Anti-Mary Exposed

The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity by Carrie Gress, 196 pages

For Carrie Gress, the feminism which rose to prominence in the '60s and '70s and quickly became cultural orthodoxy only pretended to offer women liberation, instead promoting a distorted perversion of femininity.  In her telling, the vanguard of the women's movement consisted of its most dysfunctional members, and they have used the power of the media to shape a concept of the modern woman after their own image - vulgar, shallow, petulant, self-absorbed, and, above all, hostile to the Marian ideals of virginity and motherhood.  More than an ideological struggle, Gress presents this as nothing less than a diabolical plot to replace the Marian "fiat" with the Luciferian "non serviam".

This is definitely a book written for the choir, and a women's choir at that.  Anyone who does not accept Gress' premises will not be swayed by demonic testimony reported by exorcists.  For believers, there is another danger, in that Gress' sensationalism sometimes lends to her subjects a glamour that covers the tired banality of yesterday's transgressions.  That the book is aimed almost exclusively at women is both inevitable and fitting, given Gress' contention that women's identities have always been influenced, for better or worse, far more by other women than by men.  Thus it is that she advances the icon of "not only a well-behaved woman who made history but the best-behaved woman around whom all of history turns" to oppose that of a high-heel stomping on a human face, forever.