About my Letter from Mary

By Naomi Alderman, 2011

I arose to open for my lover, and my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh, on the handles of the lock. — The Song of Songs, King Solomon

Isn’t it the worst moment of all, having to give back the keys? Or being given back keys, that’s even worse somehow.

I hated it when I was at college, that point in June when they’d say: this room that you’ve lived in all this year, this room where you had that party and that conversation, where your hand first reached over and touched that other hand and all the things that followed… this room isn’t yours anymore. Give us back the key. You can’t get in now.

I’ve been a surreptitious, compulsive key-keeper. Paying for spares, claiming I’d lost them. Never using the spares I kept, of course not. But wanting to know that the room isn’t entirely locked, not to me.

So I understand Spencer Anthony, I think. Unwilling to accept that the room is really locked now. But I understand Mary too, and how the particular twist in the world we live in – men chase, women are chased, some hand-waving evolutionary-psychology bullshit explanation for a behaviour that really means ‘women never get to decide for themselves’ – means that Spencer thinks it’s his job to keep trying to get in.

I used to say, a lot, when I was working this out for myself: if you can’t say no, you can never say yes, and if you can’t say yes, then you can never really say no. Consent, and compulsion. If I’m not allowed to say “no, you can’t come in” (physically, emotionally) then I won’t even understand what it means to welcome someone in. And if I’m not allowed to express my desire for you (“I want you to come in, yes, now, yes, yes, yes”) then my refusals mean nothing, they’re just what you expect anyway.

We could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble, probably, if we’d understood this from the start. I know so many men who, when you have that real conversation with them, that proper open-to-the-bone late-at-night conversation, admit that they don't think women really like sex, and that they have to be persuaded, cajoled, seduced into it. Seduction is bullshit. If you're welcome, then the doors are open and the handles are flowing with myrrh. If the doors are locked, don't try to get in.

So I wrote a letter from Mary.