Perseus, pick up your shield

At seven or eight years old, my grandmother gave me a volume of Greek mythology. I can't remember the title. It was a scholarly work, a survey, sort of an encyclopedia. It was a small book with hard, real wood covers and those gossamer onion-skin leaves and tiny print. Yes, it smelled just as you think it did.

I had heard about the story of Medusa and I was obsessed, for no reason anyone could think of. I opened that book to the section on Perseus and Andromeda, and there was Medusa. It was a picture of an ancient bust, realistically executed. I know now that it was Bernini’s Medusa made in 1630.

The snakes of stone seemed to writhe on the page. There was something about the look on her face that fascinated me. She seemed angry and excited at the same time.

I had to know everything about Medusa. I had to have a copy of any picture of her, any article about her. I had to watch every movie in which she was a character.

It took me until last year at age 49 to understand why I was drawn to her. She was my mother. Even as a child, I knew the truth, but it was buried in my unconscious. Like Perseus, I picked up my shield and looked at her only through a reflection, an avatar, lest she finally, truly, turn me to stone. My shield mirrors were movies like Mommie Dearest and Queen Bee, the antics of Madonna, the small-town dictatrix Nellie Oleson, the nicotine-stained scene chewing of Bette Davis.

Each of these characters, these women, was a shield reflection of the Medusa in the next room. I was turning it around in the light to see who she was, to scry the truth without being killed.

Medusa was raped and cursed to walk the earth with hair of snakes; she was abused and then punished for being abused. It curdled her and turned her into an indiscriminate murderess. Her story is the story of so many women like my mother; innocent girls who were abused and broken, and who turned into monsters. It is a story that exemplifies tragedy in the original sense.

We are living in the age of the gorgon, all of us. The animating force behind so much malevolence abroad is feminine. We do not want to face this, so we deny it and punish those (especially men) who name the problem.

We have choices. We can choose to face this problem and talk about it candidly, but this requires women and men to put down the superannuated hysterical nonsense about culture-wide “misogyny,” and I don’t believe most men and women will do this.

I believe the choice we will make will be like the choices we’ve been making for decades. We will continue to punish and degrade men and boys while claiming that we’re “uplifting women.” We will continue to lie in direct contradiction to all evidence anecdotal and statistical. We will continue to create a story about how oppressed women are, and how essentially, inherently evil males are, and the resentment will continue to build.

Until it snaps, and Perseus takes up his sword again.

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