“You are all beautiful, my love”
There is a reason that women need Mary, and it isn’t just because she is the Mother of God. It is because a) Mary is the most beautiful woman God ever made. And b) women are bitches about other women—especially beautiful ones. Let me explain. Beautiful women (or, at least, women who want to think they are beautiful) can be consummate bitches about other women whom they want to make feel less beautiful than they. Trust me on this, I’ve been on the receiving end. But less beautiful women—we might, if we were being uncharitable, call them ugly—can be even uglier about beautiful women. Just look what they write about Mary! As a myth—or so Marina Warner argued in Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) — the Virgin Mary deserves to die because, in her excellence and beauty, she is an insult to all other women: [The] adulation of the Virgin excludes other women.... In a celebrated English tenson, or discussion, written in the thirteenth centur