Venus of Willendorf

A Brief Study of Archaeological Misogyny and Fatphobia, With a Few Snarky notes about Modern-day “Pagans”

Venus of Willendorf
Paleolithic “Venus” Figurines

In addition to the first discovered “Venus of Willendorf” statue, numerous other paleolithic sculptures have been found of female forms that are described in today’s clinical, fat-hating language as “obese”, i.e., diseased. The archaeologists then, in their supreme wisdom, have tried to find a way around giving any credence to the idea that people in pre-historic times could have been “obese” or found “obesity” to be desirable.

A common way of explaining the statue is that “she’s pregnant”.

“In addition to a short life expectancy, prehistoric women seemed to have suffered an increased risk of death during their 20s. This finding may reflect mortality associated with pregnancy and childbirth. It takes little imagination to see the similarities (albeit exaggerated) between the Venus and a pregnant woman. Although admittedly speculation, the Venus of Willendorf may have been used as a talisman in a precarious world of heightened obstetric related mortality.”

That seems like an awfully big stretch of the imagination to me. I’ve been fat and pregnant and it doesn’t look remotely like that. Her stomach does not resemble that of a pregnant woman. And since he is pre-supposing (earlier in the article) that all prehistoric women were skinny – have you ever seen a skinny pregnant woman? She’s all belly, usually. Skinny women don’t tend to gain much weight during pregnancy just as they don’t at any other time. This is why all these celebrated anorexic stars get splashed all ove rthe magazines after giving birth to make the rest of us feel bad. The reality is that the heavier you are when you get pregnant, the more weight you are likely to gain during pregnancy (and retain afterwards.) Its a simple fact of the way bodies work, independent (regardless of the hype) of one’s lifestyle or eating habits. Also, while there is some weight gain in the thighs and backside that is normal and common to pregnancy, the heavy weight shown on the statue’s back and sides is not a feature of pregnancy. It is, to anyone who knows or has seen a nude fat woman, very typical of a heavier female, often one somewhat older than the early twenties.

Witcombe recognizes this but again misses the reality of the human body, caught up, as is not unsurprising, in our culture’s vilification and myths about fat people:

“And she does appear to be fat rather than pregnant; a condition, it has been suggested, due to eating large quantities of fat and marrow, and a sedentary life. Whatever it was she was eating that caused her to become so fat, the suggestion that she must have led a life of relative leisure in order to gain so much weight offers a clue to her status. The question is: Is this what women in the Stone Age looked like? Or did they look more like Raquel Welch in the 1960s movie “One Million Years B.C.”?
“If what the archaeologists tell us is true, that Stone Age societies survived through hunting and gathering, the chances are the women looked more like Ms. Welch than Ms. Willendorf whose obesity would have greatly impaired her ability to move around foraging and gathering. The chances are, a Stone Age woman, much like the women in hunter-gatherer tribes today (such as the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert in South Africa), would not have had the opportunity to get that fat, unless, of course, she had some special status. She evidently did not need to gather, or hunt, but must have been catered to and had her needs met by others.”

I can say from first hand experience this is grossly (no pun intended) untrue. I have not led “an easy life” in which I was “catered to” – in fact my adult life has been marked by a much higher level of physical labor than many of the skinny middle class women I’ve known, and periodic personal famine brought about by poverty or anorexia. I’ve gone days without eating a thing, days and days, lost 25 pounds in a week from starvation and the sheer physical effort I needed to put out to keep working, last week I biked six miles and spent the afternoon chopping wood – all while remaining clinically “obese”. My body looks not terribly unlike the Venus of this statue. It isn’t because I sit around being fed bons bons all day, I can assure you. But aside from this – it is now widely known that the descriptions of the hardships of the hunter-gatherer’s life have been wildly exaggerated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisure#Cultural_differences

But I don’t want to pick on this particular article too much because in other ways it raises some good points, such as this gem:

“To identify the Willendorf figurine as “Venus,” then, was a rich, male joke that neatly linked the primitive and the female with the uncivilized and at the same time, through implicit contrast with the Classical Venus,
served as a reassuring example to the patriarchal culture of the extent to which the female and female sexuality had been overcome and women effectively subjugated by the male-dominated civilizing process.
“By naming her “Venus,” a set of associations is brought to the image that influences our response to what we see. In one respect, she becomes a negative image, a “failed Venus” who, by the standards of the Classical Venus, is not beautiful and is not sexually attractive.”

But overall the perception and naming of these ancient stone figures, wherever they are found, is that of “Mother” this and that, displaying much more of a modern bias on how women are viewed than any proof that this is how they were intended to be seen. For example, look at the second sculpture on this page:
http://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165goddess.html

They call this statue a “Mother” goddess. She doesn’t look pregnant to me. The pregnant belly is hard and protruding. Look at her upper arms, look at the folds of fat over her knees – she’s fat! Moreover, the way her body is depicted indicates she is liekly an older fat woman, as the body fat distribution and general shape are not typical of a woman in her twenties. Now why would someone have carved a statue of a body type they found unappealing or a detriment to society, especially in such a position?

Look at the statue again. What is she doing? She is seated on a large chair – a throne? – one that is ornate and carved itself, seems to be wearing a hat (or crown?) of some kind. Since she is clearly not pregnant to any unbiased examination of her nude body, and the statue was found in a grain bin, it seems quite probable that this statue is a celebration of the long life and prosperity – symbolized by fatness – that having enough food to store away for the winter brought to early humans.

The point is brought up by several archaeologists that there are no representations of “obese” men in unearthed paleolithic sculpture. This is partly why they dismiss out of hand the odea that obesity could have been considered a desirable trait. But I can think of several reasons why this would not have been the case. First of all, men do not live as long as women. Weight gain is much more likely in someone who lives a long time. Fat also is a defining physical charateristic of women, something that separates them from men. In spite of the fat-hating, woman-hating medical culture which demands a “healthy” woman should weigh less than a man of the same height, fat women – even “morbidly obese” fat women – statistically outlive men, even skinny men. And even medical science is forced to admit that women require 7-10% MORE body fat than men as an ESSENTIAL part of their bodies. The recommended amount of body fat for women is ONE QUARTER OF THEIR ENTIRE BODY. So it could be easily argued that fat hatred is, quite simply, woman hatred.

But back to the lack of obese men in sculpture. Given that women are naturally fatter than men, and more long lived, is it not likely that these sculptures of “obese” women are depictions of older women in prehistoric society? Would not such longevity have been praised and hoped for, even as it is now? The “Grandmother hypothesis” now suggests that grandmothers, far from being the frail, inept, helpless women our society desires to caricaturize them as, were vital to the survival of humankind and even that menopause developed as a survival trait in humans. But lest I feed the tired old notion that women always gathered and men always hunted, there are even modern examples of hunter-gatherer societies such as the Agta where women hunt – at least before encroaching civilzation began to destroy their way of life. And witness the “skepticism” (read, misogyny) by these anthropologists over another anthrolopological teams reporting that the women did hunt:

“Do Agta women hunt? Agta are most widely known by anthropologists today because of the Griffins’ articles claiming that some Agta women hunt large game with bow and arrow (Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981, 1984; Griffin 1984; Estioko-Griffin 1985, 1986; Goodman et al. 1985). If readers have heard about the Agta, women hunters is probably what they remember. Being the skeptics that we are, we didn’t believe this when the Griffins first described it in 1978, anymore than we believed Peterson’s ethnography. After all, we had lived among Agta for many years by that time, and though we had seen women assist men in hunting (driving game with fire or dogs towards the men waiting in ambush), our own Casiguran Agta informants denied that Agta women ever hunted on their own.
“However, in a trip through the Griffins’ research area 90 kilometers north of Casiguran in April 1979, I (TNH) found Agta bands where the women did hunt pig and deer with bow and arrow. I was so skeptical of this that, after interviewing four women hunters [on different days in different camps], I asked to see the bow of the fourth woman. When I saw that she had a bow and arrows (a somewhat lighter bow than men use), I still found it hard to believe. So I asked her if she could demonstrate her skill by shooting at a nearby banana plant. She readily did this with ease, burying an arrow into the center of the trunk from 30 feet away. Her husband, who happened to be a non-Agta farmer and thus a non-hunter, also showed me a row of ten wild pig jawbones in the roof of their house, all of which, he said, were of pigs his wife had shot. By the end of this trip through this northern part of the Agta area, I was finally convinced that the Griffins were right. Here Agta women did sometimes hunt. [Griffin reported after his last field visit to this area in 1991 that because of the near-extinction of game, it is rare to see men hunting anymore, let alone women.]”

In conclusion, I would say that one must always suspect interpretations put upon prehistoric evidence that “just happen” to exactly repeat the way society is today. Most anthropologists are heavily invested in the patriarchy and tear to shreds verbally any of their number that suggest the patriarchy was not always so firmly established, and perhaps that at some point it did not even exist at all. They cannot seem to grasp that the concept of beauty is almost entirely cultural. They cannot seem to grasp that women may have been venerated for any reason other than their birthing capabilities. When they find a satue of a man seated on a throne, they assume it is a king or ruler who is being venerated – when they find a statue of a woman on a throne they call her a mother, fertility goddess, or say “gee no one knows what they were thinking!” One doesn’t have to look far to find all feminist interpretations of archaeological evidence mocked, even as they admit they have no way of knowing what prehistoric people were really thinking when they sculpted a figure.

But to contrast modern, media-influenced pop culture paganism with ancient goddess worship, consider the juxtaposition of the following images (and I’m even leaving out the “goddess” images which are merely porn shots of young women):

Modern “goddess” art:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sooticasdream/311318073/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/architect4/157667315/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22203480@N05/2216539858/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/pandoras_box/1111244851/
http://www.aboveallart.com/images/valueva_sea_goddess.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/melanelago/2336047064/
http://images.epilogue.net/users/shadowgirl/dark_goddess.jpg
http://www.dannychoo.com/blogimg/goddess2.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/skyofqtown/423230053/

Notice that with one exception only these are white women, and ALL young, extremely thin, and mostly naked (with a bit of civilized modesty thrown in)? These are the popular images of goddess in modern pagan society. These are what come up first on an internet search. Eschewed and forgotten are these, which I have to type in a particular name to find, yet who in many cases were the revered – or feared – goddesses/warrior queens of their time and place (and even in those I have to filter out pornographic photos of young this white women to find real depictions):
Kali dancing on her husband’s corpse
Durga
Hecate, mistress of magic, goddess of death, and huntress
Oya
Coatilique, Serpent Queen
Isis-Maat
Kwan-Yin
Ishtar 1
Ishtar 2

(Note to those who don’t know – I deliberately included in here many goddess modern day pagans find “evil” or “dark”. Not by chance do these also happen to be the most powerful ones.)

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