Fertility Charm or Booby Doll

I can safely write that I am pregnant now without it coming across as too personal. It's a natural part of the life cycle and well, anyone who sees me walking (slightly waddling) down the street can point out the pregnant lady. So why has it been so difficult to write anything about it? Because it is a running thought, all day and night, that I'm pregnant/carrying a child/have a huge responsibility/am not doing anything right. Now I've read insensitive comments from people who are just bored to tears with pregnant women or the breeders out there. This has fed my already paranoid thoughts about boring friends and strangers but it is time to embrace the bump and be proud!

Perhaps thousands of years ago, our ancestors embraced the feminine side of life. They may have worshipped it for all I know. We can only guess from the artifacts they've left behind like the earliest sculpture of a human figure, found in 2008 in a cave in Germany. Click here to read more. The 35,000 year old sculpture is of a woman with exaggerated breasts, belly, and genitals. Her arms and legs are insignificant while the head is actually in the shape of a ring, which could mean that the sculpture is actually a pendant.

Now, it irritates me to no end is that mainstream media has to refer to the sculpture as "the earliest pinup" and another article titled "Obsession with Naked Women Dates Back 35,000 Years." Anyone else read this as completely modern and male centered? One anthropologist, a man who was not part of the discovery offers all kinds of juicy quotes for the masses in this article, "I assume it was a guy who carved it, perhaps representing his girlfriend," he says. "Paleolithic Playboy? We just don't know how it was used at this point, but the object's size meant it fit well in someone's hand." I can't tell if he was kidding but he certainly doesn't come across like a scholar.

So where to start? Pin-up implies something bordering pornographic. Most articles that reported on the sculpture chose to use this word but why do we assume that this figure was meant to titillate? After all, do we know if people lived in the same prudish culture that we've developed after so many years of hiding and shaming female sexuality? And speaking of females, why are we meant to jump to the conclusion that all images of naked females are meant for the viewing pleasure of men?

It may be my pregnant hormones influencing me but I suggest that this figure just might signify the awesome power of female fertility and the act of carrying a child. Back then, breasts weren't filled with silicone but more likely milk- which could explain the heft. And a large belly is pretty obvious to me. Also, sex resulting in conception doesn't always lead in a straight line to a healthy birth. So I'm guessing that a pregnant woman might wear this as a type of charm to keep her safe during pregnancy. The exaggerated features are those she would be most concerned with at the time and the lack of the head probably made the charm represent every woman rather than one in particular, hence making the charm potent to the wearer.

Of course, I can't prove my theory either.

Why have we come so far in science and technology and yet left behind any notion of the power that is inherent in the human animal? Half of the human population experiences the trauma and wonder of pregnancy and motherhood and yet these stages of our life cycle have become marginalized and separated from what passes as normal culture. So I suppose that we shouldn't be too surprised that any naked female figure these days has nothing to do with fertility, just the fun sex part. The two shouldn't be separated, they should be combined because until a woman's bodies starts to mutate into something entirely new, we are all of these messy and complicated things.