Criticisms of LessWrong

Remember, Neb, you are going to school in teh 2000's. I was going to school in the 1980s. The idea that there was any value to women, to their contributions in scholarship made me write as TS Lastname for my entire career. Why was this "feminist ethics?" cause it wasn't being address by anyone else. Cause it was a stance women were taking to make contributions. Cause the style of thought that women felt they were contributing was largely unnoticed. So you make a movement, and hope other people jump on board. I can assume the movement has grown up far beyond "feminist ethics", but that's what I was schooled in. Where I "run to mamma" as it were.

The funny thing I see, as an "old" lady, is watching the views from teh 80s be so radically different from today's writers, women or men. When Challace and Blade came out, you were not allowed to critize it, or you were "attacking women" or some such. I thought the whole "there was once this golden age where women ruled in peace and harmony" was bunk. It didn't match what we knew about the myths; it didn't match anthropology; it didn't match human nature (women are just as bitchy and controlling and war like as men in companies where they are on top). I wrote several undergraduate papers that attacked such things, only to get blasted by the grad students grading me. bleah.

But it's changing, fast. actually listening to your subject, and not objectifying him or her or "it" in the case of religion has changed everything. But all that took your academic ancestors lots of battles against idiots to get to. :-)

Sometimes young whippersnappers need things to be womynsplained to them, as it were. I don't know anyone who takes stuff like Chalice and the Blade seriously these days, outside of the sooper seekrit feminazi indoctrination camps of course.

Oh, and if you think trashing Chalice and the Blade is bad, try Courage to Heal. You're obviously just a shill for NAMBLA.

I don't think anyone does take it seriously now, no. Once someone actually had the balls to say "just cause we are pro women, doesn't mean we have to be STUPID about it", the gloves got taken off, and that whole movement was shown for what it was.

Courage to heal was one of the single most offensive books i have ever read skimmed. She's back with the "let's all be victims, it's easier that way" mentality. I mean, at least Dwarkin explained why everything in society was rape and how that changes, and makes it a challenge to change the world, not a right to say "I must have been raped, which explains why I am the way I am". And she has no real distinction between "I might be depressed" and I have real mental illness including clinical depression.

I take it back, it wasn't the most offensive. That right belongs to the chick from teh 80's who said that you thought yourself sick, and that if you accepted and loved various parts of yourself, you would get well. Gay men had AIDS, according to her, because they hated their sexual organs or some such. sighs......

It was also based on zero actual research, and recycled forgeries. Now that's scholarship.

Speaking of which, do we have an article on the goddess/ancient matriarchy nonsense? Neopaganism kind of touches on that, but it could be its own article.

oh, yes. we do indeed need that. :-) Cause it is quite different from neopaganism in its own way, especially with all the "research" nonsense.

As fascinating as this is, I really have to point out that I read that as "Dawkins" and did the absolute mother of all double takes.

I do that all the time. Dawkins wrote about rape???

Not that I'm aware of directly, but elevatorgate and all that.