By JEEU CHRISTOPHER A. GONZALES

The girl is thrashing in the bed, spewing green goo on the priests. She grabs a crucifix and rams it into her vagina. The priests are horrified. 

This sequence in William Peter Blatty’s The Exorcist seemingly paints the ultimate desecration of the crucifix. But, on a much deeper level, the act is a manifestation of the vagina being defiled. The crucifix is the Church’s territory post. It claims women’s lives through the Church’s historically anti-women outlook, which is revealed in its letters and doctrines masquerading as humanist and pro-family stances. The Church’s vantage point concerning women points to the ultimate oppression: The vagina is beyond a woman’s grasp. 

The Vagina

In 2004, the Church released a letter delineating the roles of men and women in an attempt to redefine Roman Catholic Church orthodoxy. The “Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church on the collaboration of men and women in the church and in the world,” written by the Vatican’s highest-ranking cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, contained anti-women sentiments that had stirred up debates around the world. 

The letter reiterated a woman’s role, without mentioning a man’s, in the home. It said that the woman should possess “feminine qualities like listening, understanding, caring, and faithfulness.” While the Vatican believed that the woman can also pursue her own career, “those who wish also to engage in other work may be able to do so with an appropriate work schedule.” Such a statement only proved how the Church prescribed femininity as a women’s primary societal role, entrapping them within the confines of domesticity. 

The Vatican letter left many questions unanswered and roused issues that had already been settled, like the institution of parental leave for both men and women in some European countries and the emergence of self-professed male feminists. Aside from the mention of Adam in the creation of man and the original sin, there was virtually no reference made to the role of the male. The Vatican paper might as well have been entitled “Letter to the bishops of the Catholic Church about women” in its fixation on the vagina. 

Catholic doctrines at present manifest the Church’s perennial hold on the vagina. Requiring marriage before copulation, the Church has limited the woman’s sex life. This manifests in the Church’s ardent opposition to any form of birth control, which is a salient point in the feminist schema. The Vatican insists that it is against procreation and should be banned along with abortion and gay marriage. This ban denies women their freedom to use their own vagina. 

The Church’s rigid moral prescription, in truth, forces women into unsafe sexual practices by repressing their sexual activity, implicitly saying that their main role is to reproduce and maintain a normalized heterosexual home. 

The Virgin

Along with material things, the Church also converts the body of the sacred feminine into assets. The Church’s valuation of the vagina depends on what penetrates it. Since the Holy Spirit entered the Virgin Mary’s womb without entering the hymen, her value is higher than that of any woman who has engaged in copulation with ordinary men. 

Superficially, the Virgin Mary is the exact opposite of Mary Magdalene in all aspects. The Holy Spirit enters the virgin, leaving her hymen intact but nonetheless using her a vessel for the unborn savior. The male characteristic of the Holy Spirit bears no difference from the penis. Put bluntly, only the value of the penetrator is what sets the Virgin Mary apart from Mary Magdalene, the virgin and the harlot, the wife and the whore. The marking of territory reveals it is the Church’s moral doctrines that decide women’s worth, according to the laws of penetration. 

This appraisal echoes the Church’s idea of the family, where the vagina is used to nurture man’s seed and continue his line. The proprietorship dates to Friedrich Engels’ assertion that the rise of private property enabled the state to install institutions like the Church to subjugate the female. The Church’s moral dictates have been able to establish women as second fiddles to men in order to secure paternity and lineage. 

The Harlot 

This introduces the obnoxious face of the institution called marriage—the slavery, the prostitution, and the subjugation of women. Engels defined marriage as a “form of prostitution,” for although the illusion of parity is created, the woman remains a servant in the eyes of menfolk. The only difference between the harlot and the wife is the whore’s monetary incentives after the sexual act. Both are, in essence, bought by the male, the whore in bars and brothels, the wife in a ceremony officiated by the Church. 

Because women are valued according to what penetrates their vaginas, reclaiming the female reproductive organ is a paramount goal of the women’s liberation movement. But since the proprietorship of woman and her vagina comes as a result of the patriarchy brought about by the authority of the Catholic Church, she can only be freed by the dismantling of this power. The deterritorialization of the vagina can only be realized with the annihilation of private property, the system that binds woman to man and to the Church. It is only with the reclamation of the vagina that she can assure her rightful place in society. 

The aims of all women oppressed throughout the centuries will finally be realized when they are freed from the shackles with which they were bound 2,000 years ago. The downfall of patriarchy will be the only way for women to reclaim their vaginas from the reins of a gendered class society. ●

Published in print in the Collegian’s November 22, 2004 issue.