Gender in Tamrielic Faith Part 1: Ayem the Mortal and Boethiah

My first real experience discussing Ayem was when I first saw Foul Murder in a post here and a few fellow redditors here indulged me with their interpretations of it and introduced me to a few obscure works such as What my Beloved Taught Me and the finer discrepancies between the different Red Mountain accounts.

Naturally I was not impressed with the ALMSIVI. But the thing with the gender perspective, it that it cuts through a lot of the personalities and metaphysics and looks at the social context surrounding the characters before and after apotheosis, and we clearly see the ways in which the Mortal shines through in the Divine. The things most important to them as mortals became their spheres as Gods.

In using these tools, I learned a great deal not only about the Tribunal as people, but about the Chimer. I will also talk about the pleasing inferences (in my opinion) I have made about the nature of Altmer culture and the Anticipations, although I will keep them brief in this series and would not have a problem with people disagreeing with them; I am taking an extremely narrow point of view.

In C0DA, Jubal calls Ayem a b!tch on page 37. Like the image of Dibella being dragged by the hair, this word catches my unfair feminist eye with the glare of sunlight off a Women & Songs CD. He calls her a b!tch because he asks her a question and she answers cryptically.

And is that not just it: The feminine mystique, which we began to explore with the Nordic Goddesses and the ideas of Maiden, Mother and Crone, are given new breadth and depth through Ayem and her Triunes. This enigmatic, confusing and ever-changing female need can be so maddening to both women and men that even women can be found being unfair to other women when confronted with this aspect of femininity.

The B-Word, as we shall call it for the sake of keeping the post suitable for work/school has many meanings, but is primarily used to describe a woman who is behaving in a manner that is aggressive, condescending, rude, mean or generally unpleasant. Feminists have long complained that it is a term applied to women who are acting like men; in charge, assertive, dominant. In the passage where Jubal calls her this word, Ayem is wearing her armour, not some gown or dress.

So maybe it is an accurate description after all, if inflammatory, if taken in the social context of the B-word, Ayem was indeed being dominant, condescending, unpleasant and difficult to understand. I wanted to know just what kind of woman Ayem was, to look past the insults and prejudice at her person and let her speak for herself. She may still end up being a bad person, but at least she won’t be cloaked in the filth of ad hominem.

To understand Ayem we need to understand Chimeri females, and we know very little about the Chimer, other than what we know of the Velothi and what we learned from the Tribunal, which amounts to precious little. But we know they cherished being different from the Altmer, and we do know a bit about the Aldmer and Altmer, who shall be referred to collectively as Altmer for the sake of brevity in this piece. (ha brevity, this is more than 2300 words)

The Facts Relevant: The Altmer are a rigid, presumably caste-driven and elitist society that practices eugenics. Basically to the Altmer, an infant is assessed at birth and if it does not meet rigid perfection standards it is killed. This would mean there would be enormous pressure on Altmeri women to basically constantly be pregnant, because they could not be expected to bear only perfect offspring, or if they do happen to bear perfect offspring, their bloodline would be a hot commodity. Children are currency (social or literal) when it comes to eugenics (again read the Handmaid’s Tale, and Children of Men doesn’t hurt either).

It is not necessarily that Boethiah felt particularly sorry for Altmeri females or was particularly concerned with their plight. The Prince of Plots did however see an opportunity to undermine this static society that was simply no fun and full of wasted potential. He taught a way for people to better themselves, rather than to rely on their inherent abilities and inborn perfection. He promised them that your adult worth need not be judged when you are but a mewling infant, and that it was possible for mothers to raise successful children, rather than simply birth them.

Even with this promise, there were skeptics, but the Prince of Revolution would not be deterred. She fought Trinimac, the greatest warrior in all the Aurbis, and perhaps attacked with words as well as swords. Perhaps she ate him, maybe he surrendered to her, perhaps she offered him a deal or simply convinced him to abandon his arrogance and admit the error of his ways. We will never know what transpired when Boethiah ‘consumed’ Trinimac, but we do know is that part of his remains were consumed by the faction that wanted to follow Boethiah and Veloth and became the Chimer.

This would have been The Greatest Story Ever Told to Chimeri children, and this is the social climate in which Ayem the Mortal was born. Even to the Changed Ones, change is a relative term, and it takes a long time for cultures to completely diverge from their progenitors. To give some relative terms, in Canada women got the right to vote in 1917, but it was only in 1983 that it became illegal for a man to rape his wife in the same country.

Translate this to a time of political and social upheaval for a recently-padomaic race of elves that live WAY longer. Old habits will die hard and slow, and the Chimeri women would have had a difficult time of it. Suddenly, you don’t want to get pregnant every year because now you have to keep your children and raise them yourself. The only culture they have known they want to change from and they had to make their own culture, make their own children’s stories, and make their own art and music. This all takes time.

From the shadow of Boethiah emerged a young woman who wanted to do something to help. She saw that her people were only defined by the fact that they were Changed and followed Veloth. They had a new religion but they needed more. They needed values, they needed culture, they needed a national identity beyond the Princes’ teachings.

Ayem would have admired Boethiah, and this is how he became her Anticipation. Eventually Boethiah would become her shadow. Ayem would have liked the idea that a person can connive their way to power, relying on their own strength and cunning. She would have found the Prince’s gender-of-convenience a useful reference when learning how to use her own femininity as a weapon or tool. There is no magic in the sex of Boethiah, it is just to barter for influence and power.

And for Ayem, it seemed to very much be the same way. Absolutely not a prude in any way, shape or form, however sexuality simply did not define her, she would not allow that. Hers was a powerful ambition, one that Boethiah would have at the very least found entertaining at first. This powerful ambition, and what I suspect of being a touch of perfectionism, would transform her into the Face-Snaked Queen of the Three-in-One.

Face-Snaked, one of my favourite images in the lore; I just imagine Ayem wearing all her many and conflicting aspects on her skin, and having it snake around her like some kind of insane, living tattoo. But it is imagery that poses important questions: at what point does being versatile and ambitious turn to being duplicitous and power-hungry? Are they really any different from one another? Like the difference between b*tch and boss, just a matter of perspective?

One of the faces that Ayem wears that I would like to discuss in detail is that of the Mother. Nothing really suggests she had natural children, but correct me if I am wrong. But it appears that before Nerevar came into the picture, she was married to her country and her job:

> Ayem was accompanied by her husband-state, a flickering image that was channeled to her ever-changing female need. - Sermon 8

When she met Nerevar, regardless of which account you choose, that of Ayem the Mortal or Ayem the Goddess, the Chimer were being threatened by war against the Dwemer and the Nords, they were a fledgling society trying to keep it together in a hostile new world. Resdayn was just a flickering ideal, something to work towards where she could channel all her creative potential.

I discussed in the Mara post that being a Mother did not mean you had to make babies. Being a Mother is about realising potential, not only through family, but through work, art, science or community activities. It’s about creating, nurturing, maintaining and belonging.

And for Ayem the Mother, this was evidently the case, when she became Mother to her people. Her prolific children’s book writings are a prime example of trying build a culture for her people, and teaching the children from a young age the right ways to live, so they can reach their own potential. She also wore the mantle of Mercy, the escape from Justice, because what Mother would not seek to protect her children or endeavours from the cruelty of the laws of nature and civilisation? What parent would not break the laws at least a little if they thought it would benefit their children?

But at what point does it stop being Mercy and just start being immoral? At what point does the creator or parent have to acknowledge that their child or creation’s needs cannot always be put ahead of the greater good? How far can we cloak our own ambitions in the interests of our children before it becomes a lie? At what point is the cloak of Mercy simply a disguise we wear hoping that one day we can similarly escape natural justice and the consequences of our choices?

I mentioned Ayem may have been a perfectionist, an adjective I applied to her only with great consideration and I do believe it fits. She was not perfect, but she was a perfectionist, and ultimately, this may have been the root of her madness, and is a driver of mental illness in working women everywhere. I single out women in this situation firstly because this is a piece on gender, and because generally speaking, perfectionism is strongly correlated with anxiety, depression, eating disorders and obsessive compulsive disorder, all of which are reported more frequently by women than men.

Why? The answer feminism would offer is that when women were granted the same rights and privileges as men, their expectations within the feminine sphere did not change, so not only did they have to continue with the rearing of offspring and the majority of the unpaid household work, they were also expected to perform at the same level as men who often do not have the same burdens at home.

Which, from personal experience, is not a reasonable situation, because that is not equality, it is in fact forcing women to perform at a higher and less sustainable level than men. Ayem, being a leader and eventually Goddess, is not only equally vulnerable to this phenomenon, but perhaps more so because the stakes were so much higher, it was not just a family in the balance, it was an entire nation at risk.

How do women cope when faced with such standards of performance and perfection? Well they certainly become more strained, less kind, less nurturing. They may feel pressure to cut corners or steal divinity to buy themselves more time and energy to accomplish their goals, rather than compromise on said goals. Sometimes their mental health also suffers.

Ayem went crazy not because she lost the powers of the Heart. She went crazy because not only did she lose her powers, she could no longer be what she wanted to be. The perfect image she had crafted for herself was shattered, leaving her a broken woman responsible for her own widowhood. A perfectionist will not care for what they have already accomplished, only for what they failed to do, and the anxiety and depression that follows can be crushing.

Mara, Kyne and Dibella represented an ancient archetype, one that is cyclical and restricts the awesome power of feminine power to specific life stages in order to maintain balance, and presumably, sanity. Ayem represents a much more modern, post-suffrage archetype of feminine identity, one that is not fully consolidated even a hundred years after women first won the right to vote. It is one that is highly controversial, even and especially now. Google the Mommy Wars if you haven’t heard of them, this is a thing, and it is such a broadly sweeping controversy about the role of women, particularly breeding women in a modern society. Women like Ayem, convinced and determined they can have it all, are at the very heart of this controversy that is affecting not only how families operate, but how governments plan social programming around the world. The vitriol makes the Canon Wars look petty indeed.

Slight change of plan, this will now be a series of minimum 4 essays, with the 4th being specifically on Nerevar, the Nerevarines, and the False Incarnates. ALMSIVI’s relationships with Nerevar and his ilk will be addressed primarily in that 4th essay, although I am open to discussing it in the comments as well. Thank you again for following me and encouraging me /r/teslore!

EDIT: all the indents removed.