I'll Be a Post-Feminist When It's Post-Patriarchy

As will this Philadelphia Inquirer writer...

but now that I have your attention, the real reason I'm posting (besides nostalgia for once having had a blog--but you probably don't want me to blog about my life right now...it would be sooooo mushy (he said as he listened to The English Congregation's apotheosis of bell-bottom mush, "Softly Whispering I Love You"))...

the real reason I'm posting is to put something out there that will be of interest to Goddess-geeks (and probably only G-gs): a debunking-the-debunkers article from Max Dashu's Suppressed Histories Archive confronting one little (but interesting) corner of the Was There or Wasn't There an Ancient Goddess Religion debate. (My recent theme of skepticism and counter-skepticism owes, I guess, to a class I'm teaching now in which critical thinking plays a central role; we're reading a book by Michael Shermer, etc.)

I do respect, to a point, the scholarship of Cynthia Eller, the focus of the article I've linked to, but have also, as Dashu does, found it to be of a piece with a rather historically naive, ideologically-driven strain of "feminism" that preoccupies itself with the foibles of earlier feminist writers, seeking to redress allegedly sloppy thought and theory. Which would be fine...if one didn't, from the pulpit of reason, make even worse mistakes that served one's own narrow agenda.

I'll take Susan Griffin over Judith Butler any day; it's sort of analogous to the way one wag compared Hemingway and Burroughs. Burroughs's fiction changed the way we see the world; Hemingway's changed the way we see Pamplona. Griffin, for me anyway, changed the world, while Butler very persuasively laid out a revolutionary new theory that I first read in the eighteenth-century writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.