It was all Yiannopoulos' fault!

Is this a legitimate critique of feminism or is it misogyny, as Claire Lehmann insists in the convo? Quillette went on to (rightly) defend James Damore for his critiques of feminism.

Paula Wright

Jan 11, 2023

Endnotes:

Peter was in a bad mood that day. He’d recently split up with his girlfriend.
This occurred 17th October 2015 (see 1st screenshot)
Claire had been a member for around five years, I cannot say exactly as she came back after this flounce and deleted a lot of her posts. She was one of my moderators for most of that time. Peter too was a moderator and we were all (we believed) great friends.
Peter was devastated by this attack. He withdrew from academia. The DGS forum was a small community with many of the world’s top academics as active members. He has, I think it is accurate to say, never recovered. He had thought Claire a friend before this.
It's fair to say I was pretty heartbroken too. I loved and trusted Claire. She had offered to be my and my son’s sponsor should we move to Australia, as I was trying to escape a toxic relationship at the time…
(I’d deleted the post above as I didn’t want my estranged partner to see it)
…But I loved all my admins. We were a family and I could not throw Peter under the bus. Holding up to that principle has cost me dearly in terms of a career as a writer. I’ve removed personal chatter from the following.
from this, to…
One post that is missing (deleted by Claire I imagine) is one that, with hindsight, I should have seen what was coming. Her then PhD supervisor mentioned “Claire’s hypothesis about feminism being the arena for female intrasexual competition. I jokingly responded, asking if he’d mixed us up because that was my hypothesis. He said no, he hadn’t got us mixed up. I posted an essay in which I'd outlined this hypothesis and said, as magnanimously as possible, that I did not mind anyone picking up my ideas & running with them, but to please not simply erase me from the algorithm. Because I felt I’d dealt with it well, I assumed no hard feelings. Claire dropped her course soon after anyway. Looking back this was supremely naive of me. I want to add here, I was also (or so I thought) friends with Jamie, who was working in a cinema in London at the time. He once told me, “People like us need to stick together.” …It’s all very Prince Myshkin, or maybe in my case, more like Maria. In this sense, I was, and still am, an idiot.
I haven’t checked yet but I think this was around the time of the movie Suffragette and I did notice Claire became quite militant at the time, even changing her Twitter profile blurb to say “pamphleteer”. I’m aspie: massive hard drive, minimal RAM.
What’s especially ironic, is that one of the first things Quillette did was to (rightly) defend James Damore after he lost his job at Google for criticising feminism.
I revealed the screenshots in 2020 on Twitter & Lehmann responded saying she had no regrets and would not hesitate to do the same again.
My personal thoughts/analysis is that this - and whst came after- was an almost perfect example cf covert female intrasexual competition. The actual target was not Peter at all, but me and the forum as a whole. I don’t Claire wanted to have to have to admit that Quillette had an antecendant. This is supported by what she told Jordan Peterson in one of her first interviews with him. I’ve not personally watched it so this is only what I’ve been told which is: Peterson directly asks her where she had been before Quilette & she says something like ‘On Twitter” and then says she doesnt want to talk abour it. This may not count as a direct lie, but it's certainly a violation of one of Peterson's 12 Rules to, “just tell the truth.”
She did take a lot of people with her. People who I'd also thought of as friends, such as Geoff Miller.
Miller was referring to Milo’s hair in the last post.
Quillette remains a great publication that, declaired (sic ;) or not, embodies the ethos of the Darwinian Gender Studies intellectual forum, re free speech and intellectual heterodoxy. An ethos its founding editor does not personally have.
Claire is a good business woman.

On 3rd October 2015 (2 weeks before the above occurred) Claire announced she was launching “a commercial project” which was to become Quillette. Everyone was supportive. For the “many years” (In Claire’s own words) she had been on the forum, I had without reservation had allowed her to promote her Wordpress blog, where she quickly grew influence - which had led to media requests.

I thought we were all on the same team. As an aspie, I was not a good business person, and I loved that the ideas and ethos of the forum could (see screenshots below) be promoted by her. I really was The Idiot.