At NSWATM, Doctor Mindbeam argues that Mary Daly is not a feminist:
If “feminism” is “the movement seeking gender equality with a focus on women,” why not throw out someone whose views are obviously un-egalitarian? What use do we have for toxic ideology? What’s holding people back from putting their foot down and saying “No, this person doesn’t represent my beliefs even in name?” As feminists with a conscience, as progressive feminists who’ve moved to the point where we can — hopefully — look in the closet and acknowledge our own skeletons that we find there, doesn’t it behoove us to make sure that we’re not dragging along a pile of shit with us, simply because someone had a vagina and spewed it out and used the word “feminist” alongside that verbal excrement?
I think the effort to denounce Daly as a feminist is laudable, but I’m going to have to disagree: Mary Daly is a feminist… for now.
As I noted in my article on Daly, she has been invited to speak at 12% of North American colleges, based on figures from her website. When she used to work at Boston College, no feminists there criticized her in print. Actually, students protested when she was fired. Daly wrote books. Somebody was buying them.
Daly didn’t just spew bigotry and appropriate the word “feminist.” Evidently, a certain bloc of feminists considered her perspective valuable. Unless we learn that college feminists were inviting Daly to speak in order to throw tomatoes at her, and people were buying her books in search of kindling, I don’t think dictionary definitions or stated principles of feminism are sufficient to revoke Daly’s feminist credentials (except insofar as those definitions or principles convince feminists to denounce Daly as a feminist).
Really, it’s not unusual to see people in political movements doing things that are at odds with the movement’s stated principles or dictionary definition. For instance, look at conservatives, liberals, Republicans and Democrats. Conservatives try paint themselves as fiscally responsible, and in favor of small government… yet some conservatives do things that contradict those principles. Likewise, the dictionary definition of “liberalism” might make you think that it’s about freedom, yet some present-day liberals erode civil liberties like free speech and due process.
Same thing with feminism. Political movements don’t have definitions. They have descriptions.
Saying that Mary Daly wasn’t a feminist is like saying that George W. Bush wasn’t a conservative.
Who is a feminist?
I’m a big fan of Daran’s old description of feminism, which I’ll attempt to paraphrase and elaborate on:
Feminism is what people identified as “feminists” say and do. (Not what they say they say, or what they say they do.) People can self-identify as “feminists,” or be identified as “feminists by others.” If someone recognizes you as a feminist, their recognition carries more weight if they themselves are recognized as “feminist.” The more “feminist” they are considered, then the more their opinion is weighted in conferring the badge of feminism on you. Let’s call this the “identification principle.”
If the content of what someone says and does is like what other people identified as feminists say and do, then we could also say that they are feminist. At least, we could say that their words and actions are “feminist” to the degree that they are similar to other feminists’ words and actions. Let’s call this the “similarity principle.”
FeministRank
Under this concept, political recognition is something like Google’s PageRank. Your content matters, and what also matters is how your content is linked to by other people. The more links you get from other people who get lots of links, the higher your PageRank.
Similarly, FeministRank depends on your content (particularly its similarity to the content of other people with high FeministRank), and your recognition from other people with high FeministRank.
There are a couple differences between FeministRank and my naive understanding of PageRank. With FeministRank, people can both grant it and deny it. If someone denies your feminist creds, then the strength of their denial also depends on their own FeministRank. Another difference is that with FeministRank and other political identifications, self-identification has a lot of weight.
Note that the similarity principle is tough to apply due to schisms within feminism. Consequently, some folks find it helpful to divide feminism up into categories:” sex-positive feminism”, “anti-porn feminism,” Christina Hoff Sommers’ “gender feminism vs. equity feminism”, ballgame’s concept of “gynocentric feminism”, and Nathanson and Young’s concept of “ideological feminism.” Someone can have high SexPositiveFeministRank, and low AntiPornFeministRank, for example.
Armed with these elements of identification and similarity, let’s look at a couple case studies.
Am I a feminist?
There are certain differences and similarities between my views and feminism. While I am critical of some elements of feminist theory, my own theories are highly influenced by feminism. I see my views related to feminism like how bonobos are related to chimps (and don’t ask which is analogous to which). There were common ancestors not too far back.
Even though I could find people who would recognize me as a feminist, I am not a feminist, mainly because I don’t identify as one. Self-identification counts a lot. Furthermore, I could speculate that if I identified as a feminist, other feminists might deny that I am a feminist, which would reduce my FeministRank.
Is Mary Daly a feminist?
Mary Daly is a feminist because she identified as a feminist and because other feminists recognized her as a feminist.
Her work has both similarities and differences from other feminist work. Although she is an outlier in how extreme her views were, they were similar to the views of enough feminists that it’s hard to say that she isn’t a feminist purely based on her work, even though it contradicts principles that many feminists hold. The similarity principle makes me lean towards calling her a feminist, though I think part of the point of Doctor Mindbeam’s post is that he disagrees.
The fact that feminists invited her to speak at over 300 colleges is evidence that she was recognized as feminist, and that other feminists felt her work was feminist.
So is Doctor Mindbeam’s post pointless? No. By denouncing Mary Daly and convincing other feminists to do so, he is reducing Mary Daly’s FeministRank. If enough feminists join Doctor Mindbeam in denouncing her, then perhaps some day she won’t be a feminist, at least according to future standards of feminism (though she was still a feminist by the standards of her day when she was alive, which can’t be undone without a time machine)
Mary Daly is still a feminist, but she is less of one.
This comment thread is the “No Hostility” thread. Please read this and this for the ground rules. The “Regular Parallel” thread can be found here.
Wow.
Short, succinct, and devastating.
I think you’ve captured it in a nutshell.
I think it’s work distinguishing between feminism as a social movement and feminism as a description of people’s beliefs. I think what you describe is feminism as a social movement. Feminist beliefs on other other hand are probably better described as a particular cluster or clusters of similar beliefs (perhaps beliefs about how the world works or particular approaches to understanding the social world).
Daly might well not be in a feminist belief cluster (regardless of whether her contributions were valuable to feminist belief clusters).
@AlekNovy: I’m pretty new here and even I know that if I want to post something off-topic, to take it to an Open Thread. Bad form. [Comment moved; thanks. —ballgame]
@Hugh: You got your NSWATM acronym misspelled.
@Druk
1) Well first of all I didn’t post about unicorns, so it wasn’t entirely off-topic. It was on the same subject overall subject of “radical feminism” which this Mary Daly post deals with. Today something interesting happened where radical feminists shut down a radio station… the same level of radicals as Mary Daly
2) The etiquette you quote is not universal. Most blogs I frequent… Headline shocking news related to the overall broader subject are mentioned in the comments on the latest and newest post. If its a big-news item, is ok to post on the latest post, precisely because its a shocking big news item.
Note, I’m not exactly whining or protesting the moving of the comment. Just pointing out it wasn’t entirely exactly me posting links to anime unicorn comic books or something of the sort.
As far as mary daly is concerned
Fidelbogen has written for ages that the number one thing non-feminists need to do is force feminists to DEFINE themselves with strict, well defined and concise borders and outlines.
One of the ways in which feminism can get away with a lot of misandry is that they refuse to be defined, so as to be able to never be responsible for radical ideas or people in their movement.
Here’s some of his articles on the subject:
http://counterfem.blogspot.com.....zy+borders
And here are some quotes…
also
That’s a great parallel, but I got an even better one.
Saying that Mary Daly wasn’t a feminist is like saying that Glenn Beck isn’t a conservative.
Another analogy for why one should judge an ideology by its real-world actions and not its stated principles:
I grew up in South Africa when Apartheid held sway.
Officially, Apartheid was never about racism. Its stated aims were to provide different peoples’ with full political autonomy by ensuring that each had their own territories within which they were sovereign.
But of course one had to peel back the surface and look at its actual real world effects. In reality, it boiled down to only one of those “peoples” who drew the borders for all others to be sovereign in. And strangely, those borders kept all the rich parts to themselves nor had any real overlap with any real historical territories, plus the territories set aside for others where curiously too small anyway.
I also think that the “by your fruits ye shall be judged” standard is better to use than the “feminism is what the dictionary says it is” standard.
“Daly didn’t just spew bigotry and appropriate the word “feminist.” Evidently, a certain bloc of feminists considered her perspective valuable.”
Hugh, you seem to imply here that there is a contradiction between these two. Is it possible that a certain bloc of feminists consider her perspectives valuable precisely because they are bigoted? That would certainly not be unprecedented, either in feminism or in other movements:
http://www.feministcritics.org.....eparatism/
Interestingly, whenever feminism is criticized, the response is always a reversion to the more basic and egalitarian definition: “Oh, feminism is just the recognition that women are human beings, nothing more than that. How could anyone EVER disagree with feminism?”
“Oh, feminism is just the recognition that …”
JUST – there’s the falsehood in that claim. Feminism is far more than that. Feminism is complex and diverse; it contains a multitude.
Jim what you and Copyleft are pointing out is the oldest (yet highly effective) diversionary tactic of “We’re not a monolith!”. Make a critical point and rather than actually address it they just whisp it away by hiding the point you’re being critical about under a different shell and pretending it doesn’t exist or that yes it does exist but you’re being unfair by bringing it up.
To add to this, there’s a contradiction within a contradiction that’ll make your mind twist into a pretzel.
Spokesperson: Feminism is not a monolith. There are diverse views.
Person: What about Mary Daly?
Spokesperson: She’s not a feminist. What she practices isn’t feminism.
Person: But you just said feminism isn’t a monolith and it contains diverse viewpoints. Mary Daly has a viewpoint, she’s a feminist.
Spokesperson: She may have a diverse viewpoint but it’s not feminism.
Person: You just said feminism isn’t a monolith.
Spokesperson: It’s not.
Person: So she’s a feminist.
Spokesperson: No, she’s not.
Person: But feminism has diverse viewpoints.
Spokesperson: Yes, I just told you.
Person: Mary Daly—
Spokesperson: Look, educate yourself okay? Leave me alone.
Eagle, you truly are a genius
I felt like clapping when I read that.
You shall win tomorrow for that one Eagle (by that I mean I’ve copied your comment and made a small post out of it to show my appreciation for it, which will be up at around noon tomorrow, I’m in Eastern Standard time).
Gee, thanks guys. I’ve never had that sort of reaction to a comment before. I’m flattered.
I’m a bit confused here – why is “Feminism is not a monolith” and “She’s not a Feminist” mutually exclusive?
I mean – isn’t it possible to say “Republicans are not a monolith” and have a spokesperson for Republicans say about a self-described Republican “He is not a Republican.”
Maybe I just don’t get it?
Also – where are the Feminists saying “Mary Daly is not a Feminist.”
EasilyEnthused: I tend to agree with you. As for which feminists are saying that Mary Daly isn’t a feminist, the only one I can think of right off would be doctormindbeam over at NSWATM. There have been a number of blogfeminists who have been critical of Daly lately (i.e. Melissa McEwan, Sungold, and a few others), but I think for the most part their focus has been on her transphobia, and I don’t recall them explicitly claiming that she wasn’t a feminist.
“(i.e. Melissa McEwan, Sungold, and a few others), but I think for the most part their focus has been on her transphobia,…”
…and not for her equally virulent misandry. I expected better of Sungold.
Do you have links, BG? I should read what these people have to say in their own words.
Jim, I’ve been away from FC for so long that I have a lot of catching up to do and would like to give priority to actually writing a post. I might be able to dig up some links later, but in all honesty you’d probably get what you want more quickly just by googling those sites. If the site doesn’t have its own specific search box, you can confine google to searching that site by doing this in a general google search box:
site:[URL] [search terms]
i.e.
site:http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/ “mary daly”
The argument is that feminism includes numerous divergent perspectives, i.e. it is not a monolith. Being such, one cannot argue that someone like Mary Daly is not a feminist because one just argued that feminism includes a multitude of perspectives, including perspectives one disagrees with. What Eagle pointed out is the utter hypocrisy of claiming feminism is a not a monolith while claiming that someone is not a feminist. In order to say someone is not a feminist one must define who qualifies as a feminist. In short, one must create a monolithic set of criteria, therein implying feminism itself is monolithic.
TS, I don’t think that quite follows. One can say, for example, that ‘feminism is not a monolith’ (i.e. that there are pro-porn feminists and anti-porn feminists) but that someone who believes that abortion should be illegal in all cases is not a feminist.
Now, it may be perfectly valid to critique those feminists who are vague about what constitutes the ‘bedrock criteria’ for who is in and who is out, but conceptually there’s no inherent contradiction in saying that ‘feminism is not a monolith’ and ‘person X is not a feminist’.
Actually Jim I’m pretty sure that Sungold did speak on the misandry of Daly’s material, but McEwan for certain straight up disavowed it and just pretended it didn’t happen.
My problem with the whole “feminism isn’t a monolith” deal is that feminists use it as a valid reason for why there is negativity among their movement but will then turn around the deny that very same premise when talking about other groups. I’ve found it odd that its unfair to treat all feminists like IBTP while at the same time acting like manboobz is painting a fully accurate and fair protrayal of MRAs.
Agreed, Danny.
“I might be able to dig up some links later, but in all honesty you’d probably get what you want more quickly just by googling those sites.”
You know, right I hit that, I thought better of it. For one thing, you have better things to do. For another, I’m pretty sure that if Sungold overlooked it, it was an oversight or a matter of focus, so it’s no big thing. But now I se form Danny she did address it. No surprise; good for her. In the case of McEwan, yeah…well……. I did go look at her post, and she managed to keep the misandry out of it until one of her comments. No surprise, no loss there.
Would that not imply that feminism is monolithic on the position of abortion?
How would one determine that without a ‘bedrock criteria’ of what positions a feminist must hold?
Eh, this is just a weird exercise in the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Pope Urban III and Anders Breivik were/are both Christians, even they have/had objectionable opinions and acted on them. Why should Daly be “expelled” from feminism because she also had some problematic opinions?
I can give you a “bedrock” criterion for a feminism: someone who believes
1. that at some point women as a group were worse off than men as a group.
2. that there were social systems above the choices of single individuals in creating this imbalance.
3. that it is possible and necessary to discuss and/or take corrective action to rectify (1) and (2).
But like all criteria for social and political movements, yea, verily, even MRAs, cat fanciers, and space enthusiasts, there will be borderline cases and exceptions and huge disagreement as to the sine qua nons. And even if you were to agree to my criteria, they are still broad enough to include many contradictionary propositions! I suggest that by any reasonable standard, though, Daly was a feminist, insofar as female-separatists are one subset of feminism.
Secondly there is a tendency here to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lots of people with awful ideas also have good ones, and even the awful ideas in themselves were things that, after everything, responded to a particular social history and circumstance. Mary Daly was writing in a world were women’s spirituality was molded under influence even heavier than now from a particular sort of Christianity, wherein God very definitely has genitalia. Evidently, she gave those who craved it an alternative vocabulary of spiritual essences. They all sound to me still very much steeped in a rather “genital” view of god/religion/spirituality (says the snobbish Muslim), but apparently some people need that.
Mandos: “Secondly there is a tendency here to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lots of people with awful ideas also have good ones, and even the awful ideas in themselves were things that, after everything, responded to a particular social history and circumstance. Mary Daly was writing in a world were women’s spirituality was molded under influence even heavier than now from a particular sort of Christianity, wherein God very definitely has genitalia. Evidently, she gave those who craved it an alternative vocabulary of spiritual essences. They all sound to me still very much steeped in a rather “genital” view of god/religion/spirituality (says the snobbish Muslim), but apparently some people need that.”
And that gives her the right to say shit like this:
“”I think it’s not a bad idea at all. If life is to survive on the 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”.”
Seriously, killing off males to decontaminate the earth? And you’re saying the times she lived in justifies this?
Anyone who thinks the solution to a problem is to kill of a population of the earth to decontaminate it is scum. Pure and simple.
Mandos:
Secondly there is a tendency here to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Lots of people with awful ideas also have good ones, and even the awful ideas in themselves were things that, after everything, responded to a particular social history and circumstance.
Fair enough but I now have a question. If its unfair to dismiss Daly and all her work because of her misandry (which BTW most feminist sites acted like they didn’t want to acknowledge) and declare that she is not a feminist then how is it then fair for feminists to point to Spearhead and the selective writings of manboobz as supposed evidence that the entire men’s rights movement is nothing but a vehicle of hatred that hopes to keep women oppressed so men can have the right to beat and rape their wives at will? In fact speaking of Breivik there were a few feminists that tried to play him up as an MRA despite there being MRAs that outright renounced his violence as well those that associated with it (but somehow manboobz and Hugo S. managed to not be able to find any of the MRAs that spoke out against him and his actions…).
Sure we may be continuing the vicious cycle by it to them but I’m rather tired of being nice with my “do unto others….” while they basically appoint themselves the arbiters of what is fair and equal and then get mad when someone dares to disagree with them.
I decided to explore Danny’s comment here at my blog.
http://easilyenthused.blogspot.....-with.html
EE: Your conclusion is kind of ridiculous. The guy in jail probably knows way more about the criminal justice system than I do. Fat people know quite a bit about dieting, more than anyone who lived their whole lives thin for sure. And, um, well-educated communists these days know quite a bit about the financial system, more than the average person.
Thomas Jefferson was a slave-owner, and probably Plato was too. Lots of very important thinkers had pretty awful ideas, but all those ideas were part of a whole with which we cannot dispense.
Mandos, comprehension of a system and knowledge of it’s parts does not necessarily mean that they will be able to lead others to a better place.
More knowledgeable? Absolutely.
Good advisers? Not necessarily.
Thank goodness most of us do not trust every aspect of our lives to a single advisor or philosopher. I don’t dispute that she was a feminist, but the number of feminists who take Mary Daly as a leading light and centerpiece of their philosophy/writing/activism is vanishingly small and magnified on the internet through the usual mechanisms.
Danny:
I don’t really understand your question. I do think that manboobz is selective and unfair at times, but there is an inner kernel of truth to what they’re doing that I cannot deny.
While the Spearhead is particularly egregious, not very many men’s advocacy sites share the attempt at balance that, say, this (non-MRM-identified) blog attempts to strike: that there is a separate condition of oppression under which men exist, and therefore the need for a parallel liberation movement.
Instead, most MRM sites, even those that do not call for universal female sexual availability or something nutty like that, view women’s gains under feminism as being largely at the expense of men and in some way wish or express nostalgia for the past and for a desire to reverse course.
One MRA-identified individual came onto manboobz and presented his case quite reasonably, but his reasonable presentation didn’t make it any less objectionable. He made the case that all people were “happier” in some sense when women accepted a subordinate role in family relations. He wasn’t talking about some right-to-rape, here. Merely traditional femininity.
But being as feminism is ultimately a liberation movement, presented reasonably or unreasonably, that sort of idea is just beyond the pale and evidence that the MRM is an attack on women rather than an attempt at liberating men.
I don’t really understand your question. I do think that manboobz is selective and unfair at times, but there is an inner kernel of truth to what they’re doing that I cannot deny.
That’s the point. He’s known to be unfair and selective but no one bats an eye about it but when someone does that to them all of a sudden its wrong? I’m not saying that manboobz is completely wrong about (no more than I would say that Daly was completely wrong). What I’m asking is this.
How is that that some unfair depictions are okay but others are not? How is it fair to generalize MRAs but not okay to generalize feminists?
One MRA-identified individual came onto manboobz and presented his case quite reasonably, but his reasonable presentation didn’t make it any less objectionable. He made the case that all people were “happier” in some sense when women accepted a subordinate role in family relations. He wasn’t talking about some right-to-rape, here. Merely traditional femininity.
Yes he might have been reasonable but had an objectionable position. But does that make it okay to pass that one off as the representation of MRAs? “We’re not a monolith” is a comment that often comes up when talking about feminists. Its true there are different ones out there some decent some not. Why can’t MRAs get that same consideration from feminists?
But being as feminism is ultimately a liberation movement, presented reasonably or unreasonably, that sort of idea is just beyond the pale and evidence that the MRM is an attack on women rather than an attempt at liberating men.
No that just means that feminism and MRM is not the same thing. MRM is a liberation movement as well just one different from feminism. Just declaring that feminism is the one true movement isn’t evidence that the MRM is just out to attack women.
Which speaks to one of the problems I have with a lot of feminists. This attitude of “we’ve decided we’re right and if you are aligning with us then it proof that you hate women”. Generalizations like that a big turn off for people who would otherwise like to interact with them. But time and time again we get posts where feminists basically sit back and complain about how despite them being oh so right they are burdened by unfair stigma and if it wasn’t for that stigma then all the reasonable people would see the light and join them (in fact there’s a post up on Jezebel today that comes close to devolving into just that). According to them if us non-feminists would just quit believing right wing hype and just accept what they say about us as undeniable fact everyone would be better off.
First of all—and we’ve been through this before—manboobz (and Pandagon and a number of other blogs) is a snark blog, and its express purpose *is* to be unfair to its subjects.
Secondly, my point was that while manboobz points out the more egregious cases and does so rather selectively, Futrelle is also claiming that he finds it very hard to find MRM blogs that aren’t ideological mates to the egregious ones in spirit if not in tone. ie, he expressly claims that he is, indeed, taking a representative sample.
I’m curious. Which MRA web sites would you count? FRA blogs? (Futrelle doesn’t focus on father’s rights issues.)
Again, that leads back to my previous question. The feminist accusation about the MRM is that most of the MRM views gender issues as a zero sum game. (I happen to believe that to a large extent it is, but that’s just me.) Is that true? Where in the MRM are the web sites that do not attempt to denigrate the gains of feminism or blame it for men’s problems? Here at FC I take it that that is the position, but I understand that the proprietors do not identify with the MRM.
Mandos: “But being as feminism is ultimately a liberation movement”
If it were so, then I wouldn’t have been treated like my white-male privledge negated all the harms that were done to me in the past by girls and women. Or been told “What happened to you sucks but it’s not as bad as how women are/were treated.”
Those feminists can kiss my rear end.
Mandos, show me where David or Amanda expressly acknowledge that they’re being “unfair” to the targets of their criticism. Moreover, while David might (or might not) acknowledge “just” being a “snark” blog, the same can’t be said for Pandagon, which endeavors to be (and is treated by many as) a blog of serious political criticism. (By “serious,” I don’t mean “ponderous,” I mean “claiming valid insights about our political culture, and not just in it for the lulz.”)
To the extent that some of the material at the Liz Library , as an example, is representative of feminist acvitism, yes, some of feminisms “gains” are going to have to be rolled back or reformed.
Mandos:
First of all—and we’ve been through this before—manboobz (and Pandagon and a number of other blogs) is a snark blog, and its express purpose *is* to be unfair to its subjects.
I echo ballgame’s challenge on this. Especially about Pandagon.
I’m curious. Which MRA web sites would you count? FRA blogs? (Futrelle doesn’t focus on father’s rights issues.)
Pelle Billing
Mensactivism.org
And if David wasn’t cherry picking there’s actually worthwhile stuff on those men’s rights reddit pages.
And he can try to parse FRAs from MRAs all he wants but Glenn does work with Fathers and Families.
The feminist accusation about the MRM is that most of the MRM views gender issues as a zero sum game.
And they make this accusation while doing the exact same behavior. Again why it is okay for them to do a certain behavior but then complain when someone else does it? One example being DV. How can feminists expect men to align with them on an issue like DV when almost every time someone among them mentions male victims of DV there is a guaruntee that someone will make the obligatory “yeah its a important but we must remember than most DV is male against female”? Even when the conversation is about men there is still “what about teh menz?” whining among them. But then they turn around and point fingers are MRAs for doing the same?
So again I ask. How is it okay for them to do some of the exact same behavior to people when they scream the bloodiest of murder when those people do it back to them? How is it unfair to discount all of Daly’s work because of her misandry but then fair to discount an entire movement because a portion of them are jerks?
The feminist accusation about the MRM is that most of the MRM views gender issues as a zero sum game.
The “sum” of a game is mathematically derived from its rules, and only makes a mathematical sense if the game is actually played by the rules. This is not the case with the “gender game”, because feminists change the rules along the way all the time, and they still cheat too.
Sorry I’m so late to the discussion. I’ve been traveling a lot, spending most of my time with family, and blogging very little. But I do want to weigh in on this.
Yes, I would consider Mary Daly a feminist. I consider Sarah Palin one, too, based on the principle of self-identification. I regard feminism as a big tent. There are some folks under that tent who hold views I find abhorrent. But to say Daly *wasn’t* a feminist just because she’s inconvieniently misandrist and transphobic? No. That would be dishonest revisionism. Besides, she has plenty of “daughters” who still embrace the whole Daly package.
To the question of whether Sungold addressed Daly’s misandry: Yep, I did, and it’s right here. My post on her transphobia is here. I don’t believe Daly ever advocated actively killing off the menz, but she sure did speak approvingly about a possible mass die-off as part of an “evolutionary” process. In my book, that’s only very marginally less vile.
In response to Jim’s (misinformed) comment that he’d expect better of me, I want to say that if I hadn’t written that post, it wouldn’t mean that I condoned Daly’s misandrist views, only that I didn’t find time. I have two kids (grade-school age) and a full-time teaching job, as well as some medical issues that limit my energy. The posts I just linked weren’t quickies; they required research. Had Mary Daly died a couple of weeks later, I would have had to spent that time grading midterm exams, instead.
By the way, I am very tickled by Hugh’s notion of FeministRank. Now someone just needs to write an algorithm for it.
Sungold – I think you nailed it with your post (I actually linked to your post on my blog!)
Question, though: If a Feminist is someone seeking female equality – what is someone seeking Female supremacy?
It always seemed to me that Daly was arguing that women are “better” than men – is that view reconcilable with Feminism?
Goodness, Sungold, that SheilaG commentator…
It’s like she refuses to hear anything and wants to just believe whatever she says is true.
Everything you said about male victims being marginalized is so supportive. Especially for someone like me.
Reading SheilaG’s comments, I wanted to vomit profusely. My god, such rancor towards men! And she doesn’t even see she’s so full of hatred!
It’s feminists like her, and her supporters, that make me distance myself from feminism and gender debate. Feminism isn’t a monolith? Well, if they’re allowed to be in the tent, don’t blame me for not wanting to come in.
“In response to Jim’s (misinformed) comment that he’d expect better of me, I want to say that if I hadn’t written that post, it wouldn’t mean that I condoned Daly’s misandrist views, only that I didn’t find time. ”
Well I was right, wasn’t I, Sungold. I overlooked/mssed your treatment of that point, but I was right to expect you to do a good job on it if you did treat it. Imena t exactly what you say – your silence would not be aggreement with Daly’s misandry.
“But to say Daly *wasn’t* a feminist just because she’s inconvieniently misandrist and transphobic? No. That would be dishonest revisionism. Besides, she has plenty of “daughters” who still embrace the whole Daly package.”
Bravo. This is why I trust you on issues like misandry. And I don’t think there is any real shame in supporting a movement that has some problematic elements, because that leaves us with nothing to support; the shame is in denying and failing to remedy them.
Um, why would they acknowledge that? It’s like asking Sadly No to provide a caveat that Pastor Swank is not a representative of right-wing thought. And why “just” a snark blog? In this day and age, destructive satire is arguably a serious component of political advocacy…
…which is the point. You’re asking a form of political advocacy for a particular set of ideological goals to give some kind of friendly liberal quarter to a point of view with which they vehemently disagree, because they believe it is attempting to undermine the form of justice that they believe in and feel the need to promote. Now, there’s a perfectly good reason to do so: in reality and in essence, it doesn’t undermine what they’re trying to do.
Now I know exactly what you’re going to ask next: why should you give quarter, therefore, to a movement that hosts such a voice as Mary Daly among its ranks? And the answer is: if you believe that Mary Daly’s presence is proof positive that the entire movement of feminism is anti-male, then you shouldn’t.
But so far in this thread at least, you haven’t made the case that, because of Mary Daly, all of feminism is the fruit of a poisoned tree. Nor have you made the case that the bulk of the MRM isn’t merely a more polite version of The Spearhead in that it undermines the work of the bulk of liberal feminism, which is with whom you are primarily engaging here.
I don’t think that “feminist” necessarily implies “equality”, in the sense that many people, myself included, think of the idea of equality as a desirable milestone, but ultimately the “poor man’s” version of liberation. In the post-whateveriarchical utopia, whether we are equal to one another or not would be of minor concern, because we would minimally impinge on each other’s liberty. And by liberty, I mean it in a broad sense, not in the anarcho-capitalist property-rights sense: we wouldn’t fear starvation from failure to obey another.
The difference between the various flavours of feminism is the degree to which they emphasize and situate liberation in relation to the nearer-term goal of equality. Liberal feminists, like other liberals, are focused on the achievable and have somewhat anti-utopian tendencies, and also have a tendency to ignore or disavow writers like Daly.
Mary Daly’s attitudes came from a particular environment and time. She got her PhD in theology in an environment hostile to more egalitarian reconceptualizations, and she seemed to have spent a lot of time trying to analyse why there was such hostility to this kind of reconceptualization when nothing material was at stake. That is, what motivation men would have to promote a god with male genitalia and then absolutely resist any attempt to re-envision the spiritual in neutral or feminine terms. Combine that with a worldview that takes spiritual essences seriously, and it’s not hard to see where Daly’s thinking might have led her: that female liberation requires the liberation of the female spiritual essence, and that there is something about the male spiritual essence that resists that liberation.
Seeing as I come from an Abrahamic background where God doesn’t have any explicit reproductive designation, the whole argument sounds odd to me, but the worldview of someone educated in a Catholic SEMINary (*snickersnicker*) is going to be a little different from mine.
As I said earlier, I would also disagree with feminists who attempt to disown Daly. Like with the entire “RadLezSep” element that is disproportionately loud on the interwebs, her words have zero chance of literally creating an all-female continent on which all men have suddenly died from the toxicity of the female spiritual essence. That leaves some scope for discussion about the implications of these ideas which are not trivial.
“…..But so far in this thread at least, you haven’t made the case that, because of Mary Daly, all of feminism is the fruit of a poisoned tree.”
I think it is beside the point whether or not it is the fruit of some poisoned tree. It’s an essentialist error to assume that a movement is irreparably compromisd by some bit, or even a foundational bit, that is problematic.
Seeing as I come from a Christian background where everything human is basically the fruit of a poisoned tree, I see dismissing something because of its ancestry as just an excuse for paralysis.
Mandos:
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So then if they aren’t saying so and should be expected to acknowledge then how did you draw that conclusion that they are snark sites?
Well since I don’t think that Daly is proof positive that the entire movement is anti-male (there’s some anti-male elements either direct (as in actual hate speech against men) or indirect (denying the existence of anti-male behavior) among them but not the entire movement) and people seem so anxious to point out that there is some useful material in Daly’s work, I still have my original question. Why is it okay to give some one group quarter but show not to the other?
Considering how there are some feminists who openly deny the way the current system harms men (and plenty who go to great length, even selectively redefining some words while fighting tooth and nail for the traditional definition of others) I’m not fully convinced of that. Sure there may not be many feminists that will go shoot up a men’s locker room but forgive me for having misgivings of people who in one breath say they want equality for all people then in the next would rather depend on their observations of the lives of other people than listening to the people themselves (something that I thought was a founding principal of feminism, trying to make sure everyone has a fair say).
I love your blog, it nice to see feminist actually doing the deffinition of feminism.