Doin’ The Love Gig
K. Stoddard Hayes lifts the lid on the antics of The Goddess of Love herself, Aphrodite, and asks whether she really is just a dumb blonde…
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 07
Athena and Discord may call her a bimbo, but there’s no doubt that Aphrodite rules in the beauty department. Who else can stop a battle just by walking into the middle of it and baring her body? She knows she’s good, maybe a little too well, and it’s sometimes difficult to get her mind off her looks. After telling Hercules she’s been sobbing for days over Nautica’s wedding to a pirate instead of her true love in My Best Girl’s Wedding, she says, “Are my eyes puffy? What about my cheeks? Are they flushed? Splotchy? I must look a wreck.” As if!
She has no modesty, either. What would the Goddess of Love need with modesty? Most of her clothes are so revealing they leave men speechless and even embarrass the second lolaus in Love, Amazon Style. When she’s told that riding bareback will cheer her up, she gets herself bare instead of the horse. And when lolaus tries to set her straight, she retorts, “Duh! Why would him being naked make me feel better?”
Aphrodite loves it when a man checks her out, and she’s not choosy about her admirers. Even Salmoneus can be her ‘studmuffin’ if she needs him for something. Well, okay, maybe she’s a little choosy. When Deimos propositions her, she tells him she’d rather lick frogs.
She knows her own gig, too. And most of the time, she loves it. When she and Gabrielle dress as twins and get into a wrestling match with Castor and Pollux to get Castor's oil in Little Problems, Aphrodite gets into the wrestling a lot more than Gabby thinks she should. “Look, there it is hanging below his belt,” says Gabby, spotting the bottle of oil. “Yeah, I noticed!” Aphrodite gushes, and she's not looking at the bottle.
“The oil, Aphrodite.”
“Right! I knew that!”
“Make love, not war, is my motto,” Aphrodite says, but she’s been known to indulge in the occasional scrap. She really enjoys helping the second lolaus beat up a gang of thugs in Love on the Rocks, especially because he’s doing all the beating and she’s just providing the moves from a safe distance. “Not so hard!” he protests.
“Oh, don’t be such a baby. If it hurts you, it hurts them.”
Put her in an enclosed space with Discord, and it's an even bet as to whether insults, fists or fire bolts will fly faster. But she’s not usually into the really rough stuff. When the bronze lion of Hephaestus menaces her and lolaus in Love Takes a Holiday, Aphrodite says, “I’m not really a cat person,” and she’s outta there in a flash of golden light.
And when a band of warriors come to steal Xena’s comatose body in Little Problems, Aphrodite shows up only after Gabrielle has wiped them out. “You go, cowgirl!” she cheers.
“Thanks for your help,” Gabrielle retorts.
“Oh, well, these are new nails,” says the love goddess, as if that can excuse everything.
Although Hercules says Aphrodite is not as dumb as she pretends to be, most of the people who know her think she’s a few cards short of a deck. When she tells Ares she’s onto his little plot to make her sabotage Gabrielle’s scrolls, he drawls, “You figured that out all by yourself, did you?”
A lot of Aphrodite’s magic leads to major screw-ups, even when the person she’s trying to help is herself. The jinx on Gabrielle’s scroll in The Quill is Mightier turns both Aphrodite and Ares into mortals, a situation Aphrodite greets with mixed feelings. She really gets into snoring like a pig and belching like a camel - “What a trip!” - but can’t deal with being smelly, dirty and definitely not sexy.
The mortals who know Aphrodite best usually try to talk her out of doing anything at all to help them. After she’s botched her attempt to switch Xena’s life force with Daphne’s in Little Problems, Gabrielle makes her promise not to use any more magic. And when the second lolaus meets Aphrodite, Hercules takes her aside and explains, "lolaus isn’t adjusting well to our world.”
“Say no more, I'll take him under my wing.”
“Actually, I'd rather you left him completely alone.”
“I'm the Goddess of Love! What could possibly go wrong?”
Well, plenty, actually, especially when Aphrodite is feeling bummed. After a long hard day of being massaged by her studly attendants, and reading petitions from her temples, she moans, “I am just over this Goddess of Love gig. You bore me, these bore me, love bores me. I quit!”
And the minute she quits, all the women in Greece start pasting their men with fists, crocks and anything else handy, while the men beg to know what they did wrong.
“Are you responsible for this?” lolaus demands of Aphrodite. “How come it only works on women?”
“Duh! If men felt the same way, where would the fun be? This rocks!”
And breaking up with Hephaestus totally messes up Aphrodite's powers. Her attempt to give the Amazons a better attitude in Love, Amazon Style turns them into Deimos’ slaves. “Take a chill pill, bro,” she tells Hercules. “I didn't do it on purpose. I saw those hagsters doing their man hating mantra and... I was just trying to lighten the vibe.”
The Goddess of Love can be cynical about love. When she sets up Joxer as a hero to break up a prince and princess in For Him the Bell Tolls, Cupid protests, “Well, you’ve done it, mom. You've managed to mess up yet another one of my perfect matches. How can you call yourself the Goddess of Love?”
“Get a grip, Cupie,” Mom replies. “Love isn’t just about happy endings. There’s also jealous love and unrequited love and tragic love. And when you strip away the tinsel, it’s just about hormones, isn’t it?”
Most of the time, though, true love makes Aphrodite mushy. When lolaus returns Nautica to the sea in Green Eyed Monster, she gets all teary watching them part. “Oh, that’s so sweet,” she wails when Cupid tells her he wants Psyche to love him for himself, instead of because of his arrows, “Oh, you really are the romantic type, aren’t you?”
The exception is when true love gets in the way of something she wants, like protecting her temples or getting more of them. “Temples are my kahunas, the way I know whether I'm happening or not,” she says.
On two separate occasions, Aphrodite tries to break up royal marriages and peace treaties to protect her temples or to get the temples of Artemis and Athena away from them. “When the Goddess of Love decides to do something petty and spiteful, she can be a tad difficult to reason with,” says her son. So when she refuses to take the hero spell off Joxer, Gabrielle leans on Aphrodite by bringing Joxer’s fight into her local temple and threatening to have him bust up every one of her temples.
Okay, so she is shallow, self-centred and obsessed with her looks. But Aphrodite can really care for someone, especially if that someone can see beyond her beauty. When her worshipper Palomides is struck down by the mad King Augeus in Reign of Tenor, Hercules finds her crying. “Can a goddess have a little privacy?” she sniffs. “[Palomides] respected me for what he saw below the surface.” She goes out of her way to try to save his life.
Aphrodite tries to stop Cupid from falling for Psyche because she's afraid her darling boy will suffer Hera’s curse and turn into a green-eyed monster forever. She even helps Gabrielle with her writer's block, though there’s nothing in it for her. And she falls in love with the scarred and solitary Hephaestus when she discovers he has loved her secretly for centuries. “Beauty isn’t just what you look like,” she tells him. “It's also what you are inside. Whoa! That’s like profound!” Maybe her own insight surprises her, but she does mean it. Even the Goddess of Love has more to her than looks.
As Hercules says after Aphrodite helps save Palomides, “I got to see a side of you I’ve never seen before.”
“Really? What side is that?”
“Your inside. And I liked what I saw. You’re quite a piece of art.”