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Mary Magdalene is getting a makeover, thanks to the forthcoming movie, but Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal are still being called the porn star and the Playboy playmate. Which, in the minds of many, pretty much mean that these women are whores, just as Pope Gregory I declared Mary Magdalene to be in 591, albeit one who was abjectly sorry for her past life of wanton immorality.
Then, as now, men insisted on controlling the narrative of women’s lives and identities. As a recent article in the BBC pointed out, Mary Magdalene is possibly “the victim of 1,400 years’ worth of character assassination.”
Even the most cursory reading of the Gospels, the article suggests, yields no mention of Jesus’ BFF as being a woman of ill repute. Mark and Luke make mention only of demons being cast out of her.
But the narrative manufactured by the pope in the 6th century AD suited the Christian church’s agenda. Then, as now, the Church was really primarily a political institution in the business of saving souls while creating a community of the faithful spread out across the world, an army of Christian colonizers seeking more subjects, not to mention making money out of granting indulgences, among other things.
It served the Church’s purpose to portray Mary Magdalene as a harlot and sinner, making her ripe for redemption, thereby advancing the parallel male-centric narrative of Jesus as the all-inclusive, all-forgiving savior, who welcomed everyone into his fold, even those cast out by society.
Rooney Mara, the actress who plays Mary Magdalene in the film, told the BBC that in the course of researching her role, “the more I learned who Mary really was, the more shocked I was that most people know her to be a prostitute.
“All these men who are in this story have churches around the world in their name, yet she is known as the whore. It made me kind of angry actually.”
Added director Garth Davis, “To learn it was an invention of Pope Gregory was astonishing, and to learn that Mary’s story had never been told in a popular way was tragic.”
In the movie, Mary Magdalene is revealed as “a young woman from a Galilean fishing village whose talent for midwifery makes her an outcast.”
She hears of Jesus, the charismatic missionary preaching nearby and seeks him out, and drops everything to follow him. Clearly she gains most favored status; according to lore, she is present at the Last Supper as well as the crucifixion, and was the first person Jesus chose to witness his resurrection.
The rehabilitation of Mary Magdalene has been underway since 1969, when the Catholic Church “cleared” her name. That didn’t stop Andrew Lloyd Weber and Tim Rice from portraying her as the woman who sang “I Don’t Know How to Love Him,” him being Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar. As the lyrics go, “And I’ve had so many men before / in very many ways / He’s just one more.”
It makes a compelling, if unfair, narrative, you have to admit. Because the reputation of women has always been sacrificed to burnish the reputation of men, particularly when it came to exalting their greatness. And because it didn’t matter how many vaginas a man plunged his d*ck into, but it sure as hell mattered how many d*cks have gone into a woman’s vagina, with or without her consent. And if she chose to receive payment for the privilege of entering her vagina (or the media equivalent, starring in a porn video or posing nude in magazines such as Playboy), that made her a person of even more questionable moral character—I believe the word would be “loose”—therefore untrustworthy, suspect, unreliable. In short, unworthy of respect. If she were a beauty pageant winner, she would be stripped of her title immediately.
Yet the men who might have paid for her services or wanked off to her videos would largely be insulated from any consequences. Because in the scheme of things, the provider of such services or entertainment is the bigger sinner than the consumer. This ignores the fact that prostitution and porn exist essentially because it feeds, and has always fed, an almost exclusively male demand for these.
The lack of male accountability for one’s sexual appetites, whether extra-marital or not, could be said to have reached its apogee with the election of Donald Trump (and to a certain extent, Rodrigo Duterte). Even without the multiple infidelities and alleged sexual assaults, he already was a despicable person, yet voters willingly overlooked his odiousness. Had the reverse happened, had, say, Stormy Daniels ran for election, even at the state congressional level, she would never have been able to escape the “porn star” tag. And should she manage to bring down a particularly vile and divisive and ineffectual president, she would still be referred to as the “porn star.” Ditto for the “Playboy playmate.”
Because you can steal and kill and torture and rape, but you’re still better than a prostitute. Just as Mary Magdalene.
Note: To be fair, in 2016, Pope Francis formally declared Mary Magdalene as the “apostle of the apostles,” which does give her some overdue recognition.
B. Wiser is the author of Making Love in Spanish, a novel published by Anvil Publishing and available in National Book Store and Powerbooks, as well as online. When not assuming her Sasha Fierce alter-ego, she takes on the role of serious journalist and media consultant.
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Art by Yayie Motos
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