I got about sixty or eighty pages in before I misplaced it, and though I could buy another copy, I would miss the notes I took in the margin and so have been hoping it will turn up. I must have done something very odd with it; I've spent a non-negligible amount of time looking for it on several occasions.

However, Eisler was not terribly prone to use the term "patriarchy" herself, at least when she wrote The Chalice and the Blade. Consequently, I had also purchased The Creation of the Patriarchy by Lerner, who does like the term, but alas, I had the two together and misplaced both, and anyway, I want Eisler to have the first word.

It's simply not possible for the content of either of those books to be terribly relevant to my main point here, however.

Suppose we agree, "Bipsy is bad--we must get rid of bipsy!", and you say "Fwee is the cause of bipsy, so we must get rid of fwee!" Suppose also there is a study showing that while France and Germany have the same fwee, they have 40x different levels of bipsy. Rather than figuring out how to reduce fwee in France or in Germany, I'm first just going to move to the one that already has low bipsy, thank you! Then, after reveling in the 40x reduction in bipsy, I might investigate whether changing fwee reduces bipsy even further. I am certainly not going to accept your claim that the entire problem is caused by fwee, however.

Although we also disagree about matters of human psychology when it comes to cultural change, this logical point is so basic that there's no point talking about anything else.

It's like trying to talk about climate change, except you don't think the sun warms the planet, only CO2.

You talk about sociological evidence, and yet comparative anthropology is one of the best ways to get insight into societies and you were trying to tell me it was irrelevant!

The problem with this conversation hasn't been that I haven't learned enough. You haven't even tried to test my knowledge.

I'm perfectly happy to have a conversation about the downsides of dominator hierarchies, but not if we're going to ignore the profoundly different impacts of different styles of domination, or if we blind ourselves to the ways in which even Enlightenment ideals were based in large part around breaking the hierarchy in many aspects of life. If you want to get into particularly fine details, I might have to pause until I finally find, or re-order, and read all of The Chalice and the Blade.

I'm also happy to discuss sociological evidence including the limitations in study design. If there's one thing I am legitimately an expert on, it is the design and interpretation of research--so I find this quite delightful. But, you know, I want to get the factors of a thousand sorted first, understand those in at least a superficial way, so while trying to eke out another 35% we don't accidentally get 100x worse instead?

I don't object because any of this stuff hurts my feelings. It doesn't. I object because it's not correct. If you tell me mustard is made from mushroom spores, or that the hottest fire is purple, or that most men in the U.S. don't even consider women to be people let alone equal, or that all sedimentary rock is over a billion years old, none of that will hurt my feelings. But I will object because it's not correct.

Also, because I don't want misinformed people to get poisoned by mushrooms etc. etc..