Page 179 - Cyberculture and New Media

170 Cyborg Goddesses: The Mainframe Revisited
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Patriarchy has God on its side. One of its most effective
agents of control is the powerfully expeditious character of
its doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and
the attribution to her alone of the dangers and evils it
imputes to sexuality. The Greek example is interesting
here: when it wishes to exalt sexuality it celebrates fertility
through the phallus; when it wishes to denigrate sexuality,
it cites Pandora. Patriarchal religion and ethics tend to lump
the female and sex together as if the whole burden of the
onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the
female alone. Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean,
sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male
identity is preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one.

The Pandora myth is one of two important Western
archetypes that condemn the female through her sexuality
and explain her position as her well-deserved punishment
for the primal sin under whose unfortunate consequences
the race yet labours. Ethics have entered the scene,
replacing the simplicities of ritual, taboo, and mana. The
more sophisticated vehicle of myth also provides official
explanations of sexual history. In Hesiod’s tale, Zeus, a
rancorous and arbitrary father figure, in sending
Epimetheus evil in the form of female genitalia, is actually
chastising him for adult heterosexual knowledge and
activity. In opening the vessel she brings (the vulva or
hymen, Pandora’s “Box”) the male satisfies his curiosity
but sustains the discovery only by punishing himself at the
hands of the father god with death and the assorted
calamities of postlapsarian life. The patriarchal trait of male
rivalry across age or status line, particularly those of
powerful father and rival son, is present as well as the
ubiquitous maligning of the female.

Pandora appears a discredited version of a Mediterranean
fertility goddess, for in Hesiod’s Theogony she wears a
wreath of flowers and a sculptured diadem in which are
caned all the creatures of land and sea. Hesiod ascribes to
her the introduction of sexuality which puts an end to the
golden age when “the races of men had been living on earth
free from all evils, free from laborious work, and free from
all wearing sickness.” Pandora was the origin of “the
damnable race of women - a plague which men must live