Sanctifying Misandry by Katherine K. Young & Paul Nathanson

Author:Katherine K. Young & Paul Nathanson [Young, Katherine K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mcgill Queens Univ Pr
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

6

A Hag for All Seasons:

The Ultimate Revolution

Mary Daly is an academic who taught radical feminism at Boston College. Her refusal to allow male students into her classes led to a lawsuit, which she and the college settled out of court.1 This controversy led to her retirement. She made her reputation by attacking men, however, not ignoring them. In one of her best-known books, she states, “The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination.” The remedy: “The process of cutting away the Supreme Phallus.”2 Elsewhere, she writes that “Phallocracy is the most basic, radical and universal societal manifestation of evil, underlying not only gynocide but also genocide, not only rapism but also racism, not only nuclear and chemical contamination, but also spiritual pollution.”3

Daly’s implacable and relentless hostility to “patriarchal religions” such as Christianity, especially Catholicism, became the cornerstone of her worldview and therefore of her teaching (although she believes that every world religion is inherently patriarchal and therefore inherently evil).4 She could have left Boston College, which is run by Jesuits, but she chose to stay and undermine the institution from within. At least she had the intellectual and moral integrity to leave the Catholic Church, however, which is more than we can say of many other feminist ideologues – including some of her followers, who remain affiliated with or even paid by churches that they despise, precisely in order to help destroy them. Ironically, Daly’s worldview relies heavily on ways of thinking that are very similar in some ways to those of Catholicism and many other “patriarchal religions.” If these ways of thinking seem unfamiliar, that is because Daly has inverted and distorted them.

To be sure, Daly is not a mainstream feminist. She calls herself, with good reason, a radical and a revolutionary. (She uses many additional labels for herself and like-minded feminists: “hag,” “crone,” “spinster,” and so on. One of her most characteristic strategies, along with reversal and ridicule, is reclamation. She reclaims these labels from the linguistic oppression that men have supposedly foisted on women.) Despite her status as a radical, possibly because of it, Daly has become a feminist icon. Even those who disapprove of this or that aspect of her worldview, after all, see her as a touchstone. To paraphrase an old song from Oklahoma!, Daly and her entourage have gone about as far as they can go. Feminists can “situate” themselves somewhere along a continuum, in short, between Betty Friedan at one end and Mary Daly at the other.

In this chapter, we discuss Daly’s worldview in connection with the biblical paradigm of return to paradise on (1) a personal level, (2) a collective level, and (3) a cosmic level. We continue with a discussion of (4) her admiring fans and (5) her ambivalent critics, concluding with (6) a moral critique of our own.

In the first three chapters, we discussed the biblical paradigm of return to paradise on a purely chronological basis: first paradise lost, then the Fall, and finally paradise regained.

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