This is the third appearance of the word "crone" on this blog. The first was on October 3, 2005, "Miers + cronyism," back when we were all talking about Harriet Miers: "I wonder how long it will take for someone to call Miers a 'crone.' Too sexist, you think? Clearly, you haven't read as many Mary Daly books as I have!"
The second was just about a year ago, when we were all talking about E. Jean Carroll, "My life goes on... I will go on living in this tiny cabin. But one thing has changed. I am going to dedicate myself to somehow figuring out a way for the women..."
"... who don’t have my platform to hold men accountable. Robbie and I are going to put our heads together. That’s how my life is going to change. I’m a crone. I’m an elderly woman on a mountaintop. But I think we’ve got a few good years left to figure out a way to end the culture of sexual violence. That’s what I want to do."Said E. Jean Carroll, quoted in "E. Jean Carroll Discusses Trump’s Comeuppance/Since losing a civil case to the journalist, who accused him of sexual abuse and defamation, Trump has doubled down on his attacks" (The New Yorker)....
Calling oneself "a crone" is an old feminist trope. It was big in 1979, when Mary Daly published "Gyn/Ecology," discussed contemporaneously by Rita Mae Brown in The Washington Post in "The Croning of a Woman":
The opening section of the book, "Processions," pretends to restructure language by reclaiming negative terms such as "hag," "crone," and "harpy," and giving them positive meaning. Really, though, it is an elaborate defense to ward off criticism. To my mind, Mary Daly doesn't need to justify what she's doing; she need only write clearly what she thinks.One thing she thinks is that men are the enemy. True women, or, as she, "wrenching back some wordpower," refers to them -- Hags, Crones, Harpies, Furies, Spinsters -- represent life. Men are death. In this system of thought "the basic Sin of Phallocracy is deception -- the destruction of process." While this, like many of her other neologisms, is not adequately explained, one assumes she means the blurring of connections between events.Nonetheless, Daly, in her righteous anger at the total rape of womankind, still does not address the question of why so many women comply in their own "living-death." By way of explanation, she writes "The Myth Masters [that is, men] are able to penetrate their victims' minds by seeing to it that their deceptive myths are acted out over and over again in performances that draw the participants into emotional complicity."...According to Daly, if we can only find our "True Crone Selves" we can refuse to be destroyed. And if we can break away from male rituals and wars we will hear "the healing harmony of Hags, the cacophony of Crones."...
It seems to me, if you want to use the word "crone" in a positive, feminist way, you must at least mention Mary Daly.
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35 comments:
You can always prove a theorem or something.
Mary Daly - that’s name from the past. She was a theology professor at Boston College when I was there. I never encountered her because she was notorious for not allowing men to take her classes.
Looks like I didn’t miss much.
Why are so many women these days so miserable? What movement, what way of thinking could have possibly brought this on?
"But I think we’ve got a few good years left to figure out a way to end the culture of sexual violence."
There is no culture of sexual violence. It does not exist. Old crone yells at cloud.
"I never encountered her because she was notorious for not allowing men to take her classes."
Was Mary Daly a TERF?
I always think of Pratchett's three witches who, at least when Granny Weatherwax is in earshot, are described as "the maiden, the mother, and the, er, other one".
"The first manifestation [of TERFness] relates to specific currents within radical feminism that are inspired by authors like Mary Daly (1978), Janice Raymond (1979, 2021) and Sheila Jeffreys (1997, 2014)3. Often identifying themselves as ‘political lesbians’, these authors and activists see trans people as a vehicle of patriarchy based on the reinforcement of gender stereotypes, and as a strategy to combat both the emancipation of women and the rise of lesbianism as a form of erotic bond and political resistance. Mostly worried about trans women, they see them as a threat for women-only spaces and activism, but also to women’s bodies (Lamble, 2023). When considering trans men, the worries seem to be more about adolescent girls being misled by social media and peer pressure into ‘untrue’ gender dysphoria. More recently, they have been combatting queer theory as an attempt to erase women and a neoliberal instrument against feminism...."
https://www.digest.ugent.be/article/90008/galley/207675/view/
"In her own 1987 book Gyn/Ecology, Mary Daly, who had served as Raymond's thesis supervisor, argued that as sex reassignment surgery cannot reproduce female chromosomes or a female life history, it could "not produce women"...."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_views_on_transgender_topics
Penny Crone was a longtime on-air reporter here in NYC. She covered the NYPD and FD, as well as some baseball team that plays in The Bronx. She does real estate now.
Julie Krone is America's most successful female jockey. She is the only woman to have ridden a Triple Crown race winner (Belmont Stakes, 1993).
"... Mary Daly’s 1990 TERF book Gyn/ecology... was popular in lesbian circles at the time. Daly wrote, 'Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms. Transsexualism is an example.'”
https://www.outsmartmagazine.com/2013/12/terf-battles/
"The last time a feminist of any standing published an attack on transgenderism as caustic as “Gender Hurts” was in 1979, when Janice Raymond produced “The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male.” Raymond was a lesbian ex-nun who became a doctoral student of the radical-feminist theologian Mary Daly, at Boston College. Inspired by the women’s-health movement, Raymond framed much of “The Transsexual Empire” as a critique of a patriarchal medical and psychiatric establishment. Still, the book was frequently febrile, particularly with regard to lesbian trans women. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves,” Raymond wrote. “However, the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist violates women’s sexuality and spirit.”"
From What Is a Woman? By Michelle Goldberg July 28, 2014 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/08/04/woman-2
How widespread is the kind of unabashed misandry espoused by people like Mary Daly? I suspect it's far more common than I had imagined.
Hey look! Hooters!
Blogger AMDG said...
Mary Daly - I never encountered her because she was notorious for not allowing men to take her classes.
I was in a Mary Daly class, maybe because it was an interdisciplinary theology core class on "War, Aggression and Conflict Resolution" with several rotating lecturers.
Spoiler Alert: It was all men's fault.
Large-ish
Soft
Luscious
Pendulous
all on a proportionate frame
never out of style
"end the culture of sexual violence."
I always encourage people to read Martin Van Creveld's The Privileged Sex. The entire book is basically a historical and socio-economic dissection of current and historical feminist myths and tropes about the perceived mistreatment and inequality of women not just in Western culture, but across the globe.
In short, it's bullshit. Very poorly put together bullshit at that. Any woman that discusses sexual violence, mistreatment, or inequality in reference to living in a 1st world industrialized nation should be dismissed immediately out-of-hand.
Well, she seems nice.
My mother used to refer to her friends as crones and cronies, and I use the terms wherever appropriate.
RSM +1. Prof. van Creveld posts occasional thoughts about feminism at "As I Please."
Breasts proves that has G_d is a man.
Were set delightfully free in the late 60s.
I would never call E. Jean a crone.
But it does start with a C.
Free your mind and your nipples will follow.
Like other female body parts they are wonderful. When I squeeze my wife's, she giggles, so there's that too.
Howard said...
Breasts proves that has G_d is a man.
Holy goobs.
If need be, occupy a throne
Where nobody can call you crone.
Sorry. Once I realized this was post about boobies, I lost my concentration.
Mary Daly’s 1990 TERF book Gyn/ecology... was popular in lesbian circles at the time. Daly wrote, 'Today the Frankenstein phenomenon is omnipresent not only in religious myth, but in its offspring, phallocratic technology. The insane desire for power, the madness of boundary violation, is the mark of necrophiliacs who sense the lack of soul/spirit/life-loving principle with themselves and therefore try to invade and kill off all spirit, substituting conglomerates of corpses. This necrophilic invasion/elimination takes a variety of forms
Damn, that woman sure loves to use the forward slash, even in her book title. Lazy writing. Learn to use conjunctions and Oxford commas, lady. The inclusive OR is your friend.
Feminism used to involve finding new ways to look at things and testing them out, looking for higher consciousness. What we have now, using the word but having lost the spirit of innovation and insight, is pre-determined dogma and accession to the threat of punishment for airing new views.
As Billy Crystal once said, it doesn't matter what they look like, men pretty much want to see all of them. I only scanned the story, but what I can't figure out - it started out talking about 'freeing the breast' and seemed to end up talking about men being pigs and women being sexual objects, basically. What was the point, again?
In my experience, women mostly have 'work' done to impress other women. It creates no end of discussion within hen parties, and any improvement toward snaring men seems to be a beneficial side effect. But I, for one, am glad to see that a predilection toward enhancements is on the decline. I perfectly understand reduction and reconstructive surgeries, but think women are crazy to get their boobs inflated. But that's me, a male pig. And don't get me started on the 'age deniers', women that think they can cheat the clock. Good grief, you can put a beautiful high-gloss paint job on a beautifully-restored car, but when you step back and gaze at it, it's still perfectly obvious that it's an older model.
"...it started out talking about 'freeing the breast' and seemed to end up talking about men being pigs and women being sexual objects, basically."
After having chased women from all around the world for the last 25 years I can unequivocally say that there are women that hate the universe for making them women. Lots of them. Penis envy is not a joke and many women view simply being a woman as unfair somehow...which when you really break it down to simple physical ability to manipulate the world could be interpreted that way. It boggles my mind why so many women are obsessed with the way the world ought to work versus the way it actually does. They could use that acceptance as the basis to excel in those things they can control and do well as they always have. Instead, many of them despise those things and work tirelessly to tear other women down and keep them from moving on with their lives.
That anti-femininity feminists are extremely toxic and super unhappy. And everyone can tell.
I note that the crone is one of three female archetypes, the others being the maiden and the mother. Crone isn't necessarily an insulting term. It can define a person past child bearing who has life experience and knowledge that empowers her beyond the strength of most women.
Ben Franklin wrote of the many advantages in loving an older woman, among which are she won't tell, won't swell, and is grateful as hell. The entire letter by Franklin is worth the moment it takes to read.
RideSpaceMountain sounds like he's got vagina envy.
In praise of Bodacious TaTas…
The closest Howard gets to a woman is Lady Boys Escorts of Boston…
I saw the tags "art" and "breasts" and had such high hopes for the link.
Oh, well.
Here's what John Donne, the poet, said about an old friend of his, the Countess of Bedford, in old age. THh poem, Elegy IX, includes general comments on the difference between hags or crones and old women, e.g. "If we love things long sought, age is a thing/ Which we are fifty years in compassing." and "Were her first years the golden age? That's true,/ But now she's gold oft tried and ever new." The poem also includes the idea that young beautiful women "rape" men by being overwhelmingly attractive.
No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace
As I have seen in one autumnal face.
Young beauties force our love, and that's a rape,
This doth but counsel, yet you cannot scape.
If 'twere a shame to love, here 'twere no shame;
Affection here takes reverence's name.
Were her first years the golden age? That's true,
But now she's gold oft tried and ever new.
That was her torrid and inflaming time,
This is her tolerable tropic clime.
Fair eyes, who asks more heat than comes from hence,
He in a fever wishes pestilence.
Call not these wrinkles, graves; if graves they were,
They were Love's graves, for else he is no where.
Yet lies not Love dead here, but here doth sit
Vow'd to this trench, like an anachorit;
And here till hers, which must be his death, come,
He doth not dig a grave, but build a tomb.
Here dwells he; though he sojourn ev'rywhere
In progress, yet his standing house is here:
Here where still evening is, not noon nor night,
Where no voluptuousness, yet all delight.
In all her words, unto all hearers fit,
You may at revels, you at council, sit.
This is Love's timber, youth his underwood;
There he, as wine in June, enrages blood,
Which then comes seasonabliest when our taste
And appetite to other things is past.
Xerxes' strange Lydian love, the platan tree,
Was lov'd for age, none being so large as she,
Or else because, being young, nature did bless
Her youth with age's glory, barrenness.
If we love things long sought, age is a thing
Which we are fifty years in compassing;
If transitory things, which soon decay,
Age must be loveliest at the latest day.
But name not winter faces, whose skin's slack,
Lank as an unthrift's purse, but a soul's sack;
Whose eyes seek light within, for all here's shade;
Whose mouths are holes, rather worn out than made;
Whose every tooth to a several place is gone,
To vex their souls at resurrection:
Name not these living death's-heads unto me,
For these, not ancient, but antique be.
I hate extremes, yet I had rather stay
With tombs than cradles, to wear out a day.
Since such love's natural lation is, may still
My love descend, and journey down the hill,
Not panting after growing beauties. So,
I shall ebb on with them who homeward go.
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