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Showing posts from April, 2024

Were the matriarchalists right all along? A review of Heide Gottner-Abendroth's "Matriarchal Societies"

     In 2012, German author Heide Gottner-Abendroth quietly and with little fanfare reached a personal landmark. After decades of writing and deep analysis of historical and anthropological resources, all of which had failed peer review by the conventional, self-appointed Academic Expert Community, she finally managed to inch her magnum opus, a hefty tome titled Matriarchal Societies, though the agonizing peer-review process, and into mainstream publication. This was a tremendous shock at the time, given the long-standing academic bigotry against anything to with the concept of matriarchy, and even more shocking given that the general consensus in 2012-era academia was that matriarchal theory was dead, 1980s-1990s era sociobiology had irrevocably won the debate, and only a few crazy boomer New Age grandmas still paid attention to "all that Marija Gimbutas crap from the 70s".     Fast forward to 2024, and a quiet revolution is in the process. Last year saw the highest amount o

The maladaptive western phenomenon of downplaying female pleasure

     Some years back I was introduced to a "book" (I use that term only because the pages were too rough to serve as effective toilet paper) called The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution written by an alleged "feminist", "biologist" and "philosopher" (again, the terms are used very loosely here) named Elizabeth Lloyd in 2005. The central thesis of this "book" is that scientists for the past century (or longer) have given undue weight to the phenomenon of female sexual pleasure and orgasm in particular, enshrining its importance both biologically and culturally, when in fact it deserves neither. To Lloyd, only a crazy, right-wing, anti-feminist misogynist would regard the female orgasm as having any purpose whatsoever, whether evolutionarily adaptive or spiritually liberating. The fact that scientists have proposed various adaptive functions for the female orgasm (from assisting sperm transport to facilitating sl