Pornography: Men Possessing Women, by: Andrea ... - Feminish

cruel acts widely sanctioned and encouraged. It is also generated byits own enduring reputation, whether exquisite as in Hom er,Genet, or Kafka; or fiendish as in Hitler, the real Count Dracula, orManson. Rotting meat smells; violence produces terror. Men aredangerous; men are feared.Fourth, men have the power of naming, a great and sublimepower. This power of naming enables men to define experience, toarticulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realmand qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, tocontrol perception itself. As Mary Daly, who first isolated thispower, wrote in Beyond God the Father:. . it is necessary to graspthe fundamental fact that women have had the power of namingstolen from us. ” 1Male supremacy is fused into the language, so thatevery sentence both heralds and affirms it. Thought, experiencedprimarily as language, is permeated by the linguistic and perceptualvalues developed expressly to subordinate women. Men havedefined the parameters of every subject. All feminist arguments,however radical in intent or consequence, are with or againstassertions or premises implicit in the male system, which is madecredible or authentic by the power of men to name. N o transcendenceof the male system is possible as long as men have the powerof naming. T heir names resonate wherever there is human life. AsPrometheus stole fire from the gods, so feminists will have to stealthe power of naming from men, hopefully to better effect. As withfire when it belonged to the gods, the power of naming appearsmagical: he gives the name, the name endures; she gives the name,the name is lost. But this magic is illusion. T he male power ofnaming is upheld by force, pure and simple. O n its own, withoutforce to back it, measured against reality, it is not power; it isprocess, a more humble thing. “T he old naming, ” Mary Dalywrote, “was not the product of dialogue—a fact inadvertentlyadmitted in the Genesis story of Adam’s naming the animals andthe wom an. ” 2 It is the naming by decree that is power over andagainst those who are forbidden to name their own experience; it isthe decree backed up by violence that writes the name indelibly inblood in male-dominated culture. T he male does not merely name