>>4024532I suppose you could interpret the sea as functioning as a makeshift womb. But I don't believe that was the intention. Even in Plato's unorthodox interpretation which emphasizes it as a birth requiring no women, it's more about the child being born from a man (Uranus) and no one else. The presence of Cronos as an intermediary between the genitals and the sea makes it hard to frame it as an act of mating, and certainly not an act of love. This is in part why I'm not convinced by Plato's interpretation. A goddess born from an act of violence by one man against another doesn't have anything to do with male love.
If anything, the birth of Aphrodite is a more brutal and cynical version of the taming of Enkidu and what it represents. The wild, powerful, and free Enkidu was domesticated via seduction by a woman. Now, Uranus was already having sex with Gaia. But, given that the goddess of love hadn't been born yet, this intercourse could be viewed as bestial and instinctive. The birth of Aphrodite could be seen as representing a transformation from dispassionate impulse to lustful desire. For women especially since the myth is about Aphrodite and not Eros. And this birth also happens to coincide with emasculation, with the the master of the universe taken straight from the height of virile strength to total impotence. Especially damning is that the entire ordeal was orchestrated by a matriarch and carried out by a subordinate male.
Read in this way, it functions as a lament for the debilitating effects of heterosexual lust. Quite the opposite of a story celebrating homosexual love.
