The concept seemed so extreme to me, I just had to look it up.
Here's what I found from The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets by Barbara Walker
Xau,
Kati
http://www.goddesscafe.com/yoni/dentata.html
"Toothed vagina," the classic symbol of men's fear of sex, expressing the unconscious belief that a woman may eat or castrate her partner during intercourse. Frued said, "Probably no male human being is spared the terrifying shock of threatened castration at the sight of female genitals." But he had the reason wrong. The real reason for this "terrifying shock" is a mouth-symbolism, now recognized universally in myth and fantasy: "It is well-known in psychiatry that both males and females fantasize as a mouth the female's entranceway to the vagina."
The more patriarchal the society, the more fear seems to be aroused by the fantasy. Chinese patriarchs said women's genitals were not only gateways to immortality but also "executioners of men." Moslem aphorisms said: "Three things are insatiable: the desert, the grave, and a woman's vulva."
Ancient writings describe the male sexual function not as "taking" or "posessing" the female, but rather "being taken" or "putting forth." Ejaculation was viewed as a loss of a man's vital force, which was "eaten" by a woman. The Greek sema ir "semen: meant both "seed" and "food." Sexual "consummation" was the same as "consuming" (the male).
Apparently Freud was wrong in assuming that men's fear of female genitals was based on the idea that the female had been castrated. The fear was much less empathetic, and more personal: a fear of being devoured, of experiencing the birth trauma in reverse. A Catholic scholar's curious description of the Hell-mouh as a womb inadvertently reveals this idea: "When we think of man entering hell we think of him as establishing contact with the most intrinsic, unified, ultimate and deepest level of the reality of the world."
No comments:
Post a Comment