Dear Women of Western Culture,
My name is Mary. Not the Mary of Had-a-Little-Lamb fame. Holy Mary.
Or, if you will, Maria. But not Maria as in “The Sound of Music.” Ave Maria. You know, Mother of God? Queen of Heaven? Our Lady of Perpetual Boundary Issues?
You might remember me from such codependent masterpieces as the Pietà and nine billion paintings depicting the braless Madonna and blessed breast-fed children. Boys, all boys. Which reminds me: I want to talk about abortion rights.
Don’t get me wrong: motherhood is a noble profession. But I didn’t choose it. That’s the whole point here.
Looking back, I haven’t done much with my life except reproduce — once. For some reason, this makes me the eternal, long-suffering maternal archetype. Every second, I get prayers for help from zillions of needy depressives. These people never think to ask me about my possible empty-nest syndrome, my take on global warming, or whether I’ve managed, after all these years, to graduate college. They mostly want a favor from The Man. Well, screw that.
I am too through with being the nurturing female progenitor embedded in Western Culture’s incessantly whining collective unconscious. I am bigger than that — I am an individual, dammit, and I want to actualize my freaking potential. I want to learn skydiving and get an iPhone and play “Angry Birds” and occupy Wall Street, and I want to bust Bradley Manning out of jail. But you girlies are making all that difficult.
That’s because you, women of Western Culture — regardless of your religious beliefs or lack thereof — need to psychologically vacuum out your mental image of me, the obsessively giving Virgin. Abort me, you fuckers. This is not only to save the life of the Mother, it’s for you, too.
Please don’t ask me how the Baby Jesus would feel here. How should I know? My son the messiah — he never calls, he never writes.
Well, who can blame him? As a parent, I was way too controlling, something you can’t always see in those paintings. I forced that kid to live out my dreams: “Jesus, you’re late for your elocution lesson”; “Jesus, your father and I paid good money for that magic set, now make with the wine trick”; “I don’t care how much fun those kids are having, Jesus, you’re going to sit there until you heal that leper.”
I admit it — I was frustrated and demanding. I mean, hell, people always said I was the one with the charisma.
You question my story? Fine, check the record. At 14, I was married off to a much older man. I went through with it because I had no choice. If I didn’t, I might have gotten stoned in the marketplace — and not in a good way. A few days later, some angel comes around selling Bibles. Sticks his foot in the door and says, “You’re gonna like this book, tootsie — it’s got your name in it!” Then he shows me that part in the book of Luke where it says, “Fear not, Mary: for thou hast found favor with God.”
Whoa, what newlywed pubescent would not want to hear that? Then I read the part that said I was going to bring forth a son: “The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee… and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.”
Yeah, right: “Overshadow.” Huh. Funny, you don’t hear that word much in rape crisis centers. But whatever. I didn’t want to hurt God’s feelings, so even though I’m Jewish, I bought the leather-bound deluxe King James version. Angel threw in a free vacuum cleaner. Long story short, couple days later in the mail I get a Candygram. So, not thinking, I unwrap a chocolate-covered cherry and — BLAMMO — I’m what they call “overshadowed.”
So I become another pregnant teenager. No, wait — I become THE pregnant teenager. The cosmic bun-in-oven-who-me? avatar. You’d think I would feel radiant and fulfilled, but I feel like crap. That’s because, for over 2,000 years, the fundamental moral foundation of Western Culture has been the fact that little Mary of Nazareth (that’s me) was forcibly impregnated by the Holy Ghost — and fucking went along with it. Thank god that idiot Todd Akin said, a few months back, that thing about “legitimate rape.” Because of him, it totally dawned on me: Yeah, I really DO have ways to “shut that whole thing down.”
So you know what? Today’s Virgin is taking pro-choice to whole new levels. She is choosing her own friggin’ self. Today’s Virgin nurtures what she wants; she terminates when she wants. And so can you, women of Western Culture. In fact, until you do, you can be as “liberated” as you want — become a nuclear physicist, sell lesbian sex toys, play your tuba at Carnegie Hall, practice yoga on the beach — it won’t matter. As long as I, the Blessed Mother, remain society’s unspoken ideal of Womanhood — and I do — you’ll always be waiting, waiting to have greatness thrust upon — or into — you. You’ll spend your whole life wondering what’s wrong with you; why your movie-star potential was never discovered; why nobody asked you to the ball.
Face it, dolls: you’d be a lot better off if you got my Divinely fertilized, all-accepting, glass-slipper-fetishizing archetype the hell out of you. Because it’s never going to grow up to be a person.
