I'm Tired Of Calling Out Problematic Things.
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
When I started writing for publication, back in 2010 or so, the idea that we should call out problematic things in fiction was still new.
I believed in this idea.
When Autistic Book Party started, it was because I'd written an angry post about a short story - a finalist for the Nebula Award - that portrayed autism badly. Jim Hines boosted the post and all of a sudden there were all sorts of people wanting to know my opinion about other autistic stories and books. I was flattered and delighted. The idea that there were people who cared what I thought about autism stories, because I was autistic - that was a new idea, back in those innocent days, and I had a lot of thoughts to share.
From the beginning, I wanted to write about all kinds of autistic books - good and bad, by autistic people and otherwise, featuring autistic characters or just the imagination of an autistic writer. I wanted to say what I liked about the good ones and what I didn't like about the bad ones, and I did.
My tone, in those early days, was often one of frustration. I read some pretty insulting stuff, and I reacted to it! I used all caps! I talked about wanting to throw books across the room. I definitely talked in ways, in some of those early reviews, that no longer feel appropriate now that my profile is higher. I'm not very famous, but most authors aren't; I'm equally or more successful now than some of the authors I review. And I also have enough experience publishing my own work to know how fragile it feels to be a published author, how deeply criticism can cut even when it's valid and warranted, even when the author looks like they ought to be too successful to care.
I don't regret those early, angry reviews. I wasn't being angry for clout. I was reading things, for a good cause, that upset me and I was being honest about how I felt. My goal was not to hurt the authors - it was to teach other people about what not to do and why.
But, even back then, I was noticing things.
How much pressure there was to call out, and keep calling out, everything. How much fear there was of complicity - the idea that, if you see a problematic thing and don't call it out, you're really on the side of the bigots. That you have to join in on call-outs to prove what side you're on, even if everyone else has already discussed the problematic thing to death.
How frequently this pressure came from friends (now ex-friends) who didn't practice what they preached; friends who would claim that calling something out wasn't safe for them, but who would angrily pressure me and other friends to do the call-out on their behalf.
How, for some mysterious reason, my angry reviews always seemed to get more views and more comments than my happy ones.
I don't regret the early, angry reviews. But I regret other things I called out, in those early days, at the urging of those ex-friends. I regret everything I did out of a sense that I had to be angry, just to show that I wasn’t like the bigots.
I got wiser eventually about these social pressures and I learned, to some degree, to avoid them.
But fast-forward to today. Four years of a fascist US government and a year and a half of pandemic have strained everyone to the breaking point and made these pressures even worse. No matter how we insist that "cancel culture doesn't exist," we all know that the online publishing community overall is more angry than helpful, more toxic than supportive, more frightening than empowering, now more than ever. Even when the anger is in the name of a good cause.
And most of us know that, however valiantly we try to punch up, marginalized people are the ones who bear the brunt of our moral discharge more often than not. The most marginalized people in our community, not the powerful bigots who hate us, are the ones being driven away - not just in one or two spectacularly famous cases, but quietly and in droves.
I feel like I helped to create this toxic world, and I don't know what to do.
Because I still firmly believe that representation matters. Writing is a powerful act which can help build up our sense of empathy; and empathy and imagination towards marginalized perspectives are important. It's important to talk about how that works, and the talking can't always solely be positive - it's not a conversation with teeth unless it includes discussion of what not to do and why not, what to stay away from and why. Anything powerful enough to help people can also hurt them, and we need to talk about how the hurt works, too.
But then I look at the industry landscape we've created in the name of these beliefs.
Where marginalized people, including my past and present selves, are terrified to write our truths in case we "get it wrong."
(I haven't outgrown this fear in the two years since writing that linked post, despite many efforts; I've only grown a bit cleverer about pushing past it, and more and more exasperated with the fact that it exists.)
Where any story about the complexities of sexuality, gender, or trauma that doesn't adhere to a very specific, clean, safe script is automatically suspect - and so is the intimate life and identity of the author who wrote it.
Where more and more young neurodivergent authors are presenting with actual, full-blown moral OCD about the idea of "being problematic" - and the knowledge that, if they ever were problematic in some way, no one would ever owe them a second chance.
Where callouts of a problematic author consistently get 100x as much traction as any discussion of a book that depicts marginalized identities well or beautifully or with courage.
Where an author who tosses out an insensitive or ill-considered line about the controversy of the day is subject to the same social punishment as an author who's been deliberately inciting bigotry for years.
Where a lot of the stuff that gets yelled at for being problematic isn't even bigoted content - it's stuff that didn't fit the mold of good representation that we expected to get. It's bi characters ending up with a love interest of the opposite gender. It's authors of color writing stories the way they want instead of fitting a white reader's idea of "authenticity." It’s queer relationships that don’t come to a neat, tidy, happy end. It's traumatized characters (and, frankly, traumatized authors) having complicated, un-saintly reactions to their trauma. It's things that weren't even wrong to write in the first place except that they fit some part of the marginalized human experience that we don't find politically useful right now.
I'm tired of all this, and I'm angry seeing the harm that my community has perpetrated, that maybe I had a hand in, as a caller-out of problematic things, all along.
Is all this stuff really what we were fighting for? Is it what we wanted?
Really?
I'm tired.