Female Sexuality: The Myth

​Poor Venus.

According to one version of the ancient myth, she sprang into existence fully formed from sea foam produced after Cronus castrated his father, Uranus, and tossed the offending equipment into the sea.

Yes.
The Goddess of Beauty, Love and Sexuality was born from sea scum and severed genitals.
(Penis AND Uranus? Really???)
​
Botticelli gave the story considerably better public relations.
In The Birth of Venus, his goddess floats gracefully to shore on a scallop shell: naked, golden-haired, impossibly beautiful and, oddly, innocent. She is the embodiment of desire, yet she doesn't appear particularly desirous of anything herself. (To me, she looks sad. With a dash of vapid.)
That contradiction has always fascinated me.
So, my Venus arrives on her shell, too.
But mine is wearing a bunny suit.

Because apparently, somewhere in the 1960’s, nothing said "female sexuality" quite like a cute and fluffy woodland creature with  libidinous leanings.
 
She looks almost sweetly bewildered by the whole business. And perhaps she should be. Like Botticelli's Venus, she's been presented as an object of desire before she seems to have discovered desire for herself.

Therein lies the joke.
​
And perhaps something considerably less funny.
Women have long been handed contradictory instructions about sexuality: Be desirable, but not desiring. Be sexy, but not sexual. Attract attention, but don't appear to want it

​No wonder she looks confused.
Maybe that's why the bunny suit works.
What could be more harmless than a bunny?
Or less threatening? 
Next, we'll meet the goddess behind the bunny ears.