"The drawing is prosaic, revealing asymmetrical breasts and bony middle-aged shoulders, but it also manifests a little poetry, suggesting that I’m a proud proto-crone."

Writes Sarah Thornton, quoted in "We Must Defend the Bust/Breasts are subject to capricious restrictions and contradictory norms. What would it take to set them free?" (The New Yorker). The New Yorker article is by Lauren Michele Jackson, writing about Thornton's book "Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, & Witches Tell Us About Breasts." Thornton was writing about an artist named Clarity Haynes.

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..."

"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). Kaplan is seeking additional punitive damages — not a gag order.

We're told:

Carroll is seventy-nine. She just adopted a new dog, a Great Pyrenees. “She’s right here, Miss Havisham, Sham for short,” she said, gesturing offscreen.

"Robbie" is the lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, who's quoted saying she considered seeking a gag order when Trump, having lost in the defamation case continued to repeat the defamation. But she didn't want the "First Amendment concerns," and she's seeking additional punitive damages instead.

The dog is named Miss Havisham — that is, the character in "Great Expectations" who devotes herself extravagantly to her disappointment in men. At trial, there was an unsuccessful attempt to introduce evidence that she'd once named a dog/cat "Vagina." 

"Mr. Kondo... has long known that he didn’t want a human partner. Partly, it was because he rejected the rigid expectations of Japanese family life."

"But mostly, it was because he had always felt an intense — and, even to himself, inexplicable — attraction to fictional characters.... Mr. Kondo sees himself as part of a growing movement of people who identify as 'fictosexuals.'... He wants the world to know that people like him are out there and, with advances in artificial intelligence and robotics allowing for more profound interactions with the inanimate, that their numbers are likely to increase...."

I'm getting the sense that it's not going to be enough that we regard him with empathy and refrain from saying this is trivial or mentally disordered. "Fictosexuals" will demand full respect.

Or so I'm thinking, as I read the long NYT article "This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out. Akihiko Kondo and thousands of others are in devoted fictional relationships, served by a vast industry aimed at satisfying the desires of a fervent fan culture." 

[T]he idea that fictional characters can inspire real affection or even love may well have reached its highest expression in modern Japan, where the sentiment has given rise to a highly visible subculture and become the basis for a thriving industry. The Japanese word for the feelings those characters inspire is “moe,” a term that has become shorthand for just about anything that is viscerally adorable. ...

"Chollet celebrates not only the witches of the past, but also the so-called 'witches' of today..."

"... independent women who have chosen not to have children, aren’t always coupled, often defy traditional beauty norms (letting their hair go gray), and thus operate outside the established social order."

From "A French Feminist Tells Us to Embrace Our Inner Hag" (NYT)(reviewing "IN DEFENSE OF WITCHES/The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial"). 

Since [Mona] Chollet’s childhood, the word ["witch"] “has had a magnetic hold on me,” she writes. “Something about it fizzes with energy. The word speaks of a knowledge that lies close to the ground, a vital power, an accumulated force of experience that official sources disdain or repress.”...

Sometimes, by choice or by circumstance, a woman becomes what Chollet calls a “femme fondue,” or dissolving woman, who becomes overwhelmed by “the service reflex” and disappears into motherhood or child care, losing her grip on the first person. 

We're told that the book refers to all of these feminists: Rebecca Traister, Gloria Steinem, Susan Faludi, Adrienne Rich, Susan Sontag, Elizabeth Gilbert, Audre Lorde, and Rebecca Solnit.

What about Mary Daly?! 

When I think of feminism and witches, I think of Mary Daly. As Wikipedia puts it: "Daly said it is the role of women to unveil the liberatory nature of labels such as 'Hag,' 'Witch,' and 'Lunatic.'" That links to a page in Ruether, "Women and Redemption: A Theological History" where we find this snappy paragraph:

Since I used the word "phallocracy..."

... I decided to look it up in the NYT archive. I was surprised that it has only appeared 3 times. The Times is big on feminism, and it's a real word, defined in the OED as "A society dominated by males; the dominance of men over women; the distinguishing belief of a phallocrat."

January 27, 1985:

["Sisterhood Is Global/The International Women's Movement Anthology"] abounds with emotions and opinions, and has little of the style of a standard reference work. And despite its stress on statistics, accuracy is not its strongest suit.... The editor, Robin Morgan, chose the contributors and then gave them a free rein... For the Dutch contributor, the major issue is ''Do we still make love with our oppressor?'' The problems are rather different in Haiti, where teen-age girls stitch baseballs for 14 cents an hour. Elsewhere, the titles tell much of the story: ''Women in a Warrior Society'' (Australia); ''Fighting for the Right to Fight'' (Colombia); ''Elegance Amid the Phallocracy'' (Senegal)....

August 15, 1999:

For nigh on 20 years, Mary Daly, who is widely considered the world's foremost radical feminist philosopher and theologian, has barred men from her classroom at Boston College, arguing that they marred the learning experience of women.

For 20 years, too, the university objected to her separatism and penalized her with reprimands and denial of promotion, but never fired her. Nor could it change the strong mind of a woman who... even uses her own lexicon, with words like phallocracy and academentia....

This week, Boston College, a Jesuit-run Catholic university, officially took Dr. Daly's office back from her....

December 21, 2010:

She had names for what she was fighting. “Phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy — call it whatever,” [Mary] Daly said. In 1987, with a co-author, she published her own dictionary — seventh in a line of nine books she wrote — meant to spell out a new lexicon for women... Anyone who didn’t bother to question male dominance was a snool; anyone who promoted it, a dickspeaker....

There's also "phallocrat," which the OED defines as "A person who advocates or assumes the existence of a male-dominated society; a male chauvinist or supremacist." The NYT has used that word only twice, and the first one predates the earliest publication found by the OED. Hey! I beat the OED on something. Here, from July 1972:

Nelly Kaplan, the French writer‐director whose “Papa, Les Petits Bateaus” and “A Very Curious Girl” were shown at the recent Festival of Women's Films, has writ ten two more screenplays which she hopes to put before the cameras soon in France. The first is called “Phallocrat,” and it deals with a man who is, tyrannical in his relations with his wife and daughter.

The other one, from 2010 is an article about Susan Faludi's memoir "In the Darkroom":

It is... a project as high concept as a sitcom pitch: What if a famous feminist author — whose activism was spurred by her father’s bullying machismo — discovered that said phallocrat had become a woman? Complications ensue. But Ms. Faludi mines her material less for easy ironies than for insights into the very meaning of identity.

So how did I happen to use that word today? Commenters have been pushing me to watch the video of James Damore — the memo-writing ex-employee of Google — with Jordan Peterson.

All I said was:

I watched the entire Peterson video. I should write something about it. Peterson had no idea how to draw Damore out and seemed only too willing to fill up all the available space on his own. Phallocracy in action??