Saturday, April 23, 2016

If you like the posts I write about mythology here, then you may also like this piece I wrote for the journal Eidolon about teaching Ovid's rape stories (particularly as compared to rape narratives in popular movies).

Monday, February 8, 2016

The Goddess of Wisdom, Warfare, and Woman-hating



      Based on my obvious feminist leanings, you might jump to the conclusion that I am a huge fan of Athena. And I have to admit, she’s an attractive figure: a warrior goddess, imbued with a great deal of force and obviously feared by weak mortal men. Charging across the battlefield carrying a shield decorated with Medusa’s severed head, she makes a nice power fantasy. I think the first time I heard of her was in sixth grade world history, when we covered ancient Greek gods and goddesses. Of course, sixth grade classes tend to cover Greek gods and goddesses in a safe and sanitized way, when all the gods’ qualities are phrased as innocuously as possible and the gods are freed from all their problematic baggage. Aphrodite is the goddess of “love and beauty” (rather than the goddess of sex and reproduction), and Hera is the “goddess of marriage and motherhood” (rather than the goddess of atrocious punishments for her perceived enemies). When I got to high school and started delving into mythology seriously by reading genuine classical literature, I got to see all that problematic baggage that had been omitted or cleaned up before. (“So when they said that Jupiter fell in love with Callisto, they meant--oh, no…”)
      Athena has her own problematic baggage, which is why I’m not so crazy about her. Unlike her father, she doesn’t go around raping everyone in sight, but she does have an extremely vindictive side. One of the stories about how the famous seer Tiresias came to be blind claims that Athena blinded Tiresias as punishment for seeing her naked. You may have heard the story of how Athena came to be patroness of Athens: she was competing against Poseidon for the honor, and she created the olive tree while Poseidon created the horse. The horse, conventional wisdom says, should have been the obvious winner, except that the women of Athens all voted in Athena’s favor out of pure gender favoritism, whereby Athena won the contest. (In historical Athenian elections, this was given as the reason why women were not allowed to vote.) Unfortunately, Athena was not so loyal to her gender compatriots as they were to her; in fact, she had a policy--as she expressly reports, serving as the incarnation of divine justice in Aeschylus’ Eumenides--that in any judgment she sides with a male over a female by default. This policy of favoring males and attacking females is most egregiously demonstrated when Medusa (at this time a beautiful woman, not the more famous snaky-haired monster) is raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Athena is offended in principle (she’s a virgin goddess! An aggressively virginal goddess! No one should be having sex in her temple, under any circumstances) but is unable to gain satisfaction from Poseidon, who outranks her in the divine hierarchy. In frustration, she takes out her anger on Medusa, who didn’t really have control over the situation. (A similar rape occurs in Athena’s temple after the sack of Troy, when Ajax the Lesser rapes Cassandra in Athena’s temple. Here Athena is likewise offended, and since Ajax is a puny mortal, Athena is free to kill him with impunity. Cassandra is not subject to violent retribution from Athena, mercifully. Still, at this point Cassandra was already under her famous curse, plus she was sold into slavery and presumably raped again before she was murdered by her master’s wife. It’s not like being spared Athena’s wrath meant that Cassandra lived happily ever after.) This is what I mean: Athena is vindictive, but in particular she’s vindictive toward women in their sexual roles, while overlooking the fact that women in ancient Greece have very little control over their sexual lives. Most Greek women did not have the social authority, much less the combat expertise, to choose like Athena whether or in what circumstances they would have sex.
      Maybe you would call attention to some of the problematic women I have supported in the past: Medea, Hypsipyle, Procris, Camilla. If I can cheer on Medea as she kills all the men who want to control her life, why can’t I cheer on Athena as she aggressively enforces her own sexual standards? I’d say mostly because Athena is unquestionably powerful, and recognized as such. She’s an Olympian goddess, after all. Medea may have enough magic powers to make a deadly burning robe and summon a dragon chariot, but she is fighting without allies against the men who rule the state and control its armed forces. They could certainly round up a mob to kill Medea, or at least throw her out of town. Athena attacks weak humans who have no defense against her, and certainly aren’t able to kill her. When a person has such a great degree of power, I hold them to a higher standard of behavior. Even though Greek gods are no moral paragons, and in ancient times were never conceived of as being objectively good or moral in their behavior (at least not as mythological characters--we can get into a long argument with Socrates over whether his god is good or not), I evaluate these Greek gods through my own cultural lens--and at the end of the day, I expect better from them.