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