Remember Aphrodite
Daniel D. Hannoush
In the generation preceding the Trojan War, the women on the island of Lemnos came to reject and mock the goddess Aphrodite. Wrathful toward her spurners, Aphrodite cursed the women of the island in retribution. It is said that “she visited them with a noisome smell,” afflicting them with a nauseating odor that repelled their husbands.1 Rejecting their spouses, the men of Lemnos began to search elsewhere for companionship and were seized by violent lust for the captive women brought back from raids on the northern land of Thrace. For this change of heart and act of infidelity, the wives sought vengeance. They revolted. In the myth, the betrayed women committed a massacre on the male inhabitants, not even sparing mercy on the young boys and old men.
With all men gone, the women formed a temporary, self-sufficient, matriarchal society. Despite becoming the sole providers and caretakers of the island, there was one thing they could not do for themselves: conceive children. Notwithstanding their empowerment, they could not force themselves into the state of motherhood. For that, they needed men. It is not until Jason and his crew of Argonauts stopped by the island that the women of Lemnos were impregnated and bore the next generation of islanders.2 However, even after spending nearly a year with the women and fathering their children, the sea-bound adventurers did not become husbands. They had no intention to, and the Argonauts had only momentarily rested before resuming their quest in pursuit of the Golden Fleece.
The tale of the women of Lemnos is a parable about the emotional and psychological consequences that arise when desire is no longer rightly ordered– a warning against turning our backs on Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, passion, love, and procreation. Taken as a contemporary lesson, our present social discontents reveal a zeitgeist shaped by the rejection of the very archetypes that once governed desire. I call this pattern the “Lemnian Sequence,” recognized in the following order:
The corruption of mutual welcome (odor) drives desire toward alternatives (Thrace), alternatives train comparison and strategy, strategy hardens into contempt (revolt), and contempt leaves surface-level intimacy (the Argonaut).
To reject Aphrodite is to reject the disciplines that enable human desire to be responsibly governed. Modernity has degraded beauty and love into marketable products we can experience through consumption. Nearly all romance-related content has been saturated with shows like Love Island that condition us to encounter beauty with curated images and witness love as an experience to be calculated and consumed. Love is displayed as a complement of beauty– as something accessed through this commodified perception of the beautiful. Many within our generation operate under the false assumption that if one becomes sufficiently beautiful, one will be loved. Yet this reverses the older truth that beauty is revealed through the act of loving itself.
Because both beauty and love are framed around individual decision-making, they are reduced to choices. These choices, once intentionally formed through communion, are now options we are engineered to select. The rituals that once kept beauty formative and love sacred are now alien to the modern imagination and deemed outdated. Why cultivate beautiful reflections of reality when experience is dominated by selective media? Why bear the sacrifice of courtship when seemingly more efficient avenues promise gratification without cost? Aphrodite, in this sense, becomes a discretional lifestyle option that is dismissed as too idealistic to be fully embraced.
“The Lemnian women did not honor Aphrodite, and she visited them with a noisome smell.”
At first, this quote sounds like an archaic punchline a self-amused grandfather would offer at the dinner table and chuckle about all evening. But the remark isn’t made for comedic effect at all, and the etymology of “smell” is important. The Greek word used is δυσοσμία (dysosmía), which refers to a condition of corrupted smell built from dys- (“bad,” “abnormal”), osmē (“smell/odor”), and -ia (a condition).3 Aphrodite’s punishment can be interpreted as a corruption of the medium of mutual welcome. The atmosphere that once sparked feelings of attraction and intimacy had shifted into an uncanny charge that made the warmth of the other feel odd. The modern odor, therefore, is this feeling of mistrust and contempt that explains the behavior of the husbands on Lemnos island.
When first encountering this story, I could not help but think of the “smell” as analogous to what we now call the “ick.” The ick is difficult to explain because it often precedes thought and is felt in the body before it is justified by the mind.4 It presents itself as a protective reflex that reinforces guardedness between men and women by shielding the ego through contempt:
If I can make you ridiculous, I never have to admit that I once desired you.
Irony and humor conceal what is fundamentally defensive, and what should have been warmth is now lost.
One reason this modern odor is hard to name is that we mask it with distraction. Pornography and parasocial intimacy offer stimulation without the depth and reciprocity of vulnerability. What promises satisfaction instead leads to numbness and desensitization to genuine relationship-building activities, and as the nervous system builds resilience to frictionless substitutes, real intimacy begins to appear intrusively demanding and repels us away from one another, as it did on Lemnos.
“Therefore, their spouses [the husbands] took captive women from the neighboring country of Thrace and bedded with them.”
Thrace was separated from Lemnos by water, and capturing those women required time and intention– a deliberate channeling of desire outward. If Thrace is the land of alternatives, then Thrace can be found in our pockets, where the time it takes to test loyalty is reduced to seconds. The Thracian captive is visible everywhere; she thrives in the feed and constant visibility. Through her, libido is easily redirected into a digital “elsewhere,” or an endless archive of cyber-concubines where one can escape the mysteriousness of real intimacy.
As mentioned previously, the notions of love and beauty have been commercialized. This, coupled with the omnipresence of Thrace, forces relationships to behave like a market. Love and intimacy start to move as if guided by an invisible hand, or an invisible δυσοσμία (dysosmía), where the currency traded is attention. This replacement economy of relationships allows people to assume they can be exchanged at any moment due to constant comparison. Even when no one acts, the sheer knowledge of alternatives reshapes how everyone behaves. In this atmosphere, hedging becomes rational, and people keep their options open in order to evade the risk of being locked into commitment. This can be seen in the acts of maintaining a “roster” of backups or preserving plausible deniability in Instagram DMs. Romantic hedging institutionalizes anxiety through the logic of Thrace: browse, compare, upgrade, exit.
“Thus dishonored, the Lemnian women murdered their fathers and husbands.”
The modern revolt is less a literal slaughter than it is a social death and rhetoric that is carried through narratives. Rather than purge the island with knives, we do so with reputations and punish the category the person who harmed us represents. Replacement produces shame, shame demands meaning, and meaning is easiest to find when you can locate a villain. Many respond to disposability by building identities around suspicion, using “all men are…” and “all women are…” as dogma of purification. Transforming the other into an antagonist erases the necessity to confront the more painful truth that they were simply a person who caused disappointment.
If I can make you dangerous, I never have to admit I miss you.
Contempt is the cheapest form of belonging! It instantly flatters the injured ego by telling it that you are enlightened, not hurt.
As much as we think we know the differences we bicker over, the gender-war narratives are driven less by those distinctions and more so by mimetic insecurity. We tend to borrow our desires and our self-understanding from one another, then panic when those mirrors turn hostile. The more we divide one another through this “war,” the more we lose sight of the identity we are defending in the first place. Each side reconstructs the other as a threat through a process of ontological “othering,” using negative generalizations. Yet, mimetic rivalry creates a paradox wherein becoming rivals, we resemble one another more, and the enemy becomes the model.5 The more one side anticipates harm, the more it adopts defensive strategies that begin to mirror the very traits it condemns. Social norms often encourage individuals to ration affection as a way of preserving leverage and guard their vulnerability in order to avoid being taken advantage of. What began as self-protection soon becomes imitation, and the relationship between the sexes becomes a contest over who can care less.
In Lemnos, the revolt creates a temporary order by eliminating the men. In modern life, the revolt creates a temporary order by eliminating the possibility of mutual welcome. It offers the promise of control, but it can never deliver intimacy, for intimacy requires what the revolt trains us to despise: willingness to be vulnerable and reconcile.
“So, having put in to Lemnos, at that time ruled by women, the Argonauts had intercourse with the women.”
Jason and his crew landed on the shore as men with a quest, men in motion, men for whom Lemnos was a temporary stop. The women receive them, sleep with them, and conceive the next generation to repopulate the island. The myth is careful about the cost of this renewal, as it happens without mention of matrimony. Here, the Argonaut represents the modern posture to relationship as he offers union without any binding covenant. He can provide pleasure, even tenderness, even children, but he will not become accountable to the form of genuine love that remains thereafter.
And so the Argonaut impulse spreads as people learn to keep moving on and treat attachment as danger. We participate in Argonautic tourism, temporarily consuming experiences and sampling bodies, all while resisting the one thing that would give those experiences a stable, long-term meaning: mutual promise. This may be why much of modern intimacy feels simultaneously intense and hollow: the body and emotions are involved, but the future is left on the sidelines as a taboo that shouldn’t be discussed. The island repopulates, but does it ever heal?
A culture cannot surpass surface-level intimacy when mere differences are recognized as dangerous. When we lose the ability to hold distinction as a virtue, rivalry turns us into caricatures of ourselves. The more we lose a stable sense of self and borrow identity and desire from one another, the quicker our differences are experienced as an oncoming threat. Rivalry forces us to imagine and then imitate the most negative depictions of one another to produce doubles (men and women mirroring each other’s worst defenses while claiming to fight the other side).
To break the curse of Aphrodite, we must restore polarity between the sexes and treat our differences as awesome. In the end, revering Aphrodite is simply appreciating the wholeness that allows men and women to meet. The symbols that speak to this fullness are as old as time itself: Men are fire, heat, initiative, the willingness to step forward and bear costs. Women are water, depth, receptivity, the power to give life shape and continuity. Men are freedom in the sense of outward movement, the command to be; women are fullness, the breath that animates and allows the shelter to become home. In the case of fire and water, together they make a world that can grow, but without the other, either burns or stagnates. Taken as archetypes, we have forgotten that each sex becomes most itself by offering its strength in a way the other can receive.
Once we recognize this truth, the modern temptations become easier to name and resist. The cure is reverence for Aphrodite, which is difficult to live but simple to name if we begin by refusing the Thrace trap, the Argonaut posture, and the revolt of contempt.
Do this, and you cleanse the odor at its root. Do this, and you Remember Aphrodite.
Apollodorus, Library (Apollod.), trans. James George Frazer, Loeb Classical Library ed. (1921), § 1.9.17, ToposText.
In Greek mythology, Jason is the leader of the Argonauts, a band of heroes who sail aboard the ship Argo on a quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. In Apollodorus’ Library, the Argonauts “touch” at Lemnos (then ruled by women) and have intercourse with the Lemnian women; the episode is tied directly to Jason’s voyage toward the Golden Fleece.
In contemporary medical literature, dysosmia describes an abnormal or distorted sense of smell, in which familiar odors may be perceived as unpleasant or repulsive. This offers a striking parallel to the myth’s logic of attraction turned repulsion. For more, see https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/22779-dysosmia-disordered-smell-perception
Psychologists have begun treating “the ick” as a recognizable dating phenomenon characterized by a sudden shift from attraction to repulsion, often triggered by minor behaviors and experienced before conscious reasoning. For more, see https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-psychology-of-relationships/202502/the-ick-factor-the-science-behind-sudden-attraction
René Girard describes this dynamic as mimetic rivalry: when desire is borrowed from others, rivalry intensifies, and opponents increasingly resemble one another, turning the rival into the model. See René Girard, Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, esp. Part I; and I See Satan Fall Like Lightning