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wondering about whether you could rec some "romance is a social construct" texts? ofc it is, but i like having books and articles to reference/learn specifics from/see how these ideas have developed.

Sure! Here's a quick reading list. Bear in mind that I am not a professional historian and my reading on this subject is a little diffuse. I'm not tackling the behavioral ecology stuff right now because a) I don't have a more direct book rec off the top of my head than Evolution's Rainbow, which is not technically focused on social monogamy, and also b) I approach that whole field with my eyes wide open for people letting their own perspectives and cultural views get in the way of their observations of animals, and I do not have the energy to go deal with it right now.

If you're going to read two books, read these two:

Stephanie Coontz, Marriage, A History: how love conquered marriage. 2006. All of Coontz' work, having to do with the social construction of the family, is relevant reading to this question (and I'd also recommend The Nostalgia Trap, because the historical context of how we conceptualize families is a major part of the construction of romantic love), but this one is most focused on the social construction of romantic love specifically and what it has replaced. Coontz is, I will disclose cheerfully, a major formative influence on my thinking.

Moira Wegel, Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating. 2016. Exactly what it says on the tin; focuses more closely on the modern invention of dating and romance.

Other useful readings to help inform your understanding of different ways that various people have conceptualized sex, sexuality, society and long-term connection include:

George Chauncey, Why Marriage? 2015. Chauncey is best known for Gay New York, which also offers a useful history of the way that relationship models and social constructs for understanding homosexuality changed among men having sex with men c. 1900 to 1950. This book, published just before Obergefell v. Hodges, is a discussion of why contemporary queer rights organizations focused on same-sex marriage as an activism plank in the wake of AIDS organizing. I find it really useful to read queer history when I'm thinking about how we understand and construct the concept of romantic relationships, because queers complicate the mainstream, heteronormative concepts of what marriage and romantic relationships actually are. More importantly, queer activist organizing around marriage has played a major role in shaping our collective understanding of romance and marriage in the past twenty years.

Elizabeth Abbott, A History of Celibacy, 2000. In order to understand how various cultures construct understandings of marriage and spousal relationships, it can be illustrative to consider what the people who are explicitly not participating in the institution are doing and why not. I found this an interesting pass over historical and social institutions that forbid (or forbade) marriage with a discussion about general trends driving these institutions, individuals, and movements towards celibacy.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex, 2023. This is a very pointed historical look at gender roles, concepts of beauty, and concepts of sex, attraction, and marriage among medieval Europeans with an extended meditation on what ideas have and have not changed between that time and today. I include this work because I think a deep dive into medieval notions of courtly romance is useful, partly because it is an important origin of our modern notion of romantic love and partly because it is so usefully and starkly different from that modern notion! Sometimes the best way to understand the cultural construction of ideas in your own society is to go look at someone else's and see where things are the same versus different.

It's a mish-mash of recommendations, and I'm reaching more for books that have stuck with me over the years than a clean scholarly approach to the subject. I hope other folks will chime in for you with their own recommendations!

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am i being stupid by refusing to invest any of my money? i just don’t find it ethical (lots of people have 0 idea what theyre actually invested in with typical low risk investments and it would actually drive me nuts to have to investigate every single thing thats on there) and i also have zero faith in the stability of the economy or the world i just literally don’t trust like that. and fear that with climate change i’m not going to have a traditional future or retirement anyway. is this incredibly stupid i’m being so genuine because i dont know

I think your ethical concerns are totally reasonable. Any investment in the stock market is pretty inherently fraught, even if you choose index funds that exclude the especially bad stocks of like firearms/military contractors/etc. Even something like a bond can be easily said to be bad, because it's a loan to the government, and most money market or high yield savings are not untainted either, because most banks themselves invest in fucked up shit like oil pipelines. The one avenue I think that would be mostly okay is a high yield savings account for a credit union, or a bank that you've researched and know doesn't invest in that kind of shady shit. I have also argued previously that it's not wrong to invest in an apartment or house -- as long as you're not landlording, vulnerable people having more secure housing and the ability to share that housing with others in their community is good and understandable. So on balance, I get where you are coming from, though I think having a financial safety net makes people less likely to have to take on unethical jobs and makes them less vulnerable to financial abuse and exploitation, which has merit ethically.

I tend to see the doomerism question a bit differently. If the US empire falls or the economy collapses, you'll either have much bigger problems than your 401k bottoming out (problems like the complete obliteration of the supply chain), OR we will be living in a financial paradigm so dramatically different and more just that you wont MIND that you dont have that money anymore. Whereas if the US economy continues to exist, you're gonna be fucked if you dont have a retirement to fall back on, so why make yourself needlessly more vulnerable by not saving? The ethical rub with this, though, is that it creates the moral hazard of rooting for the US empire and economy to never fall, and that rendering you more conservative... which is a possibility, but like, as i said, i think it's possible to have some money saved for a rainy day under capitalism while still praying for capitalism's downfall. if anything, being more financially independent makes it EASIER for me to risk unemployment & etc by doing more radical political actions and speaking my mind and saying no to things. but ymmv

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Imagine that you and I shared a personal language, one that only we two could interpret.

Perhaps we do.

Communication (wikipedia) / The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin / Solaris (1972) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky / Ineffability (wikipedia) / Emma by Jane Austen / Solaris by Stanislaw Lem / Making Amends - panel 2 by Holly Warburton / To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf / Fool's Errand by Robin Hobb

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Once upon a dark and politically conservative time, there was an anarchist avant-garde music project that hatched a scheme to infiltrate mass culture and pay their friends’ legal bills. They succeeded beyond anyone’s silliest imagination and so many left wing groups had all their legal expenses paid for such a long time.

This is a parable about the power of a goofy little scheme and of getting back up again when you get knocked down.

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May I offer you Humankind by Rutger Bregman, Hope in the Darkness by Rebecca Solnit, Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown, Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie, Factfullness by Hans Rosling, or Braiding Sweet Grass by Robin Wall Kimmerer in these trying times? Or the backlog of Yes! magazine? Or Fix the News? Especially today, your newsfeed is going to be tilted towards anti-humanist despair. Balance it out intentionally.

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Therapy is risky because sometimes they'll just ask you their standard "why can't you, though", and you think you're making some good point by saying something like "well if I don't do anything with my life then what's the point of being alive in the first place" and your therapist gets that look on their face and you immediately realise that your dumb ass just got caught, pinned to the ground with your stupid-ass neck between the spikes of a pitchfork, and you are not going to wiggle out of there before you two unpack what the fuck you just said.

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brb getting very emotional thinking about the metaphor of transformation in tam lin. How tam lin is saved by a lover with the strength and conviction and patience to hold him, just hold him-- no matter what form he takes. How with each version of him, no matter how repulsive or frightening, she refuses to let go. holding on through it all, until it passes and he's ready to be a person again. because he needs her and she trusts that he will not hurt her. How holding tight is what sets him free. How faith and devotion can in themselves be transformative. Man. Do you feel me.

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I am one (1) minor inconvenience away from writing a wlw retelling of the Ballad of Tam Lin

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Cedar Pattern.

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Ask a city planner or designer to name some popular amenities for a park, and they’ll rattle off a list: children’s play area, water feature, shade, seating. “Tandoor oven” will not be on it—unless you’re in Toronto, where residents of the Thorncliffe Park neighborhood worked with the city to install a new bread-baking oven in their local park. It’s the first public tandoor oven in North America.

-How an Oven Changed the Fate of a Neglected Toronto Park

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werewolf yuri

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How to be anti capitalist and still invest in the stock market?

The Socially Conscious Mustachians group on Facebook is a great place to turn to, if you want to speak with other people contemplating these questions. There are some forums on the Mr Money Mustache site where people explore alternate options too.And I suppose I should mention that there are index funds that purposefully exclude stock in firearms, tobacco, fossil fuels, and other especially morally galling industries.

Personally, I wouldn't pretend that any investment method can be moral. Holding onto any resources within the imperial core is arguably immoral. I think if you've been around here a while, you might have noticed that my lens of analysis is not one of personal moralization. If someone thinks that me saving for an early retirement is immoral, I can't necessarily disagree with their value judgement, I certainly see the basis of it. My viewpoint is that not being dependent upon an employer for a wage means I can be far more selective in how I spend my time, and not take work that I view as morally compromising, and live more in alignment with my values in a variety of other ways while surviving as a disabled person and supporting my friends from time to time, none of which would be possible if I was dependent upon a full-time wage. But I can see why others would disagree. I would certainly welcome the collapse of capitalist society and lose all my savings if it meant not having to make these awful choices.

If you wish to invest without putting money in the stock market for moral reasons, then investing in a money market is really the only way to go. Bonds and CDs loan money to a genocidal government; investing in the stock market fuels (and allows you to profit from) capitalism. If you can find a banking institution or credit union that does not invest in oil pipelines and political lobbies and keep your money in a high-yield savings with them, that's the simplest, best, and likely more secure way to go.

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its interesting to me how self-deprecation neatly ties into making others feel bad. like. if you constantly assume that you’re stupid no matter how informed or skilled in a topic you might be, people who are a bit less learned or skilled than you might see how you, someone who is obviously skilled, talk down about yourself, and assume that if you think YOURE an idiot you must think theyre an even bigger idiot and lose confidence or find you intimidating as a result. its fucked up. and its part of why it can be so important to break out of cycles of self-hatred–not just for yourself, but for people around you

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October 28, 2022, 7:11 P.M.

For whatever reason I enjoy thinking about Diana Wynne Jones' writing as a whole and picking out unexpected or resonant trends. For example, some things that comes up often is:

She'll fabricate a world (right down to its cosmology), fill it with memorable characters, set one or two short novels in it... and then never touch it again. On to the next one. Rinse and repeat for her entire career.

The concept of multiple/parallel universes appear half a dozen times in different novels/sequences, but always in completely different ways. The multiple worlds of Chrestomanci function very, very differently from the multiple worlds of The Homeward Bounders, which themselves function so different from the Ayewards/Naywards of Deep Secret, or the walls between the worlds in Dark Lord of Derkholm. More importantly, all these approaches to multiverse explicitly contradict each other. There is no larger DWJ multiverse; there is no way to coherently combine any of them, much less all of them. I love her for this. Every book is its own project. Franchising be damned.

With one exception (which is the Dalemark quartet, oddly enough), none of these worlds are sealed-off secondary worlds. Our own Earth appears in all of them, though usually from the 'wrong' end of the telescope. Meaning, it's stuff like reading Charmed Life and assuming you're reading a magical secondary world fantasy for most of the book... up until the point when Janet is pulled into the story due to Gwendolyn's spell. The reader instantly understands that Janet is from our own world, from the 1970s when the book was written. She never makes it home, either. She never sees her parents again. She's a supporting character who becomes permanently stuck in the world of Chrestomanci, as a casualty of Gwendolyn's spells.

It is interesting, though, how there are almost no sealed-off secondary worlds in DWJ's oeuvre.

There are lots of neat things to say about how DWJ did this, and why she'd do it, and the implications in the storytelling. But tonight I'm thinking mostly about how it can be a moment, narratively, that makes you halt and have to recontextualize all these things you thought you knew (or were assuming) about the nature of the story.

In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed, Urras is obviously the metaphorical capitalistic stand-in planet for our own Earth... up until a moment right near the end, where we realize our own Earth exists in this novel too and is an ecological wasteland due to unchecked climate change.

Urras may be the distorted-mirror, uber-capitalist version of our own world. But it's also a planet with a functional ecosystem. It's a planet where society is careful about maintaining that ecosystem. We're not going to be Urras, says Le Guin. We'll be lucky if we become Urras. To become Urras means we wised up in time to not go extinct.

And suddenly, little subtle moments in the worldbuilding around both Anarres and Urras—their shared attention to their own ecology—come into a different light. All because our own, devastated Earth turns out to be present in the novel too.

And in Howl's Moving Castle, Howl is a magician who fits into the fairy tale landscape of Ingary as naturally as anyone else—until the chapter when he has to go home to retrieve a lost spell, and you realize home is in another world, aka home is our world, aka Howl is fucking Welsh and found his way into Ingary by pure accident. And Ben Sullivan, Ingary's missing royal magician, is no native of Ingary either.

To Sophie, it just means that both magicians travelled to Ingary from the same enigmatic foreign land, which is as strange to her as any spell.

To us readers, it means "oh my god he's Welsh too? Just how much is Wales secretly connected to Ingary? Next thing you'll tell me Ben Sullivan's a rugby player as well—"

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everything is about tam lin except tam lin which is about power

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She holds him tight His body writhes like she is hurting him It shudders It prickles all over with fur Suddenly an armful of coarse hair and snarling teeth and scrabbling claws She fears him not He is making piteous whines like a creature in a trap Lungs heaving against her Muscles bunch and so She owes him so little Yet she hangs on Her fingers search for purchase as he Shifts He becomes huge, all encompassing Her encircling arms thrown wide She can scarcely cling Tossed in the waves The behemoth he has become She fears him not He is shrunken She is quick with her grasp Despite how her body flinches She fears him not He burns The pyre The sacrifice He scorches her arms She cannot breath in his smoke She bears it One second Two She fears him not His skin is warm They sweat They pant Human Together