Read on Twitter
This is something that's been on my mind a lot lately, and I've been wanting to write something about it, because the flexible language of myth was what drew me to classics, and I use Greek myth to think through my life a lot 1/ https://twitter.com/YungHumanist/status/1241472334382469120
And how I think about Athena has developed as my own feminist consciousness has. As a grown up Cool Girl (of this model https://jezebel.com/the-cool-girl-is-not-fiction-but-a-phase-1642985632), I feel like in some ways I really fell out of love with Athena as I realized how toxic this model of femininity is 2/
Because she *does* read as a "girl power" goddess in a pantheon where there aren't that many ways to be a powerful badass. Artemis and Athena feel like the only places that young-Amy could see herself, but Athena was always cooler. She showed up in cool stories 3/
And it wasn't until much later that I saw how much Athena's decision to always side with the man (in the Eumenides) is almost a symbol of what it means to throw your lot in with patriarchy. All her friends just happen to be guys because she just doesn't get along with women 4/
And this is pouring way too much of my own anxieties into a fictional character, but at this point I have a clear image of what I think Athena looks like in the modern world. And it's not particularly pretty 5/
Athena drinks scotch and likes football and steak and maybe rides a motorcycle or owns a gun? And she doesn't know if she *actually* likes those things or if she just likes the way people react to the fact that she performs a "not like the other girls" model of femininity 6/
I guess an Athena-shaped container is where I've placed a lot of my own anxiety about what it means to reject (some) traditional gender roles, something that feels like challenging the patriarchy, without reinscribing an idea that traditional markers of masculinity are *better*
Anyway, quarantine is going great and I'm definitely not spiraling down rabbit holes of self-analysis why do you ask?
