I actually agree with all of this here, and my personal take on having reviewed much of the detailed writings on the figures is that it’s both. It’s logical to decude such, as our separation of sex and religion is purely a modern development with the advent of Judeo-Christianity. Sex has always had its place in religious worship and for many cultures, was the ultimate practice of religion. I think that viewing the Venus through the lens of modernity is just a bad idea all the way around, the point was to create an erotic stimulation, probably to commune on an emotional level with early fertility goddesses. I’ll see if I can find the time to dig up that piece that discusses them being used in orgies, basically sex festivals that were usually annual where the otherwise busy hunter-gatherers and early agrarian humans would all get together and have sex. Almost all cultures that have been untouched by agriculture practice group-sex, from Africa to New Guinea to South America, and it’s theorized (here) pretty convincingly that we evolved from tree-dwelling pre-humans who had sexualities not unlike gorillas (one man mates with all the women) and then as we became bipedal, we developed a sex life much more group-like, like that of bonobos and chimpanzees, our actual relatives. There really wasn’t such a thing as privacy back then, and yes, you’re 100% correct, we lived in very egalitarian, equal societies that likely became hierarchal with the advent of agriculture, and the idea of paternity and ‘owning’ women finally came about once we civilized. Up until that point, everyone carried their weight, everyone shared things, including sex. I’d definitely suggest giving Sex at Dawn a read (linked below through my Amazon affiliate program). It’s a pretty amazing work.

These archeological theories could all be wrong and it could have just been some really creative mind that was super bored, but, I kind of take the fused approach that a little bit of each explanation is true, especially with what we know abou Sumer, Babylon, and other extremely early cultures marrying sex and religion as one practice. It wasn’t until the advent of Judaism that this began to stop.

Considering there were 200 of them, the most likely possibility is that different cultures created them for different reasons.

Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships