‘Snools Rule’: Mary Daly and the Radical Feminist School of Atrocious Writing

Posted on | March 15, 2014 | 93 Comments

Mary Daly (October 16, 1928 – January 3, 2010) was an American radical feminist philosopher, academic, and theologian. Daly, who described herself as a “radical lesbian feminist”, taught at Boston College, a Jesuit-run institution, for 33 years. Daly retired in 1999, after violating university policy by refusing to allow male students in her advanced women’s studies classes. . . .
— Wikipedia

In one of the deranged rants by anti-PIV feminist Radical Wind quoted here previously, this sentence occurs:

Women’s situation is more complex since we are oppressed by all the different classes of men who are the originators and subjects of patriarchal snooldom.

“Snooldom”? I noticed that, but figured it was a made-up nonsense word. My guess was that the writer had one of those word-blank moments, but rather than stop and look up the word she wanted, just wrote “snooldom” in the draft with the intention to go back and insert the desired noun later in editing, which she subsequently neglected to do.

My guess was wrong, however. “Snooldom” was coined by Mary Daly in her 1984 book, Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy:

Given these conditions of Stag-Nation, Elemental Shrews and Furies urgently experience the need for Re-Naming/Re-Claiming our stolen Flames, undoing the promethean theft of Fire, retrieving our ravaged desire.
The would-be preventers of this retrieval of gynergy, the ghosts/ghouls that want our movement dead, are snools. The noun snool (Scottish) means “a cringing person”. It means also “a tame, abject, or mean-spirited person” (OED). In sadosociety, snools rule, and snools are the rule. . . . Snools are sadism and masochism combined, the stereotypic saints and heroes of the sadostate. . . .
Snools appear and re-appear in various forms. . . . Among the henchmen required for the smooth operation of fixocracy are the cocks, danglers, pricks, and flashers who keep girls and women intimidated. Necessary also are the fakes, framers, frauds and hucksters whose job is to manufacture and spread delusions. Heavier work is assumed by rakes, hacks, rippers and plug-uglies. . . .
Such, then, are the rulers/snoolers of snooldom, the place/time where the air is filled with the crowing of cocks, the joking of jocks, the droning of clones, the sniveling of snookers and snudges, the noisy parades and processions of prickers. Such is cockocracy/jockocracy, the State of supranational, supernatural erections. . . .

What is this nonsense? It resembles the “word salad” of schizophrenics, and any reader can be forgiven for suspecting that Mary Daly was one of the first feminists to discover that Women’s Studies is a license to steal: Get yourself a tenured professorship, find a publisher, submit a 300-page manuscript crammed with absurdities, and nobody cares!

Any book published by a tenured Women’s Studies professor is automatically profitable, because she will assign it to her students, it will be favorably reviewed in feminist journals, all university libraries will order a copy, and with any luck, the book will be added to the syllabus in other Women’s Studies departments. The author will sell copies at book signings in lesbian bookstores and, if it gets any media attention at all — even an hour on C-SPAN’s “Booknotes” — you’re guaranteed to sell 5,000-10,000 copies this way.

Years ago, when I worked at The Washington Times, I acquired quite a collection of feminist books from the “discard” table where editors of the book-review section left the books they didn’t want to keep. One of those feminist tomes was Mary Daly’s 1998 book, Quintessence… Realizing the Archaic Future: A Radical Elemental Feminist Manifesto. There are no words strong enough to describe how unspeakably wretched this book is. In this, however, it does not differ from anything else Mary Daly ever wrote. One of the few serious attempts to analyze Daly’s weird gibberish was Mary F. Rousseau’s review of Pure Lust, which included this:

The book is an instance of what it seems to recommend — new perceptions and judgments, expressed in a new language. It seems indeed, to be its author’s self-portrait. . . .
But the operative word is seems. For after a careful reading of more than 400 pages of Joycean word-play, this reviewer remains unsure of several of its main points. Words which have several different meanings are used in all of their meanings at once, often with intricate efforts to link all of the meanings of a word to the agenda of radical feminism. As often as not, entirely new meanings are assigned to words and new words are coined.

Applying the phrase “Joycean word-play” to Mary Daly’s writing involves an unnecessary insult to James Joyce. It is more apt to compare Daly to the “Beat” writers of the 1950s and ’60s, Jack Kerouac or Allen Ginsberg, except that their bohemian rebellion against bourgeois convention did not presume to represent a philosophy or political ideology. Daly’s method can only be explained as an expression of Sloth, Greed and Pride — having once become known as a “feminist author,” after publishing The Church and the Second Sex in the radical year 1968, she had found her market niche, which she felt obligated to continue exploiting with a new book every five years or so thereafter. However, her paucity of ideas and her unwillingness to do actual research led Daly to the crucial insight that consumers of radical feminist books didn’t really care about facts or logic or coherent argument. No, the feminist readership consists of disgruntled misfits who want someone to give voice to their inchoate rage.

My theory, then, is that Mary Daly discovered she could write books by spending a few hours a week sitting in front of a word-processor, probably with a supply of whiskey and ice near at hand, typing any kind of stream-of-consciousness nonsense that popped into her head. So long as her rants were aimed at the phallocratic patriarchy, and invoked the celebration of radical liberated womanhood, the incoherent nature of Daly’s prose was actually a feature, not bug. No one could refute her “arguments,” because no one could make sense of them.

And if any critic dared to point out the obvious truth — that Mary Daly was just an ugly woman whose anger toward men involved a large measure of sour-grapes rationalization — well, MISOGYNIST!

As a racket, then, radical feminism is a perfect hustle for any lazy writer fortunate enough to obtain an academic sinecure. As a philosophy that presumes to explain how the world operates, however, it is a useless dead end, a one-way ticket to Bedlam.

Regular readers will therefore not be surprised to learn that anti-PIV fanatic Radical Wind is a major Mary Daly fangirl:

Women by contrast are dispossessed from all the words necessary to name and therefore conceive of our condition — this is one of men’s most deadly weapons against women’s liberation. As Mary Daly says, “Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God.” (Beyond God the Father: Towards a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (1973), p.8). Radical feminists are cursed with this invisible distorting lens, men’s false reality separating us from the world and from ourselves, the meaning of our words doomed to never reach our recipients — we may repeat the truth of the atrocities again and again but so erased and reverted is our reality that even to get women to glimpse a modicum of men’s oppression and understand that men’s violence against us is not a victimless crime, may take years.

In other words, if feminist arguments don’t make sense, if they fail to persuade women that they are victims of oppression, this is not the fault of feminists. No, blame the patriarchy, which “dispossessed” women of the language they need to describe their “condition.”

Radical Wind repeatedly invokes Mary Daly as an authority:

[I]f we talk of popularity in terms of numbers, it isn’t difficult to see that the vast majority of women in the radical feminist community, especially those who have written and influenced current feminism, are not male-essentialist. As bloggers and regular commenters, including those who left, we’re just a handful, probably around 8-9 women, and the only published essentialist writers I know of are Mary Daly and Sonia Johnson. That’s two. Sonia Johnson, who in order to have her work published uncensored, self-publishes, and Mary Daly, whose immense philosophical work is often discounted as merely spiritual, and her essentialism is rarely if ever discussed seriously in radfem work.
— Jan. 29, 2014

I’ve finally figured something out. That we’re not supposed to be angry against women, as in, our anger against women is purely manufactured by men. And if we are angry, we’re angry against the male colonisation in her, not really her, though what happens is that we confuse it with the woman and hit on her instead.
This ‘embedded maleness’ or ‘incarnate male presence’ as Mary Daly called it, are insidious male ideologies that men have hammered into our psyche, like an anti-personnel landmine fastened inside us which explodes in contact of other women, so that women turn against us, instead of turning against men and feeling sorry or compassion for the pitiable state that men have put us in.
— Dec. 18, 2013

As Mary Daly says in Pure Lust, apparent microshifts in consciousness have the power to bring macrochanges in our reality, in women’s world and possibly the universe. The power yielded by moving ourselves and other women along with us is incredible. This is what I understand by the physics, or metaphysics of liberation — meta because it isn’t just a physical process, it transcends the physical realm. It reunites our male-fragmented parts and reintegrates ourselves to natural life movement.
— Oct. 16, 2013

Men have made science to be full of endnotes, dead-talk, lies and boredom. I will never thank Mary Daly enough for coining the word “academentia”. They are not interested in the truth, but interested in concocting fake evidence to support their lies and propaganda against women, to legitimise their totalitarian regime and political agenda of destroying the universe. . . .
One thing I’ve noticed is that one reason why writing felt so much like a chore is that the process was separated from the ends. Men focus everything on an end product, which is a dead object, a finished object, a square frame. It is very much based on ejaculation, or perhaps male notion of extinction. I read that from Mary Daly in Gynecology more than a year ago and she formulated this in a way I hadn’t really found words for. It’s not living work. University essay-writing was all about deadlines, dead ends. This is deeply alienating.
— April 13, 2013

So, science is a male conspiracy, “concocting fake evidence . . . against women,” as part of a “political agenda of destroying the universe,” and if women find writing a chore, this is because the idea of writing as a “finished object” is “based on ejaculation.”

Unnngh. Unnngh. Unnngh.

There — I’ve finished. Was it good for you? Now, fix me a sandwich.

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Category: Feminism

Comments

93 Responses to “‘Snools Rule’: Mary Daly and the Radical Feminist School of Atrocious Writing”

djpatrickh
March 15th, 2014 @ 3:30 pm

RT @smitty_one_each: TOM ‘Snools Rule’: Mary Daly and the Radical Feminist School of Atrocious Writing http://t.co/eEYAbKXY7i #TCOT
PatDissent
March 15th, 2014 @ 2:43 pm

Filed as proof colleges are the ranking whores of the universe; that is to say, they will give a degree on anything to anyone – insane or not – if there is enough money in it for them.
Norman Invasion
March 15th, 2014 @ 2:45 pm

One thing I’ve noticed is that one reason why writing felt so much like a chore is that the process was separated from the ends. Men focus everything on an end product, which is a dead object, a finished object, a square frame. It is very much based on ejaculation, or perhaps male notion of extinction. I read that from Mary Daly in Gynecology more than a year ago and she formulated this in a way I hadn’t really found words for. It’s not living work. University essay-writing was all about deadlines, dead ends. This is deeply alienating.

Periods were invented by women.
Katie Scarlet
March 15th, 2014 @ 2:47 pm

I’d fix you a sammich, but now I have a migraine.
robertstacymccain
March 15th, 2014 @ 2:50 pm

Rimshot!
Cube
March 15th, 2014 @ 3:18 pm

Monkeys, typewriters, Shakespeare – some assembly required.
Bozikek
March 15th, 2014 @ 3:18 pm

Nice article, though why is there a picture of Robert Ebert at the top?
badanov
March 15th, 2014 @ 3:44 pm

Thnx for the Snooldomistic belly laugh. LOL
johncunningham
March 15th, 2014 @ 3:49 pm

quite an impressive pic of that hideous dike–what would best describe her? she looks like someone set her face on fire, and put it out with a shovel.
maniakmedic
March 15th, 2014 @ 4:10 pm

Were these “women” dropped on their heads while simultaneously eating paint chips and sniffing glue as children? Just reading their word salad makes me feel like I’ve been huffing paint, so I can’t even begin to fathom what it must feel like to produce this crap.

They do realize humanity can’t reproduce asexually, right? I know education in America sucks, but I’m pretty sure that there is still a modicum of learning done in basic biology since every kid is forced to take a sex ed class. So do they think they just sprang from their mothers’ loins a la the Virgin Mary with no input from daddy? Speaking of which, did their fathers screw up big time or did they just get stuck with the short straw with these shrews as children?

I just can’t wrap my head around living life in such an angry, hateful state.
AnonymousDrivel
March 15th, 2014 @ 4:35 pm

Dr. Seuss must’ve really done a number on her.
WarEagle82
March 15th, 2014 @ 4:36 pm

“Fat, butt-ugly, drunk and angry is now way to go through life.” But it appears that was the hand the patriarchy dealt her….
Matt_SE
March 15th, 2014 @ 4:37 pm

Interesting article at the Federalist: http://thefederalist.com/2014/03/13/the-children-of-tama/

The left does seem to deal in metaphors. But metaphors are inexact representations. When one uses an inexact representation as the basis for further argumentation, it magnifies the mistakes across each iteration.

It’s a copy of a copy of a copy.
But that metaphor may be inexact…
darleenclick
March 15th, 2014 @ 4:47 pm

Daly, Block & ilk are the worst of the worst of Leftist supremacists. It is their own invented dogma that is the pinnacle of enlightenment and any dissent including any science, is and of itself, *proof* of patriarchal conspiracy or brainwashing.
smitty
March 15th, 2014 @ 4:53 pm

Snool sounds like short hand for homo bureaucratus.
Scott Cable
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:01 pm

http://www.friends-tv.org/zz219.html

Monica, Rachel, and Phoebe read a female empowerment book, Be Your Own Windkeeper, which has even more detrimental effects on their relationships with each other than it does on their relationships with men.

Rachel: This is like reading about my own life. I mean, this book could have been called Be Your Own Windkeeper, Rachel.
Phoebe: I don’t think it would have sold a million copies, but it would have made a nice gift for you.

Rachel: Why do we always have to do everything according to your time table?
Ross: Actually, it’s the movie theatre that has the time schedule. So you don’t miss the beginning.
Rachel: No, see this isn’t about the movie theatre. This is about you stealing my wind.
Monica: You go girl! I can’t pull that off, can I?
Ross: Excuse me? Your… your… your wind?
Rachel: Yes, my wind. How do you expect me to grow if you won’t let me blow?
Ross: You… you know I… I don’t have a… have a problem with that.
Rosalie
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:14 pm

You’re right. Why would a Catholic college hire someone like her? What is it with these Catholic schools? Why would Notre Dame ask O to speak at their commencement? They’re not only phonies, they’re probably as left as O.
Rosalie
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:18 pm

She definitely represents your typical, radical feminist. And it ain’t pretty.
RS
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:37 pm

. . . spending a few hours a week sitting in front of a word-processor, probably with a supply of whiskey and ice near at hand, typing any kind of stream-of-consciousness that popped into [his] head.

Wait. I thought that was the recipe for award winning blogging. : )
RKae
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:40 pm

This may seem off-topic, but stick with me.

A friend of mine had a professor who would go on long rants against skyscrapers. They were “ugly,” “oppressive,” etc. After several months of this, my friend discovered that the professor suffered from a phobia of elevators. Well, that sort of explains things, doesn’t it?

My point is: Should someone with a phobia be coming up with a social structure philosophy that relates directly to that phobia?

Should someone with a fear of water be deciding whether or not we found our new town on the coast? Should someone with a fear of dogs be deciding whether we try to train dogs or hamsters to aid the blind?

If a woman was raped by her father and/or brother while her mother went in the other room and hid her head under a pillow, is she the best person to be critiquing the traditional family structure or heterosexual relationship?

When analyzing the male/female relationship, I submit that the rambling women mentioned above have some sort of damage that makes them the LAST people who should be asked about the topic. All they do is spread their damage to impressionable people who otherwise would never come close to suffering from it.
maniakmedic
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:47 pm

As odd as this may sound, it’s people like these that add proof to me that there is a God (and a devil); if this type of thinking were natural, humanity would have died out ages ago.
maniakmedic
March 15th, 2014 @ 5:50 pm

This.
Bob Belvedere
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:05 pm

LSD + Leftism = Mary Daly
Bob Belvedere
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:10 pm

Thank you for making me aware of that article.
Proof
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:11 pm

“The would-be preventers of this retrieval of gynergy.. are snools.”

I never knew there was a sequel to “Jabberwocky”.
RKae
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:12 pm

It’s exactly that sort of writing that keeps me far away from Tolkien.
Bob Belvedere
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:13 pm

I AM SNOOLICUS!
Proof
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:13 pm

Now, now! Tolkien is easy fare…once you make a Hobbit of it!
Proof
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:14 pm

I am too snool for school!
Bob Belvedere
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:14 pm

Proof, once again, that you, sir, are a first-class wit.
Proof
March 15th, 2014 @ 6:16 pm

Please, sir! You’ll turn my pretty head!
From Around the Blogroll | The First Street Journal.
March 15th, 2014 @ 7:09 pm

[…] Robert Stacey Stacy McCain writes about the idiocy of the feminist […]
Zohydro
March 15th, 2014 @ 7:24 pm

You’ve done it again, RKae!
Rosalie
March 15th, 2014 @ 7:37 pm

And the school was paying her very well to teach this “invented dogma” to young, impressionable students.
Zohydro
March 15th, 2014 @ 7:38 pm

If snooldomy is wrong, I don’t want to be right…
Zohydro
March 15th, 2014 @ 7:53 pm

Foo Foo the Snool?
Zohydro
March 15th, 2014 @ 7:58 pm

I should have put in the pic that had both Foo-Foo and “Jake the Pillow Snake”… Can’t seem to change it now!
tlk244182
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:01 pm

Si. Esto.
tlk244182
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:05 pm

Stop it! You’re killing me! I can’t breathe!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Michael Smith
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:44 pm

Feminism – the ancient Greek word for penis envy.
K-Bob
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:49 pm

Geez, Stacy, are trying to lower your IQ on purpose to prepare for dealing with the court case or something?

It’s hard enough to read these excerpts. I can’t imagine the pain you’re inflicting on yourself by dredging them out of whatever long-form they were originally gobbeted into.
K-Bob
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:50 pm

Let the denunciations commence!
K-Bob
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:52 pm

It also works for those of us who read such things.

Oh, look, it’s well after five.
K-Bob
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:53 pm

Well, what’s a meta-for, after all?
cmdr358
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:54 pm

Deze!
K-Bob
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:54 pm

Because she needs a few thumbs up
cmdr358
March 15th, 2014 @ 8:58 pm

I’ve got a thing about never making fun of somebody’s weight or looks but…

This broad probably looks better after a few years in the ground.
cmdr358
March 15th, 2014 @ 9:18 pm

1. Laughing so much it brought me to tears.
2. My fiancée asks “What?”
3. I explain it to her and receive a disapproving look.
4. I show her Mary Daly’s picture and she says ewww!
Great post Boz.
WarEagle82
March 15th, 2014 @ 9:24 pm

It took some time for me to realize the picture from this post was a broad!

What is it about women to HATE men so much that they do everything they can to look like men?
PatDissent
March 15th, 2014 @ 9:35 pm

She wasn’t beaten with the ugly stick; someone uprooted and used the whole blessed tree.

Is it just me, or is her insanity self-evident? By all objective evidence, she appears to hate men. Yet, if the photographic evidence at hand is correct, she is trying very, very hard to look like one. Why would she be trying to transform herself into the physical manifestation of that which the evidence shows she hates?

It’s enough to make one believe they know they can’t cut it as a woman, so they want to do the impossible and switch teams. If that’s not insanity, I don’t know what is. It would make a certain, perverted amount of sense, except they are trying to be that which they claim to hate.

Either that, or they just really, really love riding the bitch cycle…

nagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnagnag
NAAAAAAAG
NAG
NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAG
NAG
NAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAG