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We have already seen abundant evidence that the therapeutic game also consists largely in legitimating "normal," that is, lobotomized and tame behavior which is in fact indoctrinated, artifactual, man-made femininity. Thus Freud reversed the meaning of Dora's healthy reaction of disgust at sexual assault by naming it "hysterical." So also Jung slyly legitimates punitive measures against strong women, implying that strength of mind is abnormal. Writing of women who express strong arguments (women "ridden by the animus"), he states:

‘Often the man has the feeling —and he is not altogether wrong— that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of “persuasion”’ [emphasis mine].

Women who have been seduced by jungian ideology might do well to consider the implications of this attitude.

Moreover, women who have been seduced, brow-beaten, and mind-raped by individual therapists or by gangs of mini-therapists in marathon encounter sessions should re-consider the meaning of "normality" in such a setting. A clue is to be found in the fact that whereas only a few decades ago anyone was stigmatized who was discovered going to a therapist, today the stigma is inflicted upon any woman who does not go to a therapist. Any institution which could so rapidly reverse its status, gaining power and prestige in the most "advanced" nation of a patriarchal planet, clearly must be serving the interests of patriarchy.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #patriarchy #freudianism #jungian psychology #anti psych #female oppression

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The diffusion of therapy, then, like that of religion, has been downward and outward, affecting all women. However, the contagion of mind-gynecology cannot be understood in socioeconomic or numerical terms only. Just as body-gynecologists spread iatrogenic disease, so also do therapists create a market for their "healing." A woman seduced into treatment is "inspired" with dis-ease she had never before even suspected. As she becomes more fixated upon her surfacing "problems" she becomes more in need of Help. The multiplicity of therapies feeds into this dis-ease, for they constitute an arsenal for the manufacture of many forms of semantic bullets used to bombard the minds of women struggling to survive in the therapeutically polluted environment. The bullets of "psychobabble" invade the ears of Every-woman, informing her in a thousand tongues of her Sickness and Need for Help. This invasion continues unchecked because it fixes women's attention in the wrong direction, fragmenting and privatizing perception of problems, which can be transcended only if understood in the context of the sexual caste system.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #female oppression #anti psych #anti therapy #misogyny as culture

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The legitimations used to erase male responsibility for African genital mutilation of women also can enable Hags to focus more sharply upon the justifications for gynecological genital mutilation. In Africa, clitoridectomy and infibulation are alleged to be justifiable because they are ways "for teaching women to endure pain." As we have seen, pain—and the dread of it—is also the Great American Gynecological Way of teaching women to be pre-occupied and pre-possessed. Other reasons given for mutilation in the African situation are religious belief and "custom." American women, like their African sisters, are also lulled into pain-full captivity by the prevailing beliefs and "customs."

African women, moreover, are mutilated for "aesthetic reasons," since the men of the tribes practicing these sado-rituals do not want their women to have anything "hanging down." Maiming for the alleged purpose of enhancing female beauty is standard practice in American cosmetic surgery. An example is mammaplasty, defined in Dorland's Illustrated Medical Dictionary as "plastic reconstruction of the breast, as may be performed to augment or reduce its size." A variation on this is mastopexy, which is performed to "correct a pendulous breast." This involves removal of breast tissue and filling the space with a silicone bag-gel prosthesis, often with additional maneuvers to reshape the breast so that it points upward. Women shocked by the pain and danger of infection inflicted upon millions of African women for "aesthetic" reasons should consider the parallels with the increasingly popular American way of deadly beautification.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #medical misogyny #fgm #cosmetic surgery

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In order to effect this re-birth—that is, castration—of women, the therapeutic "mothers" know that it is essential to discredit real mothers. All Hags are familiar with the omnipresent "blaming the mother" syndrome among psychotherapists from Freud downward. C. G. Jung, whose theories are pernicious traps which often stop women in the initial stages of mind-journeying, displays with arresting arrogance another way of discrediting women who are mothers. He simply flattens them into projection screens. We read:

“My own view differs from that of other medico-psychological theories principally in that I attribute to the personal mother only a limited etiological significance. That is to say, all those influences which the literature describes as being exerted on the children do not come from the mother herself, but rather from the archetype projected upon her, which gives her a mythological background and invests her with authority and numinosity [emphasis mine].”

Having reduced women to nothing, Jung blames them for everything. The reader is subliminally led to accept the idea that mothers and not men (such as Jung) are the castrators of women. This renders invisible the fact of female castration by males. Thus, describing a daughter who has a "mother-complex," Jung writes:

“The daughter leads a shadow existence, often visibly sucked dry by her mother, and she prolongs her mother's life by a sort of continuous blood transfusion. . . . Despite their shadowiness and passivity, they [these daughters] command a high price on the marriage market. First, they are so empty that a man is free to impute to them anything he fancies. In addition, they these women are so unconscious that the unconscious puts out countless invisible feelers, veritable octopus tentacles, that suck up all masculine projections; and this pleases men enormously.”

Jung's reversals should be obvious to Hags. He frankly admits that the daughters' condition of being "sucked dry" is a male requirement for marriageability. Just as foot-binding was required by the men of China, so is mindbinding a universal demand of patriarchal males, who want their women to be empty so that they will be forced to suck male projections/ejections, becoming pre-occupied, pre-possessed. This deprivation of vitality is required by patriarchal males who "command [this] high price" which "pleases men enormously." On the level of body-gynecology we have seen what women are commanded to "suck up": The Poisonous Pill, carcinogenic exogenous estrogens, DES, et cetera, ad mortem.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #medical misogyny #jungian psychology #motherhood #patriarchal reversal

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Another variation on the theme of chemical cures for female impurity is the ritual of estrogen replacement therapy, contemporary gynecology's response to the threat presented to males by menopause. As Emily Culpepper has shown, the history of attitudes toward menstruation from ancient times to the present demonstrates male fear, envy, and hatred of women. The menstruating woman is called filthy, sick, unbalanced, ritually impure. In patriarchy her bloodshed is made into a badge of shame, a sign of her radical ontological impurity. It is consistent with the logic of the woman loathers' doublethink that the cessation of menstruation is also horrifying. Since every woman's entire being is fetishized by men, that is, condensed, displaced, and symbolized in her sexual organs and functions, the cessation of any of these functions implies Female Power of Absence. Since the frustrated "worshipper's" desire for control is threatened, fetishized menopausal and post-menopausal women must be "kicked, stamped on, and dragged through the mud."

When women become free of the possibility of impregnation, one of the time-honored means of imprisoning females is removed. What frustrates The Jailors is the fact that freedom is attained not by the "divine" acts of sadistic surgical castrators but by natural processes of female biology. Freedom from pregnancy is evil/impure in the Gynecological State if it is not "created" by the surgeon's knife or by the doctor's chemicals. The postmenopausal woman is a potential escapee, deviant, Crone. Therefore, she must be cured.

The woman perceived as threatening to become a free/wild Crone is inundated with propaganda to convince her that menopause is a sickness which must be "treated," However, in order to be adequately convincing, the persuaders must first persuade themselves. Thus an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine pontificates that "the unaltered hormonal state of the untreated menopause [is a] possible contributory factor in the causation of cancer (emphasis mine]." Implying that menopause is carcinogenic, the medical messiahs neglect to mention that this is a universal and natural process in women, found in areas of the globe where cancer is unknown. These physicians, who are themselves "contributory factors in the causation of cancer," use a malignant misconception of menopause to support the idea that more "knowledge" (i.e., experimentation upon women) is needed to find a "safe type of hormone replacement therapy."

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #medical misogyny #menopause #female oppression #woman hating

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We have seen that the ovariotomy mania was superseded by the hysterectomy mania. The earlier practitioners of female castration were followed by bolder butchers. Ovariotomy, described by its critic Van de Warker as "ridiculously easy" (easy for whom?) has been replaced by a bigger castration business. This is given support and legitimacy by the psychiatric castrators, who, drawing upon their inexhaustible reversal reflex mechanisms, manipulate their female patients into believing that they, their mothers, and women in general are castrators of men. This reversal rivals the story of Eve's birth from Adam for top rank among the Great Hoaxes of history.

Contemporary gynecology is not content with purifying women of their uteruses. It is obvious that there is a breast surgery craze, and that this is connected with the breast fetishism of the entire culture. Sadistic surgery is targeted at that which symbolizes the female to the fetishist. It keeps women pure, that is, terrified, victimized, docile. However, this is not enough, for women thus mutilated must conform to the image of pure femininity by attempting to look "normal." Hence the market for specialists in "postmastectomy reconstruction of the breast." Moreover, in the telling words of one plastic surgeon: "Plastic surgeons have wandered into the field of tumors of the female breast." The same author, who opposes unnecessary mastectomies, offers the following cancer-promoting advice:

“Self-examination, regular examination by a qualified breast surgeon, mammograms, xerograms, and thermograms still remain the best defense against breast cancer.”

This is, of course, an effective formula for keeping women in a state of prepossession and preoccupation.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #medical misogyny #fetshization of the female #female castration

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Ultimately, the intent of The Gynecologists is to purify women and society of our Selves. In other words, their intent is to castrate, that is, to deprive women of vigor and vitality, and finally of life itself. As I have noted, the term castrate is from the same root as the terms chaste, chasten, chastise, and caste, namely the Sanskrit śasati, meaning "he cuts to pieces." A powerful and indispensable means by which the gynecological purification/castration of women is accomplished is the fetishization of female parts. The gynecological holy ghosts, themselves faded and faked copies of the "Holy Ghost," who is the inverted mythic Copy of Female Divinity, cannot bear to stand respectfully before earthly manifestations of female creative power, that is, of the Goddess within women. Thus they put women beneath them, supine, on examination tables, delivery tables, psychiatrists' couches. Clearly, women should be in upright positions, in order to be agents, helping themselves. From their lewd, lofty positions the frustrated gynecological fetishists attempt to wrench from female power of be-ing a feeling of potency which they pervert into the negation and destruction of women.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #medical misogyny #female oppression

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A feminist Searcher who reads definitions of fetishism in psychiatric encyclopedias and "studies" will find ejaculations of bias and self-contradictions everywhere. The authors of the entry on fetishism in the Encyclopedia of Aberrations and Psychiatric Handbook, for example, begin by discussing this as "a form of sexual deviation in which the person's sexual aim becomes attached to something that symbolizes that person's love-object" [emphases mine]. These sages go on to explain that the "something" may be an article of clothing or a nongenital (!) part of the body. It is only later in the article that we find their admission that the fetishistic "person" is male and the "love-object" female, when we read that: " . . . the fetishist is attempting to escape from women. When he cannot do so he compromises by depreciating them. . . . he can then consider [his mate] superfluous."

It would be a mistake for women searching for clues about fetishism to stop reading the article at this point, for we would be left with the knowledge that fetishists are male but might still assume that these constitute a perverted minority of males. Moving further into the maze of this analysis we come upon their admission that fetishism is so widespread in its implications that it includes acoustic stimulation, such as the pleasure obtained by listening to sexual stories. Immediately the processions of professional Peeping/Listening Toms appear before the feminist mind's eye, as we recall the parade of priestly, psychiatric, and ob/gyn Toms, whose main interests and concerns are sexual stories. By now we are ready to handle the concluding sentence of the article:

Fetishism is quite often a normal and necessary component of the sexual lives of all individuals [emphases mine].

A-mazing, we see not only that "individuals" means males, but that the "sexual deviation" described at the beginning of the article is considered "normal and necessary" for all males.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #male sexuality #fetishism #male psychology

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In modern times, this doctrine of grace and virtue is reflected in the so-called helping professions, in which the gynecological holy ghosts infuse New Life into victim marys. The new supernatural life may be technological (for example, prostheses replacing breasts), chemical (for example, hormone replacement), or psychological (as when a woman is subjected to any of the various forms of behavior modification intended to replace deviancy with role-defined femininity). Hence, there is actually no natural (wild) state of femaleness that is legitimated/allowed in the Gynecological State, and this denial of female be-ing is the essence of its gynocidal intent. There are only two possibilities. First, there is a fallen state, formerly named sinful and symbolized by Eve, presently known as sick and typified in the powerless but sometimes difficult and problematic patient. Second, there is the restored/redeemed state of perfect femininity, formerly named saintly and symbolized by Mary, presently typified in the weak, "normal" woman whose normality is so elusive that it must constantly be re-enforced through regular check-ups, "preventive medicine," and perpetual therapy.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #female behavior modification #performative femininity #female oppression #eve #mother mary #medical misogyny

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It took about two hours for Daina Taimina to find the solution that had eluded mathematicians for over a century. It was 1997, and the Latvian mathematician was participating in a geometry workshop at Cornell University. David Henderson, the professor leading the workshop, was modelling a hyperbolic plane constructed out of thin, circular strips of paper taped together. 'It was disgusting,' laughed Taimina in an interview.

A hyperbolic plane is 'the geometric opposite' of a sphere, explains Henderson in an interview with arts and culture magazine Cabinet. 'On a sphere, the surface curves in on itself and is closed. A hyperbolic plane is a surface in which the space curves away from itself at every point.' It exists in nature in ruffled lettuce leaves, in coral leaf, in sea slugs, in cancer cells. Hyperbolic geometry is used by statisticians when they work with multidimensional data, by Pixar animators when they want to simulate realistic cloth, by auto-industry engineers to design aerodynamic cars, by acoustic engineers to design concert halls. It's the foundation of the theory of relativity, and thus the closest thing we have to an understanding of the shape of the universe. In short, hyperbolic space is a pretty big deal.

But for thousands of years, hyperbolic space didn't exist. At least it didn't according to mathematicians, who believed that there were only two types of space: Euclidean, or flat space, like a table, and spherical space, like a ball. In the nineteenth century, hyperbolic space was discovered - but only in principle. And although mathematicians tried for over a century to find a way to successfully represent this space physically, no one managed it - until Taimina attended that workshop at Cornell. Because as well as being a professor of mathematics, Taimina also liked to crochet.

Taimina learnt to crochet as a schoolgirl. Growing up in Latvia, part of the former Soviet Union, 'you fix your own car, you fix your own faucet - anything', she explains. 'When I was growing up, knitting or any other handiwork meant you could make a dress or a sweater different from everybody else's.' But while she had always seen patterns and algorithms in knitting and crochet, Taimina had never connected this traditional, domestic, feminine skill with her professional work in maths. Until that workshop in 1997. When she saw the battered paper approximation Henderson was using to explain hyperbolic space, she realised: I can make this out of crochet.

And so that's what she did. She spent her summer 'crocheting a classroom set of hyperbolic forms' by the swimming pool. 'People walked by, and they asked me, "What are you doing?" And I answered, "Oh, I'm crocheting the hyperbolic plane."' She has now created hundreds of models and explains that in the process of making them 'you get a very concrete sense of the space expanding exponentially. The first rows take no time but the later rows can take literally hours, they have so many stitches. You get a visceral sense of what "hyperbolic" really means.' Just looking at her models did the same for others: in an interview with the New York Times Taimina recalled a professor who had taught hyperbolic space for years seeing one and saying, 'Oh, so that's how they look.' Now her creations are the standard model for explaining hyperbolic space.

-Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women

Photo credit

#caroline criado perez #Daina Taimina #women in stem #women’s history #women in science #crochet #crocheting #female mathematicians #hyperbolic space

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I made this post 11 months ago and they’ve only gotten worse.

Males are breaking down on a global scale. I would suggest connecting or reconnecting with IRL women at this time. Even if you disagree with them. I’m as guilty as anyone of letting female friendships slide due to differences of opinion. Obviously some women are beyond help and/or so far gone they might drag you down with them. Use your best judgment. But things are looking more dire by the day. Even a tenuous connection with an annoying but mostly good-hearted female friend could help as males descend further into whatever the loving fuck is going on with them.

#female separatism

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We have seen that in the West, the European witchcraze signaled the arrival of a new age of gynocidal processions. During that era the personifications of the Second Divine Person—the sons of god representing the Son of God— appeared on stage, forming the professional and corporate mystical mergers that required the massacre of "indigestible" women. In nineteenth-and twentieth-century America (and in other nations following American leadership) a further phase has been reached. This is the Age of the Holy Ghost and his ghostly representatives. The multiple holy ghosts of the Age of Gynecology (body-gynecologists and mind-gynecologists) follow the mythic model of the "Third Divine Person." We have seen in the First Passage that the original christian holy ghost was a mythic male mother, the spirtual single parent who impregnated Mary, the Totaled Woman. The latter was a reversal of the parthenogenetic goddess, who was thus reduced to a brainwashed receptacle/ rape victim.

In studying the sado-rituals of the gynecological holy ghosts, it is useful to recall some of the theological lore associated with their christian theological archetype. The holy ghost, the feminine member of the divine trinity, was known as "the Spirit"— the one who inspires, or breathes into the souls of the chosen. In the ideal transsexual world of christian myth, "he" manages not only to impregnate Mary physically, producing the "Incarnate Word," but also to fecundate the souls/ minds of the faithful, engendering "supernatural life" and inspiring them with "divine" ideas and images. It is important to realize the interconnection between these two aspects of the myth, for they are reflected in the emergence of the two classes of specialists "devoted" to women, that is, the body-gynecologists and the mind-gynecologists.

The various types of psychotherapists are the theologians of gynecology. These theologians and the specialized "ministering" physicians whom they legitimate represent the two complementary functions of the holy ghost. Both function to keep women supine, objectified, and degraded a condition ritually symbolized by the gynecologists stirrups and the psychiatrist’s couch. By their combined efforts, these specialists keep many women in the state of perpetual patients whose bodies and minds are constantly invaded by foreign objects—knives, needles, speculums, carcinogenic hormone injections and pills, sickening self-images, festering fixations, debilitating dogmas.*

It is significant that certain male-defined feminine qualities are attributed to the holy ghost of christian theology. Thus he is called Helper and Healer—which makes him an appropriate paradigm for the "helping professions." He is also known by the name Gift. The deceptiveness of such appellations is apparent to victims of theological/psychiatric/ gynecological "help," who have learned the truth of the slogan: There is no such thing as a free lunch.

* As we have seen, it is no coincidence that the establishment of gynecology was followed chronologically by the creation and spread of Freudian ideology and its offspring. The medical establishment soon found that its colonization of women's bodies required the concomitant conquest of their minds/spirits. The new theology of therapy has fulfilled this role, extending its tentacles into the privacy of minds and hearts.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #female oppression #western civilization #patriarchal religion #therapy is a scam to keep women docile

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Feminists who identity their deep centering Selves with the term witch are not being merely metaphorical, or cute, or popularizing, or "trivializing." I suggest, rather, that the reverse is true: that to limit the term to apply only to those who have esoteric knowledge of and participate formally in "the Craft" is the real reductionism. This is the case particularly since the cult, as Murray demonstrated (perhaps inadvertently), has been strongly invaded by patriarchal influences.

Together with Robin Morgan, who has done so much both to elicit in women the wide and deep intuition of the meaning of Witch and to resist simple vulgarization, I hope that more feminists will give to the study of witches “the serious study that it warrants, recognizing it as a part of our entombed history, a remnant of the Old Religion which pre-dated all patriarchal faiths and which was a Goddess-worshipping, matriarchal faith . . . [reading] the anthropological, religious, and mythographic studies on the subject.” Hopefully, in doing so we will not sacrifice the original vigor and integrity that inspired the "New York Covens" in the late sixties to proclaim:

“You are a Witch by saying aloud, "I am a Witch" three times, and thinking about that. You are a Witch by being female, untamed, angry, joyous, and immortal.”

Many women have understood this identity of the Witch within, the Self who is the target of the fathers' attacks and the center of original movement. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English did much to spread knowledge among women of the role of the witches as midwives and healers, showing that their suppression coincided with the creation of a new male medical profession. In the early seventies, Andrea Dworkin named the witchcraze for what it is: gynocide. She showed its interconnectedness with other horrors such as foot-binding, fairy tales, rape, and pornography. Others have searched out pieces of the mosaic which are not easy to find.

Such works should be valued for igniting the Spark which inflames the desire to search further. There is much to be done. Working with increased confidence and precision, Hags must continue in the spiritual tradition of such visionaries as Matilda Joslyn Gage, continuing to uncover our past and paths to our future. This will be possible to the degree that we continue with courage in the Journey of our own time/space. Seeing through the fraudulent re-presentations of the witchcraze will help us recognize the tactics of today's Male Midwives, the professional Wizards who have unsuccessfully "succeeded" the Wise Women—the Unhealers of Modern Medicine.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #witches #feminist witchcraft #patriarchal reversal

[haggishlyhagging]

[Note to self: Compare the female suicide attempts of modern day to those of women during the height of the witch craze. Compare the environment women were forced to survive in then to the one we must endure now. Compare the patriarchal explanation for mass suicides then to modern psychological explanations.]

Another form of scholarly mystification is illustrated in the work of social historian/ anthropologist Julio Caro Baroja, The World of the Witches. In the last section of his book, adopting a modern "psychological" approach, Baroja presumes to describe "the personality of the witch." He sagely informs us that "a woman usually becomes a witch after the initial failure of her life as a woman; after frustrated or illegitimate love affairs have left her with a sense of impotence or disgrace." Hags may successfully "double-double unthink" this statement to mean that "a woman usually becomes a witch after the initial success of her life in overcoming the patriarchally defined role of 'woman'; after seeing through the inherent contradiction of 'romantic love'—a clarifying process which enriches her sense of gynergy and grace." Baroja's book concludes:

In conclusion, it seems to me, as a historian, that witchcraft makes one feel pity more than anything else. Pity for those who were persecuted, who wanted to do evil yet could not do it, and whose lives were generally frustrated and tragic. Pity, too, for the persecutors who were brutal because they believed that numberless dangers surrounded them.

This pitiful analysis reveals the pitfalls of "pity." Since there is no reason to think that good witches—Spinsters, midwives, healers—"wanted to do evil," this "pity" is perverted and deceptive. Hags may well feel grief and anger for our tortured foresisters, but pity for their/our persecutors is not the appropriate response. Righteous anger is more in accord with the reality and can generate creative energy.

Just as social historian Baroja has recourse in the end to feeble psychologizing so also does moralist W. E. H. Lecky in his two-volume History of European Morals. He writes revealingly (in the sense of unveiling and re-veiling at the same time) of the conditions that drove some witches to suicide:

In Europe the act was very common among the witches, who underwent all the sufferings with none of the consolations of martyrdom.

Without enthusiasm, without hope, without even the consciousness of innocence, decrepit in body and distracted in mind, compelled in this world to endure tortures, before which the most impassioned heroism might quail, and doomed, as they often believed, to eternal damnation in the next, they not unfrequently killed themselves in the agony of their despair.

This is a perfect description of the condition to which the lords of patriarchy desire to see defiant women reduced. It is an announcement of androcratic intent. How would Lecky know that the witches were "without even the consciousness of innocence"? The expressions "decrepit in body" and "distracted in mind" are deceptive because not accompanied by any description of the christian torturers' methods.

On the following page, this "historian of morals," having admitted the fact of unspeakable torture of witches, actually manages to write that "epidemics of purely insane suicide . . . not infrequently occurred [emphases mine]." Lecky here refers specifically to the women of Marseilles and of Lyons. He then goes on.

In that strange mania which raged in Neapolitan districts from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, and which was attributed to the bite of the tarantula, the patients thronged in multitudes towards the sea, and often, as the blue waters opened to their view, they chanted a wild hymn of welcome, and rushed with passion into the waves [emphases mine].

By naming this phenomenon a "mania" and failing to note the significance of the dates, Lecky makes its meaning invisible to most readers. Hags, however, knowing something about the history of The Burning Times, can see that this was a completely sane decision. Multitudes of women rushed into the sea, precisely because they refused to be "patients" for the witch doctors/torturers and chose to be agents of the one Self-affirming act possible under the Reign of Infernal Justice. Otherwise, they would have been forced to submit their minds and bodies, to accuse themselves, their daughters, their mothers, their dearest friends, of impossible crimes. Moral historian Lecky legitimates this horror by deleting the context and the agents of gynocide from his text. He writes that such cases "belong rather to the history of medicine than to that of morals." Thus no one is to blame. The Fathers are exonerated, since there is nothing in this picture relevant to the history of "morals."

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #witchcraze #the burning times #witch hunting #female suicide #femicide #patriarchal scholarship

[haggishlyhagging]

To Josephine Butler, the Contagious Diseases Acts formalized and legalized the sexual enslavement of women. The acts were designed to protect the health of military men by subjecting any woman the special Morals Police identified as a prostitute to a "surgical examination," which involved the use of crude instruments by often cruel doctors for special vaginal examinations. The acts were enforced in eleven garrison towns, military stations, and naval seaports. An amendment to the 1864 act required that all women identified by the Morals Police as prostitutes must submit to a medical examination. If a woman was found to be free of venereal disease, she was then officially registered and issued a certificate identifying her as a clean prostitute.

The coarse brutality of doctors, men who had only recently taken over the work of midwives, and the arbitrary police identification of women as prostitutes, combined with Victorian morality to create an outrage among women against such examinations. "The examination was demeaning because of its public character. Streetwalking at night was one thing; being forced to attend examinations during the day often taunted by young boys . . . was another."

In 1869, after the final Act passed, Josephine organized the Ladies National Association to campaign for the repeal of the Acts. A statement from the Association, summarizing their position, was published in the Daily News on December 31. It was accompanied by the names of 130 of the 2,000 women who had signed it; among those names were Josephine Butler, writer Harriet Martineau, and Florence Nightingale. The statement said, in part:

Unlike all other laws for the repression of contagious diseases, to which both men and women are liable, these two apply to women only, men being wholly exempt from their penalties. The law is ostensibly framed for a certain class of women, but in order to reach these, all women residing within the districts where it is in force are brought under the provisions of the Acts. Any woman can be dragged into court, and required to prove that she is not a common prostitute. The magistrate can condemn her, if a policeman swears only that he "has good cause to believe" her to be one. . . . When condemned, the sentence is as follows: To have her person outraged by the periodical inspection of a surgeon, through a period of 12 months; or resisting that, to be imprisoned, with or without hard labour—first for a month, next for three months—such imprisonment to be renewed for her whole life unless she submit periodically to the brutal requirements of the law.

Along with the many responses that flowed in from this appeal came a letter from Victor Hugo encouraging the women to "Protest! resist! show your indignation!" Recognizing regulation as a form of slavery, he noted, "I am with you to the fullest extent of my power. In reading your eloquent letter, I have felt a burning sympathy rise in me for the feeble, and a corresponding indignation against the oppressor."

The Percy case is an example of the way regulation was administered. Mrs. Percy supported her family by working in a musical theater on a military base. Her 16-year-old daughter accompanied her each evening and they were always escorted home by a military officer. One evening during their walk home the police approached the woman and her daughter as public prostitutes and ordered them to report for the requisite medical examination. Mrs. Percy's daughter gave the following account to George Butler, Josephine's husband, when she was taken in by the Butlers after her mother's suicide:

They called the police and ordered my mother to go up to the Metropolitan Police Office and bring me with her. Mamma and I went. We there saw Inspector G—. He was in his room, and mamma was first called in alone. I cannot, therefore, tell what passed between mamma and the Inspector, because I was not there. I can only tell you this, that mamma was never the same person again after that hour. She told me that she assured Inspector G— that she would rather sign her death warrant than the paper he gave her to sign. I was then called in. I shall never forget the moment when I stood before Inspector G— and he accused me. He said, "Do you know, girl, why you are here?" I replied, "No, sir, I do not." He said, "You are here because you are no better than you should be. You know what that means, I suppose?" I said, "No, sir, I do not." He laughed in a horrible way when I said this . . . ."

Mrs. Percy refused to submit herself or her daughter to the surgical examination and she made her outrage known through a letter to the Daily Telegraph. The Morals Police were determined more than ever to make a lesson of Mrs. Percy and her daughter. The theater which employed Mrs. Percy was forced to fire her. She and her daughter moved out of town but were induced by one of Mrs. Percy's co-workers to return to work under a false name. The Morals Police unrelentingly pursued Mrs. Percy, warning lodging houses that if they took her in they would risk being cited for running a disorderly house.

In desperation, with no place to live or work, Mrs. Percy threw herself into the Basingstoke Canal. The CD Acts not only regulated and controlled prostitutes, but they showed the rest of the women that to venture out of their homes was to risk being identified as a prostitute.

-Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery

#Kathleen Barry #Josephine butler #contagious diseases acts #female oppression #male mind #prostitution #women’s history

[haggishlyhagging]

It is an interesting but limited exercise to show that psychologists and psychiatrists embrace these sexist norms of our culture, that they do not see beyond the most superficial and stultifying media conceptions of female nature, and that their ideas of female nature serve industry and commerce so well. Just because it's good for business doesn't mean it's wrong. What I will show is that it is wrong; that there isn't the tiniest shred of evidence that these fantasies of servitude and childish dependence have anything to do with women's true potential; that the idea of the nature of human possibility which rests on the accidents of individual development of genitalia, on what is possible today because of what happened yesterday, on the fundamentalist myth of sex organ causality, has strangled and deflected psychology so that it is relatively useless in describing, explaining or predicting humans and their behavior. It then goes without saying that present psychology is less than worthless in contributing to a vision which could truly liberate—men as well as women.

The central argument of my paper, then, is this. Psychology has nothing to say about what women are really like, what they need and what they want, essentially because psychology does not know. I want to stress that this failure is not limited to women; rather, the kind of psychology which has addressed itself to how people act and who they are has failed to understand, in the first place, why people act the way they do, and certainly failed to understand what might make them act differently.

The kind of psychology which has addressed itself to these questions divides into two professional areas: academic personality research, and clinical psychology and psychiatry. The basic reason for failure is the same in both these areas: the central assumption for most psychologists of human personality has been that human behavior rests on an individual and inner dynamic, perhaps fixed in infancy, perhaps fixed by genitalia, perhaps simply arranged in a rather immovable cognitive network. But this assumption is rapidly losing ground as personality psychologists fail again and again to get consistency in the assumed personalities of their subjects (Block, 1968). Meanwhile, the evidence is collecting that what a person does and who she believes herself to be, will in general be a function of what people around her expect her to be, and what the overall situation in which she is acting implies that she is. Compared to the influence of the social context within which a person lives, his or her history and 'traits', as well as biological make-up, may simply be random variations, 'noise' superimposed on the true signal which can predict behavior.

Some academic personality psychologists are at least looking at the counter evidence and questioning their theories; no such corrective is occurring in clinical psychology and psychiatry: Freudians and neo-Freudians, Nudic-marathonists and Touchy-feelies, classicists and swingers, clinicians and psychiatrists, simply refuse to look at the evidence against their theory and practice. And they supply their theory and practice with stuff so transparently biased as to have absolutely no standing as empirical evidence.

To summarize: the first reason for psychology's failure to understand what people are and how they act is that psychology has looked for inner traits when it should have been looking for social context; the second reason for psychology's failure is that the theoreticians of personality have generally been clinicians and psychiatrists, and they have never considered it necessary to have evidence in support of their theories.

-Naomi Weisstein, ‘Psychology Constructs the Female’ in Radical Feminism, Koedt et al (eds.)

#Naomi Weisstein #female psychology #sex roles #psychiatry #female socialization

[haggishlyhagging]

One can see that the process of indictment under torture could and did progress ad infinitum, illusion building upon illusion, destruction upon destruction. Sister was used against sister, friend against friend, and—without doubt—lover against lover. The primary bond of love and trust, without which female identification is difficult to establish—the bond between daughter and mother—was broken on the torture rack, burned in the purifying paternal fires.

Unlike the patriarchs who invented and legitimated foot-binding and genital mutilation, however, the wholly christian fathers and sons generally did not use mothers as the primary instruments of the physical torture of their daughters. Rather, they used mothers and daughters as witnesses against each other. In addition, they vampirized the power inherent in the Mother as symbol, naming their persecuting institution "Mother Church." Thus on a mythic/symbolic level they attempted to warp the deepest feelings of women—all of whom are, of course, daughters snarling these feelings into Self-contradictory love-hate. In the witchcraze, males used the Mother symbol to cover their own motives of sadism and control. Instead of using physical female bodies to carry out the acts of torture and murder, the christian fathers used the institutional Body of Mother Church. This Mystical Body, the church, which was also known as the "Bride of Christ," was/is the false "Mother" used to destroy female-identified Selves. In carrying out this destruction the fathers and sons invoked the "Mother of God"—the robotized replica of The Goddess—who had been tamed and re-named, made into a reminder of their need to keep on maiming, raping, and killing female divinity.

-Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology

#mary daly #witchcraze #witch hunts #male violence #patriarchal religion #male vampirism