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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