Friday Random Ten “Showing Off the Tattoo and Explicating” Edition
from Amanda @ Pandagon 30 Dec 2005 11:34 am
Read our Leader's entire blog front page today--great stuff. And don't forget to check out the cool cat who taught us all how to rate ourselves obsessively.
1) "Nationwide"--The Dead 60s
2) "Chinese Rocks"--Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers
3) "Tribbles Down South"--The Mekons
4) "Something About Us"--Daft Punk
5) "God Makes No Mistakes"--Loretta Lynn
6) "Institutionalized"--Suicidal Tendencies
7) "Sometimes I Wonder"--Barbara Brown
8) "I've Been Loving You Too Long"--Otis Redding
9) "Fuck This World"--The Queers
10) "Happy Faces"--Lorraine Silver
Last FRT of the year, so why not tack on some more self-indulgent posting?
When I was a kid, I was really intrigued by mythology. (Well, still am, but it was an obsession that started young.) Like everyone else, my favorite mythology was the Greek mythology, probably because the stories and especially the characters are so well fleshed out and compelling. It turned out to be a fortunate obsession in my adulthood because it made it a hell of a lot easier for me to read poetry and plays easily for my college major because I got a lot of the allusions. But what was really challenging for me was reconciling my patriarchy-blaming worldview with my love of old patriarchal mythology. Luckily, I wasn't as interested in Biblical mythology, where you have to stretch pretty hard to find subversive women, like they did when they looked extra-textually when naming the Lilith Fair. The Greeks were evil old patriarchs, for sure, but their mythology has actual goddesses, and cool ones at that.
So when looking into it, there's one thing that always stuck with this porn liberal--the best Greek goddesses are virgins. In fact, it's sort of counterintuitive to the modern way of thinking about these things, because in our culture, "virgin" means untouched, inexperienced, unspoiled, as well as sexually inexperienced. But the virgin goddesses Athena and Artemis are the most independent of the goddesses--Athena's powers are unquestionable and Artemis lives a life that I suspect symbolized freedom to the ancient Greeks as much as it does to us. These are not the virgins of the Christian mythology that date back to Mary--meek, submissive, defending their virginity through self-destruction, as the Catholic virgin martyrs did. In fact, there is one tale of Artemis being threatened by a man secretly watching her bathe (read: would-be rapist) and she turns him into a stag and she and her posse of huntresses kills him.
And it struck me why the coolest goddesses were virgins--in a society as patriarchal as the ancient Greeks', where women were literally the property of men, the best way to convey the notion that a woman had some amount of self-ownership was to call her a virgin. Having never been fucked was a symbolic shorthand for having never been taken possession of, having never been owned. While the virgin goddesses are still technically their father's property, Zeus' benevolent attitude towards his children meant that for all intents and purposes, virginity was symbolic of something far more important--independence.
Of course, I'm aware that the stories around the virgin goddesses are still misogynist stories, with a palpable unease at the very idea of willful women permeating each tale. Nonetheless, there they are--powerful goddesses who people genuinely admire and fear, unlike the Christian version of the virgin goddess, whose virginity symbolizes her subservience to her son as well at to he husband and father (father above, in this case). Mythology is multi-layered and ambigious, allowing for many interpretations, and I think there's lots of room to interpret the virgin goddesses as models of female freedom.
You'd think I'd be more drawn to the brainy Athena than the dark and mysterious Artemis, but I'm not. Athena is too cold, not playful enough. I've always liked Artemis the best, liked the image of her passing eternity indulging herself in the hunt, living as she saw fit, hanging out with who she pleased. Her relationship with Orion is an especially intriguing story (version that's closest to the one I've read most often here), because she befriends a man on her own terms, they become extremely close, and this so threatens her brother Apollo that he tricks Artemis into killing her best friend. It's often implied in these stories that Artemis was in love with Orion, a facet of the story that I really like, because the implication is that merely having sex doesn't take away Artemis' virginity, because she's still not possessed by him.
There's a lot of ways to intepret the story, and I imagine the fact that Artemis kills Orion, if only by accident, was something of a warning to people about the danger to men of allowing women in their lives to have their own minds. (Artemis has a long history of being viewed as a threat to men, though as a general rule I sympathize with her righteous anger in the stories where she deals out punishment to men--for stealing her property, for the usual crime that pisses off gods of being not grateful enough, and what I love best is that Artemis has a history of killing rapists.) But I like a more feminist interpretation where Apollo is a villianous whiny-butt who doesn't like Artemis and Orion's relationship because it exists outside of the male dominated world that Apollo is the god of, and instead exists in the shadows of the forest where people are freer, and while Apollo wins the first round by both depriving Artemis of her friend/lover, she wins in the end by making Orion immortal by placing him in the sky. In most stories, Artemis and her brother work as a team, but it always does well to remember that she's a chaotic threat to his well-ordered male world, the moon to his sun.
Willful, loyal, independent, free, full of determination whether she's in a joyous chase or out for revenge--that's why I decided to end out my year paying tribute to this goddess and having her iconography tattooed on my shoulder. Here's a picture, hope it's easy to make out, since I had to take it over my shoulder in the mirror.
I'm really pleased with how it turned out. I was thinking something serious and monochromatic, but my artist I think saw right through me and realized that I'd be happier with something that has a playful bent to it. He was absolutely right, and I think his design really extracted what the virgin huntress symbolizes to me.
Oh yeah, and of course credit where it's due--the artist's name is Shane and he works at a place called Golden Apple, which of course made this nerd smile because Artemis was not one of the three goddesses overcome by petty vanity and the need to win a beauty contest when the Golden Apple of Discord was thrown amongst the gods.