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MARY MAG * by Flick Ruby
I stood in a hall of judgment, where men were being tried for their crimes
against women. I was dressed in scarlet, and so were all the women in the
hall. All of them were judges, and all of them were advocates, and so took
turns to read out the charges and to plead for the prosecution and the
defence. A single male figure, representing the whole of mankind, stood
slumped in the dock, his face hidden in his hands. Well might he feel
ashamed and terrified for his sex, for the litany of crimes was long, and
terrible, and the chanted indictments repeated certain words over and over
again.
-You have raped us, countless times. You have raped strangers, in
peacetime and in war, to establish conquest of a territory whose nature you
fear, to continue your separation from the woman in yourself whom you have
lost and whom you hate. You have denied these rapes, saying that we have
deserved punishment, or you have called them acts of desire, saying that we
invited them.
-You have raped your daughters inside their homes, and you have established
a taboo forbidding them to speak of it, and when they have spoken of it you
have reviled them and called them liars, or you have blamed their mothers.
You have established a dominion over their bodies, calling it Father-right,
and when they have escaped from you, you have called them whores who will
be raped by the men outside in the street.
-You have raped your wives, and you have denied that there can be any such
crime as rape in marriage. Does not the woman's body belong to her
husband, and does not he have the right of access at all times? You call
this love, and you call us willing.
-You have sold us in the marketplace as slaves and concubines, to be used
and discarded at your whim. You have defiled our image, creating false
idols of us as your naked playthings, your dolls. You have stripped us of
our clothes in public and humiliated us, and you have denied us our own
desire.
- You have denied us souls. You call us brood mares and dangerous animals,
so much do you fear nature and seek to control it.
-You have denied us independence and the right to choose our own lives.
You have seperated us from each other, and when we have broken free into
loving each other you have mocked and punished us.
- You have denied us an education that includes our history. You have
written all the official and learned books, and you have barred us from
your scheme of knowledge, at the same time insisting that you have done no
such thing.
-You have lied to us over and over again. Your fear of difference, of the
dangerous Other you have invented, is so great that you mutilate us to fit
us to your pattern. You mutilate our bodies and cut out the part of us
which reminds you of yourself, or you mutilate our spirits, cutting out our
desire and our intelligence because you think those things are male. You
have taught our mothers to do this to us, as you have taught us to do this
to our daughters.
- You have punished us when we have tried to rise. You have scorned us, or
imprisoned us, or removed our means of livelihood, or stolen our children.
You have called us evil and foolish and dangerous, and you have warned us
against each other. You have burned us, or called us possessed, and you
have tried to stamp out our power, our love, our life.
-You have raped us.
-You have denied us.
-You have created God in your image alone, and you have spoken in the name
of God to name us Babylon, the harlot city who must be trampled and
overthrown. You have named us the false bride who betrays the commands of
God and who must be scourged and brought low in the dust. You have named
us the scarlet women who have blocked mens passage to salvation.
-You have raped us.
-You have denied us.
-We are the scarlet women, oh Man, of your deepest nightmares, and we have
risen at last, and we shall oversee your downfdall, for this is the last
reckoning, and this is the judgement place.
-Can you understand now what you are capable of? Can you lean now?
From Michele Robert's, The Wild Girl, the gospel according to
Mary Magdalen