WIE: In your book Beyond God the Father, you call into question the image of the male-gendered God. You write: "The biblical and popular image of God as a great patriarch in heaven, rewarding and punishing according to his mysterious and seemingly arbitrary will, has dominated the imagination of millions over thousands of years. The symbol of the Father God, spawned in the human imagination and sustained as plausible by patriarchy, has in turn rendered service to this type of society by making its mechanisms for the oppression of women appear right and fitting. If God in 'his' heaven is a father ruling 'his' people, then it is in the 'nature' of things and according to divine plan and the order of the universe that society be male-dominated." Your challenge of the image of the male-gendered God has without a doubt made many people deeply question the idea of a God with a male face, as well as the limiting and damaging effects of this image on our social, political and cultural structures. Now, many feminists have responded to this by replacing the word "God" with "Goddess," and by replacing the image of God as Father with the image of Goddess as Mother. Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man, whom we also interviewed for this issue of our magazine, said that "we do not begin to get on a spiritual journey until we go beyond the gendered metaphors for God. What in the world could it possibly mean to say Mother Nature? What's motherly about it as opposed to fatherly or brotherly?" While he specifically said that he appreciates the work you've done to dismantle the image of God the Father, he also said, "I think Mary Daly should be as critical of [God the Mother] as she has been of the notion of God the Father." What do you think about this?

MD: You see, I don't care what Sam Keen thinks. Do you understand? If that seems like the epitome of arrogance, so be it. How can I care what he thinks? He doesn't get it.

WIE: Right. Well, I'm not so much specifically asking about him personally, but about the idea that gendered images for God—male or female—are ultimately limited.

MD: Well, it's not totally adequate because it assumes that there are two sexes throughout the universe. These are the models for reality, and I don't know if there are a hundred sexes or if sex would be of any interest whatsoever in some system other than our solar system. How can I know? So it's limited, but insofar as our experience gives us images, certainly the female is more appropriate for talking about nurturing life, loving and creativity on every level. If you have to choose between the two, female obviously is better. And I don't even have to choose between the two; I mean, the other isn't worth consideration anymore. It's just hanging all over putridly. So, I wouldn't call the book "Beyond God the Father" now, I'd just say "Beyond God."

Keen's perspective, aside from the fact that I would totally disagree with it, is dated. The patriarchs have more sophisticated kinds of arguments now. Particularly the postmodernists: "I'm a person gendered as feminine." Think how disempowering that is. You can't get out and say, "I'm for women. Women's liberation." It's "the liberation of persons gendered as feminine." There's nothing in that that makes your blood roar! There's no power in it.

WIE: As you know, Buddhism is becoming increasingly popular in the West, particularly among men and women who for various reasons are critical of the views and structures of Christianity. Many believe that Buddhism is more in line with modern humanistic ideals. And the Dalai Lama is almost universally revered for his embodiment of what are considered by some to be exclusively "feminine" qualities—qualities such as nonviolence, compassion and concern for the environment. Interestingly, however, a number of statements attributed to the Buddha seem to reveal that he had strong convictions about the spiritual superiority of men. This has been very challenging for Western women coming to Buddhism, and has often been set to one side if not completely avoided. In the Pali Canon [principle Buddhist scriptures], the Buddha is reported to have said: "Ananda, if women had not obtained the Going Forth from the house life into homelessness in the Law and Discipline declared by the Perfect One [acceptance into the Buddha's monastic order], the Holy Life would have lasted long, the Holy Life would have lasted a thousand years. But now, since women have obtained it, the Holy Life will last only five hundred years. Just as when the blight called gray mildew falls on a field of ripening rice, that field of ripening rice does not last long—so too in the Law and Discipline in which women obtain the Going Forth, the Holy Life does not last long."

MD: It's just the same old song in a different language: "Women pollute."

WIE: My question is: How do you think that Gautama the Buddha could have come to such an extreme position about half of the human race? What would you say to a Western Buddhist woman wrestling with the apparent incongruity of such an enlightened being holding such a woman-negative view?

MD: As I wrote in Gyn/Ecology: all patriarchal religions are patriarchal—right? They take different forms. What would I think? There's nothing to think about. It has taken another form—seductive, probably, because christianity is so overtly warlike and abusive. And furthermore, I don't know what "enlightened" means. It's not a word that's in my vocabulary. This is like a christian woman being upset over something that Paul said, instead of seeing that of course he's an asshole. He's one more very macho asshole described as a saint and as enlightened, and once you get over that, you get over it. You see it for what it is and you don't worry about why he would say such a thing. Of course he would say such a thing. That's what he is. It's really extremely simple. Stop wrestling with it; it's not interesting. Get out of it. That would be my approach to it. Misogynists! Hateful! All of them! I studied them. And finally I just didn't try to reason with it anymore. Boston College was most enlightening to me. The experience of being fired for writing The Church and the Second Sex introduced me to the idea that it's not going to change. That's the way it is—leave it.

WIE: In the past couple of decades, there has been increasing interest in prepatriarchal agrarian societies that worshipped female deities. While there is evidence that these societies were more egalitarian in their views of and roles for men and women, some people criticize the current fascination with these goddess cultures as a rewriting of history, a creation of a fictional paradise lost. Once again, Sam Keen writes: "We need to question the historical romanticism of feminist ideology. . . . When God was a woman—Isis, Ishtar, Artemis, Diana, Kali, Demeter—she was a terrible mother, as bloody as God the Father. . . . If nature is the goddess we must claim her dark and demonic sides, and not merely her nurturing qualities. . . . Slavery, forced labor, injustice are not modern or 'patriarchal' inventions." What is your response to Keen's assertion that the lauding of these matrifocal societies is "historical romanticism"?

MD: First of all, if it's only matrilineal and matrifocal, it's not really prepatriarchal. Prepatriarchal would be really ancient—gynocentric. And so what he's speaking about, as I understand it, is already patriarchy on the way. I'm talking about a really woman-centered society of which we have no direct memory. But, as Monique Wittig said, "If you can't remember, invent." Part of it has to be created because most of the records have been destroyed. All of what he's talking about is an intermediary stage.

WIE: Because you also speak about inventing an image of an idyllic prehistoric culture, it sounds like you're not concerned with any risk of romanticization.

MD: What is the risk? I mean, we live in hell. This is called hell. H-E-L-L—patriarchy. Do you watch TV and see the stuff from Kosovo? The ethnic cleansing, genocide—watching them get on trains and go off to nowhere and starve and die and have the shit bombed out of them by NATO. Is it romantic to try to remember something better than that? There's a reality gap here. How can I make it clearer? We're living in hell and he's talking about a danger of romanticism in imagining something that is a hope for something better in the future? I think that the question comes from not looking deeply enough at the horror of phallocracy, penocracy, jockocracy, cockocracy, call it whatever—patriarchy. If you experience the horror of what is happening to women all the time, it is almost unbearable, right? All the time! And a lot of it is mental horror, spiritual horror, together with the physical horror and the atrocities that I've analyzed in detail. Then, when you are acutely aware of that and desire to exorcise it, the exorcism welcomes, requires, some kind of dream. The accusation of romanticism belongs to a detached intellect, not seeing the desperate need for escape from where we are. And when I speak, it's out of desperation; I know it! I know what women's lives are like! Intuitively, instinctively, experientially, I know. I don't have to have been there in prison and had my genitals cut up and experienced the horrors that happen to women now—I am existentially aware of it. So I don't have patience with that.

WIE: Some people say that exclusively blaming men for the patriarchy is misguided. Transpersonal theorist Ken Wilber, in an article entitled "Don't Blame Men for the Patriarchy," writes: "'Patriarchy' is a word that is always pronounced with scorn and disgust. The obvious and naïve solution is to simply say that men imposed the patriarchy on women. But alas, it is nowhere near that simple. . . . If we take the standard response—that the patriarchy was imposed on women by a bunch of sadistic and power-hungry men—then we are locked into two inescapable definitions of men and women. Namely, men are pigs and women are sheep. . . . But men are simply not that piggy, and women not that sheepy. One of the things I try to do . . . is to trace out the hidden power that women have had and that influenced and cocreated the various cultural structures throughout history, including patriarchy. Among other things, this releases men from being defined as total schmucks and releases women from being defined as duped, brainwashed and herded."

MD: Usually for someone at that state of consciousness—which is unconsciousness—if anything would work, it would be to make the analogy with racism. Because that's back where he is in that. It would be like saying, "Well, that this is a racist society is the fault of blacks, too, and you can't just blame white people for a racist society. The others must have collaborated in it." And the fallacies become immediately obvious, don't they, when you speak of that case. So it works for me to just make that comparison and see if they can flounder their way through it. You could say certainly that some blacks would appear to have collaborated in that, but it's shallow sounding. It doesn't work, although there have been "Uncle Toms" and all that. So that's the way I would approach it.

WIE: Along similar lines, Sam Keen told us: "Men and women have been in this thing together all along. . . . Any time you put the blame on one of the genders, you have rendered the other inferior. . . . In America, women are just as injurious to the world as men are." He has also written: "Are we to excuse womankind from complicity and active participation in the spoiling of the environment? Go to any mall and watch the frenzied buying of the latest fashions, any landfill and see the mountain of disposable diapers and trash, any thrift store and count the discarded items of serviceable but no longer 'stylish' clothes and appliances, and it will be obvious that womankind is as compulsive a consumer as mankind. . . . There is an existential and moral fallacy involved in seeking to transfer all the blame . . . onto the shoulders of men. The issue is not genderal. We all have dirty hands."

MD: I can't stand it. He's too smart for me. It's just not worth answering. Each sentence is full of falsities. Again, it's like saying the blacks get the benefit of supermarkets over here and things that they don't have in the jungles and villages of Africa—so what?

It's true that to be a feminist now absolutely requires being an ecofeminist or what I would call a "Radical Elemental Feminist." There's no way that you can accept the pollution and the destruction of animals and the harm to nature out there because what happens to nature is happening to us; we're sisters. But I just want to say that in with this "frenzied buying" statement there is nothing about the context. Why are women so frenzied to buy the latest fashions? Because their lives are so empty and they've had no opportunities. Because their self-image has been so damaged. I can go on and on about the damage that has been done to women under patriarchy. And then women are blamed for going out and buying all the time, but there's nothing left for them when their creativity has been smashed. This is very woman-hating, the way it's written.

It's not that I don't get mad at women for their complicity, but it's not the same level of being mad. I can get so angry at tokenized women—women who sell their sisters out. It happens all the time on a more sophisticated level, but I always have to remind myself to go to the source. It's more annoying to see women doing it because I believe they have the inherent capacity to do better than that. But I also see how they've been smashed down, and so I always go to the source. Why are women the way they are, the ones who are woman-hating, who have all of those hideous qualities that women get in patriarchy? I hate that, too—to have to see women in that condition is hateful, it's disgusting.

But you see, I have great respect for the inner power in women that can grasp far more than is attributed to them. I don't just think that I'm smarter than Sam Keen. I think many, many women are smarter than Sam Keen. One of the typical ironies of patriarchal society is that he gets to have a voice, while you can walk around and talk to many highly intelligent women on the street whose voices are not heard and who have insights he lacks. Yet he gets to have a "name"; that's the joke of it. And for me to honor that is ridiculous. No woman who is really on track would be wanting to read these men—they're boring. I think that emphasizing male authors in this context serves no purpose. Why not take some radical feminist texts and talk about them? Maybe you're writing for the wrong audience. Look, are we trying to raise the energy level, to convey joy in life, to convey biophilia and encourage the biophilia that's in women? Or are we trying to just go on dialoguing with these men? What I try to do is speak to women on the highest level of vibration that there is, and those who can hear, who can sense, on that level do get it. And then they can spread it to others; there's a ripple effect. Women, my tribe, radical lesbian feminists—the women who get it—are overjoyed to have their lives affirmed. And I want that joy to exist because that inspires courage and movement forward and creativity. That's my job.

WIE: In your latest book, Quintessence, you describe a utopian society of the future, on a continent populated entirely by women, where procreation occurs through parthenogenesis, without the participation of men. What is your vision for a postpatriarchal world? Is it similar to what you described in the book?

MD: You can read Quintessence and you can get a sense of it. It's a description of an alternative future. It's there partly as a device and partly because it's a dream. There could be many alternative futures, but some of the elements are constant: that it would be women only; that it would be women generating the energy throughout the universe; that much of the contamination, both physical and mental, has been dealt with.

Also, my favorite word is not "postpatriarchal." It's "metapatriarchal." The prefix "meta" has four meanings. It's transformative of, in the background of, beyond, or transcending. It isn't just post or after in linear time. So we can, right now, even though patriarchy is all around, try to live metapatriarchally. You can try to be metapatriarchal by not succumbing to all the rules and roles and games of patriarchy.

WIE: In Quintessence, your idyllic continent is inhabited by women only, but the rest of the world is inhabited by women and men.

MD: I didn't say how many men were there.

WIE: Which brings us to another question I wanted to ask you. Sally Miller Gearhart, in her article "The Future—If There Is One—Is Female" writes: "At least three further requirements supplement the strategies of environmentalists if we were to create and preserve a less violent world. 1) Every culture must begin to affirm the female future. 2) Species responsibility must be returned to women in every culture. 3) The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately ten percent of the human race." What do you think about this statement?

MD: I think it's not a bad idea at all. 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. People are afraid to say that kind of stuff anymore.

WIE: Yes. I find myself now thinking that's a bit shocking.

MD: Well, it's shocking that it would be shocking.

WIE: So it doesn't sound like your vision of a separate nation for women is something you see as an interim stage that would eventually lead to men and women living together in true equality.

MD: No. That's a very old question. I answered that to audiences twenty-five, thirty years ago. I just don't think that way. See, right now, I would be totally joyous to have a great community of women—whether men are somewhere out on the periphery or not. I don't have this goal of: "Oh, then we can all get together again!" That doesn't seem to be a very promising future. So why would I think about it? I think it's pretty evident that men are not central to my thought.

WIE: I have one last question. At the beginning of this interview, you spoke about the experience of being deeply at one with that which animates all of life. I wanted to ask you what you think about the possibility of becoming identified with that as who one ultimately is, having that as one's ultimate resting place, or ground, so to speak, and where one's gender would no longer be a primary reference point.

MD: I don't know if that has anything to do with my experience. I have my own experience of oneness. Sometimes I have ecstasy and a kind of active repose in connection with nature. It's tremendous. But I never forget that I'm a woman, because this is me. I know who I am. I have Female integrity.