And her alleged turning men into stone?
She emasculated them with her sharp wit. They were frozen with the realization that they were perpetuating an outmoded patriarchal dogma and the horror of the realization of the unfairness of a system that they themselves were responsible for maintaining. The natural response afterward was to deny this new truth - to reject it as the witching stare of a Gorgon. "Her gaze turned me to stone!" Naturally Perseus couldn't let this be... and the winner always writes the history books.
Surely Perseus would not have written "So there I was hanging with this Medusa chick. Man, she wouldn't quit talking! 'Equality of all!' 'Equal pay for equal work!' Geeze. Still - I just kept humming the 'Olympus Tonight' theme and nodding my head when it looked like she was pausing. You know how chicks are - she thought I was listening! So anyway at one point she turned around to go to the kitchen for drinks and WHAM! I was on her with my sword (knowwhudImean)!" Etc etc.
Perseus was just a hairy backed knuckle dragger who liked beating women up.
Did he at least have soft spot for animals? What about his loyal Pegasus?
Treated that poor winged horse like a car. There was no love there - he was the kind of guy that would kick his horse when it collapsed in the street. Did I miss anything?
Andromeda – was she a typical victim of domestic violence?
Well, yeah. His encounter with Medusa reinforced the behavior he'd learned as a child - that men can do whatever they like, and women are little more than cattle. They are to be bought and sold, traded like horses. Once they're acquired and had they're locked away in the kitchen where they make food and children while the man seeks out paramours with teenage boys (well - we are talking the classical era here).
Aha, so he just asked a couple of his teenage male-friends to witness that they saw a terrible sea monster grasping its dirty greedy hands for Andromeda while in fact she was just picking mussels for dinner and the most scary beast she encountered was a slimy seaweed licking at her ankles. Bang, Perseus turns into a legend and poor Andromeda better escapes from his tyranny into the sky to become a star formation. Yeah?
That's the gist of it, yeah. Convincing his teenage pals wasn't too hard. He bought them a case of cheap beer. Once they were totally hammered it was only a small matter of saying "Hey guys! Wouldn't it be awesome if ..." The rest of the story seems pretty self evident, really.
And the snakes on Medusa’s head?
Pff. "Snakes." She was cutting edge counter-culture. Those were dreadlocks.
Oh, a fashion pioneer as well? While Perseus was a conservative, vain, self-centred bloke always carrying his pocket mirror with him (hence the story of watching Medusa through it - he had to explain its presence somehow)?
'Xactly.
Well, Medusa truly deserves a prominent place in history...
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