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16 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
"Purity and strength", December 21, 2001
Nobody, especially not its fans, would deny that the neo-Nazi fantasy _The Turner Diaries_ is hate literature. There's even a moment where the author fantasises my extermination: he describes the body of a white intellectual who rejected notions of racial solidarity, swinging from a rope attached to a streetlight. That's me and my kind, right there. Funnily enough, I also get exterminated in Mary Daly's _Quintessence_. So do all my women friends, though they even use the "feminist" word despite the damage done to that word's reputation by Daly, Dworkin and others. Why extermination? Because, it seems, we are "snools", in Daly's bizarre jargon, because we reserve the right to criticise ideas that don't make sense, "phallocrats" because we support democracy instead of Daly's "gynocracy", "necrophiles" because we think science and technology are on the whole good things, without being uncritical about their use. My women friends' feminism is different from Daly's, so they are "totalled women" and "fembots". Note how many of Daly's "dis/covered words" express hatred, from "snool" to "snot boy". And Daly's writing is shockingly bad, a mix of cutesie neologisms - "crone-logical", "be-witching" etc - in praise of an elect of lesbian separatists, along with name-calling abuse of her enemies, almost the entire "man-infested" human species. As Daly's outcasts, we probably wouldn't want to live in the mindless and passionless utopia Daly prescribes and describes in _Quintessence_, but that's okay, because Daly wants us dead. In the following quote, a sample from _Quintessence'_s holocaust fantasy, Daly's narrator, "I", is "Anonyma", a Mary Daly fan from 50 years in the future, who has brought Daly forward in time to survey the world her books brought about: " "Are there men and boys on the other continents?" [Mary] asked. "Yes," I said. "But ... the world today is Gynocratic and Gynocentric. ... The Earth's transformation has required that her inhabitants grow through profound psychic changes. Those who were not able to grow could not endure in the purity and strength of the New energy field..." "Are you saying that men who insisted on clinging to patriarchal beliefs and behaviors became obsolete and 'died off'?" asked Mary. "Yes, they rapidly became extinct," I said. "And what became of the patriarchally assimilated women who identified with the roles and rules of patriarchy?" asked Mary. I answered, "Those women who refused to release themselves from the phallocratic dependencies and habits that had been embedded in them under the old system were in effect refusing to evolve. So they also could not survive in the New energy field." " [End quote.] So only a few male survivors, and since "patriarchal beliefs and behaviours" turn out to include heterosexuality, interest in science, rationality and various other thought-crimes and desire-crimes, that's most women dead too. So much death, without the slightest tinge of regret in Daly's prose: who's the necrophile? Daly says our extermination occurs in the next 50 years, so it is not caused by our failure to reproduce while Daly's parthenogenic lesbians flourish and thrive: that unlikely development would take many, many generations. To "extinguish" us all in 50 years means killing the living. The instrument of our execution is Daly's "New energy field", which is fatal to those of us who lack, in Daly's strikingly Hitlerian turn of phrase, "purity and strength". Impure and weak people may find it interesting, then, that Daly really is interested in "New energy fields". In the November 2001 issue of _Philosophy Today_ she waxed enthusiastic about Rupert Sheldrake's morpho-genetic or morphic field. Given _Quintessence-_'s fantasy of extinction by energy field, it's perhaps reassuring that Sheldrake's field has the scientific credibility of Reich's orgone accumulators (ie "none"). But what can we make of a political work that celebrates the imagined extermination of all who are not pure and strong? What do we make of its author? Is Daly merely a joke, an embarrassment to her own cause and a gift to the right-wing media that drags out cases like Daly and Dworkin whenever they want to make feminism look ridiculous? Or should she be held responsible when what she writes is hate literature as much as _The Turner Diaries_ and other neo-Nazi tracts? Or do we make liberal excuses: "this is a damaged person, who cannot be held morally accountable when she strikes out ineffectually at those around her"? It's a serious question about responsibilities, and I don't know the answer. On the whole, though I know Daly would dislike this option most, I favour the liberal option. Daly causes more damage to her own causes than to anything else. That was a pity when the implosion of Daly's own credibility took out a fair chunk of feminism's credibility with her, though the excesses of her most dogmatic followers were also to blame for that. Daly is a key part of the reason why the most powerful political movement of the 1970s had become politically inert and ineffectual by the 1990s, as it still is, and that was a disservice to us all except for feminism's enemies. But these days her advocacy damages only the fringe to which she is still attached. Still, Daly believes in naming her enemies, and perhaps it would show respect to name her philosophy too, though it's not necessary to in/vent a (child)ish jar-gone, a/kin to Daly's own, to find the name. _Quntessence_'s lesbian separatist utopia, where superior people reproduce themselves by parthenogenesis without risking their moral or genetic purity by sexual contact with inferior beings, where there are no divergent ideas or dissent, where most of the inferior beings (men and women who like men) have been exterminated, except for a few tame specimens "on other continents", is not a variant of feminism. It's a variant of fascism. We can laugh or apologise or condemn, but let's call it what it is. Cheers! Laon
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