‘Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life’ by aurora linnea—Spinifex Press Book Launch
An unflinching, awakened indictment of sadosocietal sickness—with resurrectionary hope
The woman who possesses love for her sex, for the world, for truth, justice, and right, will not hesitate to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under what guise of age or holiness it appears.
- Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State1
I had intended on attending the launch for linnea’s Man Against Being toward the end of February, although we became busier at the laundromat than expected. Such is work. However, as always, I am thankful to Spinifex Press for providing videos of the launches, like this one, available online for those who cannot attend or who may wish to review.
There is reason to watch this book launch, if not also read it—and, even more importantly, read linnea’s book. Man Against Being is a vital work for our time, a call to recognize that man’s dominion over woman, over nature, is the root of the ongoing war against reality, what drives man’s hunger to escape his own flesh through his technology. What use would it be, for instance, to acknowledge the capitalism of transgenderism and recent technological advancements but not address the more inconvenient fact that mind-body dualism predates modern capitalism and has operated independently of any industry behind it? Mistaking one piece for the whole picture, a typical error, creates only a partial, distorted view of what has actually coincided with the social order—inside and outside Western philosophy and culture. Transgenderism leading into transhumanism does not contradict the ideas of Western thinkers following in Plato’s view of the body as a prison which the soul must transcend. Only radical feminists, like linnea, have investigated deeply enough below the surface, tracing the history, while too many others have wallowed in the superficial. Where radical feminism has been castigated as being atrophied, supposedly not further developing its analysis since the 1970s, linnea’s work strongly indicates otherwise.
Although Mary Daly and Susan Griffin stand out as two of linnea’s intellectual foremothers/foresisters—apart from Andrea Dworkin, who almost goes without saying, such is her tremendous influence—I see another, deeper into the past: Matilda Joslyn Gage. Daly writes of women—Hags doing Hag-ography and Hag-ology—who “must continue in the spiritual tradition of such visionaries as Matilda Joslyn Gage, continuing to uncover our past and paths to our future.”2 Upon reading Man Against Being, I have no doubt that linnea lives/writes in the tradition of the Great Hags.
I have transcribed remarks from Susan Hawthorne, Lierre Keith, Ariel Salleh, and Renate Klein. However, I have reproduced, as noted below and linked, linnea’s own text of her remarks, with page numbers added here for the passages referenced. Including linnea’s own text makes the most sense to respect her choices in punctuation and paragraph breaks. When transcribing elsewhere, I have worked to maintain the integrity of each woman’s voice. Notes at the end function more as extra commentary on some points to be visited after reading.
For the sake of not having as many notes, the text has in-text page references for quotes from linnea’s Man Against Being and other points in the notes at the end, such as noting the Sado-Ritual Syndrome in Daly’s Gyn/Ecology.
HAWTHORNE: Welcome, everybody, to this launch of Man Against Being by aurora linnea, and it’s fabulous to have you here, so let me just thank you and begin with a welcome.
We respectfully acknowledge the wisdom of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and their custodianship of the lands and waterways.
The lands on which Spinifex offices are situated are Djiru, Bunurong and Wurundjeri, Wadawurrung, Gundungurra, and Noongar.
We also acknowledge the many women throughout history who have fought for women’s freedom and the freedom of lesbians, often at the cost of their lives.
Today, Lierre Keith is launching aurora’s book. You can see it there. Lierre is the author of seven books, including The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability [2009], and it’s been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She is co-author, with Derrick Jensen and Max Wilbert, of Bright Green Lies: How the Environmental Movement Lost Its Way and What We Can Do About It [2021]. She is the founder of WoLF, and you’ll see “WoLF” written across her chest. WoLF—the Women’s Liberation Front—is a radical feminist nonprofit which is suing the state of California on behalf of women forced to share prison cells with men. She lives in the Redwoods with an enormous pack of enormous dogs. Welcome, Lierre.
KEITH: Thanks for inviting me. I feel quite honored that I was asked to present a little bit on this book.
This book is basically a descendant of both Mary Daly’s Gyn/Ecology [1978] and Susan Griffin’s Woman and Nature [1978]. Coming from me, that’s about as high praise as you could get, because those are two of my favorite authors ever—and absolutely foundational to radical feminism as we know it. I feel like aurora has just taken the ball and run with it in a really amazing way. This is the beautiful cover of the book, and this is the table of contents. I’m just going to give you an overview of what you can expect if you read it.
Her basic thesis is that men hate—and I shouldn’t say “men”; she uses the word “Man,” and she does that very specifically, so I’m going to try to use the same language. “Man,” meaning men as a class, their whole framework that they’ve created under patriarchy—that’s “Man,” which is different than individual men. I get that distinction, so I’m going to try to use “Man” the way that she did.3
Man is horrified at the idea that he’s alive, because someday he might die, and, also, he feels very powerless at this, so instead of embracing the joys and the sorrows of the human condition, you have these patriarchal cultures—including ours—where everything that reminds him that he might one day die, and that he has a vulnerable body, sets up this tremendous response where he has to try to deny it. Others, the scapegoats, the people who are in a subservient position, then, become the bearers of mortality and of life and of the material. This battle is never over because, of course, you can’t deny reality. At the end of the day, we are all material creatures, and we are all going to die, so he’s horrified at his body. She uses all of these different examples of it, in a very compelling way, to show that just across the culture—and this is around the globe; it’s not even just Western culture—how Man has this horror that he’s alive, and how much he really hates it.
The second part of this is called “Severed Heads Forever,” and it’s about this sort of Cartesian dualism, essentially that the mind exists and the body does not. Once you’re split like that, you have to constantly be reinventing that split, because it’s not real, but they want it to be, so they keep doing this over and over. And then, of course, you’ve got “Others//Bodies,” so you have to have the scapegoat who takes on the role of the embodied.
“Mastering the Body by Proxy” is the chapter where I felt like it most matched Mary Daly, because, in Gyn/Ecology, she saw this pattern that she named the “Sado-Ritual Syndrome”—and this is all across the world.4 When she looked at the horrendous things that men do to women, she saw a pattern, and so she named the seven different things that are always present when this happens. I feel like aurora did something very similar here. She’s chalked out the different parts of this, the way that they hate the body and the things that they do to physical bodies—their own and others—and she also acknowledges that this is a ritual; she points that out, so very parallel to Mary Daly.
“Life After Life: Post-Embodiment Fantasies of the Terminal Man” is all the crazy stuff about how we can modify our bodies, how we can “trans” our bodies, how we can “become computers” and go live in the internet somewhere—just trying to leave the body as far as we possibly can. Finally, her prescription for this, how we’re going to get out of it, she calls “resurrectionary feminism.” The end chapter is really worth the journey; it’s a hard journey, but the end is so beautiful and so hopeful that it really makes up for what you have to endure in the middle. Because she gets into the details here, and it’s patriarchy, so it’s not any fun:
In the urgency of my heartbreak as a ravaged world succumbs to plunder and the killing won’t slow but only accelerates with the unstoppable surge of years, I write because I want to scream it: men hate life. By ‘life,’ I mean the substance of creation, the creatures that men themselves are, their existence as bodies and the matter from which their bodies are made. Life is being alive on the earth, being an animal, being a body. . . . [O]ne finds that what is truest is always rather shockingly and painfully simple. It is an oversight to shrink from what is clear to see. So we observe that men have spent thousands of years articulating their hatred for life and acting on it. Men have made themselves clear—why not take them at their word? (p. 3)
This is another way of saying, “When Man shows you who he is, believe him,” because they have done nothing for the last 10,000 years but show us how much they actually hate life, so we’re not making this up. I know we get called “manhaters” and whatever nasty things, but aurora just shows you, in their own words and their own actions, how much they actually hate being alive—and other living creatures. Here’s a twelfth-century monk:
Worldly life, future death,
Permanent ruin,
Worldly life, evil thing,
Never worthy of love
. . .
Life, stupid thing
Accepted only by fools,
I reject you with all my heart.
For you are full of filth. (qtd., p. 3)
And that pretty much sums it up.
[Christian] [w]riters taking up this theme breathlessly catalogued the profusion of horrors that made life such a scourge: dirt, bad smells, flies, fleas, cold, heat, hunger, thirst, worms, wild animals, fire, lightning, fierce winds, poisonous plants, hard labor, poverty, deprivation, surfeit, fear, desire, sex, childbirth, disease, injury, aging, death, decay. (p. 4)
There’s just this list of reasons why life is terrible. This is fully embraced into Christianity, at a certain point, and then is still with them today.
In the centuries that have passed between the Middle Ages and now, men have given lavish, violent display to their rejection of the life they called stupid, evil, and unworthy of love. They have razed field and forest, felling trees by the thousands, grinding them into sawdust, clearing the land for cities and suburbs and feedlots, leaving the earth scarred, the creatures who once lived in and amongst the trees displaced, the air thinner for the loss of the trees’ enlivening breath. . . . And where men have erected cities to house themselves in isolation from the world they abhor, the earth enervates interred under miles of tons of concrete, today the single most abundantly used substance after water. (p. 5)
I did not know that about concrete, so that’s a lot of concrete, and its purpose is just to cover the earth so nothing can grow.5
And the oceans are dying. The guts of fish, turtles, and seabirds bloat clotted with plastic dregs. And countless gallons of unknown, unknowable chemicals leach into the soil and into the groundwater, so humans and other animals are born deformed and diseased and rapidly decline. Forests turn arid into tinder and catch fire, polar ice melts, the permafrost thaws, topsoil erodes. We breathe the ashes, our lungs blacken. A mountain’s peak is blown to rubble, so men can mine for coal to keep electric lights burning in vacant office parks. . . . Grasslands desiccate into deserts. Then nothing grows, then nothing eats, then nothing survives, nothing lives. (p. 6)
Our one and only beloved planet is just being wrecked by this.
And as the living world thrashes in its death throes, men intoxicate themselves placated with self-soothing fantasies of excarnation, ascension, myriad raptures both religious and technological. They are convinced that they can live without their lives. That they will be better off without them. And the killing continues apace. (p. 7)
I think she’s got that pretty well wrapped up.
Fearing death, insulted and affronted by it, men have hardened themselves against life, for in mortal material reality there is no living without dying. Yet to scorn life and to wage war against it sets men at no safer distance from mortality; they have not preserved themselves but, by damaging the creation their lives depend on, only expedited their own demise. By disavowing themselves as animals, the beings they are by nature, they have harshened their own suffering, for now their lives are spent in paranoic denial. (p. 7)
Then we get to the chapter on body horror, and she goes through different kinds of cultural avenues where you will see this over and over—this terror that men have, the disgust they feel toward physical embodiment. Some of it is pop culture, some of it is serious philosophy. You’ve got the Blob, you’ve got Sartre, you’ve got Harlan Ellison, Plato, all the way back to the Greeks, The Exorcist, Lovecraft—all kinds of examples of just how much they hate the animal body.
Whatever the Blob is, it’s obscenely organic. Anatomically speaking, it most resembles the mesentery: that membranous ruffle of connective tissue that holds our bowels contained within our abdomens. But then in other scenes it is more placental, a sack of jellied blood spat from the black-hole womb of the universe. Like a cancer, the Blob metastasizes into a writhing fabric of cysts, polyps, abscesses. It is tumorous, its constant growth malignant. The Blog is a diseased organ gone rogue, sentient but severed from any reasonable rational mind that might temper its frenzy. (p. 14)
We’ve got this Cartesian dualism absolutely going on here. Then she quotes Sartre, and the thing that was interesting to me, about this particularly, is I remember way back when I was a teenager, at that age when people start reading serious philosophy. Some of my friends had taken up Sartre, and I hated it. I started to read Being and Nothingness [1943], this whole thing about “slime”—I was so repelled by how much he clearly hated life.6 I was like, “Why is anybody reading this?” So, it was quite clear to me the misogyny involved in this, that he associated the “slime” with this sort of “feminine” ooze. I was like: You wouldn’t be alive without a woman’s body. We menstruate and, yes, birth is bloody, and it involves some “slimy” parts, but so what? That’s just what’s inside your skin—this is just what being alive is, this is your blood and your nerves and your guts and your everything, and I don’t why do you hate being alive so much. I had a hard time taking him seriously after that, and, in fact, I couldn’t finish reading the book, and I got into fights with some of my friends about it. So, I was very happy to see this quote in here, because this is exactly what turned me off that whole group of philosophers was this:
I open my hands, I want to let go of the slimy, and it sticks to me, it draws me, it sucks at me . . . It is a soft, yielding action, a moist and feminine sucking. (Sartre, 1943, qtd., p. 15)
It’s always women’s fault, right?
And then Plato: Elizabeth Spelman diagnoses Plato with the syndrome that she has called “somatophobia”: “a paranoid terror of the mortal material biological body characteristically expressed as abhorrence for all things physical” [linnea’s sharper, applied definition of Spelman’s concept].7 She argues that this is all across the Western philosophical canon, this antipathy for human bodiliness. The soul is associated with “the immortal” and the ethereal, and it’s above the terrible, slimy, awful suffering body; you have to split them off—and only one is ever going to be good.
We have another Christian—St. Peter Damian (1007-1072/73 CE)—saying the body was corruption itself, that it’s always been rotten, we just see it at death, but it’s always been there the whole time (“human flesh . . . the rottenness which it has always been,” qtd., p. 23). Martin Luther (1483-1546 CE) called the body “maggot-sack” [“Madensack”], filled with the “vilest worms, adders, toads, and snakes,” just all this repulsion for the animal body (qtd., p. 23). Here’s Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex [1949], and, as you may know, she was in a long-term relationship with Sartre:
He would be inevitable, like a pure Idea . . . and he finds himself shut up in a body of limited powers . . . This quivering jelly which is elaborated in the womb . . . evokes too clearly the soft viscosity of carrion for him not to turn shuddering away . . . Because he is horrified by needlessness and death, man feels horror at having been engendered; he would fain deny his animal ties; through the fact of his birth murderous nature has a hold upon him. (Beauvoir, 1949, qtd., p. 24)8
She recognizes the same thing as what he feels, except she’s clearly stepped back from it, and she’s analyzing it. Instead of nature being amazing and beautiful and miraculous, this incredible gift that we get to have, that we’re here, that we get to experience all of this, they really see it as some terrible, awful, horrifying, revolting place that they’re stuck. They have acted that way, so we do have to believe them, but I just thought it was interesting that, even though she’s involved with him long-term, this was the love of her life, apparently, she got this about him and about men and about the philosophy that they were engaged in together. She’s able to step back and analyze it.9
Another medieval Christian was more concise: ‘After man comes the worm. After the worm, stench and horror.’ (p. 33)
This is what they think about being alive.
Terrorized by the brute fact of his body, Man pits himself against material reality, initiating what Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death (1973) calls Man’s ‘revolt against existence itself’ (p. 84). Reality defies and defiles Man, denies him the power to exist indefinitely in his own immortal image, clean, and pure and spiritualized. Unstigmatized, unindebted. Thus he abhors reality as adversary and oppressor. (p. 41)
This is the battle they’ve been fighting.
“Severed Heads Forever: Disembodiment and Immortal Manhood” is all about Cartesian dualism, “the decapitation,” that we only exist in our minds; we don’t exist in our bodies, and the mind is the pure thing that might last forever. The body is just absolutely going to die, and that’s a terrible thing, not just the inevitable sadness that becomes life again. “Any data one receives through these channels is open to doubt” (p. 46) [linnea paraphrasing Descartes], so he’s saying that our bodies are not trustworthy in any way. All we know is that we have thoughts and those truly exist, so that’s where we’re going to put all our chips on that side of it. This is called Cartesian dualism.
I did not know this about Descartes: His mother died when he was quite young [just over a year after his birth], so he didn’t have a mother. He also was quite sickly as a child, probably with tuberculosis, so he had a hard childhood. I found some forgiveness in my heart after reading that about him that, without that really primary bond of the maternal matrix of love and protection, of course, he was going to end up like this. This fills in the rest of the story for me, why he ended up hating being alive so much. I think there was a primary wound that, when that’s not filled at a very young age, there’s not much to repair it when you’re that young, so I think he had a hard time. It’s there in his philosophy.
Men have to be reborn because they hate that they came from women. They hate their bodies so much. You will see around the globe all of these horrendous initiation rituals that men put boys through to make them into men. They basically have to completely reject the soft, “womanly” body that they were born from, and they have to go numb, “not cry out when wounded” (p. 73). That’s the only way to be worthy. And aurora goes through a bunch of pretty horrendous rituals that men do to young boys to get them to become this: “War, of course, is the consummate, quintessential, and most spectacular rite of violence by which Manhood is established and affirmed” (p. 73).
Now, this chapter [“Others//Bodies”] is about all of the scapegoating, how the hatred of the animal body is then projected onto women, animals, and racialized people—anybody who’s considered beneath and “Other.” So, here’s the dualism:
mind / body
soul / body
spirit / body
essence / substance
immaterial / material
immortal / mortal
pure / impure
culture / nature
analogue / digital
heaven / earth
sacred / profane
light / dark
light / heavy
good / evil (pp. 79-80)
This is the world that they’ve set up, the dualism ecofeminist Val Plumwood calls patriarchy’s mantra of radical exclusion: “I am nothing at all like this inferior other” (qtd., p. 81). “Radical exclusion dictates that what the Other is, the Self is not” (p. 81).
In the social hierarchy Man has scaffolded, the Other functions as ‘the material bottom beneath which one cannot sink’ [Andrea Dworkin, 2000]. As a negative reference point, the Other provides man with a reliable reservoir of relative self-esteem: if the Other is on the bottom, then man gets to see himself on top. Since his self-concept as discarnate hence undying hence omnipotently Godlike depends on the other being held low, Man is obliged to enforce the others debasement and denigration. (p. 81)
Then, we get into Marx and Freud, and it’s basically the same thing. It’s “by controlling nature rather than being controlled by it that Man [according to Marx] becomes ‘human,’ by which he means ‘superior to an animal’” [Marx, Das Kapital (Capital), vol. III, 1894] (p. 88). The far left does it just like the far right. Freud, of course, wasn’t so sure that man could actually master this, but his whole thing was that there’s this terrible conflict between “civilization” and “not civilization,” that man has to control all of these urges in order make civilization happen. But [according to Freud] there’s always going to be this conflict in our minds because we’re at war with ourselves—between these terrible urges that we have and the sort of better, higher way that that we want to try to be. So, the “animal drives” [according to Freud] have to be mastered through “repression” and “sublimation”: “[I]f we let them have their way, they would infallibly bring us to ruin” [Freud, “My Contact with Josef Popper-Lynkeus,” 1932/1964] (p. 88).10 This is really what he thinks about human beings.
There are the Buddhist counterparts, and it’s exactly the same:
That these Christian men’s Buddhist counterparts were no less repulsed by the female is made clear in the Maharatnakuta Sutra [707-713 CE]:
‘As the filth and decay of a dead dog or dead snake are burned away, / So men should burn filth and detest evil. / The dead dog and snake are detestable, / But women are even more detestable than they are.’ (p. 97)
It’s filth; it’s decay; it’s worms; and it’s all “evil”—and [according to ancient Buddhist scripture] “women are even more detestable than they [the dead dog and dead snake] are” is the punchline to all of this. No matter where you go in patriarchy, it’s the same story.
“Mastering the Body by Proxy: Rituals of Corporeal Control and Punishment” discusses the rituals of control and the punishments that are inflicted on women on animals—and that men do on themselves. In this chapter, she makes some very good points that I wish feminists would make more. I was very impressed with this chapter as well. First of all, to ritualize:
By the rituals he invents and executes and repeats obsessively, Man labors to reconfigure reality. Joseph Campbell defined ritual as ‘the enactment of a myth’: the practice of bringing a myth to life, lending it concrete presence in the world, through methodical, purposeful, symbolically significant actions. (p. 113)
That’s what they’re doing every time they commit these horrors: they’re reenacting that myth. Man is trying “to make real his sacred myths,” and it’s “a course of escalating violence, the compulsion to overpower the mortal material body twisting into a bitter urge to punish it for its crimes against him, as he grows increasingly desperate to believe in the fantasy to which he has hitched his salvation” (p. 114). She has this list, where I think it really is parallel to Mary Daly: “Mortification, mutilation, humiliation, consumption, replacement, torture, annihilation” (p. 114). This is the “progression” of it through the course of patriarchy, and these are the rights that Man performs—and he has done this obsessively for thousands of years. We see the “glorious” results around us: We’ve got a half-dead planet. So, we need to take Man seriously. This chapter is hard to read, of course, because you’re going to read about torture and rape. I won’t lie to you: She doesn’t pull any punches, but we do have to face this, and I think that her framework is quite sound and really will be helpful to radical feminism going forward.
In “Life After Life: Post-Embodiment Fantasies of the Terminal Man,” we have all of these ridiculous fantasies that Man has now about how he can get out of his body, that you can surely alter your body so much that it will finally fit your fantasy, which is absurd. Of course, humans are not made out of Lego blocks; you can’t do this, but then, ultimately, the goal is to go live in computers and conquer the universe through that. This is a perfect paragraph:
The Self uses the Body. The Self controls the Body. The Self communicates through the Body. But the Self never is the Body: the two remain forever divided and estranged. Because it preserves the dualistic structure, the body-as-avatar model that informs the rhetoric of body-mod ‘empowerment’ neither transgresses nor rages against mainstream patriarchal ideology, but in fact reinforces it, regardless of how superficially unconventional the body modifier’s chosen aesthetic may be. In reality, the pierced, tattooed, scarred, implanted, branded, cosmetically nipped and tucked body symbolizes a selfhood in lockstep submission to Man’s somatophobic alienation from biological reality. (p. 174)
And then:
The edgy reinvention of dualism inaugurated by the 1990s body-mod craze is in the midst of a renaissance, locked into place now as transgenderism’s guiding theory. The ‘transgender’ person, we are informed, repeatedly and with evangelical zeal, has suffered the cruel misfortune of being ‘born in the wrong body.’ This individual’s body is wrong because it is one sex, male or female, while the individual’s interior True Self is the so-called ‘opposite’ sex or maybe no sex at all . . . The interior sense of one’s sex is named ‘gender identity’ and enshrined as integral to the True Self, to whose expression the biological body is an unfortunate impediment. (p. 175)
Everything else that’s wrong with transgender ideology, to me, this has always been the main problem. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have felt such tremendous grief at the amount of just the hatred of the human body that is involved in this movement. They are willing to mutilate the bodies of even pretty young kids. How much do you hate being alive that you just want to remove their capacity for sexual function and destroy their reproductive organs before they’re even mature? It’s filled me with such grief to see this across the culture being celebrated as some kind of “freedom” when it is really just a hatred of the human animal. I don’t understand why, even if you felt that, why you wouldn’t fight it. That’s the thing: Do we have no loyalty at all to our animal selves? And I guess the answer is ‘No,’ at this late stage of patriarchy. So, Man has to cast off his corporeality:
‘Freed from our frail biological form, human-cum-artificial intelligences will move out into the universe,’ writes machine intelligence pioneer Earl Cox [1996, qtd. in Noble, 1997/1999]. Postbiological Man, as a fathomless formless unbounded absolute intelligence, will saturate all matter and energy, and all things that exist anywhere and everywhere in the universe will be converted into a medium of computation, streaming with data, with math. Man, having cast off his body, makes his return to matter only to invade it mercilessly, no longer restricted to any one static form or vessel but suffusing all things, colonizing the substance of creation. And in this way he enlivens the universe with intelligence, which shall be the redemption of matter itself: the dead stuff dumb as it was will gleam permeated and penetrated by Man’s mind. (p. 205)
This is brilliant: She’s exactly right about what these men are trying to do. The universe is dead to them, and, if they can infuse it with male consciousness, it will be “alive,” and it will be “perfect,” and it will be “wonderful.” And it’ll all be worthwhile because, on its own, it’s terrible and awful and the best you can say about it is that it’s just “blank”—and, at worst, of course, it’s the “slime,” all of that, but this is their goal. If you haven’t read Martine Rothblatt, who’s a major figure in trans ideology and a billionaire, he created a whole religion, and this is the point of that religion called “Terasem.” They think that they’re going to go out into the universe in computer mind somehow and going to be omniscient and omnipotent and absolutely everywhere and they’re going to somehow colonize it all and make it good. Because of their “sacred” presence, because it’s not good as it is—it’s never good as it is [according to Rothblatt’s transhumanist ideology]. So, I think she’s absolutely nailed it. This is just another perfect paragraph from the book.
Finally, in “Resurrectionary Feminism: Revitalize, Reintegrate, Resensitize, Revolt!”, this what she thinks is the way forward because she does not leave us hopeless. The last section of this book is so beautifully written; it’s just pure poetry. For “resurrectionary feminism,” as she calls it, the body is essential—this is the first principle:
As we struggle for women’s liberation from male dominion, we cannot allow ourselves to be conned into trailing after Man on his quest to be freed from ‘the tyranny of biology.’ In the words of Somer Brodribb (1992), ‘[W]hat would it mean to be integrated into our own negation, except the realization of patriarchal fantasy. To pursue an anti-mat(t)er, anti-physic approach is to repeat patriarchal ideology’ (p. 133). We are not oppressed and degraded by our bodies, but by the regimes of delusional men who have projected dread bodiliness onto women as they thrashed vainly to escape themselves, holding us captive sequestered on reserve to serve as their scapegoats, fodder for patriarchy’s murderous role-play game of immortal male mastery over material reality. (p. 217)
I think she’s exactly right. Then, she writes:
Jane Caputi, a student of Mary Daly, argues that newly minted mythologies, or pre-patriarchal ones unearthed and resuscitated, have the power to reorient human consciousness in the direction of a more feminist mode of being. Specifically, Caputi calls for a rekindling of goddess mythologies—an enduring favorite within feminist circles, for obvious reasons—as a ‘way for human beings to know and understand cosmic processes of thought, creation and destruction’ (2004, p. 233). The troubling implication therein, however, is that human beings have no wav of understanding these processes without recourse to our own inventions. It is inconceivable that we might grasp the living world directly, by experiencing it, by simply being in it and a part of it, alive and alert, feeling, listening, tasting, watching attentively. Inconceivable, too, that we could revere winter simply for the snowed-in cold of it, and love spring for its flowers, and die because we must. And so, because experience tells us nothing we need to know, we require myths, and religions, and secular dogmas like the scientific reductionism that enlightens us to the fact that all the world is quarks. We turn away from material reality and quest after truth in goddess spirituality, Mariology, Taoism, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, Wicca, Hinduism, Indigenous folktales of trickster coyotes and moon rabbits. There is much to treasure in these mythic traditions, and I am as enchanted by the ancient lore as anyone. But they are products of human minds, and when we mistake them for keys to reality, we remain enthralled primarily with ourselves. Are we to take it that the living world has no organic intrinsic magic of its own to enrapture us? (p. 220)
This is why I’m just in love with this last chapter. She’s just completely nailing it all the way through: “Reality’s magic dwells in imminence: there is nothing to transcend so sense again that the life in you is your own tameless divinity” (p. 225). She calls us to radical empathy:
Accepting ourselves for the vulnerable bodies we are, reawakening to our own fleshly sensitivities, we can feel our way out of numbness and back into an awareness of corporeality as the basic, fundamental condition shared by all earthly creatures. (p. 242)
So, we’re all kin in this, we’re all alive, we’re all sentient, we’re all part of each other:
Resensitization to the unity of the living world beckons us back to our native grace. The empathetic urge to care begets an instinctual morality, its principles sourced not from any handed-down catechism but from the capacities of our sentient animal bodies. . . . [W]hat is needed is a willingness to feel without inhibition, fostered by a humble praxis of attention and responding with care to the world as we encounter it. (p. 244)
She’s calling for something really new, and I think this is just a wonderful clarion call to this this new form of justice that she’s envisioned for us. But she’s not forgetting that things are bad here:
What is necessary, then, is to name the killers, the rapists: the engineers of mass desecration. It is necessary, too, to diagram the machinery that the destroyers have instituted, every mechanism that has enabled them to be as viciously efficiently industrious as they have been in their devastation of the world. . . . [O]nce we have studied that system’s daily operations and its equipment, once we understand how it functions, how it is maintained, then we will be ready to put our empathy to work. (p. 246)
It’s not just about sitting around and feeling the beauty of the world. We have to fight for it. We have to fight for it before it’s too late. So, this is her plan:
First, we refuse to collaborate. To the fullest extent possible we remove ourselves from participation in the misery industries, no longer living in collusion with the Master class.
Second, we provide sanctuary to the wounded . . . We shelter the victimized, tend to their injuries, leaving no/body behind . . . Yet there is a crucial difference between tending to the wounded and ending the war.
And so our third program of empathetic action is directed towards the slaughter itself. To abort atrocity rather than chase after it laboring to palliate the scorched earth in its wake, nothing less than organized political resistance will serve.
Radical empathy’s imperative, then, is plain: stop the war. (pp. 246-247)
And that’s it.
HAWTHORNE: Thank you, Lierre. That is a brilliant summary of what is a very complex book, actually, and a wonderful book. I agree with you that aurora is kind of a descendant of Mary Daly and Susan Griffin. That’s fabulous.
Now, it’s my chance to introduce aurora. aurora describes herself as “a radical ecofeminist writer committed to poetic dissidence and uncompromising disloyalty to male dominion.” You probably picked up on that during Lierre’s talk. She has authored poetry books, poetry chapbooks, horror stories, and zines and contributes regularly to the media disruptions of Women’s Liberation Radio News (WLRN). In the past, she has served women as a shelter worker and rape crisis advocate. aurora says she is “no longer in collusion with the predator.”
So, over to you aurora to talk about Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life.
LINNEA: First, I just want to take a minute to express my gratitude for all of the women of Spinifex not only for giving me this opportunity to share my work but, more crucially, for keeping radical feminist publishing, and therefore radical feminist literature, alive.
Thank you to Renate and to Susan, to Pauline, Rachael, Caitlin, and Danielle, and thank you, too, to Deb, Helen, and Belinda, for making Man Against Being a far lovelier and more polished production than I could have ever imagined when it was mostly like scribbles and notebook corners and on the edge of library receipts and things like that. I’m really very appreciative for all of you.
I also want to thank Lierre for taking the time to speak about the book tonight and all of this really lavish praise that I don’t know quite what to do with. Just for you to have read it really means the world to me. So, thank you.
Now, I have a couple of things to say about the book:
What follows is linnea’s own text of her remarks, published on February 25, 2025, which can be read at her website Holistic Anti-Atrocity Feminism, with page numbers added here for the passages referenced.
Man Against Being is a simple book, simple in its premise and in its plea. As a writer, I have sometimes been embarrassed of my own simplicity, worried that, because things often seem to me straightforward, I must be simple-minded, a synonym for stupid. As if the marker of intelligence were a baroque complexity and ambiguity drifting the mind ever farther from common sense: the facts as we sense them in our direct experience of this world we share in common. Yet I’m more and more confident that what is discredited as “simple-mindedness” is better termed “clarity.” In the epilogue to her novel Mercy, Andrea Dworkin writes of her proposition, scorned as simple-minded by more academic feminist peers, that “bad things are bad.” Really, though, “bad things are bad” is a perfectly valid moral principle; it would take us a long way if we were serious about it. A simple but clear morality is not necessarily the inferior of a complicated, vague one. The same can be said for simple ideas, simple concepts, straightforward thinking grounded in the simple observation of one’s reality.
Man Against Being is the product of such a simple observation. Having lived thirty odd years amongst humans in the United States of America, and having read a great deal, and watched films, and spoken with people and listened to them, it occurred to me that, in this society, we hate being bodies.
Soon I was seeing this hatred of organic, physical, biological bodiliness everywhere. And indeed, for many years, a disgusted loathing of the body I am dominated my own life; I knew the hatred intimately. From there the line of thinking I followed was straightforward: to hate being a body is to hate being a biological organism is to hate being alive on earth, is to hate living, to hate being. It seemed clear to me that this was the basic patriarchal psychopathology, the foundational defect in the ideological framework of society as men have wrought it.
When I tell people that I write about hatred of bodies in patriarchal society, they tend to assume that my topic is the standard liberal feminist hobby-horse of women’s dismal body image, the result of a misogynist capitalist culture which deluges women with imagery of artificialized female bodies-as-sex-objects and then assails us as the target market for a legion of commodities promised to grant us that painted plastic manmade-woman look. Obviously the hatred that women and girls are programmed to feel for their bodies as imperfect sex objects is a serious problem, and a source of real pain. But what I am getting at, in writing about body hatred, is not so circumscribed. Instead, my concern is what the feminist philosopher Elizabeth Spelman in 1982 termed “somatophobia,” which she defined as the fearful abhorrence for the biological body integral to the worldview of the patriarchal west. Spelman’s particular subject was the somatophobia that runs through the work of Plato, for whom the body was a grave in which the soul is buried, a prison in which the soul is caged, and an “impediment” which thwarts the soul in its quest for pure knowledge. With this, Plato set the tone of western thinking on bodiliness back in the fourth century BCE. The state of opinion has hardly improved since then.
Somatophobia is the common theme that binds together manmade civilization’s apparently disparate yet uniformly patriarchal religious, philosophical and scientific belief systems as merely varied riffs on a single monolithic ideology. In contemporary popular culture, somatophobia finds its expression in horror movies, transgenderism, New Age spirituality, cyberculture, technofetishistic transhumanism, and even certain strains of feminist thought. With Man Against Being, I try to make evident just how pervasive somatophobia is, and how invisible, so entrenched at this point that it easily escapes notice. Just because the body-as-grave formulation has been so normalized that we rarely consciously or explicitly articulate it for ourselves, the manmade culture we inhabit has by no means outgrown its somatophobic bedrock. The ruling male Master class is no less terrorized by being bodies than Plato was. What has changed over the last several thousand years, however, is that today, when men lash out in horror and hatred, their coping mechanisms are possessed of a greater destructive power than ever before.
In the book, I write:
Body horror churns septic at the core of Man’s delusional mentality, from which fear leaches steadily out congealing into the anxious alienation and anguished rancor that pollute to pathological the sum total of Man’s relations with the living world and its creatures, his fellow Man and himself not least of all. The revolt he launches against his own being is the original war, the primary antagonism that turns Man against the world. (p. 41)
The war is ongoing, a constant smoldering just beneath the surface, until, vented as men’s violence against women, animals, and the biosphere, it reignites. We are all living in the war zone. Simply put: this is why our world is burning.
It is not difficult to understand Man’s fear. Bodies die, after all. As bodies, we are wounded, we sicken, we age unto infirmity, we die and decay back into the earth. Death is nonexistence, is the sudden cessation of oneself. It’s a frightening prospect. I cannot blame the forefathers for being spooked. But what they do deserve blame for is their total failure to reconcile themselves with the reality of mortality, turning instead to delusions of control, domination, and revenge. Ernest Becker, in his 1973 book The Denial of Death, theorized that the fear of death, and the stratagems devised to evade and to vanquish it, is what makes Man human, supreme over all other creatures. Becker writes, too, that manmade civilization has from its inception been molded by this nonacceptance of mortality. In his view, Man has created culture as a fantasyland within which he tries to insulate himself from the realities of his condition as a biological organism. On this count, I agree with Becker. I disagree, however, that Man’s anxious rejection of mortal material reality is the natural, reasonable, right and good response to death. I would likewise dispute Becker’s claim that this rejection is what makes men human. More correct would be to say that it is what has made the male into Man as we know him. In other words: Manhood, or masculinity, is an outgrowth of death-denying body horror. Like most developments rooted in the avoidance of reality, it is not reasonable or positive or helpful, but dangerously dysfunctional. Masculinity, defined by the craving for power and control, a hardening of the body, the desire to become steel or stone, is an armor that men don dreaming it can shield them from mortality. For Man, ideally, in his own mind, is immortal. Desperate to realize this fantasy, he devotes himself to grasping after disembodiment and dominion.
Mind/body dualism is the ideological prerequisite for both masculine disembodiment and male dominion as strategies of self-immortalization. If Man means to believe he’ll live on despite the demonstrable perishability of biological bodies, of which he is one, he must first convince himself that he is in fact something other than deathly flesh. What he has settled on as that other thing is the soul, or the spirit, or the mind. Whatever he calls it, it is an immaterial essence figured in opposition to the body, set down at the opposite pole. The logic holds that if the body is mortal, then the soul and mind are immortal. Thus by identifying himself with the soul, or the mind, Man saves his own eternal life.
If the first phase of the dualistic defense against death is Man’s assertion that he is the immaterial immortal mind/soul, the second is to project the material mortal body onto beings designated as Not-Man, or Other. Within the western cultural model that has historically dominated and has metastasized within the last century into a truly global white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy, the readymade Others have been nonhuman animals, women, and racialized peoples. They are used as scapegoats, conscripted to carry the hated body on Man’s behalf, their presence the concrete proof he needs to trust in his own liberation from bodiliness. As proxies for the body, these scapegoated Others can also be dominated and abused in ways providing Man with a soothing sense of mastery over material reality. I write in the book,
Man lines up his scapegoats for the sacrifice. He is the Self and they are the Others . . . Identified with sex, filth, stupidity, excrement, sin, disease, decay and degradation both physical and social, Others become the earthly matter that Man rejects, the biological squalor, the dirt, the evil and the End; they are the deaths Man refuses to die. . . . [And so] Man rises, for now he has disburdened himself of the terrible weight that once polluted him, and now he can reign on earth as in heaven, the immortal MasterMind over all. (p. 110)
So there you have it, that’s my theory, very simple, as I said. The ruling fathers of male dominion, unwilling to make peace with mortality as their creaturely reality, have rejected bodiliness, projecting it as a base condition onto Others they could overpower and avenge themselves against. By doing so, they have imagined themselves transcendent masters over the earth, above biology and self-snatched from nature’s murderous jaws. Body horror, and the delusional denial of our human nature as organisms, festers as the ideological foundation for patriarchal society, the conceptual root of this sick civilization’s attendant atrocities and architectures of oppression. Because Man hates what he is, he has mutilated life on earth into a hateful ordeal, increasingly unlivable for creatures of all kinds.
But what do we do with this understanding, practically speaking? How can we apply it, incorporate it into a daily praxis of living in resistance against patriarchal madness and male violence?
Being the daughter of two veterinarians, it is my conviction that if we cannot render an accurate diagnosis of the disease, we have zero hope of curing it. What I love about radical feminism is its matchless efficiency as a diagnostic instrument for probing the buried heart of the malignancy known as manmade civilization. If we determine that the causative pathogen is a bad ideology, and its symptoms are manifold forms of male violence accelerating unto world murder, then we can conclude that, to become well, to save the world, our task is to purge the contaminating ideology from our culture, a process which will necessarily involve purging it from our own consciousness. If we do not, we will remain vectors of the disease, and we will risk reproducing it in our own strivings toward cultural transformation.
Mind/body dualism is therefore to be resisted rigorously. Many of us thrash against the recognition that we are flesh-and-blood animals, and not some mysterious ghostliness temporarily tenanting a corporeal vessel, because we’ve been trained that to be a body is diminishment and disgrace, degradation to a subhuman state. I’m asking you to slow your thrashing. Try to sit with the possibility that there is no soul, that consciousness is bodily, that the self you are will not outlast the earthly matter that is your substance, because between self and substance there is no dividing line. Overcoming patriarchal body horror demands that we accept the creatures we are.
Which of course means accepting that we will die. Feminists who desire an end to male dominion cannot succumb to the temptations of masculinist immortalism. Any and all dependency on the anodyne delusions of manmade civilization compromises us. Simone Weil wrote, “There is not any love of truth without an unconditional acceptance of death.” She wrote, too, even more simply: “Truth is on the side of death.” Death not as in killing, not the necrophilic infatuation with the unalive, but death as in mortal material reality. Somehow, we have to get on its side. Male dominion is a DisneyWorld turned wasteland by fantasies doomed to spoil. Feminists need to live in the real world, wholly committed to reality. For the real world is the living world, and feminism fully realized is a vital revolt against male dominion’s vast morbidity. Fully realized our movement is a loving, lively defense of all vulnerable mortal bodies targeted as Man’s sacrificial scapegoats. This means every body, our own bodies, the body of the living earth. All the cruelties men inflict to degrade, dominate, desolate, dispossess and destroy what he calls corporeal are to be recognized as male violence and repudiated. Which means knowing that male violence is rape and pornography and femicide, yes, but also animal experimentation, and deforestation, also militarism, and pesticides, and nuclear power, nuclear war. Recognizing the full scope of male violence, and its roots in body horror, feminism is the choice to live gently, reverent of the shared sensitivity that unites all creatures as kin. And where male dominion is somatophobic, biophobic to the point of mass-extinction-level suicidality, feminism, fully realized, is a conscious disciplined delighting in aliveness.
I’d like to close by reading from my book again, to leave you with the invitation that is all, in the end, that I have to offer. It’s an invitation into life as it is, not as men have perverted it, but life on earth in its real—real, yet how unbelievable—material biological organic earthbound beauty, which even Man in his wrath has not succeeded in snuffing out:
. . . [I]t is a simple thing but it will take practice, to see the world clearly again, to re-enter into intimate relation with reality. Such a homecoming requires the humility to fall quiet. The ecofeminist Deena Metzger suggests a meditation: ‘Allow yourself to be a tree and let that be sufficient.’ Can you stay still, just be here awhile? The bloodsea tidal inside you, the thick sap of it: listen. . . .
Learn to take your own pulse, fingertips finding your throat’s most plainspoken cleft. Trace the swerve of veins that blues your slender wrist. Rest your hand over your breast and let your heart rise to it, as it plaits its ancient melodies of systole, diastole – the birth music. Close your eyes and let the darkness glide red down your optic nerve, now float a moment in that incarnadined lull. . . .
And can you remember the scent of your own sweat? Never be ashamed. Can you remember the taste of your own rhythmic bleeding, the monthly slick of it glossing warm your fingers, or a lover’s mouth? Who would dare make you ashamed? Let your own flesh, its wending nerves and venous filigree, its miles of gut held safely coiled, the matrix of womb and marrow, let this lavish profusion of cells become irresistible to you, all that you desire, and worship the simple miracle of your aliveness.
Thank you.
HAWTHORNE: Thank you very much, aurora. Now, I have to sit down and reread your book, even though I’ve already read it several times. It’s a book with such richness. Does anybody want to quickly say something? Otherwise, we’ll pass to Renate for thank yous.
For the very brief Q&A, understandably short due to time, sociologist Ariel Salleh, author of Ecofeminism as Politics: Nature, Marx, and the Postmodern (1997/2017), posed a thoughtful question on the origin of the splitting, where the child—the male child, in particular—comes to fear the mother’s power and, from his dread, finds himself driven to overpower the mother, therefore extending his dominion over all women.11
SALLEH: Thank you for a wonderful synthesis of ecofeminism—plus—absolutely marvelous. I apologize; I had trouble getting into the Zoom, and I missed your beginning, so would you please indulge me with just one or two sentences on what is the original splitting moment, what is the reason for that? I do apologize that I came late.
LINNEA: The original moment—do you mean a historical moment, because I’m not sure that can be—
SALLEH: Well, it would have to be historical, of course, because we’re talking about a civilization. What is the trigger that sets this masculinity reaction formation going?
LINNEA: Mortality, the ephemerality of living, being a vulnerable body that dies, is the reality they recognize, is the origin point for all of this masculine flailing against reality, I would say.
SALLEH: Okay, that’s helpful. There have been feminist accounts, psychoanalytic accounts, suggesting that the power of the mother over the infant boy child was the trigger of the reaction formation. That would be one. There were a few other things, but did do you take that on?
LINNEA: I don’t take that on in this book. I have read that. I tend to find that psychoanalytic accounts inherit a great deal of the misogyny of psychoanalysis. So, I don’t tend to focus there. I think it’s much broader than the individual reaction to the mother and the mother’s power. Though I have read that—and interesting accounts of that—I’m loath to blame mothers for anything.
SALLEH: Thank you.
HAWTHORNE: Renate, I think we should pass over to you for our thanks.
KLEIN: Thank you very much, Susan. My first thanks go to Lierre for a really fantastic presentation. You actually showed us how one can use PowerPoint to very good effect. It was great that we could see this fantastic language that aurora is using and read for ourselves, so thank you very much for actually doing that. It was very inspiring how you summarized aurora’s book.
My second and enormous thanks go, of course, to aurora for writing this book. I remember reading the first manuscript when you sent it, and I think I said, “Oh, it’s a grim book, aurora.” And, in fact, you even incorporated that word into the introduction. The one chapter that I noticed Lierre was also sort of skipping over a bit that it has got so many examples that sometimes you just put the book down or the manuscript down—or my iPad down, rather—and just wept.
I don’t really have the words to thank aurora for your absolutely monumental work, what you have done, and it is, really, in the footsteps of Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, and also Andrea Dworkin. The language you use is just amongst the most powerful but also poetic. I think when you read something, and you think it can’t get much worse, and then there is a turn of phrase or a sentence that is so beautifully written that it just of gets you into a different frame. So, I can’t thank you enough for doing this book. I think it is actually one of the best books we’ve ever published, and some women have mentioned Nothing Mat(t)ers by Somer. Susan and I recently did a very good rendition, I might say, of Somer’s book on Women’s Declaration International (WDI), and they have it on YouTube. It’s a brilliant book, and it’s a travesty that Somer was prevented by patriarchy, I should say, and some not-very-nice women to not continue what would have been an absolutely brilliant career.
But now, on to the rest of my thanks. As I always say, a book doesn’t just make itself. There are a number of people involved, women involved, and we have an absolutely splendid Spinifex team. We are now into our into our thirty-fifth year, and it’s fantastic to be able to continue publishing such great books.
Susan, of course, is our powerful mother, our powerful goddess, our powerful whatever-you-want-to-name-her—tyrannosaurus, also. She bosses us around—and does so with very good effect. Without Susan, there would not be any Spinifex.
Then, Pauline who sadly can’t be here because she actually works in a bookshop on Friday. Pauline is a fantastic editor, and we have had many discussions over this book—and, of course, all books, but this book has just provoked so many discussions. aurora, you would be pleased of the effect that you had on Susan, Pauline, and I editing your text. It was really mindboggling, actually.
Then, Danielle—nothing would happen without Danielle. She sends books out, she keeps us online, she reminds us of meetings—even when Susan and I are hopeless with the times.
Then, of course, there is Caitlin, our wonderful social media person, who has battles with X and Instagram, and I don’t think we’ve made it onto TikTok—and I don’t know if we should—but, of course, also Facebook. So, thank you, Caitlin, for always being there. We are all in different time zones, you might be interested to know, and sometimes that is very funny and sometimes it is quite difficult.
And, last but not least, Rachael McDiarmid, who has to be the best publicist ever and the most friendly, nice, kind woman that always tells us what idiots we are and tries to make it better—and she mostly can. She also does wonders on our web, and I can’t thank Rachael enough for working with Spinifex, and you have done this now for a number of years. That’s the best thing about the Spinifex team. We have been a team for a very long time, and we value all of our team. We also value, very much, our authors.
I just want to tell you that our next launch is going to be the launch of Donna Johnson’s book Shattered Motherhood. It is about mothers who have lost a child to suicide, so a totally different topic but incredibly moving. Donna has written a very powerful book. Janet Fraser, whom you may know from her very beautiful book Born Still, which was her own experience of having a stillborn child and then being crucified for it, virtually, in the media, and everything, she will launch Donna’s book. And that’s on the 13th and 14th of March.
Thank you all for being here, which I thought was a fantastic experience, and thank you, again, to both Lierre and to aurora for your fantastic presentations, and, again, to all of us at Spinifex, I’m so very happy that we have published this book. Thank you.
Here is the launch for Johnson’s Shattered Motherhood, a work that, I would say, relates more to linnea’s Man Against Being than it seems:
Readers seeking to purchase linnea’s book can do so at the following link to the Spinifex Press website:
https://www.spinifexpress.com.au/shop/9781922964120
Matilda Joslyn Gage, Woman, Church, and State, 1893 (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002), 508-509.
Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism, 1978 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 222.
See aurora linnea, Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2024), 8-9. Here is linnea’s discussion of her use of “Man”/“Mankind”/“Manhood,” capitalized:
Males have been at the wheel of human societies, the masters and authors of our social reality, designing and presiding over the political and cultural systems, the religions and ideologies that have defined civilization for the past five or six millennia. All civilization’s exalted institutions have functioned as fraternities, instrumental in the production and reproduction of male dominion. Its myths, cultural traditions, entertainments, and recreations have served the same purpose. Because this civilization and its cultures developed under male dominion, and because men continue to dominate as the global ruling class, ‘Man’ is an accurate shorthand for the subset of humanity culpable for the cataclysm no longer imminent now but already underway. (pp. 8-9)
See the multi-chapter section titled “The Sado-Ritual Syndrome: The Re-Enactment of Goddess Murder” (pp. 107-312) in Daly, Gyn/Ecology. Here is part of the prelude, where Daly anticipated charges of “racism and/or imperialism”:
In the following pages I will analyze a number of barbarous rituals, ancient and modern, in order to unmask the very real, existential meaning of Goddess murder in the concrete lives of women. I will focus upon five specific righteous rites which massacre women: Indian suttee, Chinese footbinding, African female genital mutilation, European witchburning, American gynecology. In examining these, I will seek out basic patterns which they have in common, and which comprise the Sado-Ritual Syndrome. Those who claim to see racism and/or imperialism in my indictment of these atrocities can do so only by blinding themselves to the fact that the oppression of women knows no ethnic, national, or religious bounds. There are variations on the theme of oppression, but the phenomenon is planetary. (p. 111)
Among radical feminists, Daly has been perhaps most frequently charged with “racism and/or imperialism,” allegedly white supremacist, ethnocentric, and chauvinistic, for critiquing patriarchal cultural practices outside Western culture. Of course, a key problem with this charge, one made from the point of view of “cultural relativism,” is that, for instance, Daly indicts not only African female genital mutilation but also American gynecology as “variations on the theme of oppression.” Were Daly racist and/or imperialist, believing “white” to be “right,” she would not be critical of Western cultural practices, much less critique them alongside non-Western cultural practices. Indeed, white supremacy, ethnocentrism, and chauvinism would involve denigrating non-Western cultures and positing Western culture as the ideal rather than holding it accountable for perpetrating comparable atrocities throughout history. Upon close reading, it seems notable that no patriarchal culture, Western or non-Western, appears seen as culturally superior in Daly’s cross-cultural examination of the Sado-Ritual Syndrome.
Theorized in 1978, Daly’s seven-point Sado-Ritual Syndrome consists of the following “operative pattern”: (I) “an obsession with purity”; (II) “total erasure of responsibility for the atrocities performed through such rituals”; (III) “an inherent tendency to ‘catch on’ and spread”; (IV) “women are used as scapegoats and token torturers”; (V) “compulsive orderliness, obsessive repetitiveness, and fixation upon minute details, which divert attention from the horror”; (VI) “behavior which at other times and places is unacceptable becomes acceptable and even normative as a consequence of conditioning through the ritual atrocity”; and (VII) “legitimation of the ritual by the rituals of ‘objective’ scholarship—despite appearances of disapproval” (pp. 131-133).
Like Keith, I found linnea’s mention of concrete interesting, particularly because we seldom do see it discussed in terms of being “the single most abundantly used substance after water.” See Jonathan Watts, “Concrete: The Most Destructive Material on Earth,” The Guardian, February 25, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-most-destructive-material-on-earth. Here is a passage from Watts’s essay:
Our blue and green world is becoming greyer by the second. By one calculation, we may have already passed the point where concrete outweighs the combined carbon mass of every tree, bush, and shrub on the planet. Our built environment is, in these terms, outgrowing the natural one. Unlike the natural world, however, it does not actually grow. Instead, its chief quality is to harden and then degrade, extremely slowly.
See Margery L. Collins and Christine Pierce, “Holes and Slime: Sexism in Sartre’s Psychoanalysis,” 1973, in Martha Lee Osborne, ed., Woman in Western Thought (New York: Random House, 1979), 319-322. Here is Collins and Pierce’s critique of Sartre’s analysis of “slime”:
Sartre’s analysis of slime leaves him in an ambiguous position at best, for what emerges here is a traditional concept of the feminine, a sweet, clinging, dependent threat to male freedom. Like his predecessors Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, Sartre identifies his concept of femininity with female and rails against these qualities in women as if they were natural characteristics, evidence of a given nature. In the discussion of holes, however, it becomes clear that it is not culturally acquired or chosen qualities, but actual female anatomy which constitutes the threatening In-itself. Here, the translation ‘feminine sexual organ’ undoubtedly denotes female. One of the strongest sources of nausea is the human body, through its perpetual revelation of contingency. Nonetheless, in his remarks on sexual organs only the female, corresponding obviously to the hole, is labelled obscene: ‘The obscenity of the feminine sex is that of everything which gapes open.’ (p. 321)
See Elizabeth V. Spelman, “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views,” Feminist Studies 8, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 109-131. https://doi.org/10.2307/3177582. Spelman includes critiques of Simone de Beauvoir (Le deuxième sexe, 1949), Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique, 1963), Shulamith Firestone (The Dialectic of Sex, 1970), and Mary Daly (Gyn/Ecology, 1978). While I can see validity in Spelman’s critiques of Beauvoir, Friedan, and Firestone, I cannot find evidence of Daly actually denying the differences of sex, class, and race in Gyn/Ecology. Curiously, however, Spelman praises Adrienne Rich for her 1976 Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, which draws upon Daly’s own earlier work—with Daly even appearing in the acknowledgments and referenced positively throughout. Spelman was among the early participants in the scholarly branding of radical feminists, like Daly, as “white feminists” charged with denying class and race in favor of the category of sex.
See Simone de Beauvoir, Le deuxième sexe (The Second Sex), 1949, trans. Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier, 2009 (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 164-165. For the reader, I would like to note there is this more recent translation by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevallier that differs from the 1953 H.M. Parshley translation:
He would like himself to be as necessary as pure Idea . . . and he finds himself enclosed in a limited body . . . This quivering gelatin that forms in the womb (the womb, secret and sealed like a tomb) is too reminiscent of the soft viscosity of carrion for him not to turn away from it with a shudder. . . . Horrified by death’s gratuitousness, man is horrified at having been engendered; he would like to rescind his animal attachments; because of his birth, murderous Nature has a grip on him. (pp. 164-165)
Critical and collaborative, Beauvoir can be ambiguous in relation to Sartre. Spelman charges her with uncritically reproducing his “somatophobia,” but the passage she cites is one where Beauvoir writes that “many of them today,” referring to women in general, “want transcendence to prevail over immanence in themselves as in all of humanity” (p. 152). However, there is truth in how Beauvoir’s negative framing of female biology, namely pregnancy, influenced Firestone’s view that women should transcend female biology through using technology, outsourcing their labor to machines—a view even more influenced by her reading Marx. In her Man Against Being, linnea discusses Firestone and Beauvoir slipping into the antibiological attitude (pp. 210-211).
Although I find Beauvoir’s Le deuxième sexe insightful, surveying much philosophy and literature, I find her reluctance to confront Sartre more explicitly a weakness. She criticized D.H. Lawrence, dead since 1930, for his literary male supremacy, but she did not rigorously engage the philosophical male supremacy at home in the form of Sartre. There is evidence in how Sartre influenced Beauvoir’s understanding of “sexual liberation,” that sexual behavior should be uninhibited by laws perceived as unjust.
Feminist commentary has more often evaded Beauvoir’s far less defensible support for male child sexual abusers—particularly men offending against girls. Alongside Gilles Deleuze, Roland Barthes, Louis Aragon, and Sartre, an overwhelmingly male intellectual lineup, Beauvoir signed a 1977 petition in support of three men charged with sex offenses against thirteen and fourteen-year-old girls. The petition argued the girls held “a capacity for discernment” to engage in sexual acts with adult men. See Sheila Jeffreys, Penile Imperialism: The Male Sex Right and Women’s Subordination (Mission Beach, Australia: Spinifex Press, 2022), 160.
Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), published in 1930, elaborates on the point he makes in this 1932 piece that linnea references. See Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilization and Its Discontents), 1930, trans. Joan Riviere (1930) and James Strachey (1961) (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2022): “Against the dreaded external world one can only defend oneself by some kind of turning away from it, if one intends to solve the task by oneself. There is, indeed, another and better path: that of becoming a member of the human community, and, with the help of a technique guided by science, going over to the attack against nature and subjecting her to the human will. Then one is working with all for the good of all” (pp. 13-14) (emphasis added). For Marx, in Das Kapital, we find “the blind forces of nature” that must be brought under “common control.” Agreeing with Marx on man dominating nature, as seen above in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, Freud writes of “instincts” possessing “their primitive, ungovernable nature” necessary to control for civilization—that is, to be for civilization is to be against nature. Man’s use of technology to “civilize”—or, rather, colonize—biology has not been a deviation from civilization, a movement away from the social order; indeed, the subjection of nature to man’s will has been fundamental to it.
Psychoanalytic theory can be useful, to some degree, but it has various limitations. As linnea acknowledges, its woman-hating inheritance renders it flawed in ways that undermine truly feminist uses of psychoanalysis. Among Freud’s critics, Karen Horney (1885-1952), known for critiquing “penis envy,” analyzed the relation between the individual and the culture, without deferring to “the unconscious” à la Freudian abstraction. One could ask, then, why not simply use a feminist psychology, attentive to developments in neuroscience, and eschew psychoanalysis? Sophie Freud, Freud’s own granddaughter, has noted that part of why Freud’s ideas kept dragging about the way they did is that he refused criticism, a characteristic even apparent in his followers—namely Jacques Lacan. “Never could he be wrong,” she said, adding. “That lasted for fifty years after his death, until a few people started to dare to say, ‘Yes, but…’” When criticism grew, it turned into a wildfire. Freud’s granddaughter even questioned women’s astonishingly uncritical belief in his theories: “Women believed the great man more than their own bodily experiences.” See Judy Gretel, “Freud Goes Up in Smoke,” Toronto Star, November 14, 2003, https://ahrp.org/freud-goes-up-in-smoke-toronto-star.