What questions do you have for Feminist Mormon Housewives?

fMhLisa brought her blog back from hiatus a few days ago to say that over the next year, which will be the twentieth since she launched it, she’ll be blogging about questions she’s often gotten about the whole project, and what she’s been up to since. If you have questions you’d like to ask her, or if there are particular co-bloggers you’d like to see if she can persuade to also post, head on over and let her know.

In its heyday, fMh was my favorite place on the Bloggernacle, and I’m so glad for all the cool and interesting people I met there. I feel really fortunate that I’ve even gotten to meet some of them in person here and there. And of course I so appreciate how much I learned by reading all their commentary. It has been years now since it was consistently active, but I’ll always appreciate what a great gathering place it was for Mormon feminists. I’m looking forward to Lisa’s (and other bloggers’) retrospective.

A New Lynnette? Lynnette Strikes Back? The Return of Lynnette? Regardless, I’m Back!

I didn’t actually mean to stop blogging and disappear, and leave my faithful brother Ziff to keep ZD going all alone. The last time I posted, I see, was at the very beginning of the pandemic. And then I lost my energy to say much of anything. I was in the hospital, yet again, in July of 2020, which was an unusually weird experience because of covid. If you know my history, you know that I’ve weathered a lot of depression storms, but that year I really lost my momentum, and somehow I never made it back to blogging.

However, it’s occurred to me this spring that I evidently still have a lot to say, which currently is often showing up in ridiculously long Facebook posts, and I started thinking that maybe I needed to find more outlets for that. Read More

13 Years of Ziff

Note: This post is straight-up navel gazing. Consider yourself warned.

This month marks 13 years since I wrote my first post at ZD. That post was about asking for change in the Church. If you think I’ve been blogging about the same thing over and over for a long time, you’re pretty much right.

One thing that I think has changed in my blogging is that over time, I’ve shifted from more blogging about numbers-related stuff to more blogging that’s just plain silliness. I definitely still enjoy looking at Mormon (or Mormon-adjacent) data and trying to find an interesting pattern in it to write about. But I guess I’ve found that I also very much enjoy writing goofy parodies of Mormon stuff, or rewriting things to make them Mormon-ish. And silly blogging has the added benefit of being much less labor-intensive than stats blogging is. Rather than spending potentially dozens of hours on a post, I can spend maybe one or two. Also, as much as I try to make the numbers-based stuff approachable, I suspect that silly blogging has the potential to connect with more people, as humor is more generally shared than a love of numbers is.

The larger context of ZD and the Bloggernacle have also changed. I think when I first started blogging, after my sisters and their friends had started the blog months before, I was a little more intimidated by my surroundings, both on this blog and on the Bloggernacle more generally. To fit in well, I wanted to say important and well-thought-out things, and working with numbers felt like it gave me the chance to make something I wrote important and well-thought-out, as I’m often better with data than I am with prose. In contrast to those first few years, now that ZD has been around a while, our place in the Bloggernacle is pretty firmly established as decidedly heretical backwater. We’re also much quieter than we used to be, with many of us bloggers moving on to Heavenly Mother status (although I hold out hope that at least some of those moves might yet be temporary). In this context, I feel more comfortable that the  hundreds dozens of readers who are still here (thank you for sticking with us!) kind of know what to expect, and have made peace with our quirks. So I’m more willing to let my silliness show, and to dash off a quick goofy post and put it up than I ever would have been in our earlier days.

But let’s look at the data, shall we? I’ve written 243 posts in 13 years, or about one and a half a month. In one way, that feels like not very many, as I suspect that it’s no more than a month or two’s work for a serious blogger like Ardis. But in another way, it feels like a ton, just because there have been so many posts that I thought about and agonized over and rewrote so many times.

I went back and put all of them into one of four categories: numbers, silly, other church, and other non-church. Of the 243, 90 (37%) fell into numbers, 49 (20%) into silly, 96 (40%) into other church, and 8 (3%) into other non-church. So I’ve written almost twice as many numbers-based posts as silly posts. But in the past few years, as I had suspected, I’ve flipped and written more silly posts. Since the beginning of 2017, I’ve written more silly posts (26) than numbers-based (16) or other church (17). Here’s a graph that shows the percentage by type across time.

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 Where ZD is Going

A particular combination of life circumstances last year lured me back into being a more active blogger than I’d been in a while. However, as the year went on and I started to suspect that my religious dabbling elsewhere might be turning into a serious thing, I found myself grappling more and more with questions about what it meant for me to be blogging on a Mormon blog. When I finally made the decision in November to convert away from Mormonism, I realized I was going to have to address the issue at some point. Should I keep writing about my religious journey and explorations of faith here, I wondered, or would it make more sense to go elsewhere? I don’t feel done with blogging, certainly; there’s still so much that interests me about religion (inside as well as outside of Mormonism), and there are other topics that I’d like to write about as well. But given where I am, I’ve worried about whether it really makes sense to continue to share my thoughts here.

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Nacle Notebook 2017: Funny Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments I’ve read on the Bloggernacle in the past year. In case you’ve missed them, here are links to previous years’ posts: 2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008. I’m very good with numbers, so I can tell that the fact that there are nine old ones and one new one means that this is my tenth annual post! It seems like this calls for a celebration of some kind, but I’m not sure what form that should take.

Anyway, back to the comments. Most that I’m quoting are excerpts from longer comments or posts. I’ve made each commenter’s name a link back to the original comment or post. The comments are roughly in chronological order.

fbisti, commenting on LDS_Aussie’s post “Lies, Damn lies and Statistics?: Growth and Decline in the LDS Church Membership Numbers” at W&T:

God is fickle (depending on who is the stake president).

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The Strength of Listening, Letting Things Go, and Even Changing Your Mind Sometimes

Many, many years ago, after an extended argument on a ZD thread in which people complained about the contentious turn that a particular discussion had taken, a commenter opined that this was nothing, and we should visit a particular male-dominated blog known for endless debate to see what “real robust challenge” looked like. I was annoyed, of course, by the subtext that the (often female) participants at ZD couldn’t handle “real” debate. But the question I really wanted to ask (but didn’t, because the conversation was going nowhere fast), was something like this: what exactly constitutes “real robust challenge?” Which of the following is more challenging, I wondered at the time: to not back down in the face of vehement intellectual disagreement and participate at length in the back-and-forth of an endless comment thread in which no one changes their mind a whit—or to make an effort to actually listen to and understand what someone is saying, even and especially if it’s not an easy thing for you to hear and perhaps makes you a bit uncomfortable? Which of those involves more risk?  Which of these requires more strength? I will certainly concede that it takes a certain amount of confidence and skill to hold one’s own in an intense debate, and I think those are worthwhile attributes. But I wouldn’t mistake them for strength. I think we’re all familiar with blog participants who never ever back down, never walk away, and always have to have the last word. They can be a nightmare if you’re trying to engage in any kind of comment management or moderation, because such people will cheerfully hijack a thread with their very strong opinions about basically everything and drive it as fast as possible toward the nearest cliff. This actually hasn’t happened in a long time, especially as our blog has slowed down over the years, but in the old days when I would load ZD and see that over half of the recent comments were from the same person (and that person was not one of the ZD permabloggers), my heart would just sink, because there are certain participants who will never just let a discussion go. I have to wonder whether they would see doing so as a sign of weakness. Read More

Nacle Notebook 2016: Funny Comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments I read on the Bloggernacle last year. In case you missed them, here are my compilations from previous years: 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Most of the comments I’m quoting here are excerpted from longer comments (or posts). I’ve made the name of each person being quoted a link so you can always click through and read the entire comment or post. The comments are in roughly chronological order.

Michael Austin, in his post “Abrahamic Tests” at BCC:

If somebody has some brass plates that God wants or needs, He can do His own smiting. He knows how. He’s done it lots of times. I don’t smite.

petebusche, commenting on Michael Austin’s post:

“Smiter, no smiting!”

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Your Favorite ZD Posts

We launched Zelophehad’s Daughters in January of 2006, so it’s ten years old this month. A decade! There are a lot of older blogs on the Bloggernacle, but I’m still kind of amazed by this. I don’t think I would have guessed when we started that we would continue for this long.

To celebrate our tenth birthday, I looked back at our posts that generated the most traffic. Here is a list of the highest-traffic1 post by each person who has blogged here regularly.

Apame: It wasn’t about pants…but then it became about pants. And that’s why I’m wearing pants.
Beatrice: Another Conversation Stopper
The Bouncer: LDS Church Leadership Agrees to Meet with Kate Kelly
Elbereth: The Five Universal Truths of Road Trips
Eve: Don’t Be My Ally*
Galdralag: For Kate
Katya: How EFY Promotes Immodesty
Kiskilili: If A Woman Strips Naked in a Forest and No One Sees Her, Is She Still Pornography?
Lynnette: Church Discourse on Homosexuality
Melyngoch: Seven Modest Outfits from the Golden Globes
Mike C: The More Things Change…
Pandora: Dona Nobis Aequalitatem
Petra: I Loved to See the Temple
Seraphine: Being a 30-something Single in the Church: Part V, the Law of Chastity
Vada: I Hate Breastfeeding
Ziff: Church President Probability Changes with President Packer’s Death

Of course traffic is far from a perfect measure of what posts are most enjoyed. If you like, please feel free to share your favorite ZD posts in the comments.

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1. I took data from our StatCounter plugin and subtracted out the traffic numbers for days close in time that had zero posts, so that kind of adjusts for the general traffic level at the time. We just have a free StatCounter account, so I didn’t have traffic by post page, so I just used total traffic on the day a post was written and also attributed to it some fraction of traffic for the next few days, but less if there was also a new post up in the next few days. Really, this is just for fun, so you probably don’t much care too much about my method. 🙂

Nacle Notebook 2015: Funny comments

This post is my annual compilation of the funniest comments I read on the Bloggernacle last year. In case you missed them, here are my compilations from previous years: 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

Most of the comments I’m quoting here are excerpted from longer comments (or posts). I’ve made the name of each person being quoted a link so you can always click through and read the entire comment or post. The comments are in roughly chronological order.

Jacob Baker, in his post “Some Choice Mormon Top Ten Lists for 2014” at Rational Faiths:

Top Ten American Mormon Baby Names of 2014:

1. Shaylayleigh
2. Chassisty
3. Sarahemla
4. Zaxtaidentavindyllen
5. Seelestyal Keengduhm
6. Nephisam
7. Lynnlynn
8. Einrand
9. Romneigh
10. Obeedyentt

Honorable Mentions: Wellbeehayved, Moremann, P’rleigh, Traceigh, Leighleigh, RULDS2

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Nacle Notebook 2014: Funny Comments

This post is a list of some of the funniest comments I read on the Bloggernacle last year. (Here are links to collections from previous years, in case you enjoy this one and haven’t seen them before: 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.)

Most of the quotes are excerpts from longer comments. Also, I’ve made a small change from previous years: this time in addition to comments, I’ve included a few post excerpts, in cases where the excerpts can be appreciated as standalone comments. I haven’t included any of the many funny posts I’ve read that were funny end-to-end, since excerpting from such posts would mean losing the context and the full effect of the humor.

I’ve made each commenter’s name a link to the original so you can go read them in their full glory and original context if you wish. I’ve put the quotes in roughly chronological order.

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Which GAs Do Readers of Different Blogs Like?

I thought this might be a fun question to look at, and thanks to Facebook’s Graph Search, I have at least an approximate way to answer it. Graph Search will let you look for people who “like” different combinations of pages. (For the remainder of this post, I’m going to drop the quotation marks on “like” when describing Facebook likes, because they just get tiring to look at, and I figure you know what I’m talking about.) Most blogs that I wanted to look at have a Facebook page that readers can like, so I just looked up people who liked the Facebook page for each blog, and then looked at how many of each of these people liked each member of the Quorum of 15. One small difficulty I encountered is that Graph Search is more interested in showing me individual people than in giving me an exact count (which makes sense given what Facebook is for). It estimates the number of people who like a blog page and a GA page as more than 10, or fewer than 1000, or whatever, but I couldn’t get an exact count without repeatedly scrolling to the bottom of the results so that it would pull up even more results until it could find no more.

One thing I wanted to adjust for is that the general membership of the Church likes different Q15 members more or less often on Facebook (as I’ve blogged about before and plan to again). So I thought it would be most interesting to see which Q15 members are most liked by readers of different blogs, compared to how often the GAs are liked overall. For example, President Monson alone accounts for nearly 20% of all likes of Q15 members. If he gets only 15% of likes given to Q15 members by readers of a particular blog, this indicates he’s less popular among readers of the blog than among members in general (even if he still gets more likes than any other Q15 member from readers of the blog).

Here are results for ZD. The differences are in percentage points (the percentage of all likes of Q15 members going to this member among likers of the blog minus the same calculation for all Facebook users). I put the First Presidency at the left because a lot of the action is there, and then put the Q12 in order of seniority. Note that I’ve added the colors just to make it easier to see who is who at a glance. A lot of these graphs look similar, so I think it can be helpful to have the colors so you can easily look for the same person as you look across graphs.

zelophehad's daughtersWell, that’s a pretty straightforward pattern. ZD readers like President Uchtdorf. They really, really like him. Most everyone else falls below overall norms to compensate.

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Is There a Way to Find Common Ground?

Last year I was on a long car ride with my parents, who were visiting from out of state. My mom and I ended up having a discussion about gay marriage, and it was then that I started thinking about this problem of finding common ground–that is, the problem of Mormons like me and Mormons like my mom being able to rejoice and be edified together as we discuss difficult gospel topics–rather than starting a cage match that ends in tears (probably mine, since my mom is a tough cookie), recrimination, the silent treatment, and (God forbid!) unfriending on Facebook. (I’m happy to say that so far none of these things have happened, at least as far as I know.)

I realize that saying that my mom and I represent two types of Mormons is a vast oversimplification, one that does not fully capture our similarities, and one that does not fully acknowledge that there are lots of types of Mormons–probably as many types as there are Mormons. Even so, I think it is useful to place us in two broad categories that are familiar to Mormons who frequent the Bloggernacle. Read More

Nacle Notebook 2013: Funny Comments

This post is a list of some of the funniest comments I read on the Bloggernacle in 2013. In case you haven’t already seen them, here are links to similar lists from previous years: 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008.

The comments are in roughly chronological order. Most of the original comments are longer, and I’ve only taken excerpts. Each commenter’s name is a link to the comment in its original context, in case you want to see where they came from.

Fair warning: This is kind of a long post, so you might not want to start it unless you have a little time to spare. I hope you enjoy it! Thanks to everyone who contributed to making me laugh so much as I read the Bloggernacle this past year, including both the comments I’ve listed here as well as all those I had to exclude to keep the post to a manageable size.

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Free to Be…You and Me

The big toe on my left foot is purple and the nail, like the hair on my head, is starting to fall out. I wish I could say this was an unusual state of affairs, but ever since I took up soccer again, I find my body perpetually suffering from minor traumas.

While limping around the house last week I thought about why I do this to myself. It seemed easier years ago. As Paul Simon sheepishly laments, “And all my friends stand up and cheer and say, ‘Man, you’re old.’ Getting old.” But stubbornly in my middle age (can 42 really be middle age?!), I still do it to myself, cursing as I play, that the 22 year-old I know I am inside has mistakenly woken up, through a tragic, Freaky Fridayesque accident, in an over-the-hill body. Now, the easy solution to this discouraging reality would be to stop playing. A less drastic measure might be to not play so hard—less recklessness, lower risk of injury. More brain, less pain.

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Mothering

My husband and I are working on adopting, which is a large part of why I’ve been mostly absent here for the last year. I wrote this post last night on our adoption blog, but I thought it might generate some good discussion here, and go along nicely with some of the recent posts, so I’m cross-posting it.

Anyone who knows me know that I’m a pretty honest person, and I don’t sugarcoat things. Especially when it comes to my kids and mothering. In fact, this blog is probably about the least honest I’ve been, and even here I don’t feel like I’ve been at all dishonest, I just don’t have nearly enough whiny posts up for you to realize how whiny I can be in real life. That’s probably okay. A little less whining is good for me, and you probably appreciate not hearing so much of it. I know it grates on my nerves when my kids do it, so I really ought to be setting a better example.

But that’s not really why I’ve avoided my tendencies toward whininess here. (What do they mean, whininess isn’t a word? It totally is.) I’ve avoided it here because for the first time in a very long time people are judging me and I care what they think. Read More

Fan Mail

Anyone who has a blog knows that the ratio of spam to actual comments is crazy high. On ZD over the past five years, we’ve had about 16,000 comments—and 215,000 pieces of spam. Fortunately almost all of it gets caught, though some occasionally make their way through. (More unfortunately, sometimes actual comments get mislabeled, so do let us know if your comments are disappearing.)

One of the entertaining things about these fake comments is that they often try to seduce you with very generic flattery.  But hey, at least we’re getting fan mail. So I thought I’d respond to some of it.

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