ABSTRACT
The obverse of misogynistic disgust for the female body is its gynolatrous adulation or idolization. This chapter addresses the problem of the idolization of women, reviewing Shulamith Firestone and others’ second wave criticism of the captivations of heterosexual romantic love as the glorification of a fantasy resemblance of a woman, not the real, finite, imperfect woman herself. After a woman’s conquest and after a man has taken possession of her domestic and reproductive services, a woman can only retain his desire by trying to be or become the fictive woman he courted. The chapter then applies feminist criticism of gynolatry to the contemporary production of gynoid sex robots as re-mastered idols of the feminine that, it argues, may represent, finally, the liberation of patriarchy from women. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that the idolization of women is symptomatic of the necrophilia that Mary Daly, Grace Jantzen, and others identified as definitively patriarchal. Here, patriarchal necrophilia is understood, with Daly, as more than a preoccupation with death over natality, but as gynocidal. Two- and three-dimensional images of women that have assumed the perfectly biddable, amortal beauty of inanimacy, have, like those who worship or imitate them, assumed the face of death.
