One of the oldest and most famous depictions of the sexualized female body is The Venus of Willendorf. Dating back to 22,000 BCE, the Venus of Willendorf is a limestone carving about four inches high of a naked woman with oversized breasts, hips, belly, and vulva, tiny little arms and no feet. No one has any ideas what her purpose is. Having no feet, she can’t stand up, and she’s not flat so it doesn’t seem like she’s meant to be sitting on the prehistoric version of a knick-knack shelf. She’s carved from a type of limestone not local to the area she was discovered, and evidence suggests she was designed to be held and carried around. The Willendorf Venus was the first of many similar statuettes to have been discovered, all are a similar size, all feature prominent breasts, butts and vulvas.
Scientists and art historians love to argue about the purpose of these statues, now called the Venus Figurines, often with little evidence to support their theories. The generally accepted mainstream interpretation is that they are fertility symbols of some sort, or at least that’s what I learned in my college art history class, and I bet you did too.At some point in high school I decided to rebel against my not-particularly stringent, but still sort of Catholic upbringing by proclaiming myself a Pagan Goddess-Worshipper. . I wasn’t exactly sure what Pagan Goddess-Worshippers were into but it seemed very sexy and exotic, which suited my teenage self just fine. I read some books and adopted the myth of prehistoric matriarchal societies where fertility, childbearing, and the female body were revered. Some of this I took from two important books by archaelogist Marija Gimbutas, The Language of the Goddess and The Civilization of the Goddess. Being in high school I wasn’t exactly the most careful scholar and I’m sure I made up plenty of details on my own.
Somehow the Venus of Willendorf figured prominently in my belief system. That little statue was, as far as I was concerned, proof that the patriarchy was a relatively modern invention, and that in pre-historical societies women were worshipped. It all sounded pretty good, and as an identity the Goddess worshipping thing went well with my penchant for flowy skirts and toe rings. Also, anytime you want to make a case for mainstream beauty ideals being a creation of mainstream media, you can point to the Venus of Willendorf and her nearly total roundness. Poor little Venus, everyone’s got an opinion about her. The matriarchists claim she’s a Goddess, the art historians have suggested she’s a fertility symbol, and some researchers have proposed that Venus is a product of women creating self-affirming representations of themselves like an ice-age Vagina Monologues.
So far about two hundred Venus figurines have been discovered, all showing signs of being handled and passed around. They were portable, exchangeable and possibly collectible. The majority of them are naked though a few wear clothing of some sort, and a couple, found in the Russian site of Kostienki, are wearing what looks like restraints. One figurine is wearing a breast-accentuating chest harness and another seems to have her hands bound together at the wrist. Given that these sculptures were dug up in the frozen tundra, it’s not likely that the clothing depicted was functional in any way, it’s probably stone-age lingerie. Which brings me to the disconcerting fact that for all my teenage enthusiasm about ancient matriarchal culture, Venus of Willendorf and the rest of the Venus figurines were probably just pre-historic pornography. Cavemen were holding them up with one hand while spanking their Paleolithic penises with the other. Of all the theories out there, this is the one that the evidence actually points to.
According to Cynthia Eller in The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why An Invented Past Will Not Give Women a Future there’s no more evidence for ancient matriarchy then there is for Santa Claus. I hate to admit it, but it looks like we’re been seen as sex objects for two million years.