"Myth of gender" by Mineke Schipper: The milk of the goddess Hera adorns space

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A breast on two legs? The "Venus vom Hohle Fels" in the Prehistoric Museum Blaubeuren

The oldest known representation of a person is female and naked: six centimeters tall, carved from the tooth of a woolly mammoth. The breasts protrude oversized like two melons. The hips are lush, wider than the shoulders. The so-called Venus vom Hohle Fels is at least 35,000 years old and the surface is furrowed by grooves. Between the legs, however, the pubic triangle with vulva is still clearly visible, with a cut in it. The head is missing, and the statuette probably never had one. You can see an eyelet on the neck.

Scientists still argue about interpretations to this day: some consider Venus a symbol of fertility. For the others, the character borders on pornography. But most of them agree on one thing: breasts, vulva and bottom seem to play a central role.

A breast on two legs, one might ask - is there really still that much room for interpretation? In her new book "Mythos Gender", Mineke Schipper shows that, at least in early traditions, women's bodies were probably still far removed from the stylized sex object.

Even in ancient narratives, women are portrayed primarily in their bodily functions as the "opposite sex". It is precisely with this otherness that they are often still admired and revered as a symbol of fertility.

In many cultures, children meant power and ensured offspring. Creator deities were therefore in many cases female. Even in older myths from Mesopotamia and Egypt, life-giving rivers flowed from the earth's vagina. In Colombian stories you can read how earth, plants, animals and people came out of the womb. And even in the sky, according to Greek mythology, a woman left physical traces: to this day, the milk of the goddess Hera is visible as the Milky Way.

Uterine envy

In her research, Schipper deals with the myth in the classical sense, as a narrative network that has developed over centuries. Her focus is on narrating gender roles. The Dutch author became known for her title "A good woman has no head", in which she deals with - mostly discriminatory - European proverbs about women.

Schipper mentions a few in her new book. "Never marry a woman whose feet are bigger than your own": she quotes from Africa. "A woman who has no talent has something good": a well-known saying from China to this day. Most of the quotations speak of a mixture of belittling and fear of the female body. It starts with the children.

How exactly children were produced has long been a mystery. In early stories, the man was often not even physically involved. To have children, women in some cultures prayed to the stars, in others they made pilgrimages. For example, according to a Baniwa story from Brazil, the first woman got pregnant by simply pressing a twig against her cheek. So men played a rather subordinate role in stories when it came to reproduction.

However, according to Schipper, it is precisely here that the first steps towards later gender discrimination can be seen. A power imbalance developed between man and woman in early narratives. At that time, at the expense of men. The man threatened to become redundant as a producer. Men, according to Schipper, have therefore developed an increasing "need for compensation". Instead of penis envy: uterine envy. In monotheistic religions, Schipper concludes, women were gradually replaced as creators by an "autonomous, often male-imagined god of the sky".

Apparently the physical difference could not be completely overcome. Male gods were given anatomical extras again and again, in the form of wombs and breasts. The god of creation Shiva in Indian Hindu culture, for example, wears a bulging chest on one side. In the Bible, Adam only becomes a creator with makeshift means: he cuts the first mother Eve out of a rib. And Bumba, the god of the Congolese Cuba, vomits all creation.

Do women really not have their own stories?

Schipper uses text examples from different cultures to describe how biological gender was (re) told - and how the "small difference" was able to establish itself as a social order worldwide. This is exciting because it turns the perspective on the gender problem: If Schipper has his way, early body images of men and women provided "arguments" for later role models of men and women. In other words: when breasts and vulva are no longer primarily associated with having children, the meaning shifts. Sex and male satisfaction take precedence.

The gender conflict thus reads in places a bit reduced to an unstable "balance between female childbearing ability and male productivity". Body functions and gender roles are sometimes mixed up. In addition, Schipper also brings up a biological imbalance between men and women: "The inevitable fact that men were dependent on women for their longed-for sons must have disturbed the balance between the sexes from the start."

At least linguistically, there is often no real distinction between biological and socially influenced sex. But that is exactly what is special about the book: The author is interested in myth as a tradition of narratives. And ultimately the question of how gender is told and communicated culturally and how something like gender came about in the first place.

The argument is based on the thesis that most traditional myths reflect male views. But don't women really have their own stories? If so: Doesn't a woman make herself too much of a victim if she just takes it over? Women are not so powerless, as Schipper admits in places: "Without female resistance, the male fear of the female anatomy and the desire to control it would not have been necessary at all."