Pun Salad

Another successful suggestion I made to the Portsmouth (NH) Public Library, probably as a result of me reading this good review in the WSJ back in January. (WSJ gifted link)

The book describes the toxic combination of moral panic, cowardice, wokeness, and the social media environment, and how that affects the publishing industry. The author, Adam Szetela, focuses specifically on "young adult" (YA) books, and how would-be authors daring to write characters outside their pigeonholes of race, gender, sexual preference, etc. must tread extremely carefully to avoid a shitstorm of criticism about "authenticity" or "insensitivity" or "stereotyping" or "white saviorhood" or … well, you get the idea. Baseless accusations of racism, sexism, etc. are easy to make and spread through the social media grapevine. Bullying can be intense, and also potty-mouthed.

This has engendered the new profession of "sensitivity readers", people who are thought to represent their racial/sexual/ethnic/etc. pigeonhole, hired (expensively) by authors and publishers to check for unacceptable sins. They often find something, because how else can they justify their lofty fees?

Szetela cites the very pertinent "great untruths" as listed in The Coddling of the American Mind by Lukianoff and Haidt: "What doesn't kill you makes you weaker"; "Always trust your feelings"; and "Life is a battle between good people and evil people." It seems that those untruths are (nevertheless) large and in charge in great swaths of the publishing industry. (Fortunately, authors like Szetela, Lukianoff, and Haidt manage to get books published anyway.)

Szetela also notes the self-censorship that extends outside the YA sphere. The examples of removing Ian Fleming's non-PC descriptions in his James Bond novels, and the removal of some Dr. Seuss titles for ethnic stereotyping are mentioned.

Szetela is unsparing in his criticism of all this. (If you would like a free taste, he has a few posts up at Quillette.) He is kind of a lefty himself, and their are little nods to that throughout the book. He seems sympathetic to affirmative-action-like efforts to increase the "representation" of "diverse" authors of books and their characters. (Whereas a troglodyte like me just wants good books, without the nose-counting.) He does make an interesting point that all this moral panic ignores the thorny topic of class and the workings of the free market system. For example, the YA classic The Hate U Give ends with its family moving to a richer neighborhood by dint of diligent self-help bootstrapping; Szelta deems this "economically vacuous". He would prefer: "economic mobility" be portrayed as a "shared project that occurs through strikes, sit-ins, and political legislation."

Still, it's good to see this kind of broad and honest criticism come from inside the left-wing tent.