Thursday 19 March 2015

Repost: half-valid feminist criticisms

Mary Daly had  insights, but they only go so far in unpicking the patriarchal puzzle.  She, too, ends up adopting a position of dogmatic essentialism.

You cannot critique essentialism with essentialism.  That is as absurd as becoming a postmodernist theorist or an identity politician on behalf of quasi-left-wing causes. Or, rather, it is the same thing.

Daly quotes Valerie Solanas' views that men are basically passive.   This insight is half true.   There is nothing essentially passive about men, at all.  Only when they make their deal with their God or Idol that they will feel no emotion, in order to climb higher than women, do they begin to lose their power to direct and control their own lives from within.  Thus via their Faustian deal do they become empty.

Emptiness, however, is not a natural human condition and certainly does not describe the state of all men.

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Cultural barriers to objectivity