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A principal agenda of Daly’s philosophical project is to reveal the structures and myths within patriarchy which degrade all, but especially women’s, humanity. This critical work began in The Church and the Second Sex, where Daly reviews the historical record of Christian theory and practice to show its inherent misogyny. Drawing on the work of Simone be Beauvoir, Daly notes that Christianity, since its inception, has sought to oppress and deceive women. It holds up unattainable visions of the Virgin Mary as the exemplar of the good Christian woman, while also affirming that Mary was made pure only through the act of a male god and only for the sake of a male savior. The paradigmatic woman is passive, asexual, and, in a striking reversal of the normal order, kneels in submission before her son. The model of Christian piety is essentially one of submission and of patient suffering in light of oppression. Women achieve some merit only by accepting and internalizing their role as the patient sufferer who will be rewarded in the life to come, or by somehow “rising above” the handicap of their sex and embodying more fully the masculine norm of spiritual rigor, as was the case with Teresa of Avila (cf. Daly 1985[1968], 66-69).

Christianity is not alone in its degradation of women. In Gyn/Ecology, Daly surveys the world’s cultures and religions and demonstrates all participate in perpetuating patriarchal myths, ethics and aesthetics which form a vampiric network. Where Christianity associates women with sin through the myth of the Fall and offers the unattainable exemplar of the virgin mother, the Indian culture and religion promotes the “ultimate consummation of marriage” in the suttee, the Chinese have practiced footbinding and the exclusion of women from ancestral rites, and the genital mutilation of women continues presently in Africa. Even the so-called secular sciences habitually dismember women, both physically through so-called “gynecology” and psychically through the fundamentally misogynistic practices of psychology and psychotherapy.

Women are not the only victims of patriarchy. Daly sees racism, militarism, nationalism and environmental degradation as manifestations of the processes of rape and vivisection which characterize the phallic culture. Devoid of any life of its own, patriarch feeds off those at hand, leaving a broken and degraded world and a broken and degraded humanity. Men themselves are reduced to a subhuman condition by their acceptance of and participation in such a system. Yet it is women who bear the brunt of the rapist society’s attack.

Patriarchy successfully continues to perpetuate its crimes by cloaking its true intents and ends. It deceives its victims into accepting its false claims of reality. “Patriarchy perpetuates its deception through myth,” and religions are often the most potent vehicles for the creation and promulgation of such dehumanizing and necrophilic visions of reality. The victims are mystified through myth, myths which they internalize and to which they adhere. Women come to believe and even speak the fathers’ lies, about themselves and the world. They buy into the god-fathers’ myths of salvation and success. The god-fathers throw some crumbs of “power” and “success” to a few tokens, be they blacks or other minorities, or especially women, to demonstrate that their system is indeed “equitable,” or at least capable of reformation.

The truth of the matter is, however, that intra ecclesia non salus est. There is no possibility of redemption within or for a system which is founded upon the degradation of the human species and its environment. Through denial, tokenism, obfuscation and reversal, patriarchy hides this fact. A chief organ in its propaganda campaign is a religion which posits that God is male (and hence male must be God) and that only through suffering in this life may one find true happiness in some world beyond. This is the myth patriarchy projects onto the foreground of reality. It is the myth which is internalized and is thereby self-perpetuating. Patriarchy traps its victims in the semantic web of lies which constitutes the reality of the Foreground, and obscures ultimate reality, which is the Background.

Women are therefore stuck in a seemingly untenable position. Either they may seek suicidal security within the virtual reality of the god-fathers, thereby defining their lives by degrading lies. This perverse universe of meaning is all that they know, and therefore seemingly all they could imagine. To leave it would be to confront no sense of self as defined by patriarchy. This appears to women as the threat of Non-Being, of living in the extra-patriarchal anomie. Or they may remain within the system, and thereby retain a degraded sense of self. But to do so is to remain in a charnel house which denies one full humanity. Again, one is confronted with the threat of Non-Being, of a death of a thousand cuts. Trapped between this parasitic Scylla and the anomic Charybdis, what’s a girl to do?