Also--you asked, "What topic do you wish you could find a book or essay on?"
It caused a memory to "bubble up" for me! On your "Drinking the Ocean with a Straw" wrap-up post last spring, Nora questioned a disproportionate amount of focus assigned to the small sacrifices of motherhood. She typified it with the description: "It's not that those sacrifices aren't meaningful or important. But you can spend 90% of your moral efforts and abilities on achieving just 2% more patient mothering, and you'll have lots of Christian mommy bloggers cheering you on."
She went on saying, "What larger scale good might you be called to with all that moral effort? What might that mean for your family? It's interesting to me how much both conservatives and progressives fall into emphasizing our culpability in only the smallest and largest scale moral issues: big societal problems (climate change, the collapse of the family) and tiny individual choices (not driving, not using daycare) and completely ignore the middle 60% of issues. If you've got the right opinions on the large scale stuff, and the right lifestyle on the small scale stuff, you're good to go. I'm, obviously, dubious that this is how it looks to God. It's interesting too how gendered this can get in terms of keeping people esp women very preoccupied with small scale offences, and allowing people esp men to avoid thinking about midrange to large ones eg the ethics of the company they work for."
Martha jumped in and said, "I would love to read a whole longform essay on everything you've outlined here. Actually: many essays. Enough to meaningfully change our societal discourse."
Multiple days* later, I thought, "We should have a tradition at OtherFeminisms where someone goes 'Aye!' or 'I nominate Nora to write the first essay in that series!' and people second it." Well, maybe not pushy... but fun, and encouraging.
Anyway, all that to say--I want to see those essays!! I think it would be exciting if people from here would "poke at" that problem.
* That's how long a thought like this can simmer in my mind. Can't always just "crank out a comment" instantly! And by then I forgot and kept forgetting!
Me too! Or even if Other Feminisms could have a place, like a dedicated forum with a good threading format, for us to freestyle discuss ideas on how to better address the ~60% of issues not constantly rehashed in dozens of other places. Though again I also would really enjoy some well thought out essays on less talked about topics of importance.
Interesting, Lynette! The forums I'm familiar with are "old-school" ...or, I think, more recently ones based on Simple Machines Forum. (Though my "old-school" forum for a Sci-Fi/Fantasy author I participate on looked into migrating to something called "Vanilla Forums" which appears to have lots of features)
Even when writing on a forum, I've realized my anxieties skyrocket because it's still... it's public. It's the publicly-viewable internet: anyone could stumble upon my words. I'm now at the point where in order to write my forum posts without panicking, I'm moving towards 1-5 friends look them over in a Google Doc / collaborate on Discord. XD (Now. I may be an outlier. But then again, I wonder how many lurkers there are to every forum member in a regular online community! If we can say there is such a thing.)
I have to be honest, I don't know of any forums that both can be private and format the way I want them too. I am in a few private/members only groups on Facebook and I literally detest the way they thread. Discord also has an ability to have private groups but I find it also gets unwieldy when the group is more than a couple dozen active participants.
But I hope something exists. I am just not computer savvy enough to find it.
My favorite formatted forums that I use with any regularity are on a site called boardgamegeek , why yes I am so geeky that I attend boardgame conventions and have written thousands of forum posts over the years on a site about boardgames. LOL But even though I moderate a guild on that site for women only where we talk about more than just boardgames... that site is still public. But I wish I could find a place like Discord that was formatted in a similar way.
PS Which author? I used to be very active in a Lois McMaster Bujold Newsgroup. Which I think has now had several members go over to Discord. Though I like the formatting better on the old Newsgroup page. But if you haven't read Bujold and you like Sci-fi/Fantasy, you should give her books a read. :)
3. My hubbie things (and other nerdy friends think) highly of Bujold, and I know she's interesting--pretty sure you're right!!
2. The formatting on the old (Bujold?) Newsgroup page... what do you mean "newsgroup page" in this context?
3. The author is Stephen R. Donaldson! Which I'm afraid says something about me!! (I was trying to describe us recently and wrote: "We are apparently a group of readers drawn to an aesthetic that focuses on a spectrum of the extremes of humanity--heroes and horrors, outcasts of the town and pillars of the tightly-knit village, psychopaths and visionaries, innocents who are ineffective and the criminals whose guilt becomes power.")
While it is an older book at this point, anybody seeking good information to enhance interpersonal relationships in general, marriage, parenting etc. I strongly would recommend The 5 Love Languages. There are several additions beyond just the marriage/romance one most often heard about in mainstream media, including one for dealing with young children and one for dealing with teens. While the author certainly has a solid Christian overlay to his writing, the core principles are psychologically sound and apply to everybody. I found it to be life changing in understanding both myself and others I care about. Even though I have never married or had children of my own, I have been able to apply its wisdom to many relationships I care about. CS Lewis's the 4 Loves is not as directly applicable to relationships, but I personally found that understanding the different ways we love things to be helpful in my life many times, so it is also worth reading.
For anybody who comes from a troubled background, I also found the books Boundaries and Safe People by Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsand to be very beneficial. As the child of an alcoholic with a tendency to end up enabling people at times rather than actually helping them, I definitely needed to learn more about how to set safe boundaries for both myself and for them.
Oh goodness, this is delightful, I love this line: "For momfluencers to be successful in their brand partnerships, part of what they need to do is maintain a narrative that everything’s moving forward, ever-improving, ever-renewing. Even when things “don’t go to plan,” even when the kids freak out at the grocery store, a successful momfluencer’s family keeps moving forward, adjusting and adapting. Just like how free market capitalism is meant to work. When you link your representations of family to a logic of capitalist progress, you are applying a teleology of ongoing upward growth to your lives. What might this mean?" I'm going to have to limit myself to one article this afternoon because I still have to cook dinner!
I listened to that last year too! It was so interesting. For me, it coincided with the Other Feminisms discussion on what work is socially accepted to be visual versus what is hidden, and really enjoyed thinking about how influencing and the media narrative around influencing affects what is acceptable visual work for women.
I missed the post calling for recommendations, but John Gottman’s 7 Principles that Make Marriage work has been essential for my wife and I, especially in learning how to navigate conflict productivity.
We also found Gottman's advice helpful. Nonetheless, some of his math looks dodgy, postdiction instead of prediction from someone who ought to have known the difference:
This isn't to disparage the advice he gives. But the ideal of honesty demands great math, too, not just good advice with an impressive math-flavored coating. Especially in the social sciences, great math can be hard, and sometimes we fool ourselves most of all.
Also--you asked, "What topic do you wish you could find a book or essay on?"
It caused a memory to "bubble up" for me! On your "Drinking the Ocean with a Straw" wrap-up post last spring, Nora questioned a disproportionate amount of focus assigned to the small sacrifices of motherhood. She typified it with the description: "It's not that those sacrifices aren't meaningful or important. But you can spend 90% of your moral efforts and abilities on achieving just 2% more patient mothering, and you'll have lots of Christian mommy bloggers cheering you on."
She went on saying, "What larger scale good might you be called to with all that moral effort? What might that mean for your family? It's interesting to me how much both conservatives and progressives fall into emphasizing our culpability in only the smallest and largest scale moral issues: big societal problems (climate change, the collapse of the family) and tiny individual choices (not driving, not using daycare) and completely ignore the middle 60% of issues. If you've got the right opinions on the large scale stuff, and the right lifestyle on the small scale stuff, you're good to go. I'm, obviously, dubious that this is how it looks to God. It's interesting too how gendered this can get in terms of keeping people esp women very preoccupied with small scale offences, and allowing people esp men to avoid thinking about midrange to large ones eg the ethics of the company they work for."
Martha jumped in and said, "I would love to read a whole longform essay on everything you've outlined here. Actually: many essays. Enough to meaningfully change our societal discourse."
Multiple days* later, I thought, "We should have a tradition at OtherFeminisms where someone goes 'Aye!' or 'I nominate Nora to write the first essay in that series!' and people second it." Well, maybe not pushy... but fun, and encouraging.
Anyway, all that to say--I want to see those essays!! I think it would be exciting if people from here would "poke at" that problem.
* That's how long a thought like this can simmer in my mind. Can't always just "crank out a comment" instantly! And by then I forgot and kept forgetting!
I *loooove* this idea -
Me too! Or even if Other Feminisms could have a place, like a dedicated forum with a good threading format, for us to freestyle discuss ideas on how to better address the ~60% of issues not constantly rehashed in dozens of other places. Though again I also would really enjoy some well thought out essays on less talked about topics of importance.
Interesting, Lynette! The forums I'm familiar with are "old-school" ...or, I think, more recently ones based on Simple Machines Forum. (Though my "old-school" forum for a Sci-Fi/Fantasy author I participate on looked into migrating to something called "Vanilla Forums" which appears to have lots of features)
Even when writing on a forum, I've realized my anxieties skyrocket because it's still... it's public. It's the publicly-viewable internet: anyone could stumble upon my words. I'm now at the point where in order to write my forum posts without panicking, I'm moving towards 1-5 friends look them over in a Google Doc / collaborate on Discord. XD (Now. I may be an outlier. But then again, I wonder how many lurkers there are to every forum member in a regular online community! If we can say there is such a thing.)
I have to be honest, I don't know of any forums that both can be private and format the way I want them too. I am in a few private/members only groups on Facebook and I literally detest the way they thread. Discord also has an ability to have private groups but I find it also gets unwieldy when the group is more than a couple dozen active participants.
But I hope something exists. I am just not computer savvy enough to find it.
My favorite formatted forums that I use with any regularity are on a site called boardgamegeek , why yes I am so geeky that I attend boardgame conventions and have written thousands of forum posts over the years on a site about boardgames. LOL But even though I moderate a guild on that site for women only where we talk about more than just boardgames... that site is still public. But I wish I could find a place like Discord that was formatted in a similar way.
PS Which author? I used to be very active in a Lois McMaster Bujold Newsgroup. Which I think has now had several members go over to Discord. Though I like the formatting better on the old Newsgroup page. But if you haven't read Bujold and you like Sci-fi/Fantasy, you should give her books a read. :)
Answering thoughts in reverse-order! :)
3. My hubbie things (and other nerdy friends think) highly of Bujold, and I know she's interesting--pretty sure you're right!!
2. The formatting on the old (Bujold?) Newsgroup page... what do you mean "newsgroup page" in this context?
3. The author is Stephen R. Donaldson! Which I'm afraid says something about me!! (I was trying to describe us recently and wrote: "We are apparently a group of readers drawn to an aesthetic that focuses on a spectrum of the extremes of humanity--heroes and horrors, outcasts of the town and pillars of the tightly-knit village, psychopaths and visionaries, innocents who are ineffective and the criminals whose guilt becomes power.")
Severe Mercy! It's such a good book!
While it is an older book at this point, anybody seeking good information to enhance interpersonal relationships in general, marriage, parenting etc. I strongly would recommend The 5 Love Languages. There are several additions beyond just the marriage/romance one most often heard about in mainstream media, including one for dealing with young children and one for dealing with teens. While the author certainly has a solid Christian overlay to his writing, the core principles are psychologically sound and apply to everybody. I found it to be life changing in understanding both myself and others I care about. Even though I have never married or had children of my own, I have been able to apply its wisdom to many relationships I care about. CS Lewis's the 4 Loves is not as directly applicable to relationships, but I personally found that understanding the different ways we love things to be helpful in my life many times, so it is also worth reading.
For anybody who comes from a troubled background, I also found the books Boundaries and Safe People by Dr Henry Cloud and Dr John Townsand to be very beneficial. As the child of an alcoholic with a tendency to end up enabling people at times rather than actually helping them, I definitely needed to learn more about how to set safe boundaries for both myself and for them.
Oh goodness, this is delightful, I love this line: "For momfluencers to be successful in their brand partnerships, part of what they need to do is maintain a narrative that everything’s moving forward, ever-improving, ever-renewing. Even when things “don’t go to plan,” even when the kids freak out at the grocery store, a successful momfluencer’s family keeps moving forward, adjusting and adapting. Just like how free market capitalism is meant to work. When you link your representations of family to a logic of capitalist progress, you are applying a teleology of ongoing upward growth to your lives. What might this mean?" I'm going to have to limit myself to one article this afternoon because I still have to cook dinner!
Oh man, speaking of the Mothers Under The Influence substack..... I listened to the Under The Influence podcast series last year and it was a wild ride.https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/under-the-influence-with-jo-piazza/id1544171101
I listened to that last year too! It was so interesting. For me, it coincided with the Other Feminisms discussion on what work is socially accepted to be visual versus what is hidden, and really enjoyed thinking about how influencing and the media narrative around influencing affects what is acceptable visual work for women.
I missed the post calling for recommendations, but John Gottman’s 7 Principles that Make Marriage work has been essential for my wife and I, especially in learning how to navigate conflict productivity.
We also found Gottman's advice helpful. Nonetheless, some of his math looks dodgy, postdiction instead of prediction from someone who ought to have known the difference:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/02/27/book-review-the-seven-principles-for-making-marriage-work/
This isn't to disparage the advice he gives. But the ideal of honesty demands great math, too, not just good advice with an impressive math-flavored coating. Especially in the social sciences, great math can be hard, and sometimes we fool ourselves most of all.
You need to read "Ask Your Husband" by Stephanie Gordon.