Embrace Metapatterning By Rejecting Patriarchy for International Women’s Day

Recently I saw an unfamiliar reference to metapatterning, a verb meaning “breaking through patriarchal patterns and weaving our way out of male-ordered mazes.” As my fierce feminist protagonist Rowan Layne would say, boy howdy. It brought to mind myriad sociopolitical subjects featured in my Other Worldly novel series—and at least the mazes first introduced as labyrinths in Aliens Abound  (2021) weren’t “male ordered.”

The concept of metapatterning derived from Mary Daly, an American philosopher and theologian. And I was a tad put out that I’d somehow reached almost halfway through my sixties without having heard of her. Hence, in honor of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day today, I will wax passionately about this woman who was known as “the world’s first feminist philosopher.”

Mary Daly, 1928-2010, was considered a “radical feminist philosopher,” and “post-Catholic feminist,” but she described herself as a “radical lesbian feminist.”  Known for her theologian critique of patriarchy, traditional religion, and the Roman Catholic Church, it’s all the more astounding that she taught at Jesuit-run Boston College for 33 years. There she employed inventive use of language, wit, and passion to challenge both patriarchy and religion. A few examples:

“The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a [person] trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ‘to sin.’”

“If God is male, then male is God. The divine patriarch castrates women as long as he is allowed to live on in the imagination.”

“Male religion entombs women in sepulchers of silence in order to chant its own eternal and dreary dirge to a past that never was.”

I most definitely need to use that last one in my latest OW novel in progress, Alien Origins, wherein Rowan revisits medieval sexist centuries of Earth’s sordid past.

Daly is also considered one of the most influential voices of the radical feminist movement through the later twentieth century. Her work championed women’s liberation, urging us to “go the whole way” rather than settle for moderate change, stating, “Courage is a habit, a virtue: you get it by courageous acts.”

She championed us to be courageous because, “Women have had the power of naming stolen from us. We have not been free to use our own power to name ourselves, the world, or God.” Because “The liberation of language is rooted in the liberation of ourselves.”

Daly argued that the idea of a patriarchal, fatherly god is the foundation of a sexist culture of unfair criticism and violence towards women and an unholy trinity of rape, genocide and war. “Every woman who has come to consciousness can recall an almost endless series of oppressive, violating, insulting, assaulting acts against her Self,” said Daly. “Every woman is battered by such assaults—is on a psychic level, a battered woman.”

I was ecstatic to discover that Mary Daly also wove a universal environmentalist message into her philosophy. “We will look upon the Earth and her sister planets as being with us, not for us.” Yet another quote suitable for weaving into Alien Origins.

Daly surmised, “If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males.” By useless wars like our latest US president’s disastrous gambit, perhaps? As she also said, “God’s ‘plan’ is often a front for men’s plans and a cover for inadequacy, ignorance, and evil.”

Finally, a message from Daly most poignant and urgent today if it ever was: “I urge you to sin. But not against these itty-bitty religions, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism—or their secular derivatives, Marxism, Maoism, Freudianism and Jungianism—which are all derivatives of the big religion of patriarchy. Sin against the infrastructure itself!”