GynEcology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly

Author:Mary Daly
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

※ Obviously some males go to therapists, whereas gynecology is targeted specifically at women. However, the point to keep in focus here is that mind-gynecology has women as its essential target, even when men are in the patient role, since therapy generally reinforces stereotyped gender roles and fosters woman hating. Thus a rapist who is sent to a therapist is frequently “helped to see” that “his problem” originated with his mother.

This proliferation of therapies, which are like shadows, distorted reflections and resurrections of each other, has the effect of including everyone not only as patient but as mini-therapist. Thus, “virtually everyone who is touched by psychoanalysis identifies with it and soon wants to become a therapist himself.”94 The result is that therapy has spread not only from the “elite,” selected for “the best” psychoanalytic treatment, to the poor who are offered “budget” or government-dispensed therapies, but even to those who do not go to therapy sessions but who are friends with or even casual acquaintances of those who do. Thus the contemporary religion of therapy has produced its own “priesthood of believers.”

It is easy to recognize here an ominous resemblance to the proliferation of christian churches and sects, and to the consequent witnessing by the “born-again” laity. After the death of Jesus, the holy ghost started inspiring more and more “converts.” These eventually formed different and seemingly opposed churches, and this doctrinal and structural variety functioned to seduce more and more into membership. These in turn profoundly affected the environment of nonmembers.

The diffusion of therapy, then, like that of religion, has been downward and outward, affecting all women. However, the contagion of mind-gynecology cannot be understood in socioeconomic or numerical terms only. Just as body-gynecologists spread iatrogenic disease, so also do therapists create a market for their “healing.” A woman seduced into treatment is “inspired” with dis-ease she had never before even suspected. As she becomes more fixated upon her surfacing “problems” she becomes more in need of Help. The multiplicity of therapies feeds into this dis-ease, for they constitute an arsenal for the manufacture of many forms of semantic bullets used to bombard the minds of women struggling to survive in the therapeutically polluted environment. The bullets of “psychobabble” invade the ears of Everywoman, informing her in a thousand tongues of her Sickness and Need for Help. This invasion continues unchecked because it fixes women’s attention in the wrong direction, fragmenting and privatizing perception of problems, which can be transcended only if understood in the context of the sexual caste system.

IV

The medical employment of women as token torturers is evident in the use of nurses, physiotherapists, and token women doctors. In the field of body-gynecology, the nurse, trained to be totally obedient to the Olympian Doctor, functions as the proximate and visible agent of painful and destructive treatment. Nurses shave women about to give birth and give enemas to women in labor. It is they who give injections and it is they who withhold pain medication begged for by the patient.

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