man who looks at female genitals will be punished with children born blind.5 This book is about those ambiguous feelings towards indispensable, coveted, reviled and envied female body parts.

Information from women about their own sex is rare before the twentieth century. No doubt women had ideas about their own bodies (and about those of men), but until recently their views have had little impact. The knowledge they had was either silently taken over by the other sex or dismissed as unprofessional.

In Europe, female doctors and midwives were excluded from medicine as a scientific profession. Some women, like the twelfth-century abbess Hildegard von Bingen, wrote authoritative medical texts in Latin. Nonetheless, women were barred from secondary education and the study of medicine and, therefore, from access to more respected forms of medical practice. As a result, women’s medical knowledge has rarely been preserved in books.

An exception is Jane Sharp’s The Midwives Book, or The Whole Art of Midwifry Discovered (1671), a medical handbook based on rich experience with the female body. Hardly any knowledge is available about Sharp, except the detail on the book’s title page that she practised as a midwife for over thirty years. There were no guilds for female doctors or midwives. By the end of the sixteenth century, most medical acts were exclusively reserved for members of medical guilds, to which women had no access.6

Woman with Unborn Child. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book, 1671.

With all that in mind, it is unsurprising that most of what has been said and written about the female body originates from male sources or has been coloured by male perspectives. Over the centuries, research on human society has been led by men. Research from the female perspective at local, national and global levels is relatively recent: we do not know what women were saying or thinking among themselves, they wrote relatively little, and their own oral traditions have attracted interest only since the 1970s.

Moreover, in the cultures where they did their fieldwork, those male researchers often only had access to men. Thus, any subjects who were not male were reduced to ‘muted groups’. This term was coined by Edwin Ardener, who concluded that in the social sciences there is an enormous discrepancy in knowledge about men and women: ‘There is a real imbalance. We are, for practical purposes, in a male world. The study of women is on a level little higher than the study of the ducks and fowls they commonly own – a mere bird-watching indeed.’7

Meanwhile, whatever attention the female body did not receive in a professional, scientific capacity, it received in art. This Latin medieval student song explores an undulating feminine landscape:

Softly shines her virgin bosom, And the breasts that gently rise like the hills of Paradise.

Oh, the joys of this possessing! […]

From her tender breasts decline, In a gradual curving line,

Flanks like swansdown white and fine. […]

’Neath the waist her belly turneth Unto fulness, where below

In Love’s garden lilies blow. Oh, the joys of this possessing!8

In the twenty-first century, male students and rappers still sing about girls’ bodies as property; however, in Western culture today, some such songs are strikingly violent. Bragging about one’s potency conceals the fear of one’s personal performances in ‘Te lam Om te Zingen’ (‘Too Blotto to Sing’), a recent song popular in Utrecht University’s Earth Sciences student union: ‘My sledgehammer is my third leg / It rams rocks to pieces / but I’d rather shove it in your cave.’ The girl submitted to this ramming finds it ‘a bit strange’, because she is only fourteen. The greater the male insecurity, the younger and less experienced the girls that are targeted.

The established order

Even though both sexes are needed for procreation, from ancient times onwards most societies selected only one sex for preferential treatment. In the case of newlyweds, only one of the families decided where the couple would live: with the family of the groom (patrilocal) or with the family of the bride (matrilocal). In cultures where hunting and gathering were replaced by large-scale agriculture, family relations began to move from matrilocal to patrilocal residence, and more and more often young women had to put up with the man’s family instead of the other way round.9 The young women ended up in unfamiliar surroundings, under supervision of and submitting to the rules of the ‘others’, whereas the husband had the comfort of staying with his kinfolk on the family compound. Mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law are commonly presented as being suspicious of or even hostile towards each other.

In many cultures, girls are considered to be ‘in transit’ in their own homes. Indeed daughters, destined to depart, are considered ‘spilt water’ (Chinese) or ‘cigarette ashes’ (Arabic). Children come to belong to the clan of the husband, whereas their mothers never entirely belong anywhere. Or in the words of a Luba proverb: ‘A daughter is like a raindrop, she will fertilise the fields of others.’

Because women have often been considered male possessions, rape has been seen not so much as a violation of a woman’s honour, but as a defilement of her owner’s property. In the case of an unmarried girl, her rapist would pay compensation to the original ‘owner’, her father, and the victim was passed into the hands of the rapist, her new ‘owner’. This arrangement is outlined in the Book of Deuteronomy (22:28–29) in the Hebrew Bible, and, in many societies, it is still a common course of events.

Fathers exercise authority in patriarchal societies. The term patriarchy consists of the Greek words pater (‘father’) and archè (‘beginning’ or ‘reigning principle’). The establishment of patriarchal relations was a long process that took place at different moments in different parts of the world. In the Middle East this development took place over 2,500 years (about 3100–600 BCE). The oldest known laws are engraved in clay tablets dug up in Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Inscriptions in cuneiform characters make clear that sexuality and female birth-giving capacity were controlled by men very early, as the women’s history author Gerda Lerner convincingly demonstrates in The Creation of Patriarchy.10

Thanks to the inscriptions on clay tablets from the earliest known period (c. 3000 BCE) we know that