From chapter 3 of Pure Lust, pp. 136–39.
From chapter 3 of Pure Lust, pp. 136–39.
foreground: male-centered and mono-dimensional arena where fabrication, objectification, and alienation take place; zone of fixed feelings, perceptions, behaviors; the elementary world: FLATLAND.
—Wickedary, p. 76
This short excerpt poses the question of pre-patriarchal history. Daly chose a strong figure to voice the argument that women have never had a history and have always been subject to men: Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. While Daly did not spin an entire feminist prehistory here, she provided the groundwork for doing so, in women’s intuition of Be-ing, and in feminist research. For Daly, the motivating question had to do with memory, in particular what she would come to call Deep Memory, of realms beyond the patriarchal foreground.
Readers should note that Daly used the terms “elementary” and “elemental” as opposites here, in which elementary:elemental::patriarchy:Be-ing.
—Editors
Restoration, the product of sado-sublimation, conceals the real nature of the breakdown it pretends to mend and thus distracts women’s minds/hearts from the quest to know Elemental integrity. It does this in part by misnaming the dis-ease inflicted upon women and nature. To tell a woman who has been sickened and mutilated that her major task is to regain “femininity and desirability” is to distract her from her deep Self’s search, her final causality. It distracts her from re-membering her powers. In order to comprehend her breakdown and therefore be enabled to heal her Self, she would have to intuit what a woman can be. The problem is how to be in touch with such intuitions, when they have been obscured by restorationist ideology.
So colossal has been this concealment that even the French feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, in her monumental work, The Second Sex, actually reaffirms the discouraging assumption that underscores all of the other assumptions of androcracy, namely, that women have always been “second.” This is suggested in the title of her book. One could, of course, argue that the title is factually accurate since women have been relegated to the status of “the second sex.” However, de Beauvoir is more patriarchal in her assumptions than that.1 In the Introduction, she writes:
Throughout history they [women] have always been subordinated to men, and hence their dependency is not the result of a historical event or a social change—it was not something that occurred. The reason why otherness in this case seems to be an absolute is in part that it lacks the contingent or incidental nature of historical facts.2
This premise is repeated in the book. De Beauvoir introduces her chapter on the nomads, for example, with the cliché that “this has always been a man’s world.”3 And again in the following chapter she repeats this assumption:
From humanity’s beginnings, their biological advantage has enabled the males to affirm their status as sole and sovereign subjects.4
Many feminists today find it hard to believe that de Beauvoir could have written of women:
They have no past, no history, no religion of their own; and they have no such solidarity of work and interest as that of the proletariat.5
It is not unusual, of course, to hear such assumptions/clichés from the mouths of women’s erasers. That the author of such an important feminist work as The Second Sex—first published in 1949—accepted them so uncritically is evidence of the memory-covering effects of restorationist “knowledge.”6
Within the context of such unexamined assumptions it is extremely difficult to guess what a woman can be. Within such a context personal hope is muted, undermined. Despite all the positive values of de Beauvoir’s work, the woman who accepts this context is mired in the suspicion that the situation is immutable.
Of course, other feminist scholars writing before and after the publication of The Second Sex have brought forth mountains of evidence to support the idea/intuition that this has not always been “a man’s world.” These scholars include Matilda Joslyn Gage in Woman, Church and State (1893) and Elizabeth Gould Davis in The First Sex (1971).7 Women who have not read such books but have maintained a sense of Self have done so because on some level we have known with profound certainty that this has not always been “a man’s world,” and that reality in the deep sense—Elemental be-ing—has never been such. For the man’s world, patriarchy, is the Foreground, which, since it is derivative, contains countless subliminal messages about the deep spheres of meaning—Archespheres—which its myths are intended to mask. The power to decode its myths is the natural power of Lusty women to hear the messages of the elements, the Elemental Words—to recognize these and re-member them.
One suggestive term which we might use to name the incarnations that constitute the Foreground, the “this” world that has “always been” patriarchy is a word used by Paracelsus: elementary. According to his theory:
. . . the elementary is an artificial being, created in the invisible worlds by man himself. . . . Most elementaries seem to be of an evil or destructive nature. They are generated from the excesses of human thought and emotion, the corruption of character, or the degeneration of faculties and powers which should be used in other, more constructive ways.8
I will use the term elementary here to Name a number of phenomena which mediate/distort our experience of elements, and which are largely invisible by reason of being all-pervasive. Elementaries include not only the poisonous fumes and radioactive emissions of phallic technology, but also the popular media and the specialized fields (the -ologies that mediate knowledge), as well as traditional assumptions, spoken or unspoken. All of these artificial beings are filled with fallacies invisible to those manipulated by means of them. In mediating experience they modify memory; they mummify memory.9
It is through acts of Elemental creation that Lusty women unblock/unlock our deep memories. Therefore, in sado-sublimated society, women must be prevented from such acts, not only by the embedding in the female psyche of elementary images and words of which women are unwitting recipients, but especially by the cooptation of women into elementary speech and action. Insight can be gained from knowledge of the fact that according to traditional christian theology the image of the (all-male) trinity is to be found especially in the acts of the soul.10 In keeping with this tradition, possessed women are converted into images of artificial beings by being trained to act/operate like elementaries even on the level of internal thoughts and desires. Pre-occupied with elementary concerns, a woman becomes a memory-blocker.
In order to understand how women are caught on the wheel of elementary thinking and acting, it is important to face the fears and embedded sense of vulnerability which are the foreground conditions of phallocracy afflicting all women—since all are threatened perpetually by the phallic lust that rapes, kills, and dismembers women and nature. There can be no genuine doubt about this situation, which has been demonstrated and documented in many books and in the individual histories of women. So terrible is the lust, the intent, to destroy female nature, that women commonly attempt to erase their Selves in order to be spared.