Developments

Hello again! I'm sorry to have been absent for a while, but there have been developments in my professional life: I got a job! And I'm quite excited about it and, significantly, I expect it is going to put some pressure on my schedule this spring. For this reason, I am officially changing my update frequency from "weekly" to "when possible." I look forward to talking more mythology and poetry with you as the year goes on.

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It was grandma who told me

that Heaven is great and wide

and full of power and sway,

but still very far away.

A Story for January

      What with the new year and the beginning of January, it seems an appropriate time to discuss Janus. I’m not really sure how famous Janus is today; I suppose most people are familiar with him as the Roman god with two faces that point forward and backward, but I don’t think most people know any of the stories associated with him. Of course, the popular understanding of classical mythology leans toward the Greek side (as made famous in the Roman work Ovid’s Metamorphoses), and Janus is one of the distinctly Roman gods who has no obvious equivalent in Greek myth, so you could point to that as a reason why the Janus stories are not commonly known. Nevertheless, there’s more to Janus than his status as the two-faced god.

      Specifically, buried in Janus’ mythology is the story of a vaguely defined young woman named Carna. Carna apparently gets a lot of street harassment. It is an unfortunately common incident in her life that she’ll be minding her own business, and some jackass will catcall her and suggest that they hook up on the spot. Now everyone who’s been the victim of street harassment knows that it’s often very hard to decline such invitations without escalating the situation. Say anything aggressive, and you may get a much more aggressive response. Say something neutral, and you may still get an aggressive response. Say nothing and you may still get an aggressive response. Pretend to be nice and you’re likely to be dragged into an unending conversation about why you don’t want to sleep with them, why you won’t give them your number, why don’t you want to just visit their apartment, why can’t they drop by your place another day, and if you run out of polite excuses they’re likely to break out that aggressive response anyway. Carna has devised a response to these advances that, although it’s not something I would try out in real life, apparently works for her: when someone propositions her, she says, “Well, not right here. But lead the way to a more private place, and I’ll follow.” When her admirers are hurrying to a more private place, they’re so excited by her apparent enthusiasm that they don’t notice when she slips away.

      For obvious reasons, this doesn’t work when she tries it on Janus. Janus notices her slipping away, grabs her, and forces her to have sex as she promised. On top of this violation, he provides her with the extremely insulting reward of making her the goddess of hinges (stand in awe of the mighty hinge!), thus eternally subordinating her to himself (he’s the god of doorways, remember) and guaranteeing his perpetual sexual access to her. Although this promotion to divinity is ostensibly a reward, I feel terribly sorry for her--all she wanted to do was deflect some street harassment and go on with her own plans without having to cater to the sexual demands of random passers by, and instead she was forced into service as someone’s concubine.

      What’s worse is how Ovid reports the incident in such an insulting way. He flat-out calls her an idiot (“stulta!”) and heavily implies that Carna was, as they say in moronic victim-blaming discourse, “asking for it.” After all, she agreed to have sex with Janus. She made a practice of agreeing to have sex with men on the street! She gave some sort of affirmative consent, and it’s not Janus’ fault that she said this with no intention of carrying it out, it’s not Janus’ fault that she had found it was the least dangerous way to respond to street harassment.

      Affirmative consent is a great idea. I’m glad it passed in California last year and I hope that in the coming year other places follow suit. But there’s still much more to be done in the way of eliminating sexual objectification and convincing street harassers that the people they harass may have other purposes in life aside from someone’s sexual gratification. The idea that so many people today daily face the same obstacle that Carna faced in ancient myth gives me little hope that this problem will be resolved anytime soon.

      So, happy new year. For my resolution, I’ll be thinking about Janus, trying to prevent rapes like the one he committed, and trying to fight the victim-blaming culture that crashed down on Carna.