Some of The Mandarin’s team of writers are still on holidays and have the luxury of whiling away hours in the National Museum Australia’s best exhibition spaces. I am one of them.
Several hours in a dark, air-conditioned room taking in the rich cultural tapestry of folklore, myth and religious iconography of history’s women and female deities is my idea of heaven.
From Ishtar to Sekhmet, and Venus to Vajravetali, I will gladly admire the contour of every lion-headed, ankh-wielding mistress and marble rendering of each female protagonist whose embodiment of beguiling womanhood and venerable justice casts her as the ultimate form of enlightened being.
Please, show me your hundreds’-year-old scroll painted with the female guiding light to Paradise and a thousand, intricate, almost-invisible Buddhist sutras.
Let me feast my eyes on the gold miniature circa 1600 CE with the Mughal Indian depiction of ‘virgin’ Maryam cradling her newborn.
I could spend forever admiring the small, shiny marble figurines left in the early graves of those who resided on the Cyclades islands of the Aegean Sea.
So why, following a blissful afternoon peering at artefacts and sculptures dedicated to the divine feminine from the people of ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Rome and India, am I trembling with white-hot fury?
I have a sneaking suspicion it is because boiled down to its simplest form, the human history of worshipping (and sometimes making sacrificial offerings for) the divine feminine is a bit like a pot-luck exercise for privileged suck-ups.
Want to win a war? Worship that goddess. Concerned your natural virility will fall flat of royal expectations? Build a temple dedicated to the divine mother. Worried your military invasion will not be regarded by the colonised communities as just or ordained? Press a coin with Venus’ likeness minted on one side (and your own on the other). Or perhaps you want to curry favour for prosperity and glory in the afterlife? Commission an other-worldly depiction of Tefnut, mother of the earth god Geb, alongside an image of you adulating in the bottom right-hand corner.
A parade of zealots through time, mostly wealthy men (who to this day continue to benefit from patriarchal privilege), romanticising and idolising female divinity or kneeling humbly before a vengeful, scary ogre-lady for fear of clumsy misfortune. Because if there is no more mysticism that can inspire awe for a woman’s exquisite beauty and life-giving powers, maybe she’s to blame when things head south.
Can we truly say a society worshipped a woman in a way that actually mattered if the legacy of that cult was more patriarchy, which today exploits women for the bulk of domestic and emotional labour, and pays them nothing if not much less for their efforts?
Of course, it’s not that simple. There were many common folk whose faith in worshipping these sheros was sincere. They had little if any power to transform social norms and dismantle systems. In some cases, the march of time saw Indigenous matriarchal societies colonised or disappear completely.
For example, early communities like the native Inuits of the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, whose ancestors revered the ecological protector and sea mistress Sedna, have had traditional values systems subsumed and diluted by alternative modern systems.
In other cases, like West Arnhem’s Kuninjku people whose young female ancestral beings take the form of Yawkyawk (freshwater mermaids who inhabit pools and streams in the Northern Territory), patriarchy has been inherited from an outside community. However certain quirks of language, which do not distinguish between male or female third-person pronouns among various First Nations groups in Australia prevail.
But the idolisation or demonisation of what the divine feminine can symbolise — from the wonder of creation to the unflinching power of nature’s forces and the cycles of the seasons, or the wrath of a furious mother like Persephone’s, Demeter, who cursed the land and crippled crops when her daughter was spirited away to the underworld — has not actually improved outcomes for the fairer sex.
Even one of the ‘Feared and revered’ exhibition explainers on the holy female virtues of compassion and salvation confesses: “As mother figures, [women] are venerated as providers of mercy, comfort and strength, and are important in the daily lives of worshippers. In many societies, however, such influence in spiritual life has not translated into higher status for women themselves.”
1/2 'Feared and Revered: Feminine Power through the Ages' celebrates the power and diversity of female spiritual beings in cultural traditions and beliefs across the globe.
On display now | Tickets: https://t.co/eArZjqYiDH pic.twitter.com/3UdVDkvRMo
— National Museum of Australia (@nma) December 31, 2022
No culture in the history of humankind has yet to free women from the shackles of the patriarchy.
The world today remains a hostile place for women and girls, with the most vulnerable facing higher risks of violence, sexual exploitation, forced labour and trafficking. And in the past decade, the overall number of female homicides has remained largely unchanged.
According to a study released by UNDOC and UN Women last year, global estimates of the rates of women and girls killed at home were that 45,000 victims died at the hands of intimate partners or other family members (including fathers, mothers, uncles and brothers) in 2021.
Around the world today, more than five women or girls are killed every hour on average by someone in their own family. The estimate is absolutely unacceptable, but researchers believe the number is much higher.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data from 2017 shows that, locally, approximately one-quarter of women have experienced at least one incident of violence by an intimate partner. Women in Australia are three times more likely to have experienced violence by a partner since age 15, and one in three women (31.1%) have experienced physical or sexual violence (or both) perpetrated by a man they know.
In Australia, Indigenous women are disproportionately affected by gender-related killings, referred to by scholars as ‘femicide’. First Nations women suffering family violence are also 11 times more likely to die than their non-Indigenous peers and have a 34-times greater chance of ending up in hospital.
In the 2022 Household, Income and Labour Dynamics Survey of more than 17,000 people, 10.3% of Australian women over the age of 15 will provide unpaid care. This is compared to 6.3% of men. Women are also ‘considerably more likely’ to fulfil caring duties for the elderly in addition to the work they do to earn a living.
Meanwhile, chronic mansplaining persists, the likes of so-called ‘misogynistic online influencer’ Andrew Tate continues to inspire a following, the Taliban’s anti-women efforts have banned them from places of learning and working with NGOs in Afghanistan, and APS leaders are still giving caveats about not wanting to be shrill when discussing issues such as gender equality and feminism in a public forum.
Mursal Nabizada was a member of the Afghan parliament. She stayed in Afghanistan. She did not leave after the Taliban took over the country.
MP Nabizada was shot dead in her home today.
Afghanistan is hell on earth for women. pic.twitter.com/bT2IAatWHz
— Sara Wahedi (@SaraWahedi) January 15, 2023
With domestic sexual abuse rates being 17% for women (compared to 4.3% for men), when 22.3% of Australian CEOs are women, and Australia’s gender pay gap woefully sits at 22.8%, things are quite frankly so dire that being shrill should be the least of our concerns. I am instantly reminded of the title of Wendy McCarthy’s memoir ‘Don’t be too polite, girls’ and her opinion piece, penned last July, about the backwards slide of women’s rights in the US when the Supreme Court officially reversed the case law on abortion rights established by Roe v Wade.
Clearly, being feared, revered and everything in between is not enough for a woman to reach her full potential in this world.
A former boss once warned me that while he supported the women’s equality movement, talking about it “excessively” might diminish my credibility or perceived objectivity as a journalist. In response, I generated data demonstrating that the number of articles I have penned that used the word ‘woman’ was metrically equivalent to the number of ones referencing ‘men’. He was simply not used to journalistic output that gave statistically equal weight to issues for all people.
To this day, I wonder what it is my boss was concerned about for me: that I may be paid less than a man or at higher risk of sexual violence and murder in my own home. Boy, have I got news for him.
There’s a great piece of wisdom credited to Sufi mystic Rumi that examines the value of space between our ego and our souls. He encourages people to experience the fullness of life and existence (enlightenment) by being led by the higher desires of the soul. In order to get there, however, people need to be able to meet the basic elements of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Throughout history, gender inequality has seen women denied stable enjoyment of the first two rungs of that hierarchy: physiological needs and safety needs. And then we expect them to thrive when really it’s a miracle they have survived the death by a thousand cuts of everyday microaggressions at work, on the road, or in the shopping centre.
Solutions to what seems like the intractable problem of gender inequality and violence against women exist. And beyond the private altars of our individual lives, policymakers are working hard behind the scenes to improve women’s safety with early intervention and risk assessment, access to survivor-centred support, and a more gender-responsive justice system.
A new national plan to end violence against women and children agreed to by Australia’s state, territory and federal governments was released last October with four objectives aimed at improving prevention, intervention and response efforts, as well as recovery and healing services. The plan will be split into two five-year action plans, which are expected to be released early this year.
Social services minister Amanda Rishworth said last year the goal of the national plan was to liberate the next generation of Australian women and children from violence.
“Gender-based violence is rooted in gender inequality and unequal power relations, particularly those that view women and girls as subordinate to men and boys,” Rishworth said.
“It’s everybody’s business to address the gendered dimensions that drive family, domestic and sexual violence.”
At the end of 2022, the Destroy the Joint group tallied the deaths of women, who were killed by violence in Australia last year. A total of 55 women’s lives were taken at the hands of violent perpetrators.
Recent shocking reports of the murder and violence against women in this country has angered us all. It is unacceptable and we must act. These women, daughters, aunties and friends deserved better from us all. Violence against women is not inevitable. pic.twitter.com/1r3kXePvsE
— Amanda Rishworth MP (@AmandaRishworth) December 22, 2022
I sighed as I digested the stories of groups of people across Africa, the Caribbean and South America who honour the Sirenesque spirit of water Mami Wata, and the teachings of some ancient religions that also worshipped androgynous, gender-fluid or ambiguous beings, and left the museum.
As a millennial woman who was told ‘girls can do anything’ and persevered with grit and determination on the advice that if I did my best and kept smiling the rewards would flow, I now find myself advocating for gender equality until I’m blue in the face. How was it that I was taught to ardently believe in the potency of women’s contributions (including my own) and then spend the latter part of my life convincing others this was the case?
How did I land in 2023 and find myself living as an adult woman during times when an Australian prime minister would boast about the privilege of Women’s March for Justice protestors not being shot at, when gender-equality reporting to WGEA by government agencies has only just become mandatory, and a parliamentary staffer was busted for allegations of not only masturbating on his female boss’ desk but sharing videos and photos of the event?
It’s almost as though the more you learn, the more reason you have to be astounded by the absurdity of how civil society can claim to be civil. Academics estimate that it will be another 286 years to close legal-protection loopholes and for discriminatory laws that disadvantage women to be changed. The work to turn the tide on millennia of harassment, harm and gendered violence is likely to go on even longer.
Sex discrimination commissioner and change-maker Kate Jenkins told the National Press Club last month that she would remain patient, pragmatic and persistent in the push toward greater respect and equality. I don’t think I have another 286 years of patience in me. As an adult, I am flatlining from a lifetime of spiritual and moral injury imposed by the patriarchy.
One of the Indian goddesses showcased in the National Museum’s exhibit, Kali the Terrible or Chamunda, dishes out ‘fearsome compassion’ to release humans from their ego and free them of ignorance. A sandstone representation of Kali from 1000 CE shows an emaciated figure with matted hair and bulging eyes. She is often depicted wearing a garland of severed heads and represents death and the creative, destructive power of time.
In the spirit of Kali, I hope we are able to shift the collective consciousness to a higher perspective and banish key drivers of hate and inequality to the fiery pits of hell. This is where my thoughts, prayers, time and energy will be flowing this year. Anything less isn’t enough.
The Feared and revered: Feminine power through the Ages exhibit is showing until 27 August.
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OPINION: Being ‘feared and revered’ as a woman in this world hasn’t been enough for millennia
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