They called it a lesbian paradise, the pioneering women who made their way to St. Augustine, Fla., in the 1970s to live together in cottages on the beach. Finding one another in the fever of the gay rights and women's liberation movements, they built a matriarchal community, where no men were allowed, where even a male infant brought by visitors was cause for debate.
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"To me, this is the real world," she said. "And it's a very peaceful world. I don't hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, 'It's another glorious day on the mountain.' Men are violent. The minute a man walks in the dynamics change immediately, so I choose not to be around those dynamics."
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"To me, this is the real world," she said. "And it's a very peaceful world. I don't hear anything except the leaves falling. I get up in the morning, I go out on my front deck and I dance and I say, 'It's another glorious day on the mountain.' Men are violent. The minute a man walks in the dynamics change immediately, so I choose not to be around those dynamics."
There are some general insights here. After all, people are more comfortable around "their own kind," however you define it. I find the broadly liberal presupposition that individual autonomy is the axiom from which moral action should start less and less persuasive as a description of how the modal human operates in the world. The communities and worldviews surveyed in the article above did give me some flashbacks to feminist science fiction written during the 1970s and 1980s, e.g., The Shore Of Women. I recall that Ecotopia, written in the 1970s, had a segregated "Soul City." The author, Ernest Callenbach, admitted that during that period black nationalism was ascendant and there was general skepticism of the viability of an integrated society.
Today this sort of racial and sexual segregation may seem simply an echo of radicalisms past, but we live in the age of the Great Sort. In a nation where 90% of Americans are religious 90% of the people I know are irreligious. Many conservatives have few liberal friends and many liberals have few conservative friends. The abortion issue is so polarized that sincere people on both sides view their antagonists as moral ogres. People may trumpet the benefits of diversity and argue for the importance of treating everyone as an individual, but there are classes of diversity which many explicitly condemn (e.g., white nationalism, religious radicalism), and stereotypes which are implicitly assumed (e.g., liberals are godless and amoral, conservatives are selfish and hypocritical).
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Legal segragation as we had in the old days is obvously a serious evil. On the other hand, selectivity in close personal association is a completely normal human behavior (it's partly how our ancestors maintained their tribes) and should not be painted with the same brush.
We are naturally more comfortable with people who are like us, and can 'let our guard down' a bit. This is a psychologically necessary state, otherwise we are at a constant stress level.
There is not necessarily a contradiction here. It is not unreasonable to have public sphere (business dealings etc) open to everyone, without intruding on private life preferences (dating, friends, etc).
I was very concerned about the Federal court decision about a year ago where a room-mate search site was prohibited from providing selection based on things like sexual orientation or gender. There is a big difference between renting or selling a house to someone (a straight business deal), and selecting a person to actually live with you, the difference between the public sphere and the personal. This is an extremely anti-freedom decision, a person certainly should have the ability to select such personal traits as orientation, gender, even religion or political stand. It simply is beyond the right of the government to go there.
I'm not entirely sure what to think. On the one hand, many of these women are clearly hiding from the outside society, and what they're doing is no healthier than some fundie whackadoodle hiding out in the sticks with a crate of MREs and a bomb shelter. On the other hand, I can certainly understand why they feel the way they do.
My first instinct is to call them cowards and an insult to the original aims of feminism. However, many of them no doubt have lingering PTSD-like issues from the incidents that sent them to the wilderness in the first place; it's easy to speculate on how they *should* live, but it's virtually impossible to speak with authority without a good understanding of their lives.
What's so unhealthy about living in the sticks? Haven't cities been a genetic black hole for a long time?
Jay, I assume you mean this decision - The issue was whether the service was just letting people post their information, or was itself serving as an "information provider" (and thus bringing it into the ambit of the Fair Housing Act). This was statutory interpretation, not constitutional law, so if you think the protections for internet services should be expanded, you could always try writing your Congressman.