Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Venus Figurines: What do they mean? feat. The Dirt" video.

I think it's more likely that these figures were more likely visualizations of a desired outcome than representations of goddesses. Much like cave painters painted images of game animals and successful hunts in the hope that creating those those images would make their subject become reality for them, people (we have no real way of knowing whether the figurines were made by men, women, or both) created images of healthy, well-fed, fertile women in the hope that making those images would cause their subject to become reality. In other words they were probably a form of representational magic, like voodoo dolls. Anthropomorphic gods/goddesses, worship as opposed to magic being the focus of religion, and devotional objects seem to me to be generally more characteristic of agricultural societies than of hunter-gatherers.
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@princeprocrastinate6485 That's a bunch of modern nonsense with zero evidence. There is no evidence of any culture anywhere in the world, past or present, where religion was solely the domain of women (or of men either, for that matter).
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@Thomas Pickens "Something similar" for guys wouldn't be made of rock. How many sex toys intended for straight men today are made out of something hard like stone or glass? What exactly are you going to do with your penis and a stone figurine? Anyway you're talking about very different social contexts. Porn exists because of repression. The factors that cause sexual repression in modern society didn't exist 20,000 years ago.
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@gabrielinague3026 Yes, but that's not at all the same as matriarchy, which to me implies a society with gender structured along similar lines as in patriarchy but with women instead of men being ascendant.
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@tecumsehcristero I think you are right. But all of those were the goddesses of agricultural people. The religious beliefs of hunter-gatherers (like, for example, Australian Aborigines) tend to be extremely different from those of agriculturalists and while there are doubtless some echoes of the earlier beliefs I think it's dangerous and almost certainly mistaken to try to draw direct parallels. But as a general rule the gods (to the extent the term is applicable at all) of hunter-gatherers are a lot less likely to be anthropomorphic than those of agricultural people. Humans created gods in the image of animals and impersonal natural forces before we thought to create them in our own image.
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There's zero evidence that any such societies ever existed, so any appearance of their working for many thousands of years exists only in your own fantasies.
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@JonPITBZN "Porn, sex toys, and religious iconography are all far more widespread and common than any specific good-luck totem." In settled, agricultural societies, yes. Among hunter-gatherers, not so much, particularly with respect to religious icons (if by icons you mean representations of anthropomorphic gods and goddesses). And I think those statues would have made very poor sex toys.
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@tsopmocful1958 Define "very early on". I would say that the entire Bronze Age was rather later on. It was certainly on the other side from the Venus figurines of a very radical divide in human society, the agricultural revolution.
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There isn't much for or against the Flying Spaghetti Monster either, but that's no reason to say it's equally likely to be true as false. It's one thing to propose that prehistoric societies probably weren't organized along gender lines the way more recent and developed societies have been, and quite another to then invent a specific scheme of organization for them and assume that it was the case.
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