The Game of Life
Response to Stefania Franchini’s Chess Applied to Feminism
June 2013
Critical notes on Chess applied to feminism - The importance of being the Queen by Stefania Franchini.
I found this document on Academia, and I was struck not only by its bold thesis, but by its aggressive tone and by the fact that its popularity indicated that it had struck a chord. So I read closely and made some critical comments, which I duly sent to the author.
‘In common sense, feminism is all about a sort of supremacy of women above men: in fact, that definition is not really correct because the concept of “feminism” is referred not to supremacy, but a real equality of genders.’
I would wholeheartedly support this equality as against supremacy. But as I proceeded to read the paper, the argument took a very different turn concerning the relationship between chess and feminism.
Franchini recognises that the King is absolutely the key-piece of the game: when the king is gone, the game is over. She notes, however, that the ‘King has a very limited power’: its moves are limited (one square in any direction) and it always stands in need of protection. ‘Indeed, the Queen is the most powerful piece in Chess game’: the Queen has the most complete movement in the game and, in fact, ‘has the master role in King’s protection task.’ ‘The Queen could be used as defense or as attack.’ The author’s criticism is that the power of the Queen is wasted in this defense role, its moves ‘localized’ in order to protect the King.
The author now establishes her thesis: She holds that women are as the Queen in the game of chess, affirming that the majority of women have a ‘real potential’ that is mostly ‘wasted because of a man’: ‘I’m sure you know almost one case of a woman grounded at home, taking care of family and house, while the man builds up a career.’ Deeming this a waste of a woman’s potential, the author proceeds to develop the ‘attack’ task of the Queen, which she refers to as feminism.
I didn’t care for the argument, and I found its apparent popularity somewhat worrying. I think the direction it takes is misguided, and takes us down the cul-de-sac of endless sex wars.
Here is what I wrote to the author in response:
I found your piece on chess and feminism intriguing, thought-provoking and, in some respects, a little worrying. I’ve been having a little think about it, jotting a few comments along the way. As anyone who plays chess would ask, the key question is this: what is the end-game?
I have in my own work written about the way that women have been undervalued and subjugated throughout history and have presented that view in a few papers, and so am broadly in agreement with the general thesis of valuing and realising the potential of women. I do indeed support equality of the genders as against the supremacy of one over the other. But I would strongly argue that splitting male and female, for however legitimate a reason, is a cul-de-sac which dooms us to permanent war. A problem needs to be solved, not evaded or restated in another form. The problem of socially and historically specific relations of domination and subordination – call it patriarchy – can only be solved socially and historically by changing these social relations, not by abandoning relationship as such.
I wonder what the alternative game being proposed here would look like. I wonder if a real change in the way of life is being advocated here, or whether it is just the same civilisation only with women now occupying the superior position that is being proposed. Which itself begs some difficult questions. Who are these women who will be on the ‘attack’ and on top? All women? Or certain women, the rich and powerful, the educated and well-connected, dominating other women? Once we embrace a society of top and bottom, these hierarchies are inevitable – women over men, some women over other women – pretty much the reverse of the society we have now (men over women, some men over other men). I argue we need a complete transformation that takes us beyond such antagonistic relations.
The ideal of a career and the references to power in this article seem to indicate that the game of exploitation and domination is not being abandoned at all; it’s just the same game, only with women coming to occupy the leading places. This ‘attack’ role of female power doesn’t involve a change at all, it merely asserts the same relations of superordination and subordination, and produces the same iniquitous distribution of power, resources, life opportunities. It’s the same game, only with the pieces rearranged according to new assertions of power.
If this is the case, then there is a clear danger that the ‘attack’ model will reproduce the conflictive model that has prevailed in Western societies for centuries. Instead of overcoming the alienating separations and dualisms that have characterised patriarchal society, there is a danger of simply inverting them. Replacing a male chauvinism with a female chauvinism achieves nothing, it simply reproduces the same old antagonism in another form.
A genuine harmony overcomes separation and antagonism between the sexes with a genuine unity. For female to abandon male, and vice versa, is not an emancipation, it’s a cul-de-sac that leave us all short of a complete fulfilment. We need each other in order to be ourselves. It is right to press the question about the subordination of women, and it is right to ask questions of the potential of women and how that potential is wasted. But that iniquity and waste affects both men and women since the missing feminine is also the missing masculine. If we lose access to the one, we distort the character of the other. That applies to any society based on relations of domination and subordination. The solution is all about achieving a genuine harmony in relation.
Impatience on the part of feminists is understandable. As awareness of the imbalance of the masculine and the feminine has increased, so too has the need to resolve the problem. But to rush to resolution here risks short-circuiting the whole process of achieving balance. To go on the ‘attack’ is to resort to a brisk and blunt masculine solution to the problem of the missing feminine, and it risks self-destructing for reasons given above.
It isn’t surprising that millennia of female subordination should issue in an extreme enmity that would induce women to abandon the entire game. But be careful of what you wish for. Read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personnae. She makes it clear that civilisation has served women well in achieving a certain liberation from biological determinism and natural necessity as well as from the onerous burden of physical labour. Many feminists refer generally to patriarchy, and this accusation is casually repeated. Paglia gives such words short shrift, referring to civilisation as a woman’s best friend.
Abandoning a civilisation rigged against women is one thing, it begs the question of what game you are embracing in its place. Some feminists yearn for the lost matriarchy of the Old Europe. For the likes of archaeologist Marija Gimbutas and others, the matriarchies of Old Europe were overthrown by Indo-European warriors from the East, the so-called Kurgan waves. Others dismiss that view for its suggestions of a naturalism or biological essentialism. I want to leave those criticisms aside here in order to focus on the analogy to chess. Chess, of course, is a military-feudal-hierarchical game appropriate for the kinds of societies that arose after the demise of the Old Goddess culture. I’m not sure if there is much value in nostalgia here. Gimbutas’ thesis is well supported, she was an excellent and careful archaeologist. And her thesis works heuristically too as the kind of society we would wish to live in and work to bring about. That is how I have read Gimbutas’ work. Signs Out of Time is a documentary by Starhawk and Donna Read on Gimbutas, and her work on the Neolithic cultures of Old Europe (6500-3500BCE) which reveals evidence that Europe’s origins lay in a cooperative, peaceful, woman-honouring, Goddess-worshipping, egalitarian culture, civilizations that existed for thousands of years without war. I’d strongly recommend watching this video and investigating the work of Gimbutas (and Starhawk) further.
(http://www.cultureunplugged.com/documentary/watch-online/play/50350/Signs-Out-of-Time---The-Story-of-Archaeologist-Marija-Gimbutas)
The likes of Paglia have no time for such notions. For her, we know that nature can be daimonic for women, individual women being subordinated to the biological imperatives of the species. So there is no going back. And that is why feminists display a hostility towards notions of nature as female and the idea of essential qualities.
I’ll leave those issues to one side – I’m inclined to believe Gimbutas - and instead focus on the analogy with chess. In my view, framing power and potential in terms of chess takes us in the wrong direction entirely, diverting us away from the cooperative, peaceful, egalitarian and life-affirming view into the old hierarchical, competitive and sterile channels.
So I would suggest that it is merely the same game that is being proposed here, only without men. It has nothing to do with the peaceful, egalitarian society that unites the sexes and takes us beyond antagonism. The reference to a ‘career’ suggests the same game, only with women occupying the leading positions.
What about the pawns? Do they not matter, given their deficiency in power? Are we talking about a moral position that covers all, or merely the interests of the strongest? All women cannot be Queens. We should be aiming for a society in which all powers are pooled and are complementary so as to form a greater whole? What defines a moral position is its universality, i.e. it applies to all equally on account of their human dignity. Power as strength does not constitute a morality.
You have to be clear whether the feminism you aspire to is a genuine and liberatory transformation of interpersonal relations – one that changes the current way of life in favour of all equally - or whether it is merely a passive reflection of changes that are already underway within existing and continuing social relations (i.e there is more money in the exploitation of soft skills which are typically feminine qualities).
One of my favourite thinkers is the American Lewis Mumford. In The Transformations of Man, which he wrote half a century ago (1957), he made this argument.
“When in modern times women claimed the right to take part in all the occupations men practised, they forgot to ask how far these occupations were self-justifying, or what modifications might be made in their compulsive rituals to fit them more closely to the central needs of life. Instead of restoring men to a whole life that fully included woman's own special interests, love, sex, human nurture, the leaders of feminism were too easily content with the half-life men had allotted to themselves.” (Mumford 1957 ch 3).
In other words, in fighting a male versus female war, there is a danger in remaining captive within the same old alienating system. And that alienation will be expressed in terms of the reproduction of domination and subordination within an all-female society. A genuine emancipation is not in women coming to ape men in establishing new iniquities and hierarchies but in transforming the entire system which alienates us all from our natures and distributes life opportunities so iniquitously that we all fall far short of our potentialities. What value is a career if it condemns women to the half-life that men have been suffering all these years?
It is possible that we are taking plenty for granted. The real advances that many groups have made within existing culture – including women – can become so familiar that we fail to recognize how great the value of the accumulated experience and knowledge is and how greater it could feasibly be. The result is that some come to be so impatient for emancipation as to be readily prepared to dispense with what has been achieved so uncompromisingly. For what? There is no certainty that these achievements can be so easily taken over into another game. Breaking up the patterns and relations in an existing game can destroy precious cultural resources that have taken centuries to evolve. And all at a time when real progress is attainable and underway.
I’m not arguing a conservative thesis here, but arguing that any future alternative that is viable must be immanent in an existing society, an ideal that is present within the real. It is an old radical delusion to believe that once the form and content of an old culture have been thrown overboard, a new and better, ready-made culture is always available, taking its place instantaneously. Where is this alternative game? The only alternative discernible at present is contained as a suppressed but evolving potentiality within the current social reality.
In answering the question, one can refer to biology and culture. If we are talking evolutionary biology, there is no purpose to life other than staying in the game and surviving as a species. The lives of both men and women are sacrificed to the biological imperatives of the species as a whole, women more than men. If we are talking culture beyond biology, then there is no purpose-oriented pre-determinism which ensures that a viable, sustainable society is always available. We, as creative, moral agents, bear the burden of responsibility for preserving our culture from both rigidity and sterility on the one hand and erroneous developments and paths on the other.
I see little of value, biological or cultural, in separation and antagonism. The image of Indra's Net contained in Mahayana Buddhism is more appropriate. This is a conception in which everything is reflected in everything else. Mutuality or interdependence is an alternative way of life that we be well worth embracing as an alternative to a game based upon relations of superordination and subordination. In this concept, everything in the universe is seen to belong to a single, interconnected whole. Indra's Net is a metaphor for a world of connectedness, of interacting, interdependent entities, whether of males and females, the economic or political system, or other social arrangements, an ecosystem, a galaxy. The parts are all interdependent within each entity, with their reciprocal interactions keeping the whole universe functioning. Each part and each entity contains the whole, is the whole, and nothing and no-one can survive apart from the whole. No part and no entity is unconnected to, unaffected by, all the others. The relation is reciprocal and harmonious. There are no discrete parts and entities. It is a genuine harmony, with no need for one part to abandon the net. There is no world outside of Indra’s Net.
So I ask: in abandoning chess, are you proposing to abandon games altogether?
There are dangers here. Contemporary neuro-biology is making clear the extent to which the creative processes that occur within the minds of human beings, and human beings only, are a game. Any sense of creative becoming, for male or for female, at a collective, social level, has to recognise the creative aspects of human nature. Friedrich Schiller was right when he said that man is only completely human when he plays. The same also applies to woman. In Laws of the Game, Manfred Eigen and Ruthild Winkler show how the creative principle emerges from the interaction and integration of very many single systemic components, each following the rules of the game whose "pregiven" part is wondrous and not completely comprehensible.
I would be careful about drawing any hasty conclusions about chess as a game. The number of possible moves may not be infinite but they are beyond ordinary comprehension. If the Queen really is so powerful, she does not need to abandon the game at all – she could win within the existing rules. That she doesn’t win and dominate would seem to indicate that the issue is not so easy as determining quantities of power. Power is held only in relation. If the King alone lacks power, the same applies to the Queen. To reject the hierarchical functionalism of a game like chess, and a society that mirrors such a game, is fine. My sympathies lie with the poor pawns, history’s foot soldiers, always sacrificed to the purposes and designs of rulers. But any alternative game that is proposed must also be functional in some way. So what are the rules of the game? Can we really envisage a society composed solely of Queens? It’s the distribution and balance of powers that counts, with all subordinate to the common good that enhances the freedom of all equally, enhancing the creative powers that tie the world together.
It’s worth bearing in mind the words of the great mathematician John von Neumann. Fellow mathematician Jacob Bronowski asked von Neumann about his Theory of Games. 'You mean, the theory of games like chess.' 'No, no,' Neumann objected. 'Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now real games are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do. And that is what games are about in my theory.'
Well, chess is a well-defined form of computation that distributes powers and rewards in an iniquitous way. You are right to note the power of the Queen. But is it just power you are worshipping? What about the powerless, the poor pawns in the front rank? Thrasymachus asserted that justice is the interests of the strongest. Plato showed that this is not justice at all. The worship of power qua power entails no moral position at all. Justice is the social virtue par excellence, and applies to all equally, regardless of money, power, class and rank. What about justice for all the pieces? How do all relate to the end game? What is the common good?
And that is how I read games theory. John von Neumann had understood that real-life situations are different from computer situations, lacking the precise solutions that chess or engineering calculations have. John von Neumann made the distinction between short-term tactical thinking and grand, long-term strategic thinking. Whilst tactics can be calculated exactly, strategies cannot. In the his Silliman Lectures of 1956, von Neumann sees the brain as having a language in which the activities of the various parts of the brain are interlocked so that we devise a plan, a procedure, as a grand overall way of life. Call it a new game. In philosophy, we call it a system of values, one that embraces all equally, regardless of power and position, class, race and ethnicity, sex and gender. It is not only women who crave freedom and justice in the rigged game of the present world, but men too. Because it is not just ‘men’ who are on top, it is some men – and some women too.
Are you abandoning chess as the well-defined computation described by von Neumann, the hierarchical functionalism arranged around sexual and class domination and exploitation? I would be in agreement with this aim. Or are you proposing the same hierarchically ordered world, only with women on top? You are drawn to the power of the Queen and refer to a career. That sounds like capitalism as a girl’s best friend. But that’s not an alternative at all; it’s the same game of domination and exploitation, only this time with women on top.
If that sounds like an alluring proposition, given the way that the capital system in its current form is valuing female ‘soft skills’, just remember Max Weber’s words that the whole bureaucratic, rationalised, instrumentalised world of the capital system operates ‘without regard for persons’. Male or female, the system doesn’t care from whom the surplus value is extracted, so long as it is extracted and appropriated. Capital has the existential significance, the human creators, both male and female, are mere appendages. A career is simply a lesser freedom within a greater, systemic bondage.
Instead of a question as to who should be on top, I’d like to see this as a question against all ideas of having a top and a bottom.
But are you playing a game in von Neumann’s real life sense, bluffing, practising little tactics of deception, of challenging others to guess what you are going to think and do? It’s a dangerous game. What alternative do you have if, as will happen sooner or later, your bluff is called? I say we join together and embrace a system of values that ensures that the freedom of each is conditional upon the freedom of all.
In Nietzsche in Turin (1997), Lesley Chamberlain describes Nietzsche as playing a 'fantastic' game with the world. Nietzsche was 'Godless, jobless, wifeless, homeless', et cetera, but yet still felt that he was in control (1997: 137). That sense of power and control was the neurosis of a nothing and a nobody. Nietzsche focused very singularly on his own body and his own words as he imagined his own greatness. He thought that he had acquired a powerful means with which to protect himself from the world. He was deluded. Nietzsche’s freedom was an illusion. You cannot abandon a game you do not like, you have to join with others to change it from within. Nietzsche’s fantasy world was an illusory liberation.
The visionary, liberatory impulse is the heart of the matter. That impulse is certainly our best hope for a sane, humanitarian politics, but the task is to establish the most durable base on which to build communities. That must rest on a genuine unity of male and female. This makes the common life an advance to an alternative future and not merely a flight from a deficient present.
At risk of sounding overly optimistic, the campaign for sexual equality is succeeding and is uprooting the institutionalized oppression of women in society. There is no need to go to extremes, distorting male-female relations by reference to the exception rather than to the norm.
Certainly, research does show that despite advances, male bias still exists in key professions, political roles, wage structures, social attitudes, etc. But I would caution against the Andrea Dworkin line as divisive and self-destructive. The evidence of advance – however slow - remains and the trends are all in the right direction. To pursue Dworkin down a cul-de-sac at this point would be the height of folly and could risk short-circuiting the whole process.
To suggest that the whole game is rigged and ought to be abandoned wholesale is most certainly to take the Dworkin line that claims that all society, all heterosexual relationships, even language itself, rests on a patriarchal structure. I say pause and think before going down that road. Dworkin is far too negative and one-sided. In Dworkin’s view, ‘heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.' ('The Rape Atrocity and the Boy Next Door', Speech, 1975). In this view, everything that men do is phallic - driven by masculine need to dominate woman and render her passive and submissive. But this is demonology, not sexology. In this view, there is no difference at all between rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence and (patriarchal) society's conventions of romantic love and gender roles – it all rests on relations of domination and subordination. In this reading, men dominate women symbolically and literally. Think. Does that make sense of all male-female relations? Most? Or just some? I never trust an argument that sets alternatives at extremes. It presents us with a choice between false positions that do damage to reality and real people.
The problem is that Dworkin's demonology of maleness as sexually aggressive by definition not only separates men and women, but alienates those who are sympathetic to the cause – yes, there are heterosexual men who fully support women’s rights, also gay men, and also heterosexual women who want not just sexual equality but a positive expression of female sexuality in relation to men.
There is nothing to be gained and everything to be lost by distorting sexuality, cherry-picking data, exaggerating certain facts, ignoring trends and tendencies, suppressing other views and, frankly, high-jacking the equality movement just as it is poised to succeed. The danger is that it plays into the hands of real misogynists, sexists, patriarchs and reactionaries who want to portray feminists as an extremist 'lunatic fringe'. It’s only a short step from seeing the male and female sexes as so fundamentally incompatible that they cannot play the same game to arguing that they cannot even occupy the same country.
To abandon the game as irrevocably rigged in favour of men against women leaves no alternative but Dworkin's advocacy of a lesbian separatist, independent, women-only state with its own militia. 'Women need land and guns'. Is that the alternative game? Land and guns? That sounds like the Kurgen waves Gimbutas described as overthrowing the peaceful, egalitarian communities of the Old Europe. Is that really what women want? Their complaint is merely that the men have got what they want, not that present relations are iniquitous and wrong? We can do better than this. This is not a view that represents women in general. Dworkin speaks for a minority of women, not a majority. Most women argue for balance.
I would strongly argue that ‘land and guns’ isn’t a different game at all, it’s the same possessive, exploitative, hierarchical game based upon conflictual relations.
I make this point just to make it clear that relations of domination and subordination are present in any human relationship, and that would apply within an all female environment just as much as in a male-female environment. Or are you claiming that an all-female game would be egalitarian and non-hierarchical? That’s a big claim. I think Camille Paglia writes well when she argues that ‘Sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted.’ Paglia condemns ‘sexual freedom, sexual liberation’ as a ‘modern delusion.’
“We are hierarchical animals. Sweep one hierarchy away, and another will take its place, perhaps less palatable than the first. There are hierarchies in nature and alternate hierarchies in society. In nature, brute force is the law, a survival of the fittest. In society, there are protections for the weak. Society is our frail barrier against nature. When the prestige of state and religion is low, men are free, but they find freedom intolerable and seek new ways to enslave themselves, through drugs or depression.” (Paglia Sexual Personnae 2001 ch 1).
Those comments are capable of generalisation, beyond sexual liberation in terms of male-female relations to notions of the sexual liberation of one sex from another. Hierarchies will be present in one form or another. It’s about playing the game and playing it fair, changing the rules so that they work equally for all. We’ve been pursuing justice since Plato defined it as the social virtue par excellence. It isn’t for the asking, it’s all in the practice.
I shall conclude here. A problem is not to be solved simply by speeding up a change in structure, or by abandoning structure (the radical move), nor can it be solved by simply slowing down functional changes (the reactionary move). Neither a total conservatism denying change nor a total radicalism accelerating change is appropriate. An adversarial mutual interaction of the two approaches would perhaps be better than either approach alone but, adversarial modes are notoriously subject to irrelevance and self-cancellation in which the relative “power”, as "strength", of the antagonists, comes to shape the outcome regardless of the relative merits of their arguments.
There is a need to be careful of arguments from power. There is a danger of returning to Thrasymachus and his notion that justice is the interests of the strongest. Might is not a morality and requires a morality only by way of rationalisation. As Plato proceeded to show, justice is the social virtue par excellence, it applies to and protects rich and poor, strong and weak alike. And males and females together.
There is also a need to distinguish power from the myth of power. Individuals and groups are easily seduced by a sense of their own power, leading them into antagonistic relation to the common good that covers each and all. It is not "power" that corrupts so much as the myth of "power." Employed as a quasi-physical metaphor, "power" is dangerous and delusion and should be distrusted. Any individual, group or movement that covets a mythical abstraction must necessarily be insatiable! A philosopher should deconstruct and deflate the ‘myth’ of power rather than promote it.
Once caught up within an adversarial, either/or mode of thought and practice, it is extremely difficult to see beyond the simplistic dualism of right and wrong. One side, one’s own, is in possession of the whole truth, whilst the other side irredeemably wrong. The pursuit of power and its embodiment in this context becomes merely dichotomy between winning and losing in adversarial combat. In these terms, the inexperienced chess player is always tempted to make a risky or dramatic move in order to obtain a quick victory. The discipline, of course, involves identifying the best move on the board, and this is difficult to develop and maintain. The successful player must always be aware of the longer view. Rejection of the game as such is not evidence of the larger gestalt.
So we come back to the place from which we started— identifying our place in a wider perspective that values each and all equally for the contributions made to the greater good. That wider perspective is about particular perspectives and the relations between them and their originators, and the question posed is: Do we, as moral agents and social beings, foster whatever will promote in human beings, both men and women, those wider perspectives which will bring the game of life into an appropriate synchronicity or harmony between power, intellect, principles and practice? Do we venerate power? Or, as students and teachers, do we aim at wisdom? I would summarise Aristotle's philosophy thus: human Being lies in community, in the unity of one with the other, of each with all, of male and female together, not in separation. Or am I just being self-interested? It is a truism that men need women far more than women need men. That’s not an argument for women abandoning men; it’s an argument for men valuing women a lot more than they do. Isn’t that what we should be aiming for? Wouldn’t that be a genuine ethics, beyond divisions of sex and gender?
In ethics, I am what is called a virtue theorist. Some have suggested that virtue ethics is a more 'feminine' ethics than Kantian/deontological rule bound and utilitarian/consequentialist ethics. I’m not sure at all. I think a feminist ethics is relational, as with the likes of Carol Gilligan, whereas a masculine ethics is more rational and impersonal. But it is wise to avoid sharp antitheses, they are always misleading. This very easily translates into a sharp contrast between the warm, affective feminine virtues of caring and concern on the one hand and the oppressive, impersonal, war-mongering masculine principles of justice and duty on the other. In fact, a female literary linguist of mine has even said that if one plays around with the Latin and the French, even ‘virtue’ could mean ‘man kills’.
Ultimately, however, I think this male-female dualism soon goes to extremes. I certainly agree with the shift in emphasis from an impersonal, rules based justice to compassion and caring, but I’m not sure that this is a shift from masculine to feminine ethics so much as the achievement of a genuinely inclusive ethics that is beyond sex and gender. It is an ethics without sexual implication.
I think we should be looking to do more than supply yet more reasons to prolong the perennial war between the sexes. As a virtue theorist, my work is grounded in Aristotle. Now Aristotle, admittedly, could hardly be considered a feminist, describing females as deficient males. However, it is worth emphasising that most substantial things that Aristotle says about the virtues have little or nothing to do with the facts of whether one is male or female. That fact is not unimportant, but it is not all-important in an ethical position. It may well be, as many writers are optimistically arguing, that the increasing numbers of women in significant positions within society will change the dominant ethic. Here’s hoping. There remain obstacles, but I do not think they are insurmountable. In which case, I think it is worthwhile emphasising that virtue includes the supposedly 'feminine' virtues, so that virtue embraces all equally, as against espousing an exclusive ethics that keeps us all captive to gender distinctions.
I wish you well in this work. Resolution of these questions will determine whether we ever achieve a society which corresponds to and enhances the human ontology, male and female.
My sympathies are very much with Gimbutas, I have to say. Here is a talk I gave in Liverpool in 2010.
Goddess Worship, Nature and Animality
https://www.academia.edu/1692864/Goddesses_Animality_and_Nature