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