A Word of Our Own: Ch 21 The Monstrous Mary Daly
One night I go to bed thinking about Gender, and in a dream I call myself “he” as if I were trying to taste the pronoun. It doesn’t seem wrong. It doesn’t seem right, either...
Welcome to A Word of Our Own: A Memoir of Bodies, Language, and Home—Meditations on my homo female life (in-progress since 2017, the book, not my life).
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Ch 20: …How I mourn the word Lesbian, lesbian, LESBIAN! That brief moment it was a shout of love, and of joy. And a battle cry. Not a curse. Not a gaping wound. What is the matter with dykes? Is it Stockholm Syndrome or what that we can’t acknowledge we have needs, too, are faced with misogyny, with hate (even from our own community) unless it’s beating our heads in? And even then we apologize. Oh, I’m sorry. How on earth did my face get in the way of your fist? FUUUUUUUUUUCK!!!!!!!!
21. The Monstrous Mary Daly
One night I go to bed thinking about Gender, and in a dream I call myself “he” as if I were trying to taste the pronoun. It doesn’t seem wrong. It doesn’t seem right, either. I try “they.” Many dykes choose that, especially butch ones, and those of us in the blobby, androgynous middle, hoping to escape our mother’s fate. It doesn’t ring true, either. It strips away my female body, my past. My literal sisters. All of us in the same wave-tossed boat.
In the morning, I remember being three or four years old and playing in the front yard. It is summer. I’m wearing shorts. I jump across a tree root, stride between the dogwood and rosebud and tulip tree. My mother and a neighbor women are there. Someone chuckles, “Kelly walks just like her dad.” The others agree, laughing as if it is a little embarrassing. Me, I’m pleased as punch. I swagger, I strut across the lawn. Just like Daddy. I jump even higher over the roots and the dandelions. I love my father. But then he loads me in the car to get a tire changed, and when I overhear the mechanic refer to me as his son, I absolutely squeal in protest, “I’m not a boy. I’m a girl. I’m a girl!” Just like my sisters. Just like my mom. Right then and there I picked my team.
Lately I’ve forgotten what a three-year old knows. Or, as Maya Angelou said, “I’m a feminist. I’ve been a female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.”
For me, that’s the side of dykes, of homo females. I was afraid of getting called TERF, but now that it’s happened, I’m freed. Like the young Muslim boy getting called a raghead terrorist, I look closer at the people I’d turned away from. What ideas do they have that I share? It’s only fair, after all, to know what company you keep.
I read bits of this one and that, dive deep into Mary Daly whom I discovered at eighteen, sitting on my bed in my Kentucky dorm room, a bible prominent on my shelf, “If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the human imagination,” and “God's plan' is often a front for men's plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.” I remember I trembled as I read. Wondering if just seeing those words would send me to hell. Suspecting freedom would be there.
Now I notice how she seizes on the almost magical power of names. How we’re powerless without them. I begin to suspect it’s not Judith Butler, but hated transphobe Mary Daly, who was the Mother of Them All. Those post-modern, TERF-baiting, dyke-hating, gender essentialist trans radical activists who say the material world is irrelevant. A word is enough to transform.
Mary Daly was born in 1928 in Schenectady, New York, a working class girl with a good Irish Catholic name and plain round Irish face. After her salesman father died, everybody expected her to become a checkout girl and support her mom. But even then she knew she was too weird to survive an ordinary job, and started looking for a way out. She went from the nuns’ school where she’d sit there in her scratchy wool skirt, thrilled by the catechism class that bored even the priest, to the College of Saint Rose, founded to turn out good Catholic teachers, but creating a radical feminist instead.
After that came the co-ed Notre Dame, and Catholic University of America, where there were still few women. Then the University of Fribourg in Switzerland where she was a minority of one, a cervix-haver among all those young prostate-wielding priests and seminarians practically buzzing with testosterone, though she still soared, earning doctorates in philosophy and sacred theology. My mother, working class like her, just three years younger, only made it through one semester of college. Ana’s mom applied to med school in Cuba, but then withdrew because she couldn’t stand the pressure either, and ended up teaching kindergarten, getting married like a real woman. Far younger than them all, I crashed and burned in grad school, confronted with its mysterious language, the other students all children of professors, bewildered and enraged at the privilege which would allow them to declare feminism “post.”
To survive, Mary Daly must have really “wanted to know” as she put it. Because the further she went, the less cute she became, and the more her male peers responded with impediments, sneers, harassment, dyke-baiting before homo sex even crossed her mind. She was told in a million ways, that this knowing, this knowledge, wasn’t for her. Only priests had a right to mouth the words of scripture in church, to conduct mass. Only men had a right to speak and to name. Never round-faced, plain-named, impurely menstruating Mary Daly, no matter how brilliant she was. Anything that came from her mouth was contaminated, treif, unclean.
I imagine her kneeling next to her bed like me and praying over it, resisting this knowing, saying no, and no and no, “All things are possible to him who believes.” Her first book The Church and the Second Sex is still so hopeful that it’s painful to read. She really believed that misogyny could somehow be edited out of The Church. She was an intellectual, after all, one of the brightest of her generation. How could anybody take it seriously, this obsession with bodies? Which were really only vessels after all.
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