Hungry Eyes
Medusa from the ancient world to Sports Illustrated
I was in the checkout aisle at my local supermarket, looking at the covers of Cosmopolitan, Self, and Shape magazines — as one does, you know, to see if there are any articles of interest — when this year’s Sports Illustrated “Swimsuit Issue” caught my eye, but not for the reason you might think. The image of Hannah Davis was eye-catching, but it was the magazine on the next rack that really grabbed me: on what looked like the same cover, Ms. Davis was replaced by an unmistakable image of Medusa, complete with a ferocious scowl and a snaky head of hair (that her torso descends into a snake’s coil evokes, for the classicist, more Echidna than Gorgon, and her armored bustier is more reminiscent of the Amazons, but we’ll take what references we can get). But this Gorgon also looked every bit the cover model, with dark eye-shadow, shapely bare shoulders, and a narrow waist. For a moment I wondered if this was some kind of bizarre alternate cover, but on closer inspection I realized it was an advertisement that was made up to look like the front of the magazine. The product? Snickers, part of their “You’re not you when you’re hungry” campaign. This was in fact the back cover of the 2015 Swimsuit Issue.
I chuckled at the cleverness of the ad, the way it tricked me, and even more at the incongruous juxtaposition of the weighty and serious themes of classical mythology appearing in the pages of what verges on soft-core porn. The ad has been celebrated on advertising and design blogs. And yet as I pushed my cart of groceries out to my car I wondered how incongruous this juxtaposition really was, given not only what we know about Medusa in the ancient imagination but also how Medusa has been interpreted throughout time.
I had just given a lecture in my Myth class on Freud’s interpretations of various aspects of Greek mythology, in which myths are to a culture what dreams are to an individual: repositories of primal desires, fears, and preoccupations that must be interpreted symbolically. In a posthumously published and obviously not fully worked-out (even by Freudian standards) piece, Freud argued that the face of Medusa symbolizes a vagina and that the horror, in myth, of gazing upon the Medusa represents the horror the young boy feels when he first gazes upon his mother’s genitals: the absence of a penis fills him with fear of castration. At the same time, however, there is in the Medusa what Freud calls a “consolation” for this terror, namely being turned to stone, which symbolizes an erection: “he is still in possession of a penis, and the stiffening reassures him of this fact.” We do not have to accept any of the particulars of Freud’s analysis (few do) to feel that he is right to recognize the erotic dimension of Medusa.
More to the point but in the same tradition is the fashion designer Gianni Versace’s answer when he was asked why he had made Medusa the logo for his company: “Medusa means seduction, a dangerous attraction.” From this point of view it is not absurd at all to find an image of Medusa in a magazine devoted to the display of beautiful women.
Nor is the erotic dimension of Medusa simply a figment of Freud’s well-known penchant to see sex everywhere. In ancient representations, both literary and artistic, the gorgons (of which Medusa was one of three) are sometimes represented as horrifying monsters: snake-haired, grimacing, even bearded, as on the pediment of the temple of Artemis at Corcyra or on the well-known amphora by the “Nessos painter”. But just as often Medusa in particular is represented as a beautiful woman, whether on a pelike in the Metropolitan Museum in New York or in Ovid’s account of Medusa in his Metamorphoses, where “Medusa was renowned for her loveliness…of all the beauties she possessed, none was more striking than her lovely hair.” (Met. 4.794–8, trans. Innes) In Ovid’s telling Medusa became a monster after Poseidon raped her in the temple of Athena, who punished her by turning her hair to snakes (we may remark that, unfortunately, “blaming the victim” has a very long pedigree).
Most scholars believe that Ovid invented the story of Athena’s punishment, but her beauty is at least implicit already in the oldest literary evidence for Medusa, Hesiod’s Theogony, where Poseidon “laid down with her” (Theogony 278). So the image of Medusa on the back cover of the swimsuit issue — an attractive woman done up as the Gorgon — participates in this ancient tradition that mixes the monstrous and the alluring. Even more, the duality of that tradition is embodied by the magazine itself, which features a beautiful woman on one side (the front cover), and a monster on the other. With Medusa, horror and beauty are two sides of the same magazine/coin.
Horror, as most of us understand the term, is hard to find in the 2015 swimsuit issue, unless you count the reaction of the prurient few who objected to it so loudly. But it is still worth considering how the advertisement, and the issue in general, plays on that aspect of the Medusa story, that the Gorgon must not be looked at. For more than anything Medusa is known for her gaze. In fact the earliest literary references to Medusa, and to the Gorgons in general, don’t refer to her turning those who see her into stone, but emphasize only the fear the Gorgon’s visage inspires, as when in the Iliad she is emblazoned on Agamemnon’s shield “with her stare of horror” (Iliad 11.37, trans. Lattimore). The earliest explicit reference to the “lithification effect” of her gaze is in Pindar’s tenth Pythian Ode of 498 BCE, where Medusa is said to inflict “stony death” (Pythian 10.48). From the many representations on vases of Perseus looking away or viewing her indirectly via a mirror or shield as he cuts off her head, we can only infer that her killer needed to avoid her direct gaze. Such a figure is an interesting inclusion, then, in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, where the whole point is to look, even to stare, directly at the women, and indeed to meet their gaze, which is invariably directed at the viewer.
And do not these images freeze us, at least a little bit; isn’t it harder to turn away from Hannah Davis than, say, from the cover of The Economist? In the second century CE Lucian connected the effect of the Gorgon’s gaze not with her ugliness but with her beauty, which “stunned its beholders and made them speechless, so that, as the story has it and everyone says, they turned to stone in wonder.” (The Hall 19, trans. Harmon). It is hard not to feel that the power of Medusa’s gaze somehow parallels the power these women exercise over those who page through the magazine. Indeed, because the advertisement is on the back cover, Medusa is the final image we see if we “read” the whole thing, as if to call our attention to the paralyzed state into which the series of images seems meant to put us.
There is some debate about whether the display of female bodies such as these are degrading to women or whether they can be reclaimed as liberated expressions of freedom; Hannah Davis herself said that the cover image was “empowering.” And certainly feminists have claimed Medusa for their own, most famously in the “Laugh of the Medusa” (1975), in which Hélène Cixous exhorted women writers to take inspiration from the “beautiful and subversive figure” of Medusa who was capable of disrupting masculine discourse. “She’s not deadly: she’s beautiful, and she’s laughing.” With her power to destroy those who look at her, Medusa even may seem to subvert the very idea of objectification. The ancient author Pausanias, writer of a kind of travelogue of Greece, was no feminist, but he did often seek to provide rational explanations for myths, and in his description of a mound of earth in the ancient city of Argos which was said to cover the head of Medusa, he claimed that she was not in fact a monster at all but a Libyan queen who led an army against invading Greeks led by Perseus and was only defeated by assassination, thus linking Medusa with female power (Description of Greece 2.21.5).
But just as there is something hollow in Hannah Davis’ claim to empowerment, the ancient myth of Medusa seems to emphasize male domination more than Medusa’s subjectivity. The “hero” Perseus encounters a woman who cannot be objectified and strips her of that power, redirecting it for his own purposes (he takes revenge on his enemy Polydectes). The myth’s focus on male control of the gaze can be found not only in Perseus’ defeat of Medusa but in the way he steals the eye that the gray sisters share in order to force them to help him; the myth’s focus on masculine prowess may be seen in the fact that after slaying the Gorgon Perseus rescues the helpless princess Andromeda, who has been tied to a rock (perhaps in a bikini like those on display in the magazine?) as bait for a sea monster. And if Medusa retains any power it is only as a lifeless, sightless head, controlled by Perseus, and later, by Athena, who may be a goddess, but a goddess so marked by her anti-femininity that she does not even have a mother, being born entirely from the ultimate patriarch Zeus. The late antique allegorist Fulgentius analyzed the myth in something like these terms, as the conquest of manliness (Perseus) and wisdom (Athena) over the various forms of fear that he says the Gorgons represent.
For this and other reasons the art historian Rainer Mack has called Perseus and Medusa “the foundation myth of patriarchy.” In light of arguments that erotic images of women serve to sanction violence against women by normalizing expectations that women must make themselves sexually available to men, the juxtaposition of such images with an invocation of a woman who was decapitated because she could not be objectified is a disturbing one. And if scholars are correct that the myth of Perseus and Medusa has its origins in rituals of male initiation into adult society, we may well wonder what kind of “initiation” the swimsuit issue, which the New York Times has called “the dream book of adolescent males,” provides.
Even if the swimsuit issue does not promote violence against women, it is hard not to wonder what effect the proliferation of such images has on their viewers. The onslaught is greater and more relentless than anything Perseus ever faced, and can be found in the history of the interpretation of Medusa as well. Sartre wrote about Medusa in Being and Nothingness in a passage in which he considered how the myth conveys the experience of realizing that however subjective we may feel we are objects to all others. The classical scholar Hazel Barnes paraphrased Sartre’s discussion as follows: “When another person looks at me, his look may make me feel that I am an object, a thing in the midst of a world of things… the look of the other, which reveals to me my object side, judges me, categorizes me, it identifies me with my external acts and appearances… If I feel that my free subjectivity has been paralyzed, this is as if I had been turned to stone, made like one of the lifeless statues in king Polydectes’ court” (quoted in The Medusa Reader, ed. Garber and Vickers). This may describe the alienation of modern life, or the experience of comparing oneself to the models on the page. Jean-Paul Vernant argues that the Medusa “represents in its grimace the terrifying horror of a radical otherness with which you yourself will be identified as you are turned to stone” (quoted in Garber and Vickers) and so signals how Sartre’s reading of Medusa may show how a kind of horror may in fact creep into our experience of the images in the swimsuit issue. It comes not from looking at Medusa, or Hannah Davis, but from comparing ourselves to them; there is something like fear (and I don’t blame her) in Jennifer Weiner’s reflection on the 2015 cover, “Great! Another Thing to Hate About Ourselves.” Rabun Taylor has argued that the encounter with Medusa represents an unbearable encounter with unmediated reality (The Moral Mirror of Roman Art, 195). But the swimsuit issue, with its airbrushed and, I presume, photoshopped images, may be more terrifying even than reality itself.
It seems unlikely that the advertising team at BBDO New York or anyone at Snickers has been reading Fulgentius and Sartre. But that isn’t to say that they didn’t on some level sense the way the myth of Medusa might intersect with the magazine’s allure. The minotaur is just as well known a classical monster as Medusa but the ad wouldn’t have worked with him, and not just because he is, notionally, a man. The beautiful woman we can’t stop looking at, the dangerous monster who tries to control us and whom we may yearn to control: the juxtaposition ingeniously, if disturbingly, sharpens the frisson the Swimsuit Issue provides and attests that our classical past is anything but dead.
Curtis Dozier teaches in the department of Greek and Roman Studies and
serves as faculty advisor to veterans on campus at Vassar College in
Poughkeepsie, NY. He is the author of a series of articles on the
Roman rhetorician Quintilian. Follow him on Twitter.
