The Voiceless Mouth

The Voiceless Mouth

"Western civilization, at its root, indoctrinated shame around the feminine anatomy, and by extension sexuality, and we still carry that shame in unconscious ways. The male nude body is so normalized in heroic art that it doesn’t shock or shame. But this is bigger than anatomy; it’s an argument for a way of thinking. The heroic male struts his stuff; the woman, even the sexualized woman, hides hers away."

 While the author has noticed something, the removal of the female genitals, I think it is deeper. It comes back to Mary Beard's idea about women's voice in the ancient world and the idea of the "silent public women" and how a "man" is allowed or should speak. If you haven't watch Mary Beard's lecture I urge you to do so. Women in the classical world have been called bitches that yap, cows that low loudly and the like from the beginning of literature, why would sculpture in this culture be any different?

 The vulva (that misunderstood and devil's doorway) is powerful. It speaks.

It still speaks, from monthly menses pictures deleted from Instagram to punitive pornography laws that have gender ideas of what is unacceptable coming out of a woman body but not out of a man. 

What I find fascinating is the male response from this article. I know, never read the comments, right?  Largely a male response it ranges from "Shut up cunt" (how appropriate) to"damned if I do, damned if I don't". The former reviling the female in all forms echoing Socrates disgust for the female in all forms and the later trapped in the place of longing and desire verses social (at least mainstream) and cultural "death". This longing (the disgust and reviling of all things female while still unfortunately the mainstream, whether overt or not) is interesting to me. That artists and thinkers are still scared of the establishment view of woman, femininity and female-ness (regardless of gender or biology) but drawn hopelessly towards that silent mouth that sings gives me hope.

Interestingly Celtoid cultures wore torcs to honour their mother's line, echoing the vuvlic birch collar they passed through to be born. A far cry from the Barbie style baldness in Greek and the Roman, and then Western art. Maybe we need to un-learn our ideas of civilisation, of primitive, and see instead that cultures that harm half the population, cull babies like garbage, and torture those who are sick or different, are not civilised at all.
 

Bright Blessings xxx

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