Necrophilia

In real life, and as mirrored in media images, boys and men are obsessed with death. Mary Daly referred to this obvious male preoccupation with death as “necrophilia,” meaning the love of death. Men’s necrophilic tendencies are not limited to literally sticking their dicks into corpses, although it includes that; necrophilia refers to men’s obsession with death and all things related to death and antithetical to life, including neglect and abuse, causing reproductive harm, rape, murder, torture, war, inflicting physical and emotional pain generally, and placing themselves and others in harm’s way in every way. Where women are interested in and indeed heavily invested in preserving and nurturing life, often because they have to, or face legal or social consequences if they fail, men are working very hard to undermine women’s efforts to nurture life at every turn.

Why? Because—

Necrophilia supports male power. Obviously, the power to take life or to cause extreme suffering is a form of power, and men embrace this power fully when they torture and kill animals, girls and women, and each other. Where boys and men are obsessed with death and creating destruction, women are left to perform damage control, utilizing all their time, energy and resources on mitigating the harm that men inflict; women are then left with few or no resources to use towards building a female-centered culture or to support our own interests. This diversion of women’s resources away from woman-centered and non-patriarchal ends is deliberate. The unusual man who is even slightly interested in nurturing or preserving life is the beneficiary of enormous false gratitude, but when women make a mistake or are unable to perform caretaking duties at a high level for any reason, we are severely punished by patriarchal institutions which place extreme controls on women’s lives and enforce our caretaking role with institutional violence, including incarceration. Of course, it is frequently men’s necrophilic actions such as PIV-centric sexuality creating unwanted or ambivalent children, or men harming themselves and others, that create the need for women’s usually unpaid, institutionally-unsupported caretaking labor in the first place, and opening the door to patriarchal institutional control over women’s lives. Granting men the power to open the door to institutional patriarchal control over women is critically important to and supportive of male power.