In late 2016, National Geographic released its December volume with the cover story “The Virgin Mary: World’s Most Powerful Woman.” While I have little memory of the actual article, I do recall a bitter taste in my mouth when I saw the gentle and soft portrait of Mother Mary gracing the cover. This maternal figure—the pinnacle of humility and tenderness, an absolute symbol of Christian faith and the only human capable of mothering God’s son—may be the most powerful woman in the world. But Mary is not powerful. Rather, power is derived from the golden ideal of womanhood and motherhood that the Virgin Mary symbolizes on a global scale. We venerate a desexualized and sanitized version of a young woman who died centuries ago, and refuse to acknowledge her as anything but Mother to Jesus, Virgin of God.

The problem with celebrating the Virgin Mary as an ideal example of womanhood is that we directly correlate a woman’s value to her ability to produce children and to her lack of sexual proclivity. This is easily translated to a culture where shaming women for their sexuality and for their infertility, or their choice to not have children, is a norm. This “powerful” woman was essentialized to a submissive ideal that a patriarchal society can use to judge women against and cast them as immoral, weak, deceitful, and crass.

This is a celebration of those who cannot or will not partake in this form of womanhood. It is an antithesis to the gentile, virgin Mother Mary and seeks to acknowledge the ways that her idealization has been used to constrict and strangle the individual desires of women.