I. Seafoam of the Screen

The first goddess I worshipped was not made of parian marble or bronze; she was a constellation of pixels and skin permutated with filters. The golden apple of Eris is now an int random_ function in python. blue light of the modern screen glows with the same seductive light as that of ancient seas, promising rebirth, offering desire. The salt stung clutches of this virtual-codified sea foam are revealed distinctly as we study Fredrickson’s objectification theory. The psychological pruning of women conforming their bodies to fit the body mold that is seemingly more aesthetic and in trend now. We have become dolls, melted and mended to embody the cultural climate of the decade, a pan-generational espasim now offered on screen. We are taught to admire pixels of filtered beauty, contoured performances, plastic surgeries and metastasizing girls into our virtual generation’s engineered voyeuristic venuses.

It is funny how the very flower, that is the consumerist paragon of the male gaze and desire, is generously distributed as a token of love on February 14th. Aphrodite isn’t an illustration on your maroon, sex-forward eu de parfum. She is the quintessence of female sensuality, the amalgamation of years of Eastern and Cypriot tradition to worship the act of fusion, a word for both love-making (eros) and war (ares). Venus is a cultural mixture of Ishtar of Mesopotamia, Inanna of Babylonia, Astarte of the Phoenicians and other goddesses of passion representing the non-objectified version of what it means to be a woman—the most beautiful one at that ( yes, I use em dashes and no, that was not GPT)

II. Beauty Born from Rupture

And it was the way Venus arched, an ideogram of desire and quixotic surrealism, mortal hedonism compactified. She, who is the face of the judgment of Paris, a slewfoot brew of girls expected to adorn the visage of a goddess, not her power. She, who rose from the bloody foam of castration, with firm-round breasts, hair of gold-scented myrtle, a daughter perched on the scallop of the gods. The glamorized beauty ideals endorsed to adolescent girls not only distort their ideation of self but also exponentially increase the chances of body dissatisfaction. Dissociating your identity from your body and viewing it as an object or something to be seen can be directly correlated to the overt sexualization of statues and busts of goddesses.

Objectification occurs when a woman’s body or body parts are singled out and separated from her as a person and she is viewed primarily as a physical object of male sexual desire (Bartky, 1990). The internet has become the stanic serpent from Genesis recoded into silicon, and a woman is a stick figure of rib-cages, curated and modified for the doom-scrolling man. This depersonalization has engraved itself in our cultural milieu to the point that the modern Venus is not from seafoam but code. She is an actualization of facial symmetry statistics, a preference for the golden ratio, a creature of the invisible feed curator. She is desire quantified.

Or it might be the way, the gods enraptured in catching a woman in her calumnious passion with Mars, a perfect example of how the world tears down a woman’s autonomy down to her sexual choices; all the while shoving a dogmatic image of the Venus Pudica down girls’ throats in the age of digital voyeurism. The ancient gods laugh; the modern internet comments. A woman’s sexuality is still a spectacle. Still scandal. Still a mechanism of control.

III. The Declawing of a Goddess

Philommeides is both lust and dewy guilt of it, precipitated on a pair of moon-silver breasts clad in orichalum. She is the coy-lidded deciever, a stratum-laden mechanitis; who tricked the greatest of men and caused the greatest of wars (Battle of Troy). Arising from a scallop shell, with hidden genitals, surrounded by the carmine billows of ouranos’s organs, Boticelli painted a woman so dumb, she was just as dangerous. She hid her knidian body in a way kings hide their treasures, leaving an intoxicating trail of clues all over. But she was immortal before Praxiletes stripped her. She was a god before she was a woman. She was the Lady Lemba of Mesopotamia, Caesar’s beloved deity, the mother of doves. The Paphian Aphrodite was a giver, Giver of life, fertility and beauty.

IV. The Serpent in Silicon

Our very idea of self is developed during the mirror stage, which involves fascination with one’s own image. The process of identifying with one’s image is the “founding act, leading to the formation of the ego and the perception of the Subject (psychoanalyst Lionel Bailly). But as these mirrors slowly become a reflection of what the current and popular version of beautiful means; due to the internet, a girl’s mirror stage is drowned in the green light of her mobile. What is supposed to be a primal realization of the self (Freud) has now become an artificial experience that fragments her concept of self in the long run. Girls, just like Aphrodite, have become products of search-engine optimization, their bodies an identity currency in our attention economy. Our lancan mirrors are Instagram filters, our bodily identity dissociating under the pressure of becoming promotable on the algorithm.

Research says that girls tend to create an idealized persona for a real or imagined audience. Their self-presentational strategies often focus on impression management related to physical appearance (Leary, 1995; Mills, Musto, Williams, & Tiggemann, 2018). De Beauvoir argues that when a girl reaches womanhood, psychologically, there is a doubling of her body, one reserved for adoration and the other for chiseling to be adorned. Inject. Diet. Cut. Click. Then judge yourself for it. The tragedy is that both become prisons.

V. The Digital Anadyomene

The internet is an indecisive artist. HE gives his caryatids wings, aliferous and angelic. But he also ties their peplos to the ground. The only attire of freedom is being bare-assed. Disrobed. Tearing away the fabric, choosing autonomy. Becoming Venus Victrix. Becoming Aphrodite Anadyomene (“Aphrodite Rising from the Sea”), bare and confident, liquid water draping her body like liquid silver, her nudity is divine, cosmic, not a spectacle. She is no longer the princess of winery and purity. She is the woman god.

VI. Rebuilding the temple

Rebuilding starts with refusal. Refuse the drug of social validation. Refuse god’s mallets. You weren’t made to be a static decoration. Venus de Milo is a goddess before she is marble. Remember, you are skin before you are a girl. Remember your claws before you sculpt your breasts. You are not Boticelli’s darling. You are Aphrodite. The paphian deity of amalgamation, born from rupture, crowned by contradiction. And in rebuilding the temple, you choose what that divinity means. You choose the shape of your own becoming.