Ἔσεσθε οὖν ὑμεῖς τέλειοι ὡς ὁ Πατὴρ ὑμῶν ὁ οὐράνιος τέλειός ἐστιν.

Focus on it. Teleios, as commonly translated, means “perfect,” thereby putting this line from Jesus’ antitheses in Matthew 5 as “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48) However, this translation is surely less than perfect as the original Greek teleois has a much different connotation of wholeness and completeness that happens at something’s end. Just as God, the Father, is whole, free from the pain and anxiety of fragmentation, and perfectly put together, Jesus inspires his disciples to live their lives with this air of completeness, as if they had already reached their final destination. One can see echoes of this important biblical word in modern genetics, with telomeres. When chromosomes are translated or replicated they inevitably will lose part of each end of the strand. In order to prevent coding DNA from being lost in this process telomeres, or noncoding end DNA, is put on either side of a strand in order to preserve the genetic material that keeps us healthy and alive. As telomeres get depleted or weak, cellular destruction results from the degrading DNA, and thus we see bodies undergo the slow process of aging and decay. Just as biological vocabulary and Matthew 5 suggests, we understand some direction, some objective, some ending perfect place for us, be that death, with God, etc. From this idea comes the word telos, used both by ancient and contemporary authors to mean the life goal of a being, the perfect place at the end of their trajectory.

After a month’s worth of excavating the female bodies of ancient Greece and Rome, I would wish to culminate this phase of the research looking at the ultimate medical goal, the telos of the ancient Mediterranean female. After so much degradation of femininity and validating female oppression, both physically and socially, there must be some overall objective in mind of these physicians. Today, we will look at the goals that ancient gynecologists have set for the female body – the methods by which Hippocrates, Aristotle, Soranos, Galen, etc. have informed womanhood to redeem themselves from repugnance, instability, and uselessness that was ancient Mediterranean femininity.

To better our understanding of the feminine telos, we will first approach the outlined goals of the male body. In his innate state, the ancient Mediterranean male body was hot, dry, compact, and full of potential to reach great degrees of athleticism and physical perfection. To be masculine was to be penetrative, in all physical, emotional, and societal senses, and impenetrable; Galen outlines the inverse relation of masculine and feminine reproductive organs, thereby implying that male-initiated intercourse acted to complete a part of the female body that was missing. This transcended its anatomical dimension, and – as Deut. 22 suggests – the phallus begins to adopt an aggressive attitude, to the objective of both physically and emotionally breaking women. With a woman’s eruptive, animalistic, and primitive body expressing her uncontrollable and hypersexual spirit, there emerged an urgency for ancient Mediterranean men to tame and cure their female counterparts via penetration and, hopefully, impregnation. This leads to an interesting masculine telos, when considering Aristotle’s one-seed model (See “One-Sex” Model), in which societal responsibility is assigned to men to procreate to maintain a sense of earthly and cosmological order. Moreover, part of being a man, if not the main objective of manhood, was to generate life. This telos exposes a new characterization of ancient masculinity: immortality. The God of Genesis creates “man in His image” from the earth, and therefore the subsequent generation of man from Adam serves as a physical immortalization of God’s image, if we consider human women as the metaphoric earth that nourishes the regenerative image of the man that impregnated her. The female body, therefore, is an ephemeral tool, an unfortunate necessity to the masculine cycle of life that keeps alive the eternal, earthly image of God, the physical reminder of what we looked like in paradise.

​Very rarely will a male gynecologist of ancient Greece or Rome describe the ways in which a female can fulfill her earthly purpose; rather, we must ascertain her societal expectation through the cracks of her broken body image. Considering imagery of the wandering womb and other animalistic characterizations of the female body (See The Wandering Womb, Broken and Barking Bitches,and Little Lamb, who made thee?), women were expected to suppressed their (supposedly) inherent desires of reckless sexuality and evanescence. With this, virginity develops into a valued characteristic of the female body, as it implies “rational” self-control, pristine female anatomy, and pure flesh for gestation of the male seed. With its not-yet-penetrated status, physical perfection, rationality, and dryness, the pre-menarcheal, virginal female becomes greatly characterized as a masculine entity. However, with the evolutionary need to produce the next generation, and the unspoken male need to fulfill his sexual desires, keeping females in a perpetual virginal state would not be pragmatic; similarly, as virginal women experience menarche, their bodies no longer reflect the dry and compacted perfection of masculinity, and thus the womb becomes a threat to the female body and the order of the cosmos. This constructs a maternal telos to the female body, in which conception and childbearing becomes means of redeeming the post-menarcheal, dangerous physical state. The supposed taming of the wandering womb that comes from the moistening of insemination and the anchoring of gestation reflects a pregnant woman’s difficultly in running away and further engaging in promiscuous sexual behavior. This image of the weakened, immobilized pregnant female body surely no longer bears the masculine characterizations of the virginal female body, but rather serves as a model by which women can best perform their femininity, as passive tools of masculine domination.

​I am of the belief that we are all purposeful.
I am not of the belief that we all have a singular purpose.
Let us empower one another to remove the concept of the telos from our cultural vernacular.

The Fourth entry of the Baha’i Twelve Principles of prophet, Baha’u’llah, highlights the connectedness of science and religion: “For God has given humans reason to investigate about the truth of things. If religious matters are against science and reason, they are illusions. For that which is against science is ignorance. And if we say religion is against reason, then the meaning is that religion is ignorance.”

Baha’u’llah here shows this symbiosis between the religious and scientific understandings of the universe; moreover, there is an ignorance that comes when two such modes of understanding antagonize each other. This contemporary Baha’i philosophy mirrors greatly that of ancient Mediterranean society; as medicine was developing in ancient Greece and Rome, the emerging religious practices moved within the curve of the trending science, and vice versa. It is difficult to understand such a linked relationship between science and religion in a society that inexhaustibly pins the two against each other, but ancient Mediterranean culture saw a oneness in religious and scientific thought, as the Baha’i see today. With this, it is not surprising that some of the most influential philosophers of the time, such as Aristotle, also greatly contributed to the scientific understanding of the world. As I have been investigating for the past month, medicine can be read as a mirror for culture. Today, we will take a glance on the inverse and try to understand how culture can be a mirror for medicine. The emerging narrative of the Virgin Mary came at a moment of time in Mediterranean culture when ideas surrounding the pollutabilty, controllability, breakability of the female body where at a scientific peak; she was the essential embodiment of the “scientific breakthroughs” in her context. Continuing, the way the culture and practitioners responded to can give us greater insight to the perspective of the female body, as – in many ways – Mary is made to be archetypal Mother and Female for Christian communities. It is important to remember that Mary is given very little airtime in the Bible (outside of Jesus’ birth and death, she is only majorly mentioned once in the Gospel of Matthew, for example). Nonetheless, today we will exam Mary’s skeleton, as created by the New Testament.

In agreement with the scientific philosophy that connotes masculinity with perfection, the Bible constructs a connection between masculinity and divinity. This can be seen on various Old Testament that precede Mary. For example, In Genesis 2, the Creator constructs Adam (meaning “mankind”) first and then woman is created out of Adam, therein suggesting some order of genders. Genesis continues this gender construction, by developing Eve’s character to be the one creature in paradise that falls into temptation, eats from the tree of Wisdom, and brings death into the lives of all creatures. In this original construction of gender, the writers of Genesis draw connection between masculinity and rationality, strength, and self-control, whereas Eve (a symbol of womanhood) shows tendencies of impulsiveness, gullibility, and primitiveness. In a strong connection to Hesiod’s detailing of Pandora’s creation as a punishment to men that releases evils and disorder from her self-opened jar, it seems that womanhood in Genesis is created to bring about destruction to a stable paradise that solely contained masculinity in its untainted, unfemininized state. If we can play the story of Adam and Eve in retrograde, the only way that life can return to it’s sinless paradise is through the process of destroying femininity.

Fast-forward to the New Testament, Mary and Elizabeth’s bodies are used as vessels through which God, the Father, can express the divinity of masculinity. Luke details the way in which the Holy Spirit impregnates Mary, despite her “not knowing a man,” and Elizabeth, despite her old, infertile age (Luke 1:35-37). Reflecting on the Aristotelian “one-seed” model, which defines the man’s ejaculation as the life-generating substance that uses the female body to grow and develop during gestation, it can be deduced that readers of Luke’s gospel may have considered the generation of life to be man’s biological responsibility. As Luke outlines that Holy Spirits’ role in Mary’s and Elizabeth’s conceptions, the gospel links masculinity to divinity through the audience’s understanding of obstetric medicine. Considering the masculine gendering of the Father and Son, and now the implied life-generating nature and therefore masculine characterization of the Holy Spirit, the Holy Trinity becomes a fully masculine entity, and all that is unholy is therefore feminine. Again, the structure provided by the New Testament, specifically in Luke 1, suggests that in order to achieve goals of salvation and divinity, we must orient ourselves toward the masculine and away from the feminine.

This led me to wonder how such a structure for a religion would grow to the depths it has reached, considering it is rooted in misogyny and excludes both women and effeminate men. However, we must remember the ideology of gender construction that were discussed in the “One-Sex” Model. While ancient Mediterranean gynecologist would attempt at great lengths to ensure that women would never be able to reach the physical “perfection” of the masculine man, the “one-sex” model still permitted woman the hope of approaching this perfection through masculinization. Such a medical conception is culturally reflected in Greek mythology, as Athena and Artemis receive their divine status on through the masculine characterizations, being the goddess of war and hunting, respectively. Thus begins the direction we will head in for the next month: the masculinization of Mary. In what ways do the early commentaries on Mary (the Infancy Gospels and Nativity sermons) work within the ancient gender constructions to comment on the perfection/holiness of Jesus’ feminine mother? How can Mary remain sanctified as the mother of the Lord, who is “highly favored” (Luke 1:28), and remain both a woman and a mother? How does this gender construction of Mary will this invite or deter a feminine audience of the time? Let’s do this, dahlings!

I’ve always hated Autumn. Sure, it’s objectively the most scrapbookable season of Massachusetts, but something about it is so essentially painful for me. Not the departure from the summer’s promise of warm memories, not the reminder of decay and descent in the leaves, not the intolerable tricker-treaters that break silence in my neighborhood every October’s end. Rather, I resent Fall for being transitional, a liminal space. Today, like Autumn, I will leave a characterization of my work that has defined me for the past four weeks: ancient medicine. In doing so, I will open my research to the divine, the religious, the hyper-medical (if you will), something that has been on the back burner in all the words I’ve read and written over the past month. And while I have been collecting data and gathering understanding on Mary’s context, both medically and culturally, there is something so terrifying in departing the safety, objectivity, and criticizability Hippocratic treatises and Aristotelian philosophy. How can I enter into the life of this woman and tell her the reality of her rhetorical existence? How could I possibly be ready to confront the monument that is this mother? It’s that autumnal doubt. But as summer’s crops become winter’s sustenance, we must enter this next season of work in ​full confidence of our preparations.
​Un-timidly, let me introduce you to the second mother to many: The Virgin Mary.

If Game Show Network were to exist over two millennia ago, “The Purity Test” would surely be of the most viewed features among their male audience. Physicians, clergymen, and your average, ancient Mediterranean Joe were simply obsessed with confirming the virginity, and therefore physical purity of a female body at nuptial question. Various cultural practices and medical surveys were performed on these untrustworthy and ambiguous females in order to soothe the masculine anxiety over imperfection reproduction, uncertain genealogy, and ‘uncontrollable’ feminine sexuality. The following entries highlight some of the fan-favorite methods of testing purity, I hope you enjoy the program:

1) Pregnancy. Easy, if a woman’s womb is swollen, she clearly must be with child, and therefore she must have engaged in sexual intercourse. The Old Testament connote great shame with pregnant women that are not yet betrothed, and urges men who have sexual intercourse with virgins to marry them immediately, the unmarried mother was an unacceptable image in Ancient Mediterranean eyes: “If a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed, and seizes her and lies with her, and they are found, then the man who lay with her shall give to the father of the young woman fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife, because he has violated her. He may not divorce her all his days.” (Deut. 22:28-9)
2) Bloodied Sheets: As briefly discussed in Parthenogenesis – Creating Virginity, the Old Testament featured the nuptial sheets as one of the major articles of evidence for virginity. As women were expected to enter marriages as virgins, it would therefore be expected that the sheets upon which the nuptial consummation occurred would be quite saturated in blood from the breaking of the virginal flesh that sealed the womb. In fact, the bloodied sheets would regularly be presented to the parents of the bride as a means of affirming the legitimacy of the woman that the father presented to the husband. The Old Testament details how the father can use the bloodied sheets as a means of exposing a lying husband that is slandering a wife of which he is no longer fond (Deut. 22:13-20) While this logic does fit within its contextual physes of the sealed womb, it does pose a few problems as a questionable method of testing a bride’s virginity, as it is post-nuptial and, as contemporary science indicates, there would be no guaranteed bloodshed from the virginal bride. Ancient Jewish midrashim detail the bloodied sheets being brought before a court of elders with testifying witnesses in order to determine the purity or fidelity of a bride in her virginity trial.
3) Vaginal Examination: Even modern day gynecologists would leave a vaginal examination without full certainty of the sexual status of a woman, with “hymen integrity” being so subjective and variant depending on the patient. With this, it is not surprising that the first vaginal examinations performed by male physicians would not be without their faults. Ancient gynecologists would perform both pre- and post-coital examinations of the bride to test her virginity, specifically seeking the degree of rupture of the female genitalia. A healthy, intact looking vagina would pass the test, whereas vagina that appeared to have undergone physical trauma would be deemed impure. Clearly, upon post-coital examination of the vagina it would be impossible to determine the premarital purity of the bride at hand, nonetheless the practice persisted.
4) Ordeal Test: Described by Herodotus in his historical accounts of ancient Greece, an annual ordeal test was performed on the young female population of a town in Libya. In such a festival, the unmarried women would be divided into two groups that would proceed to attack each other. The women that remained alive and relative unscathed from the festive attack would be considered “true” virgins, as pristine physicality was associated with virginity and rupture and defilement was associated with promiscuity and “false” virginity. Moreover, Michael Rosenberg notes the religious element of this ritual, in that “virginity is read not through a woman’s anatomy, but rather through divine providence.” (Signs of Virginity, p 25)
5) Snakes and Cakes: Another popular purity test of the ancient Mediterranean culture involved virgins, snakes, and cakes. The questionable virgins would be blindfolded and led into a cave with cakes. The blinded women would present the cakes to the snakes of the cave, and if the snakes accepted the cakes, they would be deemed “true” virgins, whereas a rejected caked would point out the “false” virgins.
6) Virginity by Faith: Rosenberg highlights that among the medical and cultural ways through which men of Mediterranean Antiquity confirmed the purity of the bride at question, there was one newly emerging method that was to be revered above the others: divine oracle. In Matthew’s Gospel of the New Testament, Joseph is seen as a “righteous man,” for trusting in his holy vision of Mary’s valid virginity and refusing to expose her unmarried motherhood to the town. The Matthean infancy narrative itself includes emphatic repetition of Mary’s impregnation by the Holy Spirit and therefore connection to the divine. This implies that perhaps the most valid of virginity tests will not be in a medical examination or a cake challenge, but rather in an observation of the women’s pure demeanor and faith.

Ranging in levels of scientific validity and sheer ridiculousness, ancient Mediterranean virginity tests point to the severe distrust that men felt toward a woman’s understanding of her own body. Such practices and cultural mythologies, for example Pandora and Tamar who both masquerade as virgins, outline a fragility in the masculine conception of women. In medicine of Mediterranean Antiquity, the masculine body was conceived to be perfect, clean, and relatively undefiable, whereas “women [were] pollutable, polluted, and polluting” (Carson, Before Sexuality p 158). This, therefore, puts women in somewhat of an existential game of monkey in the middle, as they wrestle between expectations of purity and impurity. Perhaps the emerging hand of New Testament God will craft the solution to this feminine confusion: the Virgin Mother, Mary of Nazareth.

In order to rationalize the “natural order” that allowed the female body to conserve its pure, virginal state until nuptial consumption, ancient culture and medicine constructed the idea of a sealed womb. In the process of nuptial consummation, the woman’s vaginal canal was thought to widen, which was evidenced by the deepening of the girl’s voice, as her throat was thought to symmetrically widen upon her first sexual experience. Similarly, Soranos details the violent breaking of internal vaginal folds and their supporting uterine vessels upon a woman’s first sexual experience, which permanently changes the female body to be more open. Echoes of this “sealed womb” notion can be seen in the contemporary understanding of the “hymen,” or the internal vaginal membrane that partially or fully covers a virgin’s uterus; wedding veils can also be thought as symbolic projections of the hymen, which protects the bride from external dangers in her vulnerable passage between her father’s and husband’s care. As with today’s cultural obsession with “popping her cherry,” Soranos and even writers of Deuteronomy believed that heavy blood flow was to be expected with a virgin’s first experience with sexual intercourse, as the aggressive phallic force of the penis destroyed the protective tissue around or on top of the womb. This actually led to an ancient Jewish and early Christian tradition of checking the nuptial sheets after consummation, with large blood stains validating the virginity of the bride and therefore the legitimacy of the marriage. Hesiod’s myth, in which Pandora opens her own metaphoric womb-jar without phallic help, serves as a cultural cautionary tale against women that elect to change their own anatomy, as they will create evil and disorder in the world.

​The social construction of virginity, while at the center of primary cultural rituals, is surely problematic for many of its followers. Firstly, in connecting nuptials to sex, our cultures define the main objective of marriage to be defloration and eventual procreation; using language, such as “gametes,” only further associates conception with marriage, as if to invalidate any nuptial union that cannot create or does not desire children. Continuing, the sacrificial nature of wedding rituals objectifies women by reducing them to lamb-like entities that shuffle between the masculine protection of their father and their husband. Similarly, wedding attire equates purity to beauty, as if to associate shame and dirtiness with female promiscuity. As Rosenberg states, while much of the cultural and medical constructions of virginity tell young women how to understand their body, these constructions more importantly inform men how best to perform their masculinity. To be a “correct man” who followed the medical and cultural ideas of Mediterranean Antiquity was to be so sexually aggressive that you would make your newlywed wife violently bleed upon her first sexual experience.

Sex does not have to be marital, nor does it have to be painful. What sexpectations made by writers and physicians over two millennia ago do you still hold on to in your body image, marriage plans, or biology textbooks?

I was sitting in my high school biology class, during the lecture on bees. The slide that detailed their reproductive systems outlined two distinct paths of procreation: 1) the fertilized egg, produced out of two gametes, 2) the unfertilized egg, produced out of parthenogenesis. What was that, Dr. Ryan? gamete, derived from the ancient Greek word for “wife” or “husband” (think polygamous). Parthenogenesis, derived from the ancient Greek word parthenos or “virgin.” How can these social constructs that relate sex to marital status remain in today’s biology textbooks? Do we really think the queen bee wants or is deserving of all the problematic social baggage that comes with the title of ‘parthenos?’ Let us attack this issue head on… or more appropriately – maidenhead on.

Ancient Greek culture (and not-so-shockingly, into contemporary Western culture) uses marriage as ritual symbolizing the physical union of two individuals. As with most rituals, the actions performed in the ritual are often metaphoric of the internal (physical and emotional) changes that we undergo in the process of developing and moving through life. The study of Ancient Greek wedding rituals can, therefore, be incredibly indicative of the cultural perceptions of the female body, as she changes from parthenos to gyne or ‘unmarried woman’/’virgin’ to ‘married woman.’ Seeing as most girls of Mediterranean Antiquity were expected to be wed between the ages of 14-16 years old and ritual itself culminated to the nuptial consummation, the wedding rituals symbolized such a transitional period of girl to woman. Reflecting on content from Little Lamb, who made thee?, the marriage ritual from this period (and up to today) is strikingly similar in imagery and cultural perception to a sacrifice, thereby expressing then sacrificial killing of the bride’s girlhood. This is further conveyed in the ancient ritual practice, in which the betrothed girl would perform a ritual sacrifice of her childhood toys and garments on an altar the day before her wedding. The customary attire of the bride was also expressive of the symbolism of the marriage ritual: a veil and a girdle was to be worn. Respectively, the veil acted to protect the vulnerable female, as she walked the dangerous liminal space between girlhood and womanhood, and the girdle (called a “zone”) symbolically held the eruptive, feminine sexual energy that she had been preserving for her husband. The husband’s removal of the “zone” was culturally associated with the ritual of consummation, which occurred upon the marriage night. Casey M. Reynolds, in “The Nuptial Ceremony of Ancient Greece and the Articulation of Male Control Through Ritual,” points out that without postnuptial education, citizenship, or societal power, gynes remained children in the emotional and sociological sense. Perhaps the supposed transition to womanhood was, thus, conceived in the physical changes that came with nuptial consummation.

Michael Rosenberg’s Signs of Virginity excellently outlines medical and cultural conceptions of virginity from Mediterranean Antiquity, which will be helpful in navigating this liminal space between parthenos and gyne. Throughout the introductory chapter “Defining Virginity, Making Men,” Rosenberg details that this cultural compartmentalization of virgin vs nonvirgin was most likely generated out of the male fear of infertility or impurity in the female body they selected to bear their progeny. Moreover, a virgin came with the promise of undefiled, pristine reproductive organs, and near full certainty that the child was a product of his sperm only. With this, a cultural importance of virginity emerged, and the medical constructions of the virginal body followed suit.

In the tradition of the past few posts, The Wandering Womb and Barking and Broken Bitches, it seems only customary to discuss the next animal which served as a primary analogy for the female body in Mediterranean Antiquity: the lamb. Galen, a male pioneer of OB/GYN in 2nd Century Rome, was the first to relate the uterine lining ​​to an amnion – a cup that was used to collect the blood of sacrificial animals. This takes direct influence from previous Hippocratic imagery that compares menstrual flow to the flowing of blood from a sacrificial animal. Moreover, Galen develops Hippocratic constructions of the female body, by constructing the amniotic sac to be a cup that collects the sacrificial blood of the female body; perhaps this blood was considered sacrificial because the female body suffered in the process of generating new life, and thereby Hippocratic physicians and Galen were seeking to construct a deeper meaning to menstruation. In this interesting instance of Mediterranean Antiquity that relates human biology to religious ritual, the female body, on one hand, becomes empowered with significance and somewhat revered for its martyr-like suffering for the greater benefit of a growing community and new life.

This is surely a revolutionary view of the female reproductive system as being anything but violent, repulsive, and shameful. However, on the other hand, this construction of the female body delivers a similar feebleness and “repress-ability” of femininity that previous gynecological treatises incessantly construct. Male physicians, such as Galen and Hippocrates, use this sacrificial imagery to equate women to animals, such as lamb, that lack the mental agency to lucidly consent to valiant efforts such as a sacrificial ritual. Just as male leaders of religious traditions believed that they could take advantage of the lives of feeble minded animals as a means of “honoring” their gods, Galen urged Mediterranean men of Antiquity to take advantage of the female body. Continuing, as the bodies of sacrificial lambs were considered only significant to the religious ritual, Galen’s detailing of the uterine lining implies that bearing children is the sole purpose of the female body and that a woman is not able to achieve anything greater than or outside giving her entire self to the production of new life. Similarly, Galen’s constructions of the “amniotic sac” implies that male physicians of the time viewed the process of gestation as a metaphoric slaying of the mother. The question we must ask out of this, then, is who is sacrificing the mother? Is it men through the aggressive act of penetration? Is it God through the painful biology of menstruation? Is the woman’s wandering womb, which violently attacks its feminine host? or could it possibly be the female body revolting against itself, in its own monthly realization of its own “innate” inferiority? However this question is answered, femininity and the female body are depicted as lesser than and something of which to be ashamed.

This medical construction in itself functions as somewhat of a sexual assault on women, as they are unconsentingly giving their bodies over to the control of others. It is quite absurd, in my opinion, that contemporary gynecologists and obstetricians continue to use vocabulary that inherently constructs women as animalistic, lacking in agency, and controllable by men, such as “amnion” and “amniotic fluid.”

So to answer the age-old question that so wrongly has been posed at Jesus, instead of the entirety of womanhood: Little Lamb, who made thee? we can confidently answer that it was Galen and the male gynecologists of Mediterranean Antiquity that made women into the sacrificial animals that we continue to see them as today.

​Little Lamb, God bless thee.

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.