Thread by @NaomiKritzer

I was pondering Internet communities and how certain portions can get really toxic and weird and was thinking about mothering dot com. This thread talks about the straight line that led a depressing number of people from "natural parenting" to QAnon.

https://twitter.com/pamina_q/status/1296157886280859656

When I was a new mom, in 2000, there was a store in St. Paul that sold breastfeeding supplies that I went to, and they also sold Mothering magazine, and I wound up subscribing briefly and finding my way to the discussion boards.

I was a regular poster there for a while. I don't actually remember how long -- after a few months I discovered another community that was a better fit, then moved on from there to a break-away community. (This was a super common experience for an online mom at the time.)

Anyway, Mothering magazine was this problematic mix of lovely articles about gentle parenting and outdoor play and pseudoscientific garbage.

The bulletin boards had some similar issues, although in 2000, it didn't feel particularly doctrinaire to me.

The event that pushed me out was sort of hilariously dramatic: it was the Night that Peggy O'Mara Discovered The Boards. Peggy O'Mara was the editor of the magazine; she'd presumably authorized the creation of the bulletin board community but had not previously visited.

Friends, do you know what she found that horrified her to her very bones?

MOTHERS talking about SEX.

In EXPLICIT TERMS.

(There had been a "how can I give a better blow job?" thread earlier that week, I think that one really upset her.)

She fired a bunch of the mods and banned a bunch of people. There was vehement pushback and she relented but a bunch of my favorite people had already left for good and the community saw a pretty dramatic shift after that.

Anyway. When I try to explain how that community changed over time, there's really nothing that illustrates it better than the attitude towards unassisted homebirth.

When I first started posting there, there was a subforum for midwife-assisted homebirth. There were people elsewhere on the Internet advocating for unassisted homebirth, but this was not a mainstream-for-MDC sort of thing.

To some extent this was viewed as a Peggy O'Mara thing: she liked midwives, u/a birth dispensed with midwives, that was bad for midwives, end of discussion.

(I should clarify: by "unassisted childbirth" I mean PLANNED unassisted childbirth, not the kind where you give birth in your kitchen because things moved a lot faster than you were expecting.)

(Also, I'm going to drop a trigger warning before I go any further into this history. TW: infant death.)

Over time, more and more women on the forum started trying to give birth unassisted, and they pushed for a specialized subforum for unassisted homebirths. Eventually they got one, and set rules saying that you could not criticize anyone else's decisions.

There was a complex set of rules about the advice you could give. If someone 9 months pregnant started having blinding headaches, it was not forbidden to say, "this is a pre-eclampsia symptom," but I can't remember whether "GO TO THE ER RIGHT NOW" crossed the line.

Fundamentally, if someone was having horrifying symptoms but insisted that their gut told them the hospital was the wrong place for them, you couldn't contradict that.

At some point, someone actually went through and listed all the deaths and serious birth injuries and the number was shocking. I think this person had been screen-shotting, because there was a whole lot of deletion of threads when the outcomes were bad.

Anyway.

I have friends who were on MDC this whole time, hanging out in the homeschooling forum, mostly.

The thing with a really large online community -- you can totally do that, and just ... not ever look at the troubling parts. That's totally an option.

And I don't blame the individual users for saying "those areas are not for me, it's just going to upset me to look, I'm not having those conversations."

But I absolutely hold the administrators responsible.

One more random, but tangentially-related, story about MDC's community.

In the early 2000s there were SO MANY PARENTING BOARDS and lots of them were wide open, you could just go lurk. And FAR AND AWAY the creepiest one I found was the Natural-Living Nazi Moms.

(I deeply regret my lack of screen shots.)

The discussions were basically identical to what you'd got over on MDC but with open racism and antisemitism. "Let's talk about growing a big organic garden and canning! because that way we won't have to pay the Jew tax!"

There were threads looking for good children's picture books but with WHITE children ONLY. I mean, you get the idea, probably.

All of these women also posted at MDC. They had a thread lamenting how oppressed they were, not being able to talk openly about their racism there.

And they were correct that they could not: MDC was totally fine hosting discussions about treating serious illnesses in children with garlic because antibiotics are "unnatural," and totally fine with unassisted homebirth, but Nazism was not up for debate.

Anyway.

I have been thinking a LOT about message boards, and who's responsible for what, and what it means when you just ignore large segments of your online community. About how communities themselves have Overton Windows, and how those windows get moved.