Missing Mary's Point

www.jewishjournal.com/thegodblog/item/virgin_mary_bares_all_for_playboy_mexico_20081212/

Yes, this is offensive to a lot of people, no question. A lot of people love the Holy Mother much as they love their own mother. Mary is deeply important to a lot of folks, and this deeply disrespectful to people's beliefs. 

And you, dear reader, you probably already know all that.

I'm kind of fascinated by this, though. What does the sexualization of religious icons mean? What does it mean for people to look at the Virgin Mary in a lustful way? Because, let's face, ideas about sex have always been a part of Mary's story. 

It isn't just that she became pregnant while remaining a virgin. That's an important part of it, but there's more to it. The other half of that story is that no one believes that she became pregnant by miraculous means. Joseph is so embarrassed by this that he plans to call off their marriage. The story has a lot to say about the virgin/harlot dynamic. The virgin/harlot thing says that a woman can either be entirely pious and good and somehow nonsexual without being asexual, or is entirely fallen and... for lack of a better word, whorish. The virgin/dynamic acts as a tool to create specific places for women in society, keep women from being as powerful as they could be.

If anything, the Biblical story of Mary subverts the whole thing. In the case of Mary, she ends up in her social despised because of her goodness, not because of her failure. Mary's fertility, Mary's sexuality, her ability to produce life is a holy thing in the Gospel. Through the example of Mary, all sexuality is potentially holy, provided that it is not being used as a tool or a weapon or in some other way that harms, controls or oppresses.  

Now, I'm always happy to see recognition of the power of feminine sexuality in the Gospel story, but this is still wrong. I think that what Playboy Mexico is trying to plug into Mary's holy sexuality, trying to take some of that power and turn it into another commodity to be bought or sold. And that, really, really is what'd wrong with this.

This magazine pictorial is not about the beauty and power of the Theotokos. If it were, that'd be something else. This is just an opportunity for a company to make money off selling pictures of tits and vagina. Worse than being blasphemy, trying to use the power of the Holy for something evil, this just ignores the holiness of Mary, just acts as if the Virgin Mother has no greater meaning than any other product that could be bought for the price of the magazine. 

Comments

[CP]

Yeah, it's clearly trying to tap into and commodify the virgin/whore dynamic. What you were saying about Mary's sexuality revealing that all sexuality is holy is interesting. I'd say, via the lens of reading later (but still early) Christian theological reflection on this, that there is something about the Theotokos that is seen as a sign of the *transformation* of sexuality, specifically that it isn't contained by sexual complementarity. But the question is how open-ended the Theotokos symbolic allows that transformation of sexuality to be -- I'm honestly not sure.

[Irene M.]

OMG. You two are such doofs.