December 23rd, 2005
WWT #5
I was thinking of this in regard to my piece about Levy’s book. This is a key concept that answers the oft-heard “but women do it too!” lament that Levy unfortunately falls prey to, and exposes the structural nature and purpose of tokenism. This concept is developed to its fullest extent in Daly’s marvelous book Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism.
token torturer: a woman who (often unwittingly) pleases her masters by selling out her own kind, increasing the patriarchs’ pleasure by performing acts that are less than gentlemanly, thus obscuring the identity of the primary torturers
Christie Hefner, anybody?
From Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language conjured by Mary Daly in cahoots with Jane Caputi.
