The Bilitis Option

My lesbian aunt lived in one such community in Arizona (I believe she still does, but spends half of each year in Seattle). When my parents went to visit here, her brother, my father, was not allowed in the community, IIRC, so they had to meet with her and her partner (now deceased) elsewhere.

What total and utter bullshit. I can't think of a more perfect example of misanthropy. It's not simply misandry - i.e., hatred of males. It's misanthropy, hatred of humans and normal human nature and culture. I wouldn't be surprised to find demonic spirits involved.

Top Ten Signs of Stringency Among the All-Girl Alapine Apparat Chicks of Alabama

They're so stringent in their communysm, I hear, they won't even serve Cornish gay men - even free-range ones - at dinner.

They're so stringent they had to purge their CD collective of not just male artists, but all albums by CeCe Peniston.

They're so stringent they have a home workshop to modify their battery-powered "toys" from bullet shape and cylindrical to pear shape and plaid-clad.

They're so stringent they refuse to watch not only the men's sports in the Olympics - but all women's events as well, save for diving.

They're so extreme they hate warm weather, because of the lack of opportunities to break out their muffs.

They're so stringent their sectarian sex manual is tilted against onanists under the maxim "Handy is dandy, but licker is quicker."

They're so stringent they banned naming their male cats in the vein of "Mr. Whiskers" - before they had them all drowned as class enemies under the agitprop "The only good male pussy is a contradiction in terms."

They're so stringent they renamed their favorite English dessert Spotted Vic - after the (female) queen, not the actor Tayback or the eponymous Trader.

They're so stringent they developed their own topical pain cream, Benjamina Les, the better to avoid the taint of Ben Gay (not that there's anything rub with that...)

They're so stringent they won't even consider professional flooring, as the prospect of watching carpet laid by men would be ghastly...

Yes, but. Can't you see a similarity with some of the nuttest varieties of the Benedict Option?

I read the article, and your reaction seems pretty defensive, Rod. Why should you care how a group of elderly women, who aren't bothering you, choose to live their lives? Besides, as a straight man in his early 40s, you really don't appreciate what it must have been like to be gay in the 1950s and 1960s. Losing jobs, shock treatments, arrests--lots of fun stuff.
If you posted this to make the point that men and women need each other, etc., you missed. It just comes off like you're making fun of a group of old women because you don't like how they live.

When it comes to Lesbian seperatism, the Aristasians in England are much more interesting. They idealize feminity and aristocracy and believe, rightly, that the 1960s were the end of Western Civilization.

Modern society they call "The Pit." Said Miss Martindale, their foundress, "What I hate, personally, about the Pit, is the Pit tries to destroy everything of beauty, everything of innocence. Every positive aspect of the human psyche is crushed, distorted, ridiculed, perverted, and damned by the Pit."

I anticipated the Mount Athos comment, and Daniel's comment, and would refer you back to my original post. I don't find anything wrong in principle with same-gender communes or institutions, if the gender-segregation is in service of a noble or worthy goal. I understand why women would self-segregate in a convent, and men in a monastery: pursuing a life of prayer and asceticism in a community is infinitely easier without the temptation to sex, and the children that it inevitably produces. I understand all-girl schools and all-boy schools. And so forth.

Similarly, I understand communes of Amish, or vegetarians, who separate so they can pursue a religious or ethical lifestyle in community.

What sets these lesbian separatists apart, it seems to me, is that they make as the basis for their separatism a pathological fear and loathing of masculinity, and even, as the article makes clear, heterosexuality. Freaking out because a male baby is on the premises? That's just ... bizarre

Well serve me up a hot steaming cup of who gives a damn! Anyone who wants to establish their own "reservation" has my blessing! One can only hope that the Bureau of Lesbian Affairs treats them as fairly as the Bureau of Indian Affairs has treated the Indians. Bon chance ladies.....err....women.....err....womyn

My best to Jenny Garp!

Re: Mount Athos:
Female domestic animals are also forbidden, with the exception of cats, which keep down the rodent population, and chickens, which lay eggs that provide the fresh egg yolk needed for the paint used in iconography.

So when a group of radical lesbians practice gender separatism, it is strange and sad, but when a group of Orthodox monks practice gender separatism, it is a holy practice.

Okay, whatevs, both groups sound kind of wacky if you ask me.

They don't want you on their land.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you don't want them to exist at all, right? So who's the bigger meanie?

The "womyn's" groups I have been familiar with are plain nucking futz.
(excuse the term, but it is accurate)

I have been a defender of various GLBT communities, but these folks are hateful and as was said above, utterly misanthropistic.

Here is one of the womyns movement leading academics and her views on transgendered women (something alluded to in the above story...)
http://www.amazon.com/Transsexual-Empire-Making-She-Male-Athene/dp/0807762725

The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male (Athene Series) (Paperback)
by Janice G. Raymond (Author)

According to one reviewer:

Would you believe transsexuals are an insidious male plot to undermine the women's movement? So says Janice Raymond, lesbian, feminist, and alleged scholar--who originally wrote this scathing condemnation of transsexuals in as her doctoral thesis. If her professors were addled enough to accept this 200 plus-page diatribe as scholarship, I consider myself fortunate not to have attended the same university as she.

To paraphrase a statement I remember from Jean-Paul Satre's "Anti-Semite and Jew", all bigotry has a grain of truth to it--and that's what makes it dangerous. Bigots take a minor fact and blow it out of proportion, and that is precisely what Raymond does throughout her book. She contends, for example, that male-to-female transsexuals symbolically rape women's bodies by attempting to acquire one for themselves. There is, in fairness to Raymond, a condition which transsexual therapist Anne Lawrence calls "autogynephilia"--people with this condition are aroused by the change itself. But on further examination, this argument falls apart. Post-op transsexuals find themselves as much in danger of ACTUALLY BEING raped as any biological woman--why would transsexuals willingly risk being the victims of real rape merely to degrade women? And what of those who are not aroused by women's bodies at all, but are attracted to MEN? Raymond, as usual, is blind to these Grand Canyon-size holes in her logic.

What's the origin of the ban on female animals at Mount Athos? That is unknown in Western (and most other Eastern, from what I understand) monasteries and does strike me as truly irrational.

Re: What's the origin of the ban on female animals at Mount Athos?

I'm not sure we want to know.
That said, Mt athos has been home to many truly wise and saintly monks, including some of the Orthodox greats. But at the same time there has always been an undercurrent of homosexual scandal about the place, as you would expect of any institution that is fiercely all-male. They say that Rasputin (a purely heterosexual roué) visited and came away shocked.

Rod, as a sister in Christ who happens to be a lesbian it pains me to note how often you go out of your way to malign people in the gay community.

Not all, or even most, lesbians are gender separatists. Your term "penis haters" is offensive and uncalled-for.

There are extremists and crackpots in every community -- including the gay community; including the Christian conservative community. The lesbians you describe are no more like my friends than a Klan member is representative of a Southern conservative or Rasputin is representative of Eastern Orthodoxy.

I read your blog often -- I agree with a lot of your "crunchy" commentary, and even when I don't agree with what you have to say I keep reading, because reading opposing points of view is what thinking people do. But when it comes to what a friend of mine calls The Troubles, I have to say I find your posts becoming increasingly petty and mean.

What I don't get about lesbians is if they hate men so much, why do they try to act, dress, and look like men??

Nothing like taking a couple of sentences from the article out of context and twisting their meaning for your own divisiveness. You see, I actually read the entire article, and you couldn't be more wrong. These women are living life on their own terms, which honestly, I find admirable. And frankly, when you call people "damaged" because they choose to live a life different from your own, it's no wonder they want to get as far away from you as possible.

My mother and step-mother are lesbians of assimilationist sort, but I did know a few people who went to extremes in the early 1980s, when this sort of thing was more common (still not very common, but people in the media always like the wack-jobs), and agree that this is pretty silly.

On the other hand, all of the women I knew who participated in this particular stream of lesbian seperatism had pretty horrific histories with men. Most of them had been raped or abused by male partners. There are probably plenty of exceptions, but unlike men cloistering themselves to avoid the sexual attractions of women (and there's plenty of misogyny in early Catholic monastic literature) - women who never did them any harm other than by looking cute and thus threatening their chastity, my observation is that the craziest and most extreme species of lesbianism grew out of a society that did not permit lesbianism - and that enforced that lack of permission with rape and beatings. It is perhaps not that hard for most people to imagine that women who were unaware of lesbianism even as a option in the 1960s and 1970s often married, and felt that their lack of desire and their relationship limitations were fundamentally their fault. And often, they were told so - beaten by husbands for not being sexually responsive and raped by husbands or men infuriated by the fact that they could not fully respond to them.

By the time I was in college, such models (and thank G-d the habit of calling oneself a "womyn") had mostly passed, but again, the most passionate and extremely seperatist lesbians I knew were often the ones with the most reasons to be afraid of men. So is the problem that these women are wack jobs? Or could the problem be that the society that I think many here would prefer - without a public gay life, without formalized gay partnerships - drives some women into extreme solutions, simply because there were no more moderate ones.

I pity those who lose their grandsons and sons - but to an extent, I think the apocalyptic fear of men comes from a reality that is a lot more uncomfortable to look at seriously, than it is to mock the weird old lesbian seperatists.

Sharon

The Mt. Athos men are Orthodox monks who won't even allow female animals, much less female visitors. (Not even babies, I guess.)

It's a tradition that goes back centuries. The idea is to exalt the Virgin Mary above all other women.

I think Rod's point isn't to bad mouth separate communities, but to point out the dangers of extreme separation. He's mentioned this in reference to some kookier Christian experiments, as well.

As I guess I'll have to say over and over again, I in no way want to deny these women/womyn/wimmen/wymyn the opportunity to self-segregate. But I don't feel obliged to approve of it, or even to take a benign view of it. As you all know, I generally approve of people who form intentional communities to live out some ideal -- but everything turns on the ideal, doesn't it? Those separatist lesbians are only hurting themselves, as far as I can tell, but still, the idea of forming a separate community based on a total rejection of men strikes me as deeply weird and unhealthy (this, as opposed to, say, a lesbian commune where gay women wanted to live around other gay women, but who didn't organize themselves around what seems like a pathological fear and loathing of men).

And yes, if there was a male commune built around the idea that girls are yucky, I'd find that very strange too.

"But I don't feel obliged to approve of it, or even to take a benign view of it. "

No Rod, no one suggests you are in any way obliged to approve of it. And neither are they obliged to approve of you - or even to take a benign view of you.

This is one of those situations where I can hear my grandmas saying "If you can't find anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

There is much wisdom in that.

Or could the problem be that the society that I think many here would prefer - without a public gay life, without formalized gay partnerships - drives some women into extreme solutions, simply because there were no more moderate ones.

Ouch.

That is something worth considering, since violence against lesbians still keeps coming up...

http://newsdurhamregion.com/news/article/112449

"OSHAWA -- Anji Dimitriou has a black eye days after she was attacked in front her children’s school. She says her vision is still blurry and the shock is still sinking in."
More to follow...

Rod has an unfortunate habit of finding silly, strange or stupid GLBT people to poke fun at, and infer they are threatening (presumably)male dominated Christian society. Sometimes, in truth, they really are easy to mock. I have done so myself. He is never really concerned with the GLBT people who may have said or done strange things because of cr@p like this above.

What a stupid, self-serving observation. Let me tell you how this works. Though I may appear to you to have god-like powers of observation, in fact my purview is limited. I write about things that I read about in the newspaper or on blogs I routinely see. Do you really think I sought out the lesbian separatists story? No, it came to me as the lead cover story in one section of the Sunday New York Times. Unlike you, apparently, I don't make a habit of visiting gaysbeingbeatup.com, so I simply don't see the same stories you do. Celebrate diversity, baby.

You're acting like a 13 year old adolescent: angry because if straight society noticed this stuff, but angry if straight society *didn't* notice this stuff.

So, will homosexuals be welcome at the never-to-exist Benedictine community of your fantasies, Rod? Or are you just as exclusionary as they are?

Is there any place at all for gay people in your ideal world, "God's creatures too" as I'd call them if I believed in God, or would you prefer to erase them from existence?

For the record, I'm not the same person as "Z"-- I'm lower-case.

What a stupid, self-serving observation.

For noting that your portrayal of GLBT peoples is...wait for it...self serving? Sauce for the goose, Mr Dreyer...

You portray gays as a threat to your value system. You do it rather frequently, and presumably to generate the very controversy you seem to relish. You run breathless stories of gays acting foolishly, but you do not run stories of gays acting kindly, wisely, with restraint or anything else that may reflect well on GLBT people. I note that you comment on gays who threaten you, or vandalize religious buildings. You do not seem concerned that it is generally GLBT people who are harmed through bigotry, rather than the reverse. I conclude that facts which do not conform to your "narrative" of society being threatened by people like me are to be avoided.

That is why you are not to be taken seriously, and why I laugh at you.

Though I may appear to you to have god-like powers of observation, in fact my purview is limited.

You are free to blog about what you want, of course. I prefer defense issues in general, but arguments there are arcane if they even happen at all. If you want to present a one sided view of people like me, then expect some push-back.

And that is how that works.

Do you really think I sought out the lesbian separatists story? No, it came to me as the lead cover story in one section of the Sunday New York Times.

And they held a gun to your head and made you keep finding all these "gay" subjects to write about?

Bwa ha ha ha ha ha!!!

Unlike you, apparently, I don't make a habit of visiting gaysbeingbeatup.com, so I simply don't see the same stories you do. Celebrate diversity, baby.

The fact that you even make light of that tells me volumes about you.

You don't like that word that starts with a "B", but if the shoe fits...

In any event, I merely googled "lesbian beaten"...and voila!

A couple of stories of routine domestic violence between couples, and a slew of recent stories of lesbians being assaulted by men.

Real funny, huh?

I'm not sure if I will bother coming back for some time, in any event. You seem like a bit of a nasty sort sometimes, and debating whether Admiral Scheer really screwed up at the Battle of Jutland is far more entertaining.