Psychoanalyzing Mammoth Mama
Why we ask too much of our mothers only to disappoint them in the end
What you’re looking at here is the Venus of Hohles Fels, carved from the tusk of a Wooly Mammoth.
It wasn’t called “Venus” by the people who made her. We aren’t sure what they called her. And we aren’t sure what she represented exactly, either. But we do believe that with her wide hips and nourishing bosom, she most likely embodied ideal feminine traits. Personally, I think a better name would have been “Mammoth Mama”.
A small statue that, at its most primal, could be our attempt to manifest perfection.
Academics may call her a fertility idol, and while they wouldn’t be wrong, the term “fertility” puts her squarely behind museum glass. Eons removed and too sacred to speculate, even though speculation is all we can do—the people who made this didn’t have the written language to tell us what it was for.
So your guess is as good as any archaeologist’s guess. The craftsmanship is admittedly a bit crude. So those who aren’t afraid to be crude have suggested that it’s a sex toy, a masturbation aid. Basically, porn. Such an idea wouldn’t be crazy, consider that countless more manhours went into the making of porn over the last decade than was ever put into the making of the pyramids. But whereas the majority of online adult videos are rarely watched by the same person more than once, the society that made the Mammoth Mama couldn’t afford to think of sex as being so easily disposable.
It’s unlikely that this was the caveman equivalent of a horny 12-year-old’s notebook doodle. We don’t even know if it was carved by a male. If it did help males get off, that would have been a small part of its function. Ivory for the people who carved Mammoth Mama would have been extremely precious. People risked their lives to get it. What do you make out of something that gored brothers, fathers, sons, and ancestors to death? Something to help the community make more men and women. They put the hours of labor necessary into imbuing a scarce and dangerous resource with the essence of femininity. How could this object not be sacred?
So is Mammoth Mama the ideal embodiment of woman or the ideal embodiment of nature? To prehistoric humans, she could easily be both.
Big hips, nourishing breasts, and wide birth canal. Exaggerated to such proportions that birthing and raising children would be no sweat. The perfect mother, and also, (if the neolithics had ingested something that made them capable of abstraction), the perfect environment. She’s the ideal mother, and also the ideal mother of all.
What did that society ask of the ideal mom? That she be great at bearing and rearing children. What did she get in return? Empathy from her equals, adoration from her lessers, respect from her elders. We don’t know if they expected more from her, but chances are they didn’t expect her to also bring in a six-figure income and become director of her hunting party.
This despite hunter-gatherer societies of the kind that produced Mammoth Mama being truly egalitarian. Women were considered equal, their contributions were valued just as highly. But this didn’t mean they were considered the same as men. As a result, a representation of the ideal woman seems to suggest that biology alone is enough.
I’m not saying we should go back to Mammoth Mama’s way of living. No society is perfect, and life in the Ice Age almost certainly had its problems. I’m just thinking that maybe we are asking too much of our women today. It’s becoming increasingly clear that a long-running, high-flying, “successful” career simply doesn’t jive all that well with motherhood. It’s impossible to work 60-80 hours a week and have the time and energy left over to raise kids.
But this new egalitarian ideal that makes it taboo to suggest mothers can’t do everything men can? It ends up putting a lot of pressure on women to fulfill the duties of both genders.
For the most part, we don’t even pretend that anyone can achieve that ideal. TV and movies depict women who struggle to do both. It’s what makes them relatable, but also reinforces the idea that nobody will be enough. What’s more, these shows also suggest that the recognition just won’t be there. The setup is always that the woman is ignored by the sexist men of the office, and largely unappreciated by the man she married and the kids she’s raising. She’d be lucky to get a raise and a “thanks mom”, let alone a statue carved in her likeness.
So if the goals are unattainable, and the rewards aren’t worth it, why set the bar so high?
Why create this feeling that our girls have to grow up to achieve everything: to master the STEM fields, make at least half the household salary, mother honor roll students, and also have total MILF bodies? Because lack drives insecurity, which drives consumerism, which drives our economy, which is incentivized to keep us from thinking too hard about what we can actually do to stop the earth mother from going the way of the mammoth (hint: buying a product that donates to Greenpeace ain’t it).
The result: we aren’t a society that believes in enough anymore.
Two ways to deal with this:
Force society to celebrate every single person as being an ideal unto themselves. (Which is hard, because there’s not much appetite for satisfaction when your market is built on want. We’re currently trying it, and the end result is a culture war over those who want their identity recognized and those who resist.
Craft our own ideals and move towards them, while recognizing that you are as likely to achieve that ideal as you are to develop into a being that’s all boobs, hips, and bellies of ivory and nothing else.
I could say that the simpler one makes this ideal representation, the closer one can get to it, but in this day and age of “be everything”, just recognizing that ideals are impossible is a good start.
All of which, is to say that even though Mammoth Mama has impossible feminine features, the mothers of her time still had it relatively easy compared to the unrealistic expectations of our era.
As if raising you wasn’t already enough to deal with.
Happy Mother’s day!
As always, love the range of analysis and associations! And this: “…we aren’t a society that believes in enough anymore.”