Monday, January 4, 2010

The Life of Mary Daly, Lesbian Feminist Thealogian


[this photograph of Mary Daly was found here]
Where's Mary Daly?
Perhaps she will let us know one day.
Rest in Peace, Warrior Wommon.

I just found out from a white radical lesbian feminist friend that Mary had been quite ill for a while in such a way that makes her passing something of a relief to those who knew of her condition. So with that, let us welcome her into the next realms of wisdom.


[5 Jan. 2010 addenda:]
"There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so." -- Mary Daly

For me, Mary Daly was a brilliant example of a person capable of gloriously displaying radical intelligence, fierce wit, creative spirit. She was a lover of words and wordplay--she gave permission to take what one can from patriarchal religion, philosophy, theology, language (my entire glossary to the right owes its existence to her), and make it work for women. And live in the pursuit of trying to do so. She carved out new spaces for radical feminist theories with a labrys as sharp as any.

She gave permission to say good-bye to the life-draining practice of caring for men. She gave women direction in how to create lives organised around other women's humanity, not men's inhumanity. She was a lesbian separatist. And she gave so many women the creative courage to do the same. Brava, Mary Daly!

I can tell you this: without her presence on Earth, I would not have met many great radical feminists of every color, who have been inspired by her work to do their own work, name their own realities, and carve out spaces for themselves to be alive and delight in loving women. That men can only conceive of this as man-hating demonstrates how tremendously brittle and egomaniacal the male supremacist mind is.

She was and is reviled by men, by silly men, who think her evil for dissing their gods: any male god and all of men's many other gods such as white male supremacist religion, philosophy, theology, language, science, culture, media... too many to name now. To revel in being reviled by vile men. That is one radical task, among many others. But a better and far more difficult task, by far, is to be a man who earns the on-going love and respect of radical feminist women. Learning and practicing the latter, not the former, is my life's course.

I offer you my gratitude, Mary Daly. Let the patriarchal fools call you "the wicked witch" in days to come--it has already happened in the few hours since your passing. Little do they know how much they compliment you in doing so!

See, also, here for a  post in respectful remembrance of Mary Daly, from The Feminist Texican.
______________
What follows is from here:


Mary Daly, radical feminist theologian, dead at 81

She helped reshape Christian thought through decades

Jan. 04, 2010

Daly in 1987 (Photo by Gail Bryan)
Printer-friendly versionPrinter-friendly versionSend to friendSend to friendPDF versionPDF versionMary Daly, radical feminist theologian and a mother of modern feminist theology, died Jan. 3 at the age of 81. She was one of the most influential voices of the radical feminist movement through the later 20th century.

Daly taught courses in theology, feminist ethics and patriarchy at Boston College for 33 years. Her first book, "The Church and the Second Sex," published in 1968, got her fired, briefly, from her teaching position there, but as a result of support from the (then all-male) student body and the general public, she was ultimately granted tenure.

Mary E. Hunt, co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER), announced the death Jan. 3 online in "The Feminist Studies in Religion" bulletin:

"With a heavy heart, yet grateful beyond words for her life and work, I report that Mary Daly died this morning, January 3, 2010 in Massachusetts. She had been in poor health for the last two years.

Her contributions to feminist theology, philosophy, and theory were many, unique, and if I may say so, world-changing. She created intellectual space; she set the bar high. Even those who disagreed with her are in her debt for the challenges she offered. ... She always advised women to throw our lives as far as they would go. I can say without fear of exaggeration that she lived that way herself."

Daly once wrote: "There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so."

She was an exuberant participant in and shaper of the feminist movement of the 1970s, and 1980s.

The only child of working-class, Irish-Catholic parents, she grew up with a strong sense of her ethnic and religious heritage. As a young woman, she developed a desire to become a philosopher and a theologian.

Encouraged by her parents, and especially by her mother, Daly pursued her intellectual dream, receiving her Ph.D. in religion at St. Mary’s College, Notre Dame, in 1953, at the age of twenty-five. Still yearning for a doctorate in philosophy, Daly went on to earn two more degrees in theology and philosophy from the University of Freiburg in Switzerland.

Daly was influenced by thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to French feminist Simone de Beauvoir to Virginia Woolf.

In fact, Daly, the feminist, developed a kind of perverse fondness for Aquinas, whom she called “the fat old monk.” She learned to "decode" the thinking of a man who, she cheerfully admitted, conceived of women as "misbegotten males."

Eventually, in her life and scholarship she developed a sweeping analysis of "patriarchy" as the root of women's oppression and of all social ills in which people are treated as objects.

After “The Church and the Second Sex,” she said she moved from "Christian reformist" to "radical, post-Christian" feminist.

Studying archetypal forms and prepatriarchal religion convinced Daly that church doctrine consisted of a series of significant "reversals." She explained these to NCR writer Jeanette Batz in 1996:
  • the Trinity, from the triple goddess once celebrated worldwide;
  • the virgin birth, from the parthenogenesis that once begat divine daughters;
  • Adam giving birth to Eve.
Women operating on patriarchy's boundaries, she once wrote, can spiral into freedom by renaming and reclaiming an ancient woman-centered reality that was stolen and eradicated by patriarchy.

She took great delight in castigating the "eight deadly sins of the fathers": processions, professions, possession, aggression, obsession, assimilation, elimination and fragmentation. "Laugh out loud," she urged, "at their pompous penile processions."

As for God, there's simply no way to rid the language of allusion, she wrote, so, "if you must be anthropomorphic," she preferred “Goddess.”

Daly most often contemplated the divine essence as a verb, Be-ing itself, so that worship is "not kneeling in front of a so-and-so but swirling in energy." Her language echoed quantum physics, and she was flattered if you said so: "I do think about space-time a great deal," she admitted. "It's a kind of mysticism which is also political."

These attitudes toward life and religion were reflected in the Feb. 26, 1996 issue of The New Yorker in which she wrote:

“Ever since childhood, I have been honing my skills for living the life of a radical feminist pirate and cultivating the courage to win. The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’”

“Women who are pirates in a phallocratic society are involved in a complex operation. First, it is necessary to plunder--that is, righteously rip off gems of knowledge that the patriarchs have stolen from us. Second, we must smuggle back to other women our plundered treasures. In order to invent strategies that will be big and bold enough for the next millennium, it is crucial that women share our experiences: the chances we have taken and the choices that have kept us alive. They are my pirate's battle cry and wake-up call for women who want to hear.”

And so Daly would like to say: “I urge you to Sin. ... But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism -- or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism -- which are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!"

Daly poured much energy into breaking down age-old boundaries of critical thought. Her work helped set the stage for other feminist theologians who rose up in the 20th century to offer critiques of male-dominated theology that would reshape Christian thought. Several of these groundbreaking women included Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and Rosemary Haughton.

Boston College Jesuits worked uneasily with Daly for more than three decades. Finally, in 1998, a student who had not taken the prerequisite women's studies course, tried to register in a Daly class and was told by her that he could not take the course. He filed a lawsuit and in 1999, facing this lawsuit, Boston College terminated Daly's contract as a tenured professor. Daly supporters filed another lawsuit requesting an injunction against the firing on the grounds that due process had not been followed. In February, 2001, Boston College and Daly's supporters announced that a settlement had been reached.

Other Daly books include:

"Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism," which defined categories of political theory and philosophy of religion.

"Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy," an exploration of patriarchy and feminist vision.

"Websters' First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language," a humor-filled work of words aimed at "freeing the English language" from its patriarchal roots.

"Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage," a philosophical autobiography.

"Quintessence... Realizing the Archiac Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto," another consideration of feminist thought.

"Amazon Grace: Re-Calling the Courage to Sin Big."
Fox is NCR Editor.

Julian's note about the above article:

SEE ALSO: "Beyond God The Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation"  

and

"Natural knowledge of God in the philosophy of Jacques Maritain: A critical study" (Unknown Binding)

In Memory of the Great Mary Daly, Radical Elemental Feminist (October 16, 1928 – January 3, 2010)


[this photograph of Mary Daly is from her website, linked to below.]

I just found this out. I am shocked. This is where I found out the news of Mary Daly's death.

Here's a link to her website: http://www.marydaly.net/

What follows is from here.

:(

  • Jan. 4th, 2010 at 12:11 PM
cutie me
So, I have been away from eljay not because of impending birth, but because I have my daughter's cold and it sucks, and I don't have anything much of note to say.

But today I found out that Mary Daly died yesterday, and that makes me sad.
"There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so. "
- Mary Daly, Outercourse
From the crop of radical feminists of the 1970s, she was definitely my favorite. Her book Gyn/Ecology struck me as delightfully witty, verbose, and angry when I was in high school; she was the sort of feminist one would name-drop in conversations about "man-hating" along with Andrea Dworkin, Catherine MacKinnon, et al - she was not the politically correct wishy-washy feminist of today. She was a separatist, she did not hold truck with ideas like "unpacking privilege" (to her a feminist was a feminist was a feminist, regardless of color or income), and she held a lot of views that would get you soundly booted from [info]feminist these days. She was one of my favorite non-fiction authors, thinkers, and someone I aspired to one day meet. I did not get the chance.

While I don't know that she will be missed, she should be. We lost one of our most lively female thinkers yesterday.

P.I.M.P.s, W.I.M.P.s and other men who control and occupy women for pleasure or profit



[image is from here]
Take it, conquer it, enslave it, overwhelm it. Trick it, manipulate it, seduce it, drug it. Buy it, sell it, consume it, lend it around. Then get another one and enjoy beginning again. If she resists, break her down. Use violence or the threat of violence in the right way and she will beg, cringe, cry; she will help you hurt her so that you will hurt her less--this is the arithmetic of female oppression.
-- Andrea Dworkin, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation, page 28.
P.I.M.P., or PIMP: a possessive, invasive, misogynist profiteer
W.I.M.P., or WIMP: a woman-invading misogynist procurer
C.R.A.P., or CRAP: corporate, racist, atrocious patriarchy
P.R.I.C.K., or PRICK:  patriarchal, racist, ignorant, condescending, know-it-all

PIMPing is among the most lucrative political occupations a man can enact in a society that views women as sexxx-things or just as things for men to have patriarchal, white supremacist, capitalist versions of "sex" with/at/on/in. When I say "occupations" I am using the term in two ways: as an indicator of what he does for work to earn money, and as a signal or alarm for what he does politically to her to earn status as a man. His work or occupation is renting out women. His political work is to occupy women. From dictionary.com, for "occupy", the verb:

1.
to take or fill up (space, time, etc.): I occupied my evenings reading novels.
2.
to engage or employ the mind, energy, or attention of: Occupy the children with a game while I prepare dinner.
3.
to be a resident or tenant of; dwell in: We occupied the same house for 20 years.
4.
to take possession and control of (a place), as by military invasion.
5.
to hold (a position, office, etc.).

The PIMP (the possessive, invasive, misogynist profiteer) takes, holds, employs, possesses, controls, resides in and occupies women personally, psychically, politically, and physically through acts of invasion of her body and being. She may or may not acquiesce. She may or may not resist. She may or may not, under unusual circumstances known mostly in the West, "choose" to be exploited in some or all of those ways.

The politics of choice is never examined enough. In a liberal country, terms like choice and consent become meaningless so often that one wonders why we base laws and customs on them.

In the U.S., and in many other places around the world, people are not free to choose to not live in a patriarchal society, nor are we free to choose to live outside a white supremacist system, nor are we free to choose to not live in a capitalist state. Oppressors, structurally located and socially positioned through law and custom, have privileges and entitlements that those they oppress do not. These are material, meaningful protections. They can and do often mean the difference between living with or without care and consideration that is institutionally mandated and compulsory at both ends. The oppressed must, on some level, take care of and be considerate of the oppressor. The oppressor is, often, under no compulsory or mandatory, legal or customary obligation to do likewise. The oppressor gets to choose how much care or consideration he will dispense. The oppressed do not get to choose. If they aren't caring and considerate enough, they will be ridiculed, punished, or destroyed.

These privileges and entitlements can and often do mean the difference between living and dying. But neither groups is free, if by free we mean capable of living without CRAP. CRAP is toxic to all, but is more than toxic to the oppressed. To the oppressed living in CRAP means sustaining various levels of systemic and systematic abuse and neglect. Care and consideration from the oppressors is often not negotiable. Whereas the oppressor negotiates the terms of care and consideration he receives, with and without the consent of the oppressed. It is up to him how humane he will be, but however humane he is, he is still an oppressor, structurally and systemically. These structures and systems are only flexible enough to bend without breaking; they are aggressively resistant to any radical change. It is the collective work of the oppressor and the oppressed that keep these structures and systems in place. But it is only the oppressors who are in control. This is to say, these structures and systems could not be maintained without the labor and lives of the oppressed, but the oppressed cannot determine the direction or destruction of these structures and systems without the assistance and cooperation of the oppressor.

What we have here is relative freedom. We can measure our level of freedom by the degrees to which we are able to make class-liberating choices. Some of us (adults, men, whites, the wealthy) have more relative freedom than others (children, women, non-whites, the poor, respectively). Class-liberating choice-making exists only for the oppressors among us. Men can choose to be freer, for example, by loosening the straight-jackets they put on in order to be men. Women's straight-jackets, by comparison, tend to get tighter the looser the men's get. This may seem counter-intuitive, but as men get more freedom, they seek to further control and direct it. And they direct it to one another individually, disproportionately. Systemically and systematically, they direct it to their class only.

In this social and political framework, those most exploited and enslaved sexually are from the populations of people who have the least freedoms, the least opportunities to make liberating choices for themselves as a class.

It should come as no surprise then, that poor girls of color are extremely abused in systems of prostitution, trafficking, and sexual slavery. It should also come as no surprise that wealthier white heterosexual men from the Global North and West tend to travel to the Global South and East to purchase, rent, possess, occupy, and enslave girls. They do this often and a lot; often and a lot is too often and too much. The only humane level of this happening is not ever, and never at all.

There is a term for what these Western white men do. It is a term that is designed never to convey the inhumanity and horror of what these men do. The callous and cold term is "sex tourism". But it is not "sex tourism": it is, rather, the knowledgeable, willful, and horrific predation, possession, occupation, and destruction of human life using "sex" as an oppressive weapon against those who are told they must take care of and be considerate to their oppressors. Nothing could define atrocity more accurately than that.

What all girls are told by PIMPs is that PIMPs look out for girls. Women are told similar things. But the PIMP only looks out for himself. He is not even capable of looking out for her because his job, economically and politically, is to sell her out WIMPS who want to abuse her for their own pleasure and for the PIMPs profit. The individual acts of the PIMPs and the WIMPs function as a class action over and against those classes of human beings they occupy and oppress.

The WIMP and the PIMP get pleasure and profit from procuring and possessing women, girls, and boys.

"Sex tourism" rather disturbingly invisibilises an atrocity committed through class-strengthening white heterosexual male (WHM) supremacist activity, offering WHM protection from the stigma and negative consequences of their actions over and against others.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy weave together a value system that most profoundly injures the humanity and invisibilises the human status of poor women and girls of color.

Within white and non-white societies and cultures, the most oppressed are also the most stigmatised and stereotyped. If you ask white and Black straight married men what Black women who are not their mothers, wives, or daughters exist to do, the woman may want to shoot them when they honestly express their answer. Mick Jagger expressed this answer very effectively in his song "Brown Sugar". The lyrics, written by Mick "the PRICK" Jagger, and by Keith Richards are as follows:

"Brown Sugar"
(M. Jagger/K. Richards)

Gold coast slave ship bound for cotton fields
Sold in a market down in New Orleans
Scarred old slaver knows he's doing alright
Hear him with the women just around midnight 

Brown sugar how come you taste so good?
Brown sugar just like a young girl should 

Drums beating, cold English blood runs hot
Lady of the house wonderin' where it's gonna stop
House boy knows that he's doing alright
You shoulda heard him just around midnight 

Brown sugar how come you taste so good, now?
Brown sugar just like a young girl should, now 

Ah, get along, brown sugar how come you taste so good, baby?
Ah, got me feelin' now, brown sugar just like a black girl should 

I bet your mama was a tent show queen
Had all the boyfriends at sweet sixteen
I'm no schoolboy but I know what I like
You shoulda heard me just around midnight 

Brown sugar how come you taste so good, baby?
Ah, brown sugar just like a young girl should, yeah 

I said yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
How come you...how come you taste so good?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
Just like a...just like a black girl should
Yeah, yeah, yeah, woo
 
To possess and inhabit a woman is to make terribly dehumanising and oppressive assumptions about what women are on Earth for. They are on Earth to be and to do as they please, not to be done to. To live for themselves, not for men. To enjoy life, not to endure it only. To thrive, not just to survive. To experience the richness of living then naturally dying, not the poverty of living while fearing rape, possession, and death from men and their institutions of misogynistic abuse and atrocity.

To possess and inhabit a woman in any patriarchal system, but particularly in a system of prostitution or sexual trafficking or sexual slavery is to turn women into something worse than a thing. As has been noted in a variety of ways, men take better care of the cars they use repeatedly than they do the women they use repeatedly. Men love their favorite music, with on-going verbalised appreciation and respect, more than they love the women in their lives.

When men commit atrocity, we tend to deny it, and when the evidence is laid out before us, we call it a matter of nature or god's [sadistic] will, not a PIMP and WIMP (man-made) misogynistic disaster. But we men are responsible more than any other factor. Check the stats. Do the math.

What if we had a reasonably good conversation about pornography's harm but pretended there were no women being abused in the industry? Naomi Wolf succeeds in accomplishing this mission with plenty of help from New York Magazine, Ariel Levy, and MEN






















  • I cannot agree more with this article. I was in a relationship for 2 years with a man who was addicted to pornography. I am a very outgoing, sexual (but not promiscuous), and independent woman. However, after being subjected to constant rejection and coming in second to pornography, it did nothing short of crush my spirit. I would beg to say that the lowest point in my years on this earth were those two.
    Women cannot compete with the digital and surgically enhanced sex machines on the internet, open twenty-four hours for your convenience.
    Pornography will always be around, but should never become a "staple" in our society, or in our personal lives.
    By discokitteh on 08/09/2008 at 6:52pm

































  • Oh well, men are less excited for the real thing, and now women have less power and feel deprived. I can remember being the sexually frustrated, nerdy kid in school that the hot girls gleefully teased and cruelly tormented with no compassion or remorse. Porn on the internet has been a godsend for me in weakening the power that females abused. Women get no sympathy from me, and between porn and my girlfriend, my sexual needs are well satisfied. Other women are now judged mainly on their abilities, character and personality (as men are), and that is a good thing.
    By lveric on 08/12/2008 at 2:08am

































  • You haven't said anything about the mainstream porn industry basically being an extension of patriarchy. How it institutionalises a fringe, imbalanced view of sexuality (crude male fantasies), and now dictates universal sexual behaviour. One would imagine that bright, young university students would be able to see through that but it is clear that the noose of patriarchy is as everpresent in the 'liberal' modernity as in the not-so-liberal past.
    By Boharh on 08/13/2008 at 5:27am








































  • I cannot agree more with this article. I was in a relationship for 2 years with a man who was addicted to pornography. I am a very outgoing, sexual (but not promiscuous), and independent woman. However, after being subjected to constant rejection and coming in second to pornography, it did nothing short of crush my spirit. I would beg to say that the lowest point in my years on this earth were those two.
    Women cannot compete with the digital and surgically enhanced sex machines on the internet, open twenty-four hours for your convenience.
    Pornography will always be around, but should never become a "staple" in our society, or in our personal lives.
    By discokitteh on 08/09/2008 at 6:52pm

































  • Oh well, men are less excited for the real thing, and now women have less power and feel deprived. I can remember being the sexually frustrated, nerdy kid in school that the hot girls gleefully teased and cruelly tormented with no compassion or remorse. Porn on the internet has been a godsend for me in weakening the power that females abused. Women get no sympathy from me, and between porn and my girlfriend, my sexual needs are well satisfied. Other women are now judged mainly on their abilities, character and personality (as men are), and that is a good thing.
    By lveric on 08/12/2008 at 2:08am

































  • You haven't said anything about the mainstream porn industry basically being an extension of patriarchy. How it institutionalises a fringe, imbalanced view of sexuality (crude male fantasies), and now dictates universal sexual behaviour. One would imagine that bright, young university students would be able to see through that but it is clear that the noose of patriarchy is as everpresent in the 'liberal' modernity as in the not-so-liberal past.
    By Boharh on 08/13/2008 at 5:27am








































  • I cannot agree more with this article. I was in a relationship for 2 years with a man who was addicted to pornography. I am a very outgoing, sexual (but not promiscuous), and independent woman. However, after being subjected to constant rejection and coming in second to pornography, it did nothing short of crush my spirit. I would beg to say that the lowest point in my years on this earth were those two.
    Women cannot compete with the digital and surgically enhanced sex machines on the internet, open twenty-four hours for your convenience.
    Pornography will always be around, but should never become a "staple" in our society, or in our personal lives.
    By discokitteh on 08/09/2008 at 6:52pm

































  • Oh well, men are less excited for the real thing, and now women have less power and feel deprived. I can remember being the sexually frustrated, nerdy kid in school that the hot girls gleefully teased and cruelly tormented with no compassion or remorse. Porn on the internet has been a godsend for me in weakening the power that females abused. Women get no sympathy from me, and between porn and my girlfriend, my sexual needs are well satisfied. Other women are now judged mainly on their abilities, character and personality (as men are), and that is a good thing.
    By lveric on 08/12/2008 at 2:08am

































  • You haven't said anything about the mainstream porn industry basically being an extension of patriarchy. How it institutionalises a fringe, imbalanced view of sexuality (crude male fantasies), and now dictates universal sexual behaviour. One would imagine that bright, young university students would be able to see through that but it is clear that the noose of patriarchy is as everpresent in the 'liberal' modernity as in the not-so-liberal past.
    By Boharh on 08/13/2008 at 5:27am























  •  [images of Naomi Wolf, Ariel Levy, and some well-tailored U.S. men are from here, here, and here.]

    What do those people and the people quoted below have in common? Read on...

    "I cannot agree more with this article. I was in a relationship for 2 years with a man who was addicted to pornography. I am a very outgoing, sexual (but not promiscuous), and independent woman. However, after being subjected to constant rejection and coming in second to pornography, it did nothing short of crush my spirit. I would beg to say that the lowest point in my years on this earth were those two.
    Women cannot compete with the digital and surgically enhanced sex machines on the internet, open twenty-four hours for your convenience.
    Pornography will always be around, but should never become a "staple" in our society, or in our personal lives."
    *     *     *
    "Oh well, men are less excited for the real thing, and now women have less power and feel deprived. I can remember being the sexually frustrated, nerdy kid in school that the hot girls gleefully teased and cruelly tormented with no compassion or remorse. Porn on the internet has been a godsend for me in weakening the power that females abused. Women get no sympathy from me, and between porn and my girlfriend, my sexual needs are well satisfied. Other women are now judged mainly on their abilities, character and personality (as men are), and that is a good thing."
     *     *     *
    "You haven't said anything about the mainstream porn industry basically being an extension of patriarchy. How it institutionalises a fringe, imbalanced view of sexuality (crude male fantasies), and now dictates universal sexual behaviour. One would imagine that bright, young university students would be able to see through that but it is clear that the noose of patriarchy is as everpresent in the 'liberal' modernity as in the not-so-liberal past."
    *     *     *
    "I am a socially inept male in my thirties, skinny, out-of-shape and balding. The few partners that I had in my younger days when I was fitter and better looking were in the extremely low tier of physical and social attractiveness…. In other words, they were the extremely unattractive, obese sort with some psychological issues. What could I have done? … They were the only girls that would have me, and I had both sexual and emotional needs! These brief relationships were completely unfulfilling, if not altogether disturbing and psychologically defeating. The older I got, the more porn I watched and the less inclined I have become to subject myself to rejection or a dysfunctional relationship. Naturally, porn became my only sexual outlet. The moral is that some men need porn for sexual release so that they could get through the day without staring at their attractive coworkers or getting an erection when a miniskirt clad secretary bends over to add paper to the copy machine. Some would call porn a service to suffering humanity, but apparently, Ms Wolfe is not very humane. Instead, she is more interested in, for example, that some office vamp will be denied the satisfaction of making the single nerdy guys in her workplace squirm as she struts down in unprofessional attire, turning to have a laugh at their expense with her

















  • I can only speak from my experience. I have masturbated since I was about five. I don't know how I learned; I just remember I found this way to make me and my pee-pee (as a five year old) feel really, really good, and I've continued to use masturbation to feel good. I'm 53 so in the sixties as a boy I occasionally got exposed to a few pictures or magazines with suggestive pictures and text - True Detective, Playboy, etc. I have always been deathly afraid of rejection, failure and frustration. Dating, sex and relationships are at the apex of those fears. I have so conditioned myself to get sexually excited through a continuous stream of images, movies and fantasy, some of it far more intense, varied and sometimes dark than a normal sexual experience and now when I get together with a woman for sex I find an initial arousal, then a decline and if I'm going to maintain an erection and climax I must, must resort to fantasy and that fantasy takes me away from any real and connected experience with this woman. I think/feel it (the need to fantasize) as so dysfunctional and unsatisfying in the real experience that I more and more and more just use Porn, Fantasy and Masturbation to get the high and orgasm that I can no longer get with another. Like any addict deadened to real life through the use of some substance or behavior, I've deadened myself to real sex through the use of P-F-M. I'm not a clinical case study, but in just a short time our culture has advanced to such an extent that we are bombarded by images, lifestyles, marketing, technology, etc. that, I wonder, our brains have not evolved to cope with. The message I read certainly resonates with me.









  • girlfriends."
    *     *     *
    "I can only speak from my experience. I have masturbated since I was about five. I don't know how I learned; I just remember I found this way to make me and my pee-pee (as a five year old) feel really, really good, and I've continued to use masturbation to feel good. I'm 53 so in the sixties as a boy I occasionally got exposed to a few pictures or magazines with suggestive pictures and text - True Detective, Playboy, etc. I have always been deathly afraid of rejection, failure and frustration. Dating, sex and relationships are at the apex of those fears. I have so conditioned myself to get sexually excited through a continuous stream of images, movies and fantasy, some of it far more intense, varied and sometimes dark than a normal sexual experience and now when I get together with a woman for sex I find an initial arousal, then a decline and if I'm going to maintain an erection and climax I must, must resort to fantasy and that fantasy takes me away from any real and connected experience with this woman. I think/feel it (the need to fantasize) as so dysfunctional and unsatisfying in the real experience that I more and more and more just use Porn, Fantasy and Masturbation to get the high and orgasm that I can no longer get with another. Like any addict deadened to real life through the use of some substance or behavior, I've deadened myself to real sex through the use of P-F-M. I'm not a clinical case study, but in just a short time our culture has advanced to such an extent that we are bombarded by images, lifestyles, marketing, technology, etc. that, I wonder, our brains have not evolved to cope with. The message I read certainly resonates with me."

















  • I can only speak from my experience. I have masturbated since I was about five. I don't know how I learned; I just remember I found this way to make me and my pee-pee (as a five year old) feel really, really good, and I've continued to use masturbation to feel good. I'm 53 so in the sixties as a boy I occasionally got exposed to a few pictures or magazines with suggestive pictures and text - True Detective, Playboy, etc. I have always been deathly afraid of rejection, failure and frustration. Dating, sex and relationships are at the apex of those fears. I have so conditioned myself to get sexually excited through a continuous stream of images, movies and fantasy, some of it far more intense, varied and sometimes dark than a normal sexual experience and now when I get together with a woman for sex I find an initial arousal, then a decline and if I'm going to maintain an erection and climax I must, must resort to fantasy and that fantasy takes me away from any real and connected experience with this woman. I think/feel it (the need to fantasize) as so dysfunctional and unsatisfying in the real experience that I more and more and more just use Porn, Fantasy and Masturbation to get the high and orgasm that I can no longer get with another. Like any addict deadened to real life through the use of some substance or behavior, I've deadened myself to real sex through the use of P-F-M. I'm not a clinical case study, but in just a short time our culture has advanced to such an extent that we are bombarded by images, lifestyles, marketing, technology, etc. that, I wonder, our brains have not evolved to cope with. The message I read certainly resonates with me.










  • Ariel Levy and Naomi Wolf, two U.S. very class-privileged white heterosexual Jewish women who want to be liked by pornographers, procurers, and men in general, need to distance themselves from someone Naomi once--openly--admired and looked to for wisdom: Andrea Dworkin. (Ariel never really did regard Andrea as much more than a poor wounded soul who could write well.) Never mind that now.

    Naomi Wolf (born 1962) and Ariel Levy (born 1974), have been immersed in the very tiny yet magnified world of privileged white women's reality, where we don't really have to notice that poor women, women of color, and women around the world, not just white middle class U.S. women, are used and abused as sexxx-things by men of all colors.

    "Pay no attention to the women in front of the camera", is the message. "They aren't real. They don't exist." The images of them are harmful to straight men, yes. And to white class privileged U.S. heterosexual women too. You can read all about it.

    Consuming pornography harms women outside the pornography industry. As for the women most egregiously harmed, by pimps directly, well, let's not focus on them. (They're not real, you see.) Andrea Dworkin refused to distance herself from any women. She understood that the deplorable conditions that affect the most disenfranchised and marginalised women need and ought to be the central focus of feminist activism. Otherwise, well, the feminism is racist and classist as hell. She called this out in 1974. But it's over thirty-five years later, and so we can pretend she never said it. (Read the introduction to Woman Hating, to know what I'm referring to.)

    Too bad, this need for distancing. Because their work has been valuable to many women and men, bridging gaps in consciousness between the anti-feminists, the non-feminists, liberal feminists, and profeminists, and the other privileged boys who get that something is wrong with pornography.

    Now if only Ariel, Naomi, and men across the whiteboy political spectrum would just come right out and condemn pornographers, pimps, and procurers of women as commiters of an atrocity against women INSIDE the industries and systems of use and abuse. Nope, none of 'em will be quoting Ruchira Gupta's work any time soon. And the reason is classism, whiteeurocentrism, and racism, along with internalised anti-Semitism and internalised misogyny, and a very legitimate fear of what corporate pornographers do to women who speak out against them.

    But why engage with, report on, and organise with the work of women outside the U.S. who don't have race privilege? My answer is because that's most women.

    See "Over Her Dead Body: How Ariel Levy Smears the Ashes of Andrea Dworkin" for more on Ariel Levy's anti-radical feminism and misogyny against Andrea Dworkin.

    The Adolph Award for January 2010

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    Koevoet Koevoet is online now
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    The Adolph Award for January 2010 ECD goes to "Koevoet", a "Christian Patriot", and regular, if new, commenter at SurvivalistBoards.com. He's apparently had his views effectively refuted elsewhere.

    But here he shows up once again, under some sort of pretense of actually caring about women in sexual slavery. There is something particularly disgusting about racist and anti-Semitic men who use the reality of women's suffering to make their bigoted white/Aryan supremacist points.

    So, yes, Koevoet is an anti-Semite, a full-blown HaShoah denier, a misogynist, and a virulent anti-feminist who goes on and on about sexual slavery in Israel as if Israel has cornered the market on sexual slavery. He seems determined to get people to BELIEVE the words of one man in a YouTube video, as if this man speaks Gospel Truth. Who knows whether the man does or doesn't--I'm not even bothering to watch the video of some jerk promoting Israeli Jewish men as THE enslavers of women.

    Typical anti-Semitism, to try and pin a human rights issue on Jewish men and Jewish men alone, or on Jews disproportionately, or on Jewish feminists as if Jewish feminists have ever had any power in a white Christian male supremacist land. Koevoet's strategy is akin to whites only wanting to talk about when Black men rape. As if white men don't?

    As if white Christian and other white non-Jewish men don't possess and rape women and girls as sexual slaves?

    It is repeatedly pointed out to him that this is a global occurrence, and that he might want to check out what's happening in the U.S., throughout Eastern Europe, and in South and SE Asia, for example, but never mind that. He's got an Aryan-angry axe to grind with Israeli Jews, women, and U.S. Jewish feminists in particular for allegedly failing to condemn what Jewish men in Israel do to women that is white supremacist, heterosexist, and male supremacist, and Gentile/white supremacist to the core. For an excellent analysis of all this, please read Andrea Dworkin's book, Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women's Liberation.

    The discussion over at SurvivalistBoards.com, on this topic, is strange in that unlike at MRA sites, there are men who are pointing out how messed up his thinking is, and they deliver to him plenty of evidence that his views are distorted to deranged.

    The website forbids copying and pasting any comments so I'll just link to them. There's four pages of conversation, but it only takes a few minutes to read all the content, because each page is filled with avatars and notes about how many times each person has posted there and been thanked to do so, witnessed in the imagery above. The site is here. You can see for yourself why Koevoet gets this month's Adolph Award.

    Congratulations, Koevoet. Rot in hell... ASAP.