Men, and by extension their bodies and their sex, were venerated. Representative art reflected this change. We see this most notably in the works of Plato and Aristotle, who fundamentally believed in the inferiority of women, as memorialized in their written works. Leonard Schlain argued in his fascinating book, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, that the ascension of literacy and the alphabet in antiquity correlated with cultural shift in the treatment of women. Written language helped to shape those ideas concerning women. Scholars believe that this shift is tied to the patriarchal urge and successful campaign to erase goddess cultures in antiquity. Sex and female sexuality were now rendered as symbols of shame, carnality became inconsistent with “reason”, and reverence for fertility in the culture was shattered. The surviving sculptures enforced Greek male ideals of the female body, and recorded history shows a shift in attitudes toward women. As ancient Greek society – Athenian society – developed, feminine power and, by extension, the vulva was denigrated. Yet, somewhere along the line, the vulva became synonymous with the obscene. Even the Venus of Willendorf has a vulva. Before her, the fertility goddess Inanna descended to the underworld not to rescue her beloved male companion but to extend her own power she banished her husband there in order to return to earth. Easter was appropriated from the pagans celebrating the return of Astarte. Destroy the image and you can control the narrative. Patriarchy has tried to erase imagery of the feminine since time immemorial. How is it that marbled penises survived the sacking, that for nearly three millennia the penis survived in all its barely tumescent glory and nary a stray labia caught the attention of a curator? I wondered for an instant, whether the plethora of penises was the work of male archaeologists so enamored that the male member was rendered in excruciating detail centuries before – so concerned at the thought of emasculating their forbearers – that their recovery efforts spared only the minutiae of marbled male bodies. There’s no suggestion that vaginas existed. There are no vulvas, no protruding labia, anywhere. I wandered around, looking closely at all of the female nude statues and fragments. Penises of all sizes surround me: curled and flaccid, pert and alert, balls dropped and shrunken. Meanwhile, the male statues rock out with their cocks out dicks are everywhere. The forms are all Barbie-doll blank down there, like female bodies just sprung out the head of Zeus, fully formed, sometimes clothed and vulvaless. In fact, all the hoohahs are smooth: there are but modest dents around the pelvic bones of the statues, but no openings or slight separations of the pelvic mounds to be found anywhere. One has a hand over a breast to communicate modesty her hoohah is smooth. There are, of course, nude statues of Greek and Roman women, usually standing in a three point pose – a bent knee, a curved hip, a tilted shoulder to accentuate the form. It’s that none of the forms showed the reality of female genitals. I t hit me on a fairly ordinary Wednesday afternoon, when on a whim I decided to visit the Greek and Roman galleries of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art but what hit me was not that, after 20 years, the curation shifted to show an organic progression in the development of the form.