#then i hit these paragraphs on genevieve's book and was like.... ok nvmd

[child-of-hurin]

In the early 1960s, influential researcher André Leroi-Gourhan proposed a grand theory to explain most, if not all, of the art. He divided the imagery, including the signs, into a unified binary system that classified everything at a given site as being either male or female. For Leroi-Gourhan, animal species such as horses represented the masculine, while bison had a feminine aspect; the signs were also divided into male (linear and angled) and female (rounded or curved) categories. This theory was widely accepted, and for the next three decades or so, most studies that included signs tended to approach them with this preconceived notion in mind. In general, though, researchers both past and present have felt that the abstract nature of the geometric signs made it difficult, if not impossible, to study them properly, resulting in a lack of knowledge about this intriguing type of imagery. (....) On top of the spatial organization, this famous French researcher came to believe that there was also a sexual division to the imagery, with some animals or signs representing the masculine aspect, while others represented the feminine. As I mentioned earlier, he interpreted bison as being female and horses as being male, and when they appeared together, which happened quite often, he saw this as the two aspects achieving equilibrium. All the images were divided up this way, but the category where it probably had the most impact was in the geometric signs. Overnight they went from having a broad range of interpretations to all being considered either male or female signs, with many of them having a sexual interpretation. Linear and barbed signs were classified as male, owing to their supposed phallic resemblance, and all the rounded and triangular signs were identified as being female and collectively came to be known as “vulvas.” The identification of certain individual signs as vulvas, or, more discreetly, as “female fertility symbols,” has an even longer history. Early rock art researcher Henri Breuil first started identifying some of the circular or triangular imagery as such, but it was Leroi-Gourhan’s sweeping classification system that really took off (these were the days of the Sexual Revolution, after all). Many other researchers from that time also adopted this description, and before you knew it, circles, half circles, ovals, open-angle signs, and triangles were all being lumped into this category. This made my life pretty challenging when I first started building profiles for each of the rock art sites in my database, because I would regularly run into site descriptions which listed off image inventories somewhat like this: three bison, one possible horse, two red deer, and six vulvas.

- The First Signs, Genevieve von Petzinger