Editorial Note
We are publishing three excerpts from the upcoming book Just Sex (Samo seks) by Erica Johnson Debeljak, translated by Andrej E. Skubic, which will be released at the end of May by Mladinska knjiga. In a compelling blend of cultural symbolism and first-person narrative, the author opens up complex questions and challenges entrenched notions of embodiment, sexuality, and the social constructions of femininity.
Her writing addresses topics such as sexual violence, the loss of power, bodily autonomy, and aging, foregrounding the interplay between the individual and the collective, the private and the political.
In the published excerpts, the author explores how women have historically been deprived of subjectivity through the mythological figures of Medusa, Persephone, and Aphrodite. She reflects on how women were once depicted as warriors, leaders, creators, and judges of life and death, but were gradually reduced to objects of male desire or fear. At the same time, she raises questions that remain highly relevant today: How do historical, cultural, and literary representations of women continue to reproduce patriarchal patterns? How is female sexuality still subject to mythological and societal norms that constrain and define it?
She challenges dominant narratives of femininity and exposes how these narratives have, for centuries, reinforced patriarchal views of women’s bodies, roles, and value. The book draws attention to the often overlooked or marginalized experiences of women—especially those who do not conform to normative ideals of beauty, youth, or silence. It also brings to the forefront the question of the power of speech, storytelling, and language: Who has access to shaping them, and who remains unheard?
With this publication, we aim to open a space for reflection on how cultural history and narrative structures still shape our understanding of femininity and masculinity, power and subordination, sexual autonomy, and social expectations. At the same time, we hope to contribute to the visibility of a book that is sure to provoke, inspire, and encourage thoughtful engagement.
The excerpts are published in both Slovene and English.
We warmly invite you to read them!
The spol.si Editorial Team
#Medusa
If I were to need an internet handle or a hashtag and give myself the one I really wanted, a sort of secret avatar known only to myself, it would be Medusa, the iconic female monster. This was the name I whispered into the darkness when I lay in the vast sea of my marital bed, eyes open, snakes swimming around my head, contemplating the bottomless desire that swelled and pulsated in my empty bedroom. You will think that this is because I am angry. You will think that I am so angry that I want to turn men to stone with my fierce gaze, which I do not.
I do not want men of stone. I want men of flesh, of living moving flesh.
No, I am Medusa, and she is me, because before the patriarchy moved in and took away not only her story but her head from her body, she was the ultimate female badass. In her earliest incarnations – before being demoted by the Greeks to a grotesque disembodied head decorating the shields of warriors as the poet H presented her in his epic poem – she was something far more impressive, far more to be feared by the males of the species than merely a dead head surrounded by coiling snakes. Medusa – her name means the ruling one – was an Amazonian queen hailing some say from Libya. She was the leader of that “bunch of golden-shielded, silver-axed, man-loving, boy-killing women” as the ancient historian H uneasily described the intimidating and separatist female warriors – the Amazons apparently found their lovers among their enemies and killed their own sons to keep the tribe pure and female. She was also a goddess, a serpent goddess, symbolizing the taboo of menstrual blood, the wise blood that gave women the power to both create and destroy life. Blood drawn from the veins of the left side of her body was healing; blood from the right side of her body killed. She was the arbiter of death, birth, rebirth, of all that has been and all that will be. She was said by some to be the mother of all the gods whom she bore before childbirth existed – a concept that makes artificial insemination and the possibility offered by contemporary medical technology of eliminating the role of the male from human reproduction sound positively trivial.
Wow. What happened to her? How was she so reduced?
I am Medusa, and she is me, precisely because she was so reduced. She became, like me, the perfect duality of she and I, the disconnection of what is seen from the outside and what is lived on the inside. Generally, when considered at all, Medusa is quickly judged before being dismissed as part of someone else’s heroic story, a minor if briefly fascinating character who can be easily sacrificed, ignored, demonized. She has no intrinsic value. Her inner life remains unimagined, unimportant. She is seen with horror or not seen at all. Like me, she has a conflicted relation with herself, her appearance, the mirror – her reflection in the mirror diminishes her power. Sometimes she looks in the mirror and sees a breathtakingly beautiful woman, a desirable woman, a woman that any man would want. At other times, in a different light or from a different angle, she catches sight of herself, or even just a small part of herself, and sees what she is: a monster.
Is this me? How did this happen? When did this happen?
In Greek mythology, an origin story emerged, no doubt intended to obscure Medusa’s earlier and more intimidating manifestation as warrior queen. According to this new story, Medusa was the daughter of an incestuous union between her father, a sea god, and her mother, a sea monster. One of three Gorgon sisters – Sthenno, Euryale, and Medusa – she among the three was cursed, unfairly and uniquely cursed. One version of the story has it that as a young girl Medusa was so beautiful that the god Poseidon spotted her, was determined to possess her, and violently raped her in “the soft, damp meadow” as the ancient Greek poet H drolly put it. This was the first reduction: from female warrior to female victim. The damp meadow may have been the part of her body that Poseidon set upon but the actual location of the rape was the temple of Athena, and Athena was so enraged by the sight of her temple being defiled that she punished, in a discouraging though typical failure of female solidarity, not the perpetrator of the crime but rather its victim. Athena made Medusa ugly, replaced her long luxurious hair with a nest of writhing snakes that petrified anyone who looked upon her. Curse or protection from future advances as some have suggested? Hard to say which is worse.
But beyond this, why did Medusa, the ultimate female subject in ancient stories, become in the later, more patriarchal stories, the mere object of first male desire and then male fear? How did her youthful past of transitory beauty and sex appeal acquire so much importance when in her previous incarnation she was ageless power, presiding over creation and destruction? How did the magnificent cunt that bore all the gods even before childbirth existed become nothing more than a pastoral idyll – a damp, flower-strewn meadow – for male enjoyment? Yes, Medusa was cursed by Athena, but so what? A woman being punished for inviting the violent attention of a god/man, being advised (or forced) to be sufficiently unattractive to repel such attention, is nothing new. Indeed it hardly merits comment at all: some things never change. But Medusa was cursed even before this in another way that is often overlooked – we are too distracted by her ugliness, by the snakes around her head, to think clearly about her. This curse is less explicable in the context of the ancient myths, and it is not clear who or what inflicted it upon her. Though the daughter of gods and immortal creatures, though both her Gorgon sisters born from the same parents, were like them immortal, Medusa is not. Medusa ages.
Medusa is a woman who grows old, a truly wretched fate as the ancients saw it, and we do not see it all that differently today. Is this the real reason – not the snakes, not the petrifying gaze, not the decapitation – all of those mere diversions – that Medusa became the iconic female monster? Simply because she is an older woman, not young and beautiful anymore, not a subject, never a subject, and no longer worthy of being an object. For just behold her: she is almost the stereotype of the sexually repugnant, nagging harridan – huge screaming open mouth full of crooked teeth, protruding tongue, swirling snakes for hair, tusks, even a beard, that most reviled hormonal consequence of female aging.
And yet despite the lousy cards she has been dealt, and they only get worse, the hideous Medusa behaves with grace and forbearance. She doesn’t go around the world, taking revenge against her fate, turning living things to stone. (That will came later. A man will do that in her stead.) Rather she withdraws into a cave, far from life, far from the living breathing world, with only her gorgon sisters as company, and makes herself harmless, a shadow of her former self: invisible.
#Persephone
Just as I have crowned Medusa the queen of mortal, ugly, aging women, so too will I choose a queen to reign over all the victims of rape and abduction. There are so many of them that her realm will be amply populated, her followers legion. And who better to crown queen of than Persephone, the most renowned of all mythological victims of rape and abduction? The story of Persephone – daughter of Zeus, the god of sexual predators, and Demeter, the goddess of the harvest – is known to virtually everyone. Hades, ruler of the underworld, Zeus’s brother and Persephone’s uncle, takes an irresistible liking to his young niece. Knowing that Demeter will not consent to Hades’ courtship of their daughter – what mother would? – Zeus hatches a plan. He arranges for Hades to abduct the girl and spirit her down to the underworld as his child-bride, later presenting Demeter with a fait accompli. And so, as the lovely Persephone gathers flowers in a green and verdant meadow with her friends the Oceanids, a great chasm in the earth opens. From this gaping cleft comes first the galloping sounds of horses, and then a dark chariot emerges mounted by the terrible Hades. In the most famous sculptural depiction of the abduction, Hades holds the naked Persephone aloft, his powerful hand digging into her loosening thigh. The dog Cerberus, symbolizing the border to the underworld, crouches at his feet. The attack is so sudden and violent Persephone has no time to resist. The Oceanids do not even see what happened or where she has been taken.
Demeter goes mad when she discovers that her beloved daughter is missing. She disguises herself as an old woman and wanders the world for days. In her despair, she neglects the soil, forbids the fields from producing, stops all things from growing. A great famine falls over the world. At last, Helios, the sun who sees everything, tells Demeter where her daughter is, and Zeus, persuaded by the cries of the hungry people and even more so by his fellow deities who begin to fear that no humans will survive the famine to leave them their offerings – in the end, that, rather than the death of all humanity, appears to be the primary consideration – negotiates the return of the hostage Persephone from Hades. Hades has no choice but to yield to the demands of his more powerful brother.
Before releasing his child-bride, Hades tricks her into eating some food in the underworld – a sort of mythological version of the Stockholm syndrome, the kidnapper’s kindness engendering the dependence and eventually even the love of his captive. Hades offers Persephone a strange meal, a food far richer in symbolic value than in nutrition: the armored pomegranate. Persephone eats three of the crimson seeds – some versions of the myth say four, some say seven – and once she has eaten the food of the underworld, she is doomed to return. She has lost her innocence. She has seen the dead. She comes back to her mother a changed and wizened creature, uneasy and no longer fully at home in the green upperworld. Come autumn she feels the urge to be with her captor again, her dark mysterious husband, and leaves her mother until the next spring. It is a compromise that pleases no one entirely, but it is why the earth for nearly half the year becomes as barren as it was when the bereft Demeter wandered the world in despair. Thus the resonant power of Persephone’s story: her abduction and partial rescue represent the origin story of the seasons.
But why did Hades offer Persephone a pomegranate of all possible foods? It is an odd choice, a strange and beautiful fruit, a lockbox filled with sparkling jewels, and one that squirts a rich, bed, blood-like liquid when pried opened. The pomegranate is the source of two quite different words: the valuable gemstone called the garnet and the murderous shrapnel-scattering hand grenade. In many cultures and religions, pomegranates represent fertility, and are smashed – violently, like a grenade – against the walls of the bridal chamber to encourage the birth of many children. In other cultures, pomegranates have been thought to induce a pause in fertility. The early Greek physician and pharmacologist D, recommended the seeds and rinds of the pomegranate – inserted as a suppository not orally as the myth might suggest – as a form of birth control. Centuries later the contraceptive effect of the fruit would be confirmed in scientific lab tests on rats and guinea pigs. And so the pomegranate and its seeds symbolize both fertility and a pause in fertility like the changing seasons themselves.
But might the pomegranate seed – in its shape, color, texture – also symbolize female sexual pleasure? Recall the virtuous friends of Zulaikha who cut themselves with their dessert knives when they catch sight of the handsome Yusuf. Just as the captive unicorn in the famed medieval tapestry bleeds pomegranate seeds rather than blood, so too do the delicate drops that spring from the ladies’ wounded fingertips resemble the red pellets of the pomegranate. And now picture the seeds in less liquid form: incisor-shaped like a tooth, red pooling at one end, spongy pale pith at the other, hidden in a bed of fleshy rind, hard to get at unless you have knowledge and perseverance. Thus the seeds summon the image of nothing other than the clitoris, that secret scarlet nugget hidden above a woman’s sex, the key to her pleasure.
And this – the notion of female sexual pleasure, of female sexual desire – brings up the other interpretation of the myth of Persephone. Unlike other tales of abduction and rape, the figure of the mother, Demeter, features prominently in the story, far more dramatically than the act of rape or the rapist himself. In fact, the myth speaks more eloquently about the relations between mothers and daughters than about the rather dull and predictable actions of brute raping men. It speaks specifically about female maturation, the budding and repressed sexualdesire of girls as they enter adolescence, and the necessity of young women to sepa rate from their mothers to fulfill that desire. If, in a patriarchal society, a young girl is conceived of only as a frail beauty, immaculate and pure, her sexual desire as shameful, something to hide, to control, then practically the only way she can exercise her desire with impunity is precisely to be abducted and raped, her sexual initiation taken out of her control, her separation from her childhood and her mother imposed on her rather than being a voluntary act. Hence, the persistence of women’s rape fantasies, of being swept away by dark mysterious strangers, of the male animus overcoming female innocence by force. Hence, the persistence of those annoying, anti-feminist, and wildly popular (particularly among women) works like Fifty Shades of Grey. In terms of the acceptability of female sexual agency, we have progressed remarkably little over the past centuries: first we had women as the possession of men, and consequently rape as a crime against property, then she became the victim of assault, still the object of desire not the desiring subject (and, woe, if she became pregnant, or didn’t resist enough because then she became complicit in the crime against her), and today her role is merely to consent – to say no, never, maybe to a man’s desire.
But what of her own desire? What of that hot, pulsating, ruby-red pomegranate seed planted between her legs? Isn’t it possible to reimagine the story in such a way that it was Persephone who longed to escape the clutches of her overbearing goddess mother? That she swore she would die of boredom if she had to go one more time to play in that fucking meadow with the Oceanids? That she saw in her lecherous uncle Hades, just as the lascivious teenage in VN’s famous pedophiliac novel would later see in Humbert Humbert, the means to get away from her domineering mother, to break out of the jail of domestic femininity, have a little fun for herself at last? And we can reimagine other stories in the same way. What if it was not Paris who abducted the beautiful Helen but the other way around? What if it was Helen who forced the handsome young man to act so rashly and trigger the war to end all wars? Maybe Helen slid her hands beneath the Spartan banquet table, placed them between Paris’s legs, whispered hot demands into his ear: take me away from here, take me away from Menelaus, my boring, middle-aged, impotent husband. I refuse to spend another night in his bed! I am sick of being a trinket, a trophy, the prize in a lottery organized by powerful men! I am the most beautiful woman in the world, my face could launch a thousand ships, and I want what I want for a change! To hell with the consequences!
But, in truth, I did not choose Persephone as our queen because of the complexity and ambiguity of her myth, its different interpretations of female sexuality and agency. I chose her because, like Medusa, she has a prehistory far more glorious and impressive than what she became when the patriarchal Greeks got hold of her and rewrote her story. And Medusa and Persephone are far from the only great goddesses, or even the most important ones who have been thus diminished. A whole pantheon of female deities existed long before the world’s patriarchies emerged and replaced them with monotheistic, monochromatic, male deities. There is the gloriously fat Neolithic fertility goddess, the Sumerian Inanna, Queen of the Universe, all-devouring, source of the earth’s life blood, the Babylonian Ishtar, Queen of Heaven, Great Whore, Light of the World, the Opener of the Womb, Goddess of all Goddesses, the Hindu Kali Ma, now most commonly known in her destroyer aspect, squatting above her dead consort Shiva, devouring his entrails, consuming his sexual parts with her own. And let’s not forget the oldest of the Greek divinities, the earth goddess Gaia, the Deep-Breasted One, mother of all the Titans, spawning the line of patriarchal and petty Olympic gods who ended up putting both goddesses and women in their place. That was her greatest mistake, giving birth to those who would make her little more than a footnote in a man’s story.
That is why I choose Persephone because she, like all these other great goddesses, was much more than merely the beautiful, innocent object of the sexual desire of powerful male gods.
She was everything. In her previous incarnations, Persephone embodied all the main characters of her later myth – mother, daughter, ruler of the dead. She was Kore, the virgin, the maiden. She was the goddess of the dawn, of love, the protector of all women. She was the goddess of spring, the symbol of immortality. She needed no king beside her because she alone ruled the underworld. She was so terrifying that mortals feared to say her name. She reigned over all that shoots forth from the earth and all that withdraws into the earth. Together, her personae comprised the three points of a burning, turning triangle. She touchedall that moved. Like the ancient goddesses, she was the triple goddess – creator, preserver, destroyer; beginning, middle, and end. She needed no one to complete her. And like Medusa, rape was the instrument of her diminishment from these amazing heights of power. And more insulting still, the aesthetic instrument of her diminishment was kitsch: all those gaudy flower-strewn meadows. Women, no longer conceived of as creators and destroyers, but as pretty dolls in pretty meadows, wide-eyed ingenues, puppets on strings, agentless, desireless objects.
#Aphrodite
Now here is a wild origin story.
Of Aphrodite: the goddess of love and lust, passion and sexual pleasure, and also the patron goddess of prostitutes, from the lowly pornai, cheap street prostitutes (and we know where that word eventually leads), to the most exalted temple prostitutes. Aphrodite, as is so often the case with figures in Greek mythology, has several origin stories. The epic Greek poet H gave her a prosaic and straightforward origin story: simply that she is the daughter of Zeus and the goddess Dione. But the other Greek poet H recounted a much crazier tale about how she was created. This one features Gaia, one of those powerful triple female deities – like Medusa and Persephone, the Hindi Kali Ma and the Sumerian Ishtar – those intimidating creating-preserving-destroying goddesses who needed to be brought down to size in order for a male-dominant order to be established.
Gaia is arguably the most intimidating goddess of them all, the personification of earth itself and the ancestral mother of all life, said to procreate – like Medusa – asexually or parthenogenically before childbirth even existed. First she bore the void and the mountains, then she bore the sea, all of this without the assistance of sexual union or a male inseminator. In this sense, she is the ur-single-mother, doing literally everything on her own. But then – perhaps she became bored or weary – she decides to bring forth her equal, someone to be by her side, a man to keep her company, to be her partner. She creates Uranus, the personification of the sky and heaven, who is both son and husband to Gaia. With Uranus she goes on to conceive and give birth in the ordinary sexual way to eighteen children: the Titans, the “deep-swirling Oceanus, Coeus, and Crius and Hyperion, Theia and Rhea, Themis and Mnemosyne, and gold-crowned Phoebe and the lovely Tethys” as enumerated in the Theogeny. She also gives birth to Cronus, the youngest of the Titans, and to Cyclops, the Giants, and thunder and lightning besides. She is nothing if not prolific. But Uranus, like many other fathers, ends up feeling pushed aside by his children, and who can blame him? There are so many of them. He doesn’t want to share Gaia with all of her progeny, and so he hides the children away from her, and this enrages her. She comes up with a plan. She fashions – yes, nothing other than the first adamantine blade – a gray, slate sickle – and persuades her youngest son Cronus to castrate his father when he next approaches Gaia to have sex with her. Cronus obeys his mother’s gruesome command. He lies in wait and, when the moment comes, sets upon his father with the sickle. It is quite the story. Our old friend, SF, the not-so-great father of psychoanalysis, would have a field day with all of the plot twists: incest between Gaia and Uranus who are after all also mother and son, an exaggerated and horrific primal scene of the child not just witnessing but in this case forever preventing future sexual relations between his parents, a mother using her son to avenge her anger on his father, and, above all, the dread act of castration this time performed by son upon father. What more could you possibly want?
And yet, unbelievably, there is more.
After Cronus has done the terrible deed, emasculating his own father, he tosses the genitalia across the land and toward the seething ocean. As the severed penis flies through the air toward the water, three drops of blood fall to the earth, and from these three drops of blood are born the Erinyes – also known as the Furies – the famed female goddesses of vengeance and retribution, another fearsome snake-haired trio of women like the Gorgons. The Roman poet V gave the Furies the following names – Alecto, meaning endless anger, Magaera, meaning jealous rage, and Tisiphone, meaning vengeful destruction – which sounds like one more compendium of cliché character traits that men fear and despise most in women.
When the severed penis lands in the water, it floats and bobs upon the choppy waves awhile and, with this movement, it produces a foamy froth. From this foamy froth emerges a woman: the great Aphrodite, goddess of sex and pleasure.