Irresistible

From Medusa to Billie Eilish — How we’re no better than the Greeks

“Suddenly you’re a hypocrite if you want to show your skin, and you’re easy and you’re a slut and you’re a whore.”  — Billie Eilish, Vogue, June 2021

BILLIE Eilish broke the internet when her photos from the cover shoot for Vogue’s June issue was released last month. She sported classic pin-up-style corsets and glossy, tight-fitted pencil skirts, abandoning her iconic baggy t-shirt image. In the interview, she mentions doing this to rebuke the celebration of her former style in light of pop icons with more risqué branding, an antithesis which served only to amplify the casual sexism women face when making wardrobe-oriented decisions.

This is not a 21st century problem. As far back as the Olympian era, women have been blamed for the aesthetically motivated misfortunes that have befallen them: just look at Medusa.

So the story goes — Medusa is a priestess of Athena’s temple; stunning, recognised for her beauty. She catches the ravenous eye (translation: Grecian deity default) of Poseidon, who makes the executive decision to win her over, Greek-god-style. The Sea God rapes her, wounding her virtue, the symbol of her religious devotion. The distraught priestess turns to her goddess for help, only to have Athena gift her the appearance of a hideous snake-haired gorgon, with eyes that turned men to stone. This transformation is most often retold as a curse, after Athena mistakes the violation as the unfaithful digression on the part of her priestess — the wrath of a goddess scorned (the two gods were age-old rivals — ever since the competition over Athens).

Modern retellings of this myth (read as: the female version of the story) prefer the term gift when detailing the way Medusa gained serpents for hair and turned men to stone when they dared to meet her eye. A gift of protection, for power. It would not be a leap to assume the connection between the loss of conventional “beauty” and protection, female empowerment.

The word for Poseidon’s view of Medusa is irresistible — he could not — and did not — help but act on the primal instinct to devour. We use irresistible as a compliment, often in the context of strong attraction; you would be lying if you said the idea of being impossible to reject isn’t at least a little bit thrilling. Yet, if you take a step back, it’s not difficult to feel slightly uncomfortable with the realisation that we’ve glamourised a lack of consent so much: it was irresistibility that got Medusa raped; it is that same irresistibility that we exalt now.

I am not saying that women should not celebrate their bodies — I am all for Billie’s Vogue covers, for female empowerment in whatever garments do the job. The issue is not corsets or pencil skirts or glossy tights; the issue is the equation of accentuated femininity with irresistibility, and the way we have combatted this as a society. The praise Billie Eilish received for covering her body where other celebrities have put themselves “on show” is the embodiment of how little distance we have come since Medusa.

Athena made Medusa hideous to protect her, to weaponise her against the men who couldn’t resist; thousands of years later, Billie sought sanctuary in the form of unshapely clothes and the concealment of her figure, to fend off those who would “make me .. a role model because you’re turned on by me”. Clearly, we are still using the same tactics as the ancient Greeks to tackle the objectification and predation of femininity.

We might have taken strides to narrow the pay gap; we might have accomplished more widespread female education; we’ve even established support for the women who have lived through the nightmare Medusa was immortalised for; but we still want to be irresistible. Our ideology has stayed in the caged bed of the Olympian era, our instincts are still to hide our bodies, to see beauty as a curse, to use unflattery as armour.

So tell me, how far have we really come since the Ancient Greeks? How much further have we got to go?