Rose Baker - "I hope she plays 'Hot To Go!'" "Girl, this is The Epic of Gilgamesh...." a too feminist take, probably

    The dynamics of friendship and sexuality in The Epic of Gilgamesh were very strange to read. Our first exposure is in reference to Gilgamesh's voracious "appetite" for the women of his kingdom. Clearly, he is not "made whole" or even sated by any of them but requires another to be his other half. This other half is Enkidu, whose first human relational experience is sleeping with the prostitute who is sent to him. In doing this, he loses his birthright as a creature of the wild, and his strength is diminished. At the same, he is described as womanly, and implied as the complementary "partner" of Gilgamesh, in similitude of the balancing and complementing of qualities that a husband and wife are presumed to have upon each other. In the story, though, we never witness women fulfilling this role. They are a "humanizing" and perhaps impure influence, in that they disturb Enkidu's previous state and draw him into the realm of society, but they are not actually capable of providing anything except pleasure.

    Honestly, besides the unsurprising misogyny present in a story written nearly 4,000 years ago, I'm not entirely sure what to make of this. It is interesting to witness the usage of imagery that they don't establish as consistent within the narrative. If women are meant to contribute something, and Enkidu being womanly is a symbol of that, why are the women useless? It's interesting, and sad, as women are simultaneously used as the model of the value that Enkidu brings to Gilgamesh, but devalued in their actual selves. Even today, often the images and the fantasy of female qualities, are used, loved, respected, and represented in art, while actual women are somehow divorced from those essences. In Plato's simile of the line, it's as though they love the woman-god and woman-form, devalue the woman.

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