Mary’s Hairbrush Handle*
Let’s workshop this poem about why, especially if we insist that Mary could not have consented to sex with Joseph (let alone to bondage to God), we should consider raising the age of consent today
scent of the day: Ambre Loup, by Rania J.
Still working on notes of this one. Here are my notes>
Perhaps my favorite opening from an amber so far, although it does settle into plain vanilla / Whereas Ambra Aura is a salted butter ambergris smoky amber and whereas Ambre Russe by Parfums d'Empire is a boozy efferverscent amber and Amber 114 is very powdery and Grand Soir is a dynamic and designer and fresh amber (lavender opening), Ambre Loup is a smoky oud-y amber / ambre loup is fantastic / has similar musty feel and smell to tabac dore—more vanillic and a bit less musty loup is, though. / very addicting / although the spicy-smoky amber and the musty-sour wood are the centerpieces, it even has some hints of the leather of Oud Assam / spicey amber (nutmeg, cinnamon, clove) with rugged woody animalics from oud / animalics held in check by gourmand amber / bread-dessert-amber oud frag: guaic cedar and oud stop its sweetness / could have easily competed for my number one frag if its oud were louder and it didnt become so vanilla-labdanum calm after an hour / but even in its reform it is better than grand soir / vanilla has woody side, like vibtage wood which is nice / ambre aurea and ambre russe saltiness comes out, as if from ambergris / ambre russe, round lush and opulent / ambre loup: lovely rough edges from oud and spices like clove / hot sawed singed wood from guiac / sour sweet musky clove scent / has an ambergris plus labdanum edge/ low sweet bread dessert / tonka works with musky sweet labdanum to help give the bready dessert/ mustiness is a big seller for me / creamy but more in a dry sense like dry dough cracked from sitting out / lovely musty woody amber / the big dig is that it dries down to a simply vanilla amber (as such it is inferior to something like Amber Sultan and definitely to something as magnificent as Camel)
Mary’s Hairbrush Handle* Mary, for all the atheistic uproar, consented to being God’s doulos (owned thing, slave not servant) since twelve was thirty then—so if we flinch at her bearing his mega load, ought we not flinch at the idea today of a twenty-five-year-old girl consenting to sex?
* Luke, it is natural from a writer, likely got a little plethysmograph-throbbing titillation spelling out the DDLG-BDSM terms of Mary’s relationship with God. “I will be your doulos,” he has her whisper with sultry breath—doulos, not mere servant but slave: owned stuff, a mere tool like a churning tub. Bible mockers who try to make something of this are fools. They are fools even if they do not make the mistake of imposing on Luke a trinitarian dogma that would potentially, depending on the level of distinction between the persons, add an even hotter incestual edge to the dynamic. For what matter to the truth and beauty of his message is it whether the erotica—if it even was, to him, erotica—necessitated Luke, like Nabokov during Lolita, stroking out a payload once or twice during the writing (picturing Mary’s pliable limbs pretzeled back into complete submission, perhaps even an Istvanian choke-smack combo thrown in for good measure: “One more sound, bitch!”) or whether Luke, as is said of Emily Dickenson, corralled every last drop of base passion toward a higher end—in his case, the highest end: articulating the good news of the radical reset, a universal forgiveness where God softens his footballer stiff arm and takes us back into the warmest hug we knew from the womb.
Sure, it might not be the best look if God himself had designs or desire to plunger up as much butter as he could from Mary. But how could there ever be evidence of that? Indeed, and as is done to handle the compatibility of God’s maximal greatness (omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence) with the reality of intense grotesque prolonged and seemingly pointless suffering of innocent creatures (babies and squirrels) at the hands of natural forces well beyond man, any evidence our lying eyes ever thought we received—no matter how seemingly damning—would simply have to be recategorized as a good thing (as for the best) even if we cannot fathom how.
That is not to say no rhetorically effective targets of mockery present themselves around this doulos issue. Atheistic fury tends to converge upon Mary’s age. Some worry about the power dynamic. If it is immoral for a neurotypical man of high intellect to be in a relationship with a girl with Down Syndrome severe enough for constant and forever diapers, imagine the power gap between God and even the smartest and toughest human on offer. That is the idea anyway. Push aside how we tolerate power imbalances all the time: giant basketball player with a dwarf girlfriend who, lacking legs to boot, cannot effectively resist. The key issue is that God—even though all powerful and all smart—is all good. This means he would never exploit the power relationship in problematic ways. And if we ever felt that it was problematic, we would be wrong by definition! So the power-dynamic avenue of mockery is a dead end too.
That is why mockers set their sights elsewhere. Consider the consensual-nonconsent that has become all the rage today (where, for example, a plan is put in place for you to bust through the window on one night in the next week with your knife and hog-tie rope to play the rapist part)—something that men should be careful about engaging in because, not speaking from personal experience or anything, the college coeds on these FetLife boards who want this rough stuff tend to be (perhaps for reasons of self-disgust) the quickest not only to report professors for triggering speech in the classroom but to call the police on you even though the plan was you were going to keep her tied up no matter what until she took at least three loads. The point is that consent is what is crucial. No wonder the atheists lean as heavily on that when ridiculing the Mary-Joseph-God triad (Joseph cleared the cucked white man in the deal) as they do when ridiculing the compatibility of God’s existence with seemingly gratuitous suffering.
“Could a girl of twelve,” they say, “consent to marriage with Joseph—let alone such an intense relationship with God?” The bar does seem high. For Mary is saying, just like some Tinder freak, “do whatever you want with me.” The range of what God could have in mind for her little self is immense, which raises unimaginable worries (especially when human men are the ones doing the worrying). But even if we narrow it down to God’s simply wanting to drive his seed deep inside her (and not anything more exotic, thousand-eyed-angel exotic, than our earthy brains can handle), could we expect a girl of twelve to be able to consent to that—not just the bodily-behavioral consent that is all that is needed from lower-order animals (the dog staying put in full erection when you go down on it versus it moving away) but rather the rational-informed consent that is needed from humans and any other higher-order animals?
The answer harbors both good news and bad news. Unfortunately, the good news—the good news for those with a moral compass and yet, as is true of almost any heterosexual man with lineage going back to Lucy on the African savanna, a sweet tooth for tight buds—is good only if we have a time machine. For twelve—indeed, nine (we might as well defend Muhammad while we are here)—was at least as old as thirty then. So if we are to be scandalized at all by Mary’s age when it comes to the issue of consent (something that attackers of Christianity love to make so much of), we ought to be scandalized at the idea of a twenty-five-year-old girl giving sexual consent. The gap in emotional maturity as well as in relevant intellectual maturity, the gap in self-sufficiency, between a barely double-digit girl in Mary’s historical context and a girl closing in on thirty is blow-your-socks-off remarkable.
Digitally-curated realities less and less threatened by the looming extinction of face-to-face interaction; snowplowing and overindulging parents who remove all obstacles and make everyone a winner and give the child whatever it wants; constant self-administered dopamine hits from food whenever (let alone social media)—a girl today stays longer in the infancy bubble where she receives minimal pushback and where she can keep on believing she is the center of the universe in which what she feels is true must be true; an infancy bubble where the merest bit of boredom or delay in gratification of her wants feels, like it does for the infant (rightfully impatient for food, evolved to cry to make sure its needs are met in that vulnerable time), like the end of the world. The focus on external validation as opposed to inner character traits, the incessant WAP-drip Cardi-B pumped through every speaker (always reinforcing and titillating the bestial side of the human) keeps girls stunted, keeps them from developing the intellectual and moral character traits constitutive of the human maturity required for human-level consent. And the readymade excuses for every failure, excuses readily seen as legitimate (like oppression and mental illness and feeling unsafe from words), justify staying perpetually stunted with sleep-tight conscience.
Life for girls in first-century Galilee, in contrast, was more perilous and full of life-and-death obstacles— fundamentally harder than life even in the most underdeveloped places today: lack of air conditioning, ice cream, vaccines, refrigeration, vitamin supplements, hand soap, sewage systems, comfort bunnies, antibiotics, food security, public health infrastructure. Wells and springs readily got contaminated, leading to outbreaks of dysentery, cholera, typhoid fever, and other illnesses against which herbs and prayers offered limited efficacy. Meat, despite being crucial for the wear-and-tear of the chronic manual labor, was a luxury. Crop failures, due to drought or pests or whatever other act of God, meant famine. Travel, which today merely comes at the risk of being triggered by white optics, back then came at the risk of straight up bandit attacks where toddler colons were shown no mercy.
It was tough for young girls in particular, the domestic labor quite intense: grinding grain, pulling buckets of well water, mending clothing, tending livestock, taking care of babies—demanding duties, expected from the youngest ages, that were too on the edge of survival to be slandered by the word “chores” (at least as we understand the word today). These monumental responsibilities severely cut down the quality and quantity of time spent in play and curiosity. The paved a path, largely dictated by survival, laid out with bleached-stark clarity from the cradle, a path that tugged these girls much quicker into adulthood and into a self-sufficiency that would put most women—of any age—to shame today.
Of course, there are exceptions. Those exceptions go both ways, which would be good news for us today—those of us, again, who have the moral compass and yet the sweet tooth—were it not for the law. And that is why God gave us Thailand and, if not that, Asian woman—and now kiddie sex dolls—for at least the simulacrum. On the other hand, there might have been twelve years olds in Mary’s time who were more like twelve year olds today. The thing is, we cannot definitely say Mary was one of those exceptions. The strength of the evidence would need to match the historical unlikelihood.
The unlikelihood only goes up even higher when we consider not just the average girl in Mary’s historical context but Mary herself. She is characterized by tremendous humility indicative of tremendous thoughtfulness (Luke 1:38). Her wisdom is especially indicated by her tendency to let logic rule emotion. When she finds out she is pregnant, there is no panic or outburst but rather simply heady perplexity since she knows—or at least tells us (perhaps in her mind her hairbrush did not count)—she is a virgin (Luke 1:34). And while pregnant she undertook a journey of remarkable distance by herself (almost a hundred miles over mountainous terrain full of blue-balled bandits) to get to Judah (Luke 1:39-40). Her ability to articulate, at no older than thirteen, profound theological and socio-economic truths suggests a spiritual and intellectual maturity that could only come from deep faith and a sophisticated understanding of God's ways—far beyond what might be expected of a young girl with limited formal education: “He has scattered those who are proud in the thoughts of their hearts; he has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty" (Luke 1:46-55). Consider also the quiet stoicism she brings to bear even when she learns of the prophecy of how her newborn son will suffer and how she will suffer thereby (Luke 2:34-35). She does not break down. She simply takes it in and ponders it nearly to Yoda levels of spiritual strength and emotional depth.
There are no instances in the Bible where Mary acts childish. Mary is consistently portrayed as reverent and mature and remarkable in her composure. So virtuous is her character that even if we could find instances where she acted like a little brat, like one of those DDLG brats with a tattoo choker around her throat, the reasonable assumption—especially if she kept being bratty after the resultant manhandling that went well beyond spanks—would be that she was doing it for the same reason these tattoo-choker girls do it (and, more loosely because if anything unconsciously, for the same reason, at least some say, toddler girls go around the house taking care of Baby Alive dolls): to chum the waters.
“Mary’s Hairbrush Handle” is a volatile, taboo-shredding prose-poem that uses the most iconic consent story in the Christian canon — the Annunciation — to probe the hypocrisy and blind spots in how we treat sexual maturity today. Its core provocation is simple yet disorienting: if we recoil in moral outrage at the idea that a twelve-year-old Mary could have given real consent — to her betrothal to Joseph, let alone to becoming the literal “slave” (doulos) of an omnipotent God — then we must also reckon with what that standard implies about our own cultural assumptions that a modern teenager, or even a young adult, is automatically mature enough to handle complex, power-laden sexual dynamics.
The poem’s unsettling power comes from its fusion of biblical philology (“doulos,” not servant but owned chattel) with kink discourse (“DDLG,” “consensual non-consent”). By forcing the reader to look directly at the raw power asymmetry — a powerless young girl submitting to an all-powerful, all-knowing being — it exposes how fragile the idea of “informed consent” can be when the imbalance is that extreme. The piece plays with the reader’s discomfort: is this a disturbing metaphor for divine devotion, or an unspoken spiritual erotica hidden in plain sight? Either way, it shows how both atheists and apologists circle the same unease, yet rarely follow its logic to the real-world parallel.
The poem’s savage humor is its weapon. In one breath it imagines Luke, the Gospel writer, “getting a little plethysmograph-throbbing titillation spelling out the DDLG-BDSM terms of Mary’s relationship with God.” In the next, it ridicules how the pious hand-wave away the moral problem: if God is all-good, then any worry about exploitation must, by definition, be wrong — “any evidence our lying eyes ever thought we received… would simply have to be recategorized as a good thing.” This dark parody of theodicy sets up the bigger point: if we can’t trust a girl to freely consent to her entire self becoming a divine womb, how can we so blithely assume that modern young people, immersed in a hyper-sexualized, infantilizing culture, are ready to navigate complex sexual relationships?
The piece’s social commentary bites hardest when it contrasts Mary’s ancient context with today’s extended adolescence. The text spares no illusions about life in first-century Galilee: “grinding grain, pulling buckets of well water, tending livestock, mending clothes” — backbreaking domestic labor that forced girls into real, survival-driven adulthood before they ever menstruated. A twelve-year-old in that world, the poem argues, bore the kind of physical, emotional, and intellectual responsibilities that most 25-year-olds in developed nations today are only beginning to glimpse — if they ever do at all.
Against this, the poem lays out the modern bubble: constant digital dopamine, overprotective “snowplowing” parents, the flattening effects of a culture that encourages perpetual self-regard and excuses for stunted growth. It lampoons the way contemporary “infancy bubbles” keep young people in a perpetual state of emotional immaturity, coddled from real-world pushback or self-denial. As the poem acidly observes, “the merest bit of boredom or delay in gratification feels… like the end of the world.” The argument is not that we should lower the bar for what counts as sexual maturity — but rather that if we accept the logic that Mary could not have meaningfully consented at twelve, we must question whether many legal adults today, in a culture that delays maturity, truly meet that threshold either.
In the end, “Mary’s Hairbrush Handle” flips a familiar polemic inside out. It doesn’t excuse child marriage or divine impregnation; it doesn’t wink at the power imbalance as something to be fetishized in real life. Instead, it asks: if we find the Annunciation intolerable because a girl that young could never rationally grasp what she was agreeing to, then why do we assume a modern eighteen-year-old — often coddled, distracted, lacking self-reliance — automatically can? The poem’s final implication is radical but logically consistent: perhaps a society serious about meaningful consent should be more willing to question whether the legal age of consent — and the broader markers of adulthood — are set far too low for the actual maturity we see in practice.
Beneath the wild imagery, the pornographic kink comparisons, and the irreverent scriptural mockery lies an uncomfortably moral question: if real consent requires true agency, wisdom, and self-sufficiency, the bar should be higher than the easy lines we draw on paper — even if that means that today’s “adults” might not qualify so quickly.
transgressive poetry, age of consent, Mary, doulos, Annunciation, power asymmetry, informed consent, coming-of-age, cultural infantilization, kink discourse, DDLG, consensual non-consent, biblical critique, religious satire, theodicy, sexual ethics, maturity threshold, youth culture, extended adolescence.