Book Review: Pure Lust

Title: Pure Lust

Author: Mary Daly

Date: 1984

Publisher: Beacon

ISBN: 0-8070-1505-9

Length: 448 pages plus 2 indices

Quote: “The title Pure Lust is double-sided. On one side, it Names the deadly dis-passion that prevails in patriarchy—the life-hating lechery that rapes and kills...Primarily...Pure Lust names the high humor, hope, and cosmic accord/harmony of those women who choose to escape...This lust is...astral. It is pure Passion.”

Yesterday this web site discussed a popular "romance" novel and pronounced it pornography. Today we consider a nonfiction book whose frequent references to sexuality definitely rate PG-13, but which I do not consider to be pornography. Here are no detailed descriptions of sexual acts; no effort to stir up sexual thoughts or feelings in the reader. Daly's intention is to cheer and encourage feminist activists who were discouraged by the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment. She does this with her trademark combination of rarefied intellectualism, quirky humor, and wacky wordplay. Her study of philosophy and theology at Fribourg is more prominent here than it is in Gyn/Ecology or Wickedary, but she's never above illuminating a point with a reference to a pop song, TV show, novel, memoir...or "interview" with her cat.

At no time in life have I ever been allowed to forget that the English/German word “lust” is not a true synonym for “lechery.” "Lechery," rather than either "lust" or "luxury," is the correct English name for the Deadly Sin of Luxuria. For reasons a child never fully understood, my parents enjoyed reminding themselves, and us, that “lust” is a closer synonym to “libido”--for better and for worse. Life force. Animal spirits. “Desire,” in the Buddhist sense. It can mean the desire to possess things, the appetite for food and other creature comforts, cravings for power or status (or luxuries!). Dad used to title wish lists “Lust List.” The official rationale for this was so that we'd remember that although lust is a Deadly Sin, it's neither the only Deadly Sin, but nor always even a real sin—it can be just an animal instinct. In older English, and apparently even in modern German, “lust” had positive meanings; a “lusty crew” of young people didn't mean lascivious young people so much as energetic, enthusiastic ones. German families chose “Lust” and “Lustig” as family names.

Raising the irony to “News of the Weird” level when, a few years ago, the real legal name of a sex offender was found to be Lust...

Anyway, for those who don't know, the late, great Mary Daly was a Catholic scholar turned feminist scholar turned feminist humorist. Her writing is very much an acquired taste, acquired almost exclusively by women. She usually tried to write on more than one level; in a sense her books were deadly serious, and the ones about women's history and theological history were excruciatingly researched; at the same time they were meant to elicit chortles, and they do. Her affinity for wordplay led to the most popular of her books, the Wickedary, a dictionary that presented English words in slightly modified ways to reflect a radical feminist worldview; in Pure Lust the first index is an “Index of New Words”: “anamnesia,” “biocide,” “foresister,” “Crone-logical,” “Nag-Gnostic,” and many more. She self-identified as a “Revolting Hag,” explaining that women could hear a difference between “She is a Revolting Hag” as a simple description or even a tribute, and “She is a revolting hag” as an insult coming from someone who lacked feminist consciousness.

(I've never been sure whether I wanted to meet her. I've never met a woman who agreed with me about the way to make “She is a Revolting Hag” sound unmistakably different from “She is a revolting hag.” I've often described Daly, in writing, as "the glorious, uproarious, Revolting Hag of Boston," but I've never felt confident that I could say that in the way I meant it.)

A middle-aged woman in active revolt against boring dead-end jobs and dry, androcentric writing, Daly's “Elemental Feminist Philosophy” urged women to invest their energies in “Journeys beyond the State of Lechery,” to focus on desires for “abundance of be-ing,” “wisdom, joy, and power,” “a focused gynergetic will to break through the obstacles that block the flow of Female Force.” She encouraged her audience to celebrate their “rich diversity...We are Augurs, Brewsters, Dikes, Dragons, Dryads, Fates, Phoenixes, Gorgons, Maenads, Muses, Naiads, Nixies, Gnomes, Norns, Nymphs, Oceanids, Oreads, Orishas, Pixies, Prudes, Salamanders, Scolds, Shrews, Sibyls, Sirens, Soothsayers, Sprites, Stiffs, Sylphs, Undines, Viragos, Virgins, Vixens, Websters, Weirds.” Virginity, or even monogamy, was not yet considered liberating—Daly wrote things that inspired those of us who reclaimed abstinence as liberating—so Daly shrewdly commented that “One definition of the adjective virgin is 'never cap­tured: UNSUBDUED.' Wild virgins assume this definition for ourselves.,By thus breaking the rules of common usage we show that we are...Wantons,” ellipsis original, meaning “lacking discipline: not susceptible to control: UNRULY...excessively merry or gay: FROLICSOME.”

Feminist writing and activism often involved talking and writing about sexual abuse. Often the language was raunchy, and undeniably there were documents of abuse (which were, of course, absolutely evil acts when non-consensual) that gave young feminists furtive ideas about things we wanted to go home and do, consensually. So Daly wrote: “A Scold is...'of ribald speech...addicted to abusive language' (O.E.D.)...Female truth-telling—scolding--about phallic lust predictably will be called ribald and abusive.”

Sometimes I think, hope, that young women don't remember what Daly and her audience were trying to change, even as late as 1984. According to pop culture men were supposed to want to flop into bed with any woman, at any time, unless of course they'd reached a consensus with their peer group that certain women were too old, fat, ugly, or “crazy” (usually in the sense of independent, real mental illness rarely serving as a deterrent to sexual misadventures) to appeal to any man. Women were supposed to want to flop into bed with any man, at any time, too, only women were also burdened with the responsibility for avoiding unwanted pregnancies and not being tagged as shameless sluts, so while men were supposed to keep saying “Let's, let's, let's” women were supposed to keep saying “No, no, no” while nonverbally suggesting that they wanted to say yes. “If you kiss me, of course, you would have to use force, but you surely are stronger than I am.” 

In the 1980s women were starting to call out all the rape and harassment this aspect of pop culture was generating. It still remained for younger, sometimes self-styled “womanist” or “post-feminist,” typically late baby-boomers or early Generation X, to prune back the stupidity. Most men do not in fact want to have sex all day and every day, men and women are capable of sex-free friendship if they choose it, “no” means “no,” “yes” means “yes” and is what we say if we mean “yes,” and...beyond that...In the 1970s Inez Garcia famously shot and killed a rapist. Feminists cheered. Boys whined, “Wouldn't it be more liberating for her just to have said yes?” Well, actually, no. By 1990 there was more of a consensus that the really liberating thing for her to have done would have been to have taken control of the encounter and defused the man's desire, while keeping her clothes on. Any self-respecting Bright Young Thing could release a man's tensions without so much as crumpling her blouse. For further details, if needed, one could consult the novels of Alice Walker...

In the 1980s women were slowly becoming aware that, if a man indecently exposed himself to us, we had choices: the empathy hug with quick caress, the braying laugh, the snip gesture, the loudly drawled “Is that the best you can do?” I think women who came of age hearing about these choices probably always opted for the empathy hug. (Well, I did.) Older women were still saying, expecting sympathy, “Of course I quit that job after that pervert exposed himself to me at the bus stop,” and we were finally starting to say, “You mean—if he was all that repulsive—you couldn't ask someone to walk with you, or call the police, or just say 'Wow, I've never seen such a little one'?”

Writers like Daly, who was shamelessly, blatantly anti-male, who never missed a wisecrack at the expense of men, whose general tone could be read as “If you've always liked your brother, shame on you,” were part of the change. I have to say that their overall effect was good. My brother happened to be about as congenial, and my natural sister about as uncongenial, as children could be when we were growing up. I didn't need to be told that Daly's vision of women celebrating a sisterhood in rich diversity was a deliberate visualization of a desired outcome. Her sneers at all fathers, all brothers, all sons, all priests, all male writers, at all males whatsoever and wherever they might be (she adopted only female cats), were a stereotype—based in a less than satisfactory early life, as narrated in Outercourse—invoked to encourage women to share the dream of sisterhood. I was about twenty years old when I discovered this writer, still mired in the morbid self-consciousness of the very young. Even then I knew I'd been much luckier in life than Daly. But bitter herbs have a cleansing and healing effect on the body, and the bitter feminist writers, of whom Daly was surely the best, had a cleansing and healing effect on American thought.

So, do today's women still need to be reminded to celebrate our potential as Naiads, Nixies, and Norns—elemental feminine spirits credited by folklore with Powers, at least of having more fun than mortal women were supposed to have? Hmph. In Germany we recently heard of an organized act of rape-as-terrorism during which, apparently, all the women involved were not only unarmed but toothless. Not only Nixies to lure those lousy creeps into deep water, and Norns to warn them of their short unhappy lives, but Maenads with Labryes seem to have been called for.

But seriously...once men get it through their heads that gender polarity does not mean they score any points for acting like jerks, women are not doomed to that happy henhouse vision of Daly's. We can celebrate gynergy, at conventions and suchlike, but we can also enjoy the company of normal men. Once they learn that they're expected to make their company enjoyable, in real life most men find that easier than several other things they expect themselves to do.

What, seriously, did Daly believe and teach? As an excommunicated Catholic, she found supporters and publishers in the Unitarian Universalist Church, which has been known to affirm both Paganism and political lesbianism. Daly wrote with sympathy for those groups, although she was older than most of the lesbians and accustomed to celibacy, and her own theology of “God the Verb,” a Supreme “Be-ing” that transcended gender and number and just about anything traditional religious thought had ever said about It, was very different from the campy “Let us pray just like we use-ta: let us pray to Zarathustra” sort of Paganism. (Daly was neither whole-Bible nor fundamentalist, but it's worth mentioning, to Christian readers, that what she wrote about “God the Verb” is more biblically accurate than many Christian sermons; she had been a Bible scholar.) She was, of course, a leftist, though back when that meant “opposed to nuclear proliferation and the draft and the Vietnam War” it was an easier position to respect than it has become. There are plenty of digs at the Reagan Administration and the Religious Right in her books.

The philosophical “Realms of Spheres” she addresses in Pure Lust are considerations of the question “What do women want?” The First Realm addresses discontentedness with “the Sadosociety” of Catholic culture, which, in the twentieth century, tended to equate virtue with altruism and “selflessness,” which were often equated with women's sacrificing themselves to the mere self-aggrandizement of male “superiors” in the church hierarchy. “In courses of anamnesia, of unforgetting... we...weave the way toward Naming our own Real Presence. Weirds conjure the courage to Sin—to realize be-ing.” The Second Realm explores disparities between authentic “passions” and socially ingrained “emotions,” what women really want and what they've been told they're supposed to want. The Third Realm of “Metamorphospheres,” “Belonging, Befriending, and Bewitching,” presents “Stamina as its own reward. Here thinking is also thanking,” and women revel in largely hypothetical ecstasies of creativity.

In real life, do most women still want families more than friends? (Most do.) Do women who really want to “create” actually prefer mindless labor jobs to jobs that use up some small portion of our talent? (Well, I do, in the sense that I'd rather be paid to wash windows than to write dishonest product-supportive articles.) Do we even want female friends? Real friends, as serious creative introverts like Daly or like C.S. Lewis used the term, and not just any random female willing to bray about her private body parts and functions across the partition in a public restroom, as Gwen Macsai seemed to define “girlfriends” around the turn of the century? 

If I never have a “girlfriend” like Gwen Macsai, I'll be pleased...but real synergistic partners, like the actress with whom I used to write poems, or the housemate with whom I foster-mothered a teenager, or the woman with whom I mopped up what was left of the typing business in the 1980s, or either of the women with whom I worked on books, are gifts from God, loved without physical passion but with no less loyalty than husbands or children should be. Women who say they've never liked other women much or had much luck with same-sex friendship are deeply to be pitied. So, of course, are the ones who mistake mere extroversion for friendship.

Women are complex beings. At some times our “angel” natures, our cerebral qualities, seem subsumed in our “ape” functions of bearing and nursing babies. In the twentieth century we naïvely thought that, since baby-making isn't going to satisfy a woman's creativity after age fifty, women who wanted “careers” should either forego motherhood altogether, or leave the babies behind as soon as they had medical permission to go back to work, and try not to mention or think about their children on the job. Women who've been successful both inside and outside The Home now seem to be reaching a consensus that that was all wrong, that women can and should devote themselves to nursing babies for as long as five years after the birth, that the overall effect this has on the brain may actually boost these women's intelligence (or is it just that the sex hormones have done their bit and begun to subside?). 

In Pure Lust Daly seems to suggest that creative friendship might go beyond just meeting the emotional “needs” that cause teenaged girls to take their boyfriends seriously, that women might either choose a sorority-house lifestyle over marriage, or at least focus their minds on working in teams with other women and think of marriage and motherhood as mere, banal body functions like digestion. This is surely an exaggeration, though not as extreme an exaggeration of Daly's actual life choices as it is of most women's. Yet nature does give women a considerable amount of time during which, even if we've chosen to center our lives around children, we don't have children, and our emotional lives will invariably center around whatever comes closest to being the creative work we do, and whoever come closest to being our working partners. In 1984 Daly was at this stage of life—the stage from which I'm writing this review, the “Croning”--and she was revelling in it, presenting it as the culmination of a career for which even full-time motherhood might be seen as a preparation. And now I'm old enough to say that, about that, she was right.

Many animals start dying when they stop reproducing. Human women typically get at least fifteen years—a short human generation—of declining fertility, followed by twenty to forty years—a full human generation, or two—of complete sterility. Those of us who've made reasonably prudent health choices and chosen reasonably healthy ancestors are likely to be active and productive for up to sixty years after the stage of life that can be dominated by sex. And even those of us who didn't have menstrual problems can experience this postsexual phase of life as a time of steady energy, emotional peace, and vibrant health. We have more energy and more intelligence to give to our work than any hormone-raddled twenty-year-old ever had. 

If celebrating these facts of life requires a little defiance of androcentric business culture, the kind of thing Daly actually describes when she gets down to the details of the “Wicked Witching” she commends—writing and promoting other women's books, travelling, socializing, working in women's health clinics and classes, teaching, protesting, helping younger women escape harmful situations—makes her exaggerated descriptions of “breaking Terrible Taboos,” “Labrys-wielding,” “Raging” that “demands “Shrewd as well as Fiery judgment,” etc., richly ironic and hilariously encouraging.

Not every woman wants to invest the time it takes to read 448 pages of this, and those who don't think they'll enjoy Pure Lust are unlikely to miss anything. Those who do enjoy it, however, will find much insight and encouragement in it. This is a useful book for young women and a useful book for active Crones. Its once-timely topical wisecracks have become historical, but enough of its content is evergreen that it deserves to stay in print.