'Mother of the World' by my colleague, Meryl Ann Butler, Managing Editor of OpEdNews
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I'm taking a chance here. At 82 years of age, I'm going to risk embarrassing myself by reconsidering the message and significance of what some consider to be "pornography," i.e., the images of ordinary mature women.
I'm going to propose that like their prehistoric, sculptured counterparts found throughout the ancient world, the images in question can lead us to more fully understand life and its purposes. Moreover, they can help liberate men especially from the toxic patriarchy that is responsible for our wars and the environmental omnicide produced by our economic systems.
I write as a man more deeply embedded in patriarchy than most. I was once a Roman Catholic priest who entered the seminary to embrace a life of celibacy at the age of 14. As such, I became profoundly embedded into perhaps the world's most patriarchal system characterized by a largely unconscious misogyny and fear of women.
It was an exaggerated embodiment of the metasystem that afflicts the world in general. Like that overarching social arrangement, it told me that viewing the unclothed female form was somehow dangerous and sinful. Post-priesthood married life and reading feminist scholars has shown me it is not.
Here I'm not talking about Playboy or Penthouse, much less about degrading portrayals of young women and girls forced into the pornography trade, perhaps for the profit of others and/or for their own career advancement.
Still less am I referring to snuff films or misogynist portrayals of women in bondage, degrading situations or pain. All of those represent hideous abuses and exploitation of women for purposes of pleasing leering men devoid of appreciation or affection for women outside the pleasure the latter's objectifications afford.
No, what I'm presenting as culturally and even theologically liberating are the willing displays of the female form by mothers and grandmothers of mature ages from middle age through the 90s. (Perhaps surprisingly to some, these can be accessed by the hundreds on the world-wide web.)
I'm going to suggest that these depictions may be seen as representing modern day equivalents of the oldest goddess images found virtually everywhere in the world's most ancient archeological digs- many of the more well known ones are featured in the short video below.
Those representations with their prominent breasts, vulvas, and ochre paint (along with occasional inscriptions and accompanying mythology) call attention to what since prehistoric times have been recognized as mostly wordless texts revealing humankind's fundamental relationship to the feminine aspect of the Divine.
What I present here is inspired by the work of Monica Sjà ¶Ãƒ ¶ and Barbara Mor and their classic 1987 work, The Great Cosmic Mother: rediscovering the religion of the earth. Granted, the two authors often rail against pornography in the negative senses noted above (196, 328, 411, 383, 391-92). However, their treatment of the deep meanings revealed in specifically female processes associated with their unique physical characteristics suggest what I'm about to share.
The Central Significance of the Clitoris
Undoubtedly, the most unique of the characteristics in question is the clitoris. As such, it is a fitting starting point for any reverent search for divine revelations contained in the wondrous feminine form. Beginning with the clitoris also obviates criticisms by some who might find here no more than transparent rationalization of the sexual pleasure that willingly unclothed female bodies inevitably provide.
Such suspicions, Sjà ¶Ãƒ ¶ and Mor suggest, reflect the traditional vilification of sexual pleasure fostered by the patriarchy which sees erotic sensations and the women who elicit them as dangerous threats to the "surplus repression" necessitated by the reigning economic system's need to control an otherwise delightfully distracted workforce (as indicated by Marcuse in Eros and Civilization).
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