Our culture is saturated with images of the female form, as much as art is symbolically saturated with the feminine. If there is truly a balanced duality between the sexes, there is no sign of it in the lot of images we produce. We like to look at women, it seems... much more so than we like to look at men. Is it really that Madison Avenue and the Media are so male-oriented in their image creation, and so influential (still) over what dominates our fields of sight? Or, is there a more universal answer, something timeless?
A definition from Wikipedia:
In many prehistoric cultures, women assumed a particular cultural role. In hunter-gatherer societies, women were generally the gatherers of plant foods, while men hunted meat. Because of their intimate knowledge of plant life, most anthropologists argue that it was women who led the Neolithic Revolution and became history's first pioneers of agriculture.
In more recent history, the gender roles of women have changed greatly. Traditional gender roles for middle-class women typically involved domestic tasks emphasizing child care, and did not involve entering employment for wages. For poorer women, especially among the working classes, this often remained an ideal, for economic necessity has long compelled them to seek employment outside the home, although the occupations traditionally open to working-class women were lower in prestige and pay than those open to men... more
