‘Kamukha niya si’ Mama Mary!

The first sermon many girls receive is delivered in front of a mirror.

It is there that they learn the body can testify against them. Every blemish and curve becomes something to monitor or conceal. Beauty is worshipped like dogma, and the congregation eats its own. She demands devotion in the form of calorie counts and contour kits, sacrifice in the hours spent plucking and bleaching and weeping quietly under bathroom lights. Her verses are written in the blue-light haze of 2 a.m. TikToks where girls hold their phones like holy relics and whisper beauty hacks like psalms.

By the time a girl stands in front of her closet on Sunday morning deciding what to wear to Mass, she already speaks the scripture fluently. Her dress is rejected because it is too revealing. Fingers pause at the neckline, adjusting fabric with the concentration of someone preparing an offering for the altar. The body undergoes revision before it enters public view.

Inside the church, the Virgin Mary waits behind glass.

Mary stands in her alcove, suspended in permanent perfection beneath candlelight and flowers. Her expression never falters. The folds of fabric conceal every trace of flesh. Children grow up seeing her before they understand her. They pass beneath her gaze carrying rosaries and half-formed ideas about womanhood. Year after year, the image settles deeper into the imagination until holiness acquires a silhouette.

“Kamukha niya si Mama Mary!”

The compliment drifts through parish halls and family gatherings. Is it a compliment? It sounds harmless. Tender, even. A girl watches enough statues and eventually learns how to become one. The praise rarely settles upon conviction, wit, or courage. It gathers around a femininity carefully arranged within the cult of virginity.

The body becomes a living Bible passed through too many hands. Congregations capable of excusing abusive men, electing dishonest politicians, and defending predatory authority figures suddenly discover unwavering moral certainty when confronted with a teenage girl wearing a fitted dress. The judgment arrives so quickly because her body has been assigned a responsibility it was never meant to carry: proving her virtue.

Doubt, in this religion, belongs almost exclusively to women. The discrepancy raises an uncomfortable question: why does so much moral scrutiny settle on young women? Purity culture claims to value chastity, yet its attention is rarely distributed equally. A father warns his daughter about her clothing. He is less likely to inspect his son’s outfit for signs of sexual impropriety. Wedding guests praise a bride’s white dress as a symbol of purity. Few spend time speculating about the groom’s sexual history. The standard exists for both sexes in theory. In practice, one group is monitored far more closely than the other. The scales tip so dramatically that the imbalance becomes impossible to ignore. What exactly is being protected? A virtue, or a hierarchy?

One body is granted humanity. The other is asked to function as a symbol. And symbols are always held to stricter standards than people.

Scripture offers women a narrow range of archetypes. Eve reaches for knowledge and becomes the origin of blame. Jezebel exercises power and becomes a synonym for corruption. Mary Magdalene is repeatedly remembered through the lens of sexual repentance despite the biblical text itself saying far less. Across centuries of retelling, women are flattened into lessons that can be easily repeated. Their stories remain, their complexity does not.

The scrutiny follows women through adolescence, adulthood, marriage, and motherhood. Women are invited to become living statues, admired for appearing untouched by the ordinary realities of embodiment. They are asked to carry a womb without carrying hunger. Her clothing, her beauty, her mannerisms, and eventually her sexuality become evidence in a trial that never quite ends. Every layer of fabric promises respectability, and every adjustment offers another chance at salvation. A woman’s kindness and ambition are pushed to the edges of the sanctuary while the congregation kneels before a hymen they cannot see, cannot verify, and scarcely understand.

Her body becomes the altar upon which respect is offered, inspected, and consumed. How many acts of worship can be demanded from a woman before she realizes she has become the sacrifice?

Yet the Virgin Mary was never remarkable because she was untouched. She was remarkable because she said yes, because she endured, because she acted. Her humanity made her holy. Somewhere along the way, that humanity was eclipsed by the obsession with preserving her purity.

The tragedy is not that women fail to become saints. It is that they are so often denied permission to become people.

The last sermon many girls receive is delivered in front of a mirror.

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Anya Mejia, 19, is pursuing her undergraduate degree in communication at Ateneo de Manila University. She also serves as head of advocacy at Ateneo’s Spaces for Women’s Arts and Narratives.