ABSTRACT
Women’s activities and women’s relation to man persistently are used as metaphors for men’s activities and projects. In these metaphors, man mediates his engagement with the world through a representation of it as Woman and metaphorically transposes this relation to Woman on to his relation to the world. Many of these metaphors are transcultural and transhistorical. Man speaks of conquering the mountain as he would woman, of raping the land, of his plow penetrating a female earth in order that he may sow his seed therein. He symbolically mimics a woman’s birthgiving in initiation rites when man gives birth to man, concretizing metaphors into ritualistic enactments. 2 And he uses exclusively female activities as metaphors to help him structure his own relations to his exclusively male enterprises.
