The ancient Greek κῠ́ων (kuon), meaning “dog,” serves as a strong image in the cultural and medical depiction of women and their reproductive organs. Coming off of The Wandering Womb post, we have already investigated the animalistic construction of the uterus, which functioned to instill fear in women over their own bodies and create urgency in women to have sex with men. This post will continue that notion, by looking into the common analogy of women and dogs, as seen in various texts from ancient Greek culture and science.
Homer specifically, in his Odyssey, is quite generous with his use of analogies to dogs when he describes vicious women. For example, Homer uses the word κύντερον (kunteron), roughly translating to “more dog-like,” in two instances in the Odyssey: first, when describing a woman that viciously and shamelessly killed her husband; secondly, when describing a violently hungry stomach. According to Helen King, the word for stomach (gaster), used in Homer’s text was used to describe both the bowel and the womb, as Greek physicians hypothesized that digestion and gestation occurred in the same organ. Continuing, there are over ten instances in this text where Homer uses the phrase “shameless bitches” or “impudent bitches” to describe women that seem to obstruct, dominate, or hurt men of the epic. Similarly, Hesiod in his Worls and Days and Theogony adopts a similar practice of comparing Pandora and her womb (gaster) to dogs, as she is said to have been divinely created with ‘a bitch mind,’ and ‘ravenous inside.’
Throughout gynecological texts from Greek Antiquity, there continues to be a strong relationship between women, wombs, and dogs. Aristotle, in his earlier treatises, compares a sexually aroused woman to a sexually aroused female dog, in that her breasts will swell. This suggested comparison links femininity to the insatiable sexual appetite and dissolute insolence with which Aristotle describes undomesticated dogs. Obstetric vocabulary of Greek Antiquity itself seems to draw the link between the kuon (dog) and kuein (the quality of being swollen or pregnant).
Cultural and medical connections between wild dogs and women serves to further depict women as uncontrollable, violent beings that require domestication from men. From this, not only is the physical anatomy of women being animalistically portrayed, as discussed in The Wandering Womb, but the symbolic entity that is femininity becomes reduced to a recklessly sexual, wild animal. Perhaps, therefore, the wandering womb can be projected to the ancient Greek male perception of femininity itself, being something that is fleeting and uncontrollably moving away from where it “should” be. Just as intercourse was thought to anchor the womb, perhaps impregnation was an ancient man’s way of controlling and constricting woman from achieving things that their wives would have, had they not been so suppressed by their social and medical constructions.
With echoes in contemporary gender roles, this fragile and insecure male perspective of femininity influenced much of development gynecology, specifically the physes in Hippocratic treatises. The treatises outline the idea that a woman who has given birth suffers from considerably less menstrual pain than a virgin, as the vaginal flesh has been stretched and broken. Just as the penetrating man destroys the strength of the girls vaginal flesh, he is symbolically destroying her “natural” feminine tenancies for overt sexuality and fleeing mobility. Conclusively, to be a fully-realized, socially correct woman of Greek Antiquity was to be a broken bitch.