New year, new journal

Introducing Fairer Disputations (and Rosie!)

Hi friends,

Happy new year! I’m sorry for the radio silence over the past few months. I’ve been revelling in the snuggles provided by baby number three, Rose Evangeline, who was born in September.

Guys, she is a total angel baby. Even 3+ months in, I’m actually kind of in disbelief at how good she is. I finally understand those people who would talk about bringing their babies to work with them and letting them play at their feet—the kind of parents who didn’t agonize about (lack of) sleep or have debilitating anxiety at the thought of getting the baby into and out of the carseat even one more time than necessary. I have become one of them! And it is such a delight.

One consequence of this sweet temperament is that—although you wouldn’t know it from how I have neglected both this Substack and the Prudence Allen reading group (I’m sorry, guys!!)—I’ve actually been able to do some professional work over the past few months, even without any outside childcare. For a while, it was under wraps, but now I can finally share what I’ve been working on: the launch of a brand new website, Fairer Disputations.

Here’s a snippet from our About page:

Fairer Disputations is not just an online journal. It’s an international community of scholars, public intellectuals, journalists, and advocates. Our mission is to advance a new vision of feminism, one that is grounded in the basic fact that sex is real. Although the authors we feature do not all agree on every issue, they each make important contributions to the debate over how society should, in justice, accommodate the reality of sexual difference.

Fairer Disputations will advance that debate by aggregating both popular and scholarly writing, publishing our own original material, and creating an online community of new feminist voices. Beginning in January 2023, our email subscribers will receive a curated weekly digest featuring the latest in new sex realist content.

I’ve been brought on to help get the site up and running and to serve as its editor, but it’s really the brainchild of Erika Bachiochi, who directs the Wollstonecraft Project at the Abigail Adams Institute, and Rose Elvidge, who will serve as FD’s associate editor. They’ve assembled an extremely impressive group of women who have agreed to have their work featured on our site.

Tomorrow morning at 9am EST, we’re having a special launch event on Zoom. I’ll be there, along with Erika and seven of our featured authors: Louise Perry, Mary Harrington, Abigail Favale, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Jennifer Lahl, Helen Joyce, and Nina Power. (Nina and Helen’s photos aren’t in the promo graphic because they were exciting late-breaking additions to the lineup.)

You can register here.

If you can’t make it, don’t fear! We’ll be sending out a link to the video in our first FD email this Friday morning. You can subscribe here to get those weekly updates. For now, we’re in aggregation mode, but we’ll start publishing original essays soon.

Okay, that’s all for now. I’ll be back in your inbox with more later this month, including an interview with Richard Reeves, the author of the outstanding new book, Of Boys and Men, And eventually I’m hoping to wrangle my somewhat complicated feelings about Rosie’s birth into written form by way of a commentary on technocratic vs. holistic and humanistic paradigms of childbirth (drawing on Robbie Davis-Floyd’s Birth as An American Rite of Passage) and the need for medical care to be based on a sound philosophical anthropology (drawing on—you guessed it—Sr. Prudence Allen).

In the meantime, just one quick recommendation for you: if you’re struggling to navigate the beginning of the year self-improvement vibes, might I suggest Tsh Oxenreider’s Rule of Life workshop? It’s such a helpful tool in reflection and discernment, and a fresh new year is a great time to give it a try. If you’re curious, start with this essay that I asked her to write for PD a few years back.