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I'm Kelly - the founder of She Is Fierce! and your host on our blog featuring stories and wisdom from fierce women all over the world! 

Fierce Living

The Great Cover-Up: Women With Balls

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The Great Cover-Up: Women With Balls

 

Once upon a time, goddesses were important. By the time our stories began with ‘Once upon a time’, goddesses had become unimportant. Womankind kinda got hidden from view as man played God, and systematically worked at guiding our mindsets into an oppositional arrangement:

Science over art
Fact over fantasy
Thinking over feeling
Reason over intuition
Light over dark …

These are all offshoots of the primary configuration:

MASCULINE PRINCIPLE
feminine principle

And today, man is mostly still on top.

Sure, a lot has changed, but you can’t scrub out an ideology that’s been around for eons and assumes so many clever disguises. Even so, when all is said and done, it’s just a man-made social construct. The goddesses may have been overshadowed by this erection, and they might have disappeared from our modern narratives, but girls, take note and take heart: they did not disappear from our psyches, there’s still meat on their primitive bones and they are no shrinking violets!

A case in point in the ancient stories is Gaia, the sublime, wide-bosomed earth mother, who got it on with Uranus, the sky god. There’s been a resurgence of interest in Gaia over the years, and as for Uranus, well, you’d know his unfortunate name makes him the butt of many jokes. But here are some things you may not know.

Gaia and Uranus produced some seriously ugly children: the Hecatoncheires were fifty-headed, one hundred-handed giants. And then there were the Cyclops, shifty one-eyed monsters with crappy social manners. The expression ‘a face only a mother could love’ probably has its genesis here, and Gaia loved her children to bits. Uranus, on the other hand, was ashamed of them, so he hid them away (the first lot in the depths of earth; the second lot even deeper, in Hell). And he rejoiced in this!

Bad call.

The Mother of All was good and mad. She hatched a plan to avenge her man. Gaia convinced one of her sons, Cronus (one head, two hands, two eyes—still ugly), to castrate his father. She even made the iron sickle Cronus used to carry out the deed!

Extremes in behaviour, granted, but ancient myths are jam-packed with extremes of everything. They’re our raw, uncut stories representing the roots of the many themes of the human condition (Love, Death, War, Misogyny etc). Just look at myths if you want to understand the deepest patterns of your psyche and what drives you. The characters personify and bring to life all the aspects of it. And in each story, we can pinpoint many archetypes of character. Amongst the possible archetypes in this myth:

  1. The man with no balls
  2. The woman who has a man by the balls
  3. The ball-breaker
  4. The woman with balls

All, (mostly) metaphoric in a civilised society. Skip 1. — 3. Go to 4.

It takes balls for a woman to forge a path for herself in a society built on patriarchal lines. Gaia had them (not just her husband’s). The primeval mama obviously wasn’t just a fluffy maternal sort. She was an awesome combination of nurturer and fierce protector who didn’t suffer fools or subjugation. And she could teach us a thing or two about (self-)acceptance. She loved all her children equally—‘children’ symbolising all the (often underdeveloped) facets of our innermost nature: the divine and human; the male and female; the good, bad and downright ugly. Complementary, not oppositional.

With that sense of Gaia-empowerment, when you see yourself as a woman with balls—a woman of substance—there’s no need to vie for the upper hand.


Paula Houseman, She is Fierce! Contributor

Paula Houseman

Paula Houseman thought her life was, well, meh. Until she started fiction writing. What gushed forth onto the page made her realise her existence had not been mundane after all; it had been ridiculous!

Sure, she has a serious side. The concept of ‘identity’ had fascinated her for some time, and she exercised it as a graphic designer creating them for others through imagery. Then, at university (majoring in linguistics and sociology), she explored how word usage constructs our identities and realities. Paula applied her findings to an essay on women’s subjectivity, even won the 2007 UNSW United Association of Women Prize. And her honours thesis examined the archetypal significances in the words that shape our collectively authored cancer story. But while she was digging around in ancient mythology where the archetypes live, Paula developed a kinship with a butt-ugly, potty-mouthed goddess, one who embodied a holy kind of dirty, showed her the absurdity of the human condition, taught her about the value of laughter, and is responsible for the bawdiness in her book, Odyssey in a Teacup.

Connect with Paula… LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, www.paulahouseman.com

  1. A man without balls says:

    Haha. I’m literally a man without balls who is surrounded by women with balls who are ball-breakers. When I developed testicle cancer and had to put work on hold while I regained my health my two business partners, both of whom are women and acknowledged ball-breakers, stepped in and shouldered the load. We now joke that they’re the ones with the balls.

  2. Paula says:

    Sounds like a good pair (of women)!
    Women with balls (in the true sense of the expression) don’t emasculate. They empower!

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