Rouse / Women's Humor/Commentary

She's older than the hills and from what remains of prehistoric clay and stone images, She is bawdy. Deep under the ground amidst the ruins of 25,000 year old matriarchal civilizations She has lain, covered by the mud of millenia in all Her vulgar beauty.

Buried deep within the earth, Her spirit lives and stirs with the coming of spring. She is the eptiome of fecundity: The eternal Mother of us all. Her pendulous breasts, ripe belly, and exposed genitalia may make modern women blush. But they have not forgotten how to smile.

"Good God, listen to that!" my husband chortles. The laughter from the kitchen rips through the night air to where we are standing outside sharing a smoke. It is the familiar sound of what could be described as 'cackling' coming from half a dozen women enjoying some 'inside-joke.' "Is that what goes on in your women's group?" he teases. But I see he is really curious and perhaps even a bit intimidated, which makes me smile back at him like a cat with feathers stuck in its mouth. Mystery is good. And the wild way in which women can laugh is a mystery to men. However, fearing he may think my "women's group" not serious stuff, I assure him we cover a wide range of emotions as we discover our true natures and explore our spiritual paths; and promptly start to laugh.

Joking aside, it is true. We share tears over matters of the heart and soul when we meet in our 'circle.' But there are also those bouts of belly laughs that erupt from our appreciation of the raw, earthy, side of our natures and they are equally as cathartic. They

are also more fun. This business of women laughing raucously over raunchy material is what feeds and fuels a now, more repressed, part of our nature. And with the coming of spring we start to simmer beneath our ladylike crusts.

In the 5th Century BC in Asia Minor, it was the Goddess Baubo's job to help stir the libido. She was just one in an evolution of these 'Goddesses of obsenity.' The torsoless Baubo was around for a good

laugh and to lighten the spirits. It's good for the soul to have fun with the sacred, and the sacredness of sex is a rich field. When we get together and there are no men around, we like to give the irreverent its due. Laughing gets our creative juices flowing. Stimulating our creative longings merely reflects what is going on in the never ending cycle of nature. Life is ready to begin again, and after a good laugh we feel ready to live it again more fully.

Back inside the kitchen only the vapors of cooking food and hot conversation remain. The women have moved on to more private quarters, but I catch ribald howls of laughter several walls beyond right as one husband wanders by shaking his head. "What's going on in there?" I ask, knowing full well.

"Well," he grins in disbelief, "I poked my head in for a moment and heard something about coffee-enemas, and decided to just keep walking." He then likened the experience to the time he walked into his kitchen and found his wife showing a young woman she thought to be 'at-risk,' how to put a condom on a banana. He spots the less threatening gathering of men hanging around the food table and heads over, leaving me to go check out the sisters. I pass our hostess in the hall and she grabs my arm. "You're missing it girl! Mary's had a martini and is holding court."

It's certainly no revelation that girl-talk can get down and dirty. It's the kind of down and dirty that celebrates that ancient understanding of what we are about. We were more in touch with it

of course, before the Hebrews and Christians came along and forced the blatant fertility of the Mother Goddess underground. For thousands of years before that our sex was not only revered, but flaunted. It was understood that without the Mother there would be no life. Something as powerful as that occasionally needs to be lifted beyond respectful realms of behavior into the obscene to be completely honored. Women still know the language that takes them to the "nitty-gritty." It's a gender secret passed through aeons of time.

One of the modern occasions we all have for being openly irreverent is during Mardi Gras, or Carnival, in those days prior

to the on-start of Lent. In some pockets of the world people let it all hang loose before they get down to the serious labor of the birth of spring. Just last week in Beuel, Germany, on the first day of "Women's Carnival," hundreds of women-masquerading as washerwomen stormed town hall waving 5-foot-long bananas. It's good clean fun of an obscene nature that celebrates the eternal life/death/life cycle of the world once again.

So the next time you happen to overhear a group of women laughing wildly, or have the fun of partaking in it yourself, be at ease. It's just the Mother Goddess sharing Her life force and reminding us that life is good, and spring will return.

(It's an inside joke.)

Table of Contents