Tag: Mary Daly

Mary Daly’s Feminist Vision of Gendercide

In a post this month about a satirical essay by Martha Burk on controlling male fertility, weblogger Glenn Reynolds offered this parenthetical remark,

Though if you think that calling Burk’s piece “satire” changes the face of feminism you’re showing your ignorance. There are other writings by academic feminists calling for the elimination of men and similar absurdities in dead earnest, though at nearly midnight I’m not going to run them down. But as a guy who once edited Catharine MacKinnon, I know a bit about this stuff.

Barry Deutsch then challenged Reynolds as to whether there are really academic feminists who have called for the complete elimination of men. Reynolds turns up references in Mary Ann Warren’s “Gendercide,” which Deutsch says isn’t good enough.

Well, there is one academic feminist who is both a fan of parthenogenesis and advocates the elimination of men (and most women) — Mary Daly. Until a few years ago, Daly was a professor at Boston College. She was finally forced out there because she refused to allow men to participate in her classroom.

Daly has long advocated for research into parthenogenesis to dispense with men. Her book, Quintessence, is half-science fiction novel, half bizarre manifesto in which she explicitly lays out her views. Daly herself is a character in the book who visits a utopian continent where — thanks to the influence of Daly’s books — a lesbian elite reproduce solely through parthenogenesis.

And there is no doubt that Daly considers this both desirable and possible. Here’s Daly from a 2001 interview with What Is Enlightenment magazine (emphasis added),

WIE: In your latest book, Quintessence, you describe a utopian society of the future, on a continent populated entirely by women, where procreation occurs through parthenogenesis, without participation of men. What is your vision for a postpatriarchal world? Is it similar to what you described in the book?

MD: You can read Quintessence and you can get a sense of it. It’s a description of an alternative future. It’s there partly as a device and partly because it’s a dream. There could be many alternative futures, but some of the elements are constant: that it would be women only; that it would be women generating the energy throughout the universe; that much of the contamination, both physical and mental, has been dealt with.

WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article, ‘The Future, If There is One, Is Female,” writes: “At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race.” What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

Of course, what Daly is advocating here is nothing short of gendercide, and yet Daly is taken seriously by radical feminists.

Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin, for example, called Quintessence a “masterpiece.” When the Boston College controversy erupted, Daly’s supporters held a fundraiser called “A Celebration of the Work of Mary Daly” which included Diane Bell, Director of Women’s Studies at the George Washington University; Mary Hunt, Co-Director of the Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual; Frances Kissling, President of Catholics for a Free Choice, and others. Daly also counted Eleanor Smeal, Gloria Steinem, and other feminists outside of academia in her corner.

The press release announcing the celebration explicitly includes Quintessence as one of Daly’s celebrated works. Can you imagine for a second the outrage if men in and outside of academia got together to celebrate the works of a misogynist who complained of female “contamination” and advocated “a drastic reduction of the population of females”?

And that, in a nutshell, is what is wrong with contemporary feminism — that such nutcases are not only tolerated but openly celebrated. And they still wonder why so few college-aged women want to self-identify themselves as “feminists.”

Source

Mary Daly event in Washington, DC, Jan. 29, 2001. Mary Hunt, E-mail press release, Jan. 10, 2001.

The Thin Thread Of Conversation: An Interview With Mary Daly. Catherine Madsen, Cross Currents, Fall 2000.

Change Agents in the Church: Mary Daly. Rev. Joan Gelbein, Unitarian Universalist Church of Arlington, Sunday, January 7, 2001.

Mary Daly and Boston College Reach Settlement, But Continue to Argue

Feminist theologian Mary Daly recently reached a settlement with Boston College over her strange exit from teaching. For 25 years, Daly had refused to allow men in her classroom, and to their discredit Boston College officials grudgingly accepted this arrangement.

But in 1999, a student threatened to sue Boston College if Daly refused to allow him in her classroom. When college officials informed Daly that her sexist policy was no longer tolerable, Daly said she’d rather retire than allow a man in her classroom.

Boston College took her at her word and announced that Daly had retired. Daly claimed she had never said she was retiring and sued Boston College for breach of contract.

And then things got even weirder. A few weeks before Daly’s case was to go to trial, Daly and her lawyer approached Boston College seeking a settlement. The college agreed, and the two parties entered into a settlement that included a confidentiality clause — neither side was to discuss the terms of the settlement.

Except Daly and her lawyer apparently couldn’t resist getting in a dig at Boston College and put out a press release falsely claiming that Boston College had come to Daly seeking a settlement and proclaiming, “We are confident that, after hearing all of the testimony, the jury would have ruled in our favor and found that Professor Daly’s tenure rights and academic freedom had been trampled.”

Boston College was outraged by the breach of the settlement as well as the false claim that it, rather than Daly, had sought a settlement. The college threatened to sue Daly for violating the terms of the settlement. Daly’s lawyer responded by issuing a retraction of the comments that admitted Daly had sought out the settlement.

Regardless of who did what, hopefully, other colleges and universities will get the message that sex discrimination is simply intolerable at higher learning institutions. Ironically, Daly insists that the principle of academic freedom gives her the right to discriminate based on sex in her classrooms. What a twisted view of academic freedom.

Source:

Suit settled, feminist and BC still arguing. Patricia Healy, Boston Globe, February 8, 2001.

Hating the Pill

A couple weeks ago marked the 40th anniversary of the birth control pill — and in those 40 years it rivals (and probably beats) the computer as the single most important technological innovation of the last four decades. I was born well after the introduction of the Pill, and to me cheap, reliable contraceptives seem as natural and commonplace as long distance phone calls or routine air travel, which were revolutionary in their own right.

The funny thing about the Pill, though, is that ideologues throughout the political spectrum tend to hate it. The conservative version of the Pill is pretty straightforward — the Pill severed the link between sex and procreation and caused massive, largely negative, social upheaval. Writing for Frontpage.Com, for example, Chris Weinkopf (A Bitter Pill) laments that,

By effectively thwarting women’s reproductive systems, the Pill and the revolution it enabled granted sexual partners the confidence that one-night stands would not become lifetime obligations. Not surprisingly, women now complain that most men think of them as little more than sexual objects, and are unwilling to “commit.”

…by completely divorcing sex from the possibility of procreation, the Pill degraded the marital act from an expression of unconditional love, rooted in an openness to new life, to an exercise in physical and emotional gratification. This devaluation has no doubt contributed to the national rise in adultery — which experts estimates now affects at least half of all marriages — and the national divorce rate, which has more than doubled since 1960.

Weinkopf also blames the Pill for contributing to the problem of many children growing up fatherless, and complains that not only has the Pill not made a dent in the abortion rate, but that the Pill in fact is abortion. Some oral contraceptives work by inhibiting the ability of fertilized eggs from implanting on the wall of the uterus — and Weinkopf and others think interfering even with a fertilized egg at all is tantamount to murder (even though fertilized eggs often fail to implant due to any number of reasons without the Pill). Weinkopf posits some sort of active effort by “feminists [who have] succeeded for four decades in concealing from the American public … that it can cause abortions.” Perhaps there are some women who don’t know how the Pill works, though they could just read the package insert that comes with every prescription, but more likely even people concerned about the ethics of abortion don’t necessarily consider a handful of un-implanted cells to be a person.

Don’t think it’s just conservatives, though, who dislike the Pill. Radical feminists such as Mary Daly argue that the Pill is literally a poison designed by male scientists to benefit the patriarchy and make it easier to control women. In fact there is a strain of radical feminism that sees pretty much all scientific research into reproduction as a patriarchal attempt to further seize control of women.

One of the things Daly and others cite is the debate over whether or not the Pill contributes to an increased risk of some form of cancers and other side effects. While most of these risks are overblown by a media interested in hyping tales of disaster, no technology is risk free (witness the small number of men who have died because they ignored the warnings accompanying Viagra, which also causes a number of well-documented problems in certain men).

The fear of lawsuits, however, is one of the reasons that there have been so few new contraceptive drugs in the intervening years. In fact, one of the few new products that was put on the market — Norplant — immediately became the subject of a large number of lawsuits which have yet to be resolved.

It is not surprising that the Pill should have so many detractors — the Pill increased the amount of freedom that women and men had in sexual matters. As in any other area of life, freedom carries with it a great deal of responsibility and inevitably some people act irresponsibly. Yes, to some extent people have chosen to trivialize their marriage vows (though others have left bad marriages for good reasons) and too many men don’t take their responsibilities seriously.

On the other hand, the Pill also allows married couples to easily defer having children until they are older, wiser and better off financially. It allows people from turning one reckless night into a lifelong mistake.

Weinkopf, and I imagine many conservatives, finds it hard to believe Gloria Feldt’s claim that “the Pill has enabled women to take charge of … their lives,” but his real problem is that he doesn’t approve of how women (and men) have freely chosen to live their lives in the post-Pill era. In this view, he’s not all that different from the radical feminists.

Quotes from Mary Daly

What then can the label anti-male possibly mean when applied to works that expose these facts and invite women to free our Selves? … The courage to be logical — the courage to name — would require that we admit to ourselves that males and males only are the originators, planners, controllers, and legitimators of patriarchy. Patriarchy is the homeland of males; it is Father Land; and men are its agents. … The fact is that we live in a profoundly anti-female society, a misogynistic “civilization” in which men collectively victimize women, attacking us as personifications of their own paranoid fears, as The Enemy. Within this society it is men who rape, who sap women’s energy, who deny women economic and political power. … As a creative crystallizing of the movement beyond the State of Patriarchal Paralysis, this book is an act of Dis-possession; and hence, in a sense beyond the limitations of the label anti-male, it is absolutely Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female”
-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism

“Males do indeed deeply identify with “unwanted fetal tissue,” for they sense as their own condition the role of controller, possessor, inhabitor of women. Draining female energy, they feel “fetal.” Since this perpetual fetal state is fatal to the Self of the eternal mother (Hostess), males fear women’s recognition of this real condition, which would render them infinitely “unwanted.” For this attraction/need of males for female energy, seen for what it is, is necrophilia — not in the sense of love for actual corpses, but of love for those victimized into a state of living death”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.59.

“Male hatred of women expressed in such fetishized forms hides the deeper dimensions of envy, which remain unacknowledged. Thus we hear one male say of another’s “project” or invention, “That’s his baby.” We also hear men describe the books, papers, articles of other men as “pregnant” with meaning. Such deceptive expressions provide clues to the deeper levels of deception. They suggest that the procreative power which is really envied do in fact belong primarily to the realm of mind / spirit / creativity. Yet this envy is not necessarily a desire to be creative, but rather to draw — like fetuses — upon another’s (the mother’s) energy as a source. Thus men who identify as mothers (that is, supermothers controlling biological mothers) are really protecting their fetal selves. They wish to be the fetuses/astronauts and the supermothers/ground commanders, but not the biological vessels/spaceships which they relegate to the role of controlled containers, and later discard as trash.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.60

“It is impossible to miss symptoms of this male fertility syndrome in the multiple technological “creations” (artificial wombs) of the Fathers — such as homes, hospitals, corporate offices, airplanes, spaceships — which they inhabit and control. Moreover, these male-constructed artificial wombs are ultimately more tomb-like than womb-like, manifesting the profoundly necrophilic tendencies of technocracy.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.61

“Yet another application of this myth is the medically masterminded maze of lethal “choices” among surgical, chemical, and mechanical solutions to the Contraceptive Problem. It is obvious to Hags that few gynecologists recommend to their heterosexual patients the most foolproof of solutions, namely Mister-ectomy. It is women who choose to be agents of be-ing who have pointed out that tried and true, and therefore, taboo, “method.” The Spinsters who propose this way by our be-ing, liv-ing, speak-ing can do so with power precisely because we are not preoccupied with ways to get off the hook of the heterosexually defined contraceptive dilemma. “However, all females, from four-month-old babies to octogenarians are potential victims in a rapist society whose male members function as “lethal organs.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.239

“It is also of obvious significance that other lethal purifying medicine is working to ensure an even earlier extinction of women. Now that the model of female moral purity has been converted into pure sexual availability, the Purifiers have produced The Pill. This is known to increase risks of …[long list of claims] … Premenopausal Pill-popping thus prepares the way for premature death, the ultimate purification.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.250

“Since women on average survive men by a significant number of years, it should not be surprising that gynecology is functioning to remedy this unacceptable situation.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.260

“The gynecological profession and the popularizing media have combined their efforts to make the poisoning of women appear acceptable. Just as popping The Pill is both “normal” and normative for younger women, so is estrogen replacement therapy for their mothers and older sisters.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.286

“She [the enlightened woman] detects the pattern that is behind the deceptive patterns; she dis-covers the necrophilic nature of the fear in which he is fixated, which is also the fear he projects upon/injects into his snow white victims. This is not the fear of dying but the fear of living. As Valerie Solanas lucidly points out: “The male likes death — it excites him sexually and, already dead inside, he wants to die.” This statement would seem to be adequately substantiated/documented by the state of this male-controlled planet. If patriarchal males loved life, the planet would be different.”
-Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.352

On the Apollo space program:

“While overtly promoting the oppressive ideal of the nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to erotic fantasies allegedly taboo in heterosexist society.”
–Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, p.63.

Regardless of sex: Mary Daly and the return of ‘separate but equal’

One of the areas where feminist activists deserve credit for genuine improvements in sexual equality in higher education. Through the first several decades of the 20th century, many elite colleges were simply closed to women while others strictly limited the courses and disciplines women could enter. Sex discrimination was the rule rather than the exception. Feminists initiated both legal and moral challenges that today have effectively eliminated such sexual discrimination. Now, however, some feminists want to modify this ban on sex discrimination in academia. The new credo is that sex-based discrimination is wrong unless it is directed by feminists against men.

That is the conclusion that a reasonable observer of the flap over radical feminist Mary Daly’s teaching practices might conclude. Daly is a tenured professor at Boston College, where she’s taught since 1967. The author of several feminist books, including Beyond God the Father and Gyn/Ecology, Daly is one of the few people who make Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, look moderate in comparison. In Gyn/Ecology, for example, Daly devotes several
pages to the hidden sexually oppressive meaning behind the United States’ decision to name its lunar landing program after the Greek god Apollo (Daly complains that “while overtly promoting the oppressive ideal of the nuclear family, this space spectacular subliminally appealed to erotic fantasies allegedly taboo in heterosexist society.”)

But the subject of the current controversy is not Daly’s bizarre beliefs but her teaching practices – she refuses to allow men to enroll in a class she teaches on feminist ethics. Daly says men are intolerable in her classes because “what the women do is become caretakers for the men. In those circumstances, I decided, and many others have, that there’s a reality called women’s space. There has to be a separate space for women.”

And, of course, by definition, a separate space for men. In the past, Daly had gone so far as to take a sabbatical for a semester when she suspected a male student might try to enroll in her class. To be fair to her, Daly is a firm believer in the principle of separate but equal. She is willing to instruct men outside the classroom setting in one-on-one sessions but maintains they are just
too disruptive for the classroom environment.

Daly’s separate but equal position received support from her students and prominent media pundits and academics. Kate Heekin, a former student of Daly’s, told CNN she didn’t want men in her feminist ethics classes. “I want to talk about women,” Heekin said. “I don’t want to teach anyone about why I feel oppressed, why we live in a patriarchy – I don’t want to waste my energy on that.” Heekin and 14 other Boston College students wrote a letter to college administrators asking them to keep the women-only policy.

Boston Globe columnist Eileen McNamara wrote a blistering article attacking male students at Boston College who dared suggest they were being discriminated against by the women-only policy. “Boys, boys, boys, settle down,” McNamara began her article. “Mary didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. She knows you hate being excluded, that you get cranky when you feel left out.”

McNamara went on to complain about the men “sulking” over not being allowed to enroll in the class. As McNamara puts it, the men have it all wrong. “She doesn’t refuse to teach men; she assigns them to a separate section … The studies are clear: from grade to graduate school, males dominate the classroom.
They demand more attention and they get it.”

“Given the choice,” McNamara concludes her remarks, “I’ll stand with Mary Daly.”

McNamara joins Daly’s attack on the male Boston College students who started the controversy by threatening to sue the college if denied entry into the class. Daly claims the threatened lawsuit was part of a broader conspiracy to “assert white male supremacy.” Aside from being white males, the students’ main offense has been to enlist the help of the Center for Individual Rights for legal representation. As McNamara puts it, “Of all the lawyers that might represent an aggrieved student, isn’t it curious his cause is championed by the Center
for Individual Rights, which has fought affirmative action policies at universities from Texas to Michigan?”

Harvard Divinity Professor Harvey Cox echoed the vast right-wing conspiracy angle in an opinion piece in the Boston Globe. “I cannot believe,” Cox wrote, “that the real issue here is about a few classes that are open only to women
… After two decades of relentless gender leveling in higher education, everyone now recognizes that some women (and men) learn certain things better in gender-specific situations.”

A major irony in the attacks on the male students seeking to take her classes is that Daly owes her position in part to male students. In 1969 Boston College decided to terminate Daly’s contract due to her virulent anti-Catholicism (after returning from Rome for the Second Vatican Council, for example, Daly urged feminists to “laugh out loud at their [the Catholic Church’s] pompous penile
processions.”) At the time Boston College was a male-only school, but more than 1,500 students turned out to protest the administration’s decision to sack Daly. Eventually, the college reversed its decision. Given a choice, the male students at Boston College decided that academic freedom should apply to professors of both sexes. Daly, unfortunately, choose not to reciprocate this gender-blind approach.

The reader can easily imagine the reaction to this controversy were the roles to be reversed. Imagine an engineering professor at a major American college refusing to allow women to enroll in his classes because, he says, study after study demonstrates women’s inferior mathematical abilities. After explaining how he can’t slow his classes down to accommodate the women, who will surely demand far more attention than the men, the sexist professor might offer to teach women one-on-one where he can meet their special needs without disrupting his classes.

A female student might decide this violated numerous federal laws and perhaps contact a leading civil rights organization to sue the offending college to end its practice. But, some astute columnist at the local paper might ask, isn’t that a
lesbian lawyer representing the plaintiffs? And isn’t she the same lawyer who has been trying to push the homosexual agenda down people’s throats by bringing hate crimes lawsuits? Clearly, the only possible conclusion would be that this is a well-coordinated attack by “feminazis” on everything true and good – after all, nobody in her right might could oppose sexual discrimination in public institutions simply because it is wrong.

Daly’s behavior and McNamara’s impassioned defense of sexual discrimination highlight how far contemporary feminism has wandered off the path of sexual equality. Where once feminists bravely stood up for the principle of genuine equality between men and women, today many feminists in academia and the media have merely reversed the ages-old conservative stereotypes of women, defining them as the norm and men as something less (or as “The Other” to use the faddish postmodern term).

Feminists did an excellent job in showing the hypocrisy of paternalists who kept women from pursuing higher education and effectively mocked those who argued women simply couldn’t handle intellectually weighty classes or might prove too much of a disruption in the classroom. In fact, feminists relied heavily on such ideas of sexual equality to force male-only schools such as The Citadel to open their doors to women rather than set up separate programs for
women which, feminists argued, would be inherently inferior. Today, however,
all too many feminists openly accept and defend the view that sexual stereotypes and discrimination are to be tolerated, if not encouraged, provided they are created by feminists and used against men.

The claim that some topics were simply too intellectually challenging for women or that women would disrupt universities’ learning process were extremely harmful myths, and their near-eradication by the feminist movement was a good thing. But in their place, some feminists have begun to construct new myths about gender that are equally odious. Although it is no longer politically correct (nor should it be) to suggest that women don’t belong in certain classes or universities, numerous Women’s Studies textbooks, journal articles, and other materials repeat claims that men’s participation in classes is wholly negative and disruptive (so much for the oft-mentioned goal
of diversity in the classroom).

Women’s Studies professors Marcia Bedard and Beth Hartung write in an essay that male (but not female) students who “stat[e] the exception to every generalization” that a professor makes are guilty of harassment. When several male students in Magda Lewis’ feminist theory class dared to suggest that violence was a human problem, rather than exclusively a male problem, Lewis included the incident in a Harvard Education Review article as an example of the sort of oppression women experience on a daily basis.

So long as so many feminists continue to agree with ultra-conservatives that men and women are fundamentally different and must be treated fundamentally differently in similar social contexts, a world of true equality will always remain elusive, much to the detriment of humanity regardless of sex.