Blood Sugar Sex Magic

Question: Why does Freya have such a reputation for being a whore? Sure, Loki says she is, but he says that to all the girls. Does she just get a bad rap for being Vanir?

Loki does indeed say that to all the girls. Smoothest silver tongue in Asgard in action right there.

There are a lot of reasons that Freya is associated with sex. She's a fertility goddess, for one thing, which usually goes hand in hand - her brother Freyr is every bit as sex-connoted as she is (see hilarious statues of him) for the same reason. She's also renowned for her beauty and sex appeal and prayed to for help in love affairs, which usually comes with plenty of sex connotations for any goddess.

But Freya's not just representational; she's also actually having all the sex! Sex everywhere! You might be able to ignore Loki's claims that Freya has slept with everybody in Asgard and also bangs her brother on a regular basis (though can you ever really ignore Loki? He's exactly the kind of bastard who will totally tell the truth when it's that much fun), but that's far from the only time she gets down with her bad self. The most obvious example is the story of her sleeping with multiple dwarves in order to get them to give her the necklace Brisingamen, and nobody tries to pretend that didn't happen. (Also, damn, there Loki was telling the truth that time.) There's plenty of other textual evidence, too, including mentions of Freya sleeping with Odin and going out at night to prowl "like a bitch in heat."

So Freya is, indeed, having all the sex. This is understood in Norse myth. But the negative connotations attached to it are probably more modern than she is; it's more likely that it was originally a very strong part of her worship and a source of power. One of Freya's most important functions is as the mistress of seidr, Norse sorcery, and there is a heavy sexual component attached to the practice of seidr; accounts of rituals include bawdy songs being sung and aphrodisiac herbs being consumed, and Odin warns in the Eddas that magic-using women are both incredibly seductive and extremely dangerous to sleep with, as doing so gives them power over the man in question. Even the wand carried by seidr practitioners is considered by many scholars to have been an intentional representation of a phallus.

Which is not to say that Norse culture was originally totally fine with this and that all the sidelong glances and uncomfortable coughing on the subject came from Christian rewriters of the myths; there's clearly some ambivalence on the subject in Asgard. Loki obviously thinks it's something that's shameful enough that she might at least be embarrassed by it, and Odin confiscated Brisingamen from her in punishment when he learned how she'd gotten it. But nobody seems to try to restrict her from getting her groove on, either - certainly her absentee husband Od doesn't ever bother (or, indeed, show up in any of the stories we have about her), and the general feeling in most myths is that, well, yeah, Freya's having lots of sex. That's what Freya does. Njord even goes to bat for her by saying that there's nothing wrong with her having lovers, though considering that he's Vanir and thus prone to having no problem with things like sibling marriage, he may have slightly different definitions of what is and isn't sexually acceptable than the rest of the Aesir do.

So really, it's not that Freya's some kind of horrible low self-esteem trainwreck. It's that, like most love goddesses, sex is something she represents and embodies, so it's natural for it to be a big part of her stories, especially since it's also a part of the magic rituals she's known to practice. She's like an Aphrodite who also gets big power boosts from having sex. It's not surprising that she's up for it pretty frequently.

And considering her reaction to Thor declaring she was going to have to sleep with a giant to save his ass, I would not assume she's willing to jump just anybody's bones. Just make sure you hide your pretty boys when you go to Asgard.