CRACKPOTS #28: PICK ME, PUBLISHERS (Patreon)

Hey there, Liz here. This week’s newsletter comes from CLARE from the FAMOUS AND BELOVED NEWSLETTER. I can’t remember when or how I first came across Clare’s writing, but I can’t recommend her substack enough. I’d really like to write something appropriately effusive and fan girl-ish, but I woke up with an obscene amount of anxiety (???) because I'm running late on this and I’m rushing to board a train. I’ll just say: I always come away from her posts thinking, “yes of course, duh, how did I not see that before, it’s all so obvious, thanks for setting me straight.” I was delighted when she agreed to write something for us and I hope you all enjoy. xx L

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Recently, this article about “the vanishing white male author” made the rounds on Substack. Jacob Savage claims there’s no male equivalent of the most contemporarily famous novelists (Moshfegh, Rooney, Cline), nor are there “white Tommy Oranges or Tao Lins or Tony Tulathimuttes” (lol). While I don’t think this is a particularly interesting approach—all publishing is a disaster, for many reasons—it’s true. And the writer’s argument isn’t so much that it's bad there’s more diversity, but that “attacks on the ‘litbro,’ the mockery of male literary ambition” and an unwillingness of younger, white male novelists to accurately describe their place in “the world around them” are unproductive responses to exploitation or under-representation in publishing. Naomi Kanakia responded well to this, arguing both that we should be attending to the representation of “white males” in culture, but also that the reason there are no famous novelists from this demographic isn’t because woke worked, so to speak, but because white men haven’t been buying books:

...most readers are women. And most women don’t necessarily feel obligated to inform themselves about the inner life of white men… Contemporary male writers don’t really have that male audience to appeal to. Contemporary male writers instead need to succeed by pleasing a female audience. And that’s tough. It puts you on shaky ground.

This is also true, but I don’t agree with Kanakia that Savage just wants “book deals for people like [him]self.” Like, of course, but I know a lot of people who have had years-long trouble getting published, and none of them are white dudes. And yet, if you’re reading a new, popular book, you’re reading a lady talk about wokeness or how hard it is to fuck: insecurity, good vs. bad, etc. I think what that article is calling for more stuff being printed, which would, hopefully, drive more legitimate creativity and intellectual accessibility. My friends and Savage’s friends, alike, in other words, aren’t not getting published because of their identities, but because they’re not writing about the kind of stuff that’s purchasable by this positively psychotic milieu. I love a lot of the psychotic books because I’m crazy, too, which is what’s interesting to me; to pretend you’re not crazy or to pretend what’s happened to publishing is good or normal are fools’ errands. New writing might be crazy and perfectly demonstrative of woke psychosis, but it’s still useful for emotionally and historically processing the way the world is.

(kaia gerber's instagram)

I arrive at this topic not from publishing, really, but as someone with a PhD from a prestigious (but recently federal-funding-less!) university, who is developing an academic book proposal and being told to also market myself as a freelance culture critic, too (lol). My everyday experience of this is that I am treated like an anti-social freak in the normal world for dredging up, like, Stuart Hall at someone’s birthday, and like a boy-crazy bimbo in the academy for thinking queer performance studies probably isn’t a sufficient lens through which to understand our current structural crises. Like, I was being canceled for being a Marxist at work as recently as last year, because I wasn’t citing feminist critiques of Marx enough when I spoke. Ultimately, there’s no two ways about it: being a woman makes my life as a writer much more annoying.

Pre-wokeness, being too smart (PhD) or dumb (Substack) in these ways always got me called a “mean girl.” While “meanness” is a normal and common trait for people to have, that’s not what this has ever meant: it means that you don’t swallow everything every other lady says without question, and sometimes just that you’re nice to straight guys (the enemy). “Mean girl” was a useful term, however, serving in the aughts as a blanket device for all kinds of misogyny, or, later on, for Obama-era “come on, girls” feminism: we can solve gender disparity by simply not competing, so you have to be nice and not compete. Of course, conditions are such that if women don’t compete they never have money or safety or happiness. Yet the momentum of “mean girl” has persisted through wokeness, finding strange, new roots in back-and-forths like Savage and Kanakia’s. Despite the fact that all hugely successful writers right now are women, they are still getting blamed—unfairly and somehow, also, rightly so—for a decline in intellectual culture.

(what am i supposed to do with this — from vanity fair)

What Savage is talking about therefore has less to do with a disappearance of white, male writers than it does with a disappearance of intellectualism, altogether. The co-optation of “diversity” by woke industry has done nothing but shift the roles of big, well-known thinkers from Žižek and Foucault (a figure my classmates frequently called “problematic”—not wrong, but, like, does the broader public understand what goes on in the academy?) to children with Substack accounts, which has been framed as a handing off of “political thought” from out of touch, dangerous men to a more democratic public sphere. This is a fallacy, yadda yadda, and a lot of what’s on Substack is recipes for cakes with sticks on top. But the thing no one seems to be talking about is that some of the kids on Substack (me [I’m 30]), as well as psychotic women writing psychotic novels, are really producing useful thought. It’s the discourse about these things—un-intellectual responses guided only by fame and woke policing—that’s wrong. We’re supposed to want to run full steam ahead with identity politics or to get rid of them, completely, but; try as we might to pretend we are past woman-hating, no one is. Try as we might to pretend boy vs. girl publishing wars is good or bad, it’s neither. Try as we might to think male writers, like my academic ex-boyfriend, aren’t chauvinists, they are (if you’re reading this, I hate you—and TrueAnon has my email, not yours). Try as we might to write Ottessa Moshfegh or Sally Rooney off as unserious or uninfluential—I mean seriously, in terms of form and ideology and genre—we can’t. 

Through conversation with Liz about what I could write for Crackpots, I realized the replacement for “mean girl” is “pick me girl,” a much more complex insult I’m sure Liz gets all the time (Another story about grad school: first day of an advanced class about Marxism, my professor asked us all to say what we, adults getting PhDs, thought of when he said “materialism.” More than 3 people—who had already been entrusted to teach classes about theory and history to students at a very expensive university—replied with the Saucy Santana TikTok song “Material Girl.” None of these people, thusly prompted, could define materialism, because they had never heard of it. Months later, in the same class, I was canceled by my small group for saying that hysteria is bad for history). There are a million different ways to try to unpack how these labels tangle with one another and cause problems, but I’m specifically interested in their intersections with writing, how fake intellectuals engage it in bad faith, and the ways real intellectuals ignore it. I am kind of a bimbo and antisocial weirdo, and I am both stupid and smart. What’s crazy-making is that I know I’m not alone in these realities and feelings, but everyone acts like I am: like they already have it figured out. At work and on Substack, public and academic writers are still just talking about gender with a mythical ethos that men are bad guys and women are good: 2018 is forever. But without understanding what all this has come to mean through, like, TikTok and academia, alike, we cannot begin to diagnose or ameliorate whatever is left of our present intellectual culture. So, sorry, TrueAnon subscribers: you’re now going to have to read about Chappell Roan.

(this image is cause for me to seriously crack up — from call her daddy)

A couple weeks ago, “Roan” went on Call Her Daddy and shared such witty insight as “I’m very in love, but I am pro-single” and “All of my friends who have kids are in hell.” It’s this latter quip that got her in trouble, but backlash was shaded by months and months of her emphasis on how much she hates her job: fame has taken “the light from [her] eyes.” Until now, the MGZWDF (Millennial & Gen Z Woke Defense Force) defended Chappell Roan against any and all criticism; because she’s a woman, I assume, she’s allowed to cancel gigs last minute, refuse to take pictures with fans, and yell at photographers for doing their jobs. The comment about everyone with kids being in hell, though, threw people over the edge, and the MGZWDF started to turn on her, until even that invited a woke defense of its own: Roan “has already dealt with a ton of backlash from people who are hellbent on misunderstanding her,” and it’s Call Her Daddy’s fault for being journalistically irresponsible.

To Kanakia’s point, Roan might not be able to get away with this stuff if she weren’t white, but it’s specifically her womanness that makes her celebrity figure an anchor for psychosis. While I am not a fan, I rarely, wholly disagree with what Chappell Roan says. No one on Earth hates children more than me, being famous is my worst nightmare, and, while inappropriate, I think it’s funny when she’s mean to strangers because she thinks she’s Madonna. What I have a problem with is rushing to her defense, pausing to do so only when she suggests motherhood is a stupid component of social womanness. That’s the least dumb thing she’s ever said! It is stupid! All of this is merely a perfect example of how culture—specifically intellectual discourse about gender and fame, or, whatever—is completely breaking down into ash. If you say that, maybe, Chappell Roan should have to show up to work in order to enjoy having money and fame, you’re a mean girl. But if you say you don’t want kids, you’re a pick me, conceding to a boyish culture that doesn’t allow women to be women, i.e. mothers. What year is it?

Importantly, I’m not talking about discourse on X, the everything app, but Substack, where every kind of writer that exists is building an audience and persona. Žižek is on there! This is longform, citational writing that is inspired by and framed as intellectual production, and, even if it’s “We Need to Talk About Chappell Roan” and “Cake With Sticks,” it is the most accessible bastion of public criticism. So, while it’s difficult to admit we’re still going around in these circles as the rest of the real world is in free fall, internalized misogyny has bred with neoliberal individualism so rabidly and continuously, it has put a tangible limit on the potential for new ideas. As I’ve written about before, it’s time to accept that there is no more intellectually serious public sphere outside these internet black holes.

(nyt)

I read something recently that was hugely clarifying—emotionally—on these fronts, though, and which really got me thinking about how the amorphous, contemporary shape of intellectualism has dialectically created contemporary “feminism.” My boyfriend had the nerve to tell me, “Hey, I was listening to a podcast, and Tom Sachs’ wife was on promoting her book, and it sounded like something you’d like.” I mean, could this get any worse? “Why would I want to read a book by Tom Sachs’ wife,” I asked. “It’s about how she hates him, it sounds like.” Ok, I’m listening.

Sarah Hoover’s The Motherload is, basically, about how Tom Sachs is a loser. It’s a memoir about how she had a kid without thinking about it enough, and the experience of learning to love the child—already marred by medical malpractice, legitimate trauma, and a difficult relationship with her own mother—was made all the more impossible by Sachs’ inability to stop texting random girls or feign interest in Hoover’s pregnancy and birth. The most interesting thing about the book is that, based on what I just told you about it, it sounds absolutely awful: a liberal fairytale about how men suck and women, even when they don’t have to work for a spacious apartment in Soho, have it bad forever. But, in a total lack of apology for her husband’s behavior, having money, or over-complication of motherhood—saying, plainly, “I hated my kid until I did a lot of work to love him”—the memoir slickly maneuvers out of those discursive traps. It read like, “I know this is cliché, but just listen to my experience, play by play, and then maybe you’ll understand how there’s a lot of cliché problems about womanhood that we still need to work on. Men really are hurtful, and women’s bodies are nothing but disposable to everyone but ourselves. But that doesn’t mean that women are nice, have class solidarity, or that they want to be moms.”

(gangs all here — from getty)

I’m sure, somewhere, Sarah Hoover is being called a pick me for making these claims. After getting on Prozac and accepting her son as her best friend, she stayed with Sachs and had another baby. Outside their marriage, Sachs and Hoover, by proxy, have been art-world-canceled for being weird and exploitative. Nothing is working in her favor, within the context of womanhood-as-defined-by-the-MGZWDF. But, after reading her experience of being hoisted by a loser from an imbalance of brain chemicals, memory of sexual assault, and malaise from a lack of real closeness in her life or family, I’m on Sarah’s side. I understand why you would stay with that kind of guy because you don’t have much else going on, because he gives you money. I also understand how a union with an art-world-powerful man would make you feel intellectually protected, and like what you think and say matters more than it would without the access he gives you to, say, publishing a memoir. Part of wokeness has always classically been—like allowing Chappell Roan to take mental health days in the form of canceling huge concerts that people are financially dependent on—not blaming women for the very real circumstances (but tiresome) that make them insane. Something about the transition from meanness to pick-me-ness has made this unpredictable, however, and we can now seemingly pick and choose when women are deserving of empathy or serious intellectual engagement. That’s bad.

If, as Naomi Kanakia aptly points out, most readers are women, I don’t have clear answers as to how this continues to happen. Women, myself included, should be demanding more from our partners, parents, public spheres, and culture. That was always a talking point of the movement from whence “pick me” derives, though, and all that came from that was a deflated public sphere where only certain kinds of women are allowed to talk, and only about stuff as decided by a nebulous citizen’s police force. But that’s not just on Substack: the first piece of advice I got about my academic book proposal is, essentially, to make myself legible both to those clowns and to the men they hate. So, there’s no publishing anywhere—no inclusive and large enough movement that would move major ideological or epistemological needles—that is honest about the way the world is.

I’ll end by paraphrasing a piece of fiction I’m working on (oh, brother): one of the greatest contemporary myths is that men are bad because they cheat, and women are good because they believe in love. While Tom Sachs’ wife’s book seems to corroborate these ideas, in the text, the man believes love is enough to sustain a marriage, and Sarah Hoover wants nothing but to be a person of her own. In the real world, men cheat because they are carelessly entitled to anything they want whenever they want it, but women cheat—romantically, sexually, or by ignoring their children for other feelings and endeavors—because they have primal traumas of psychosis-inducing miscommunication and ignorance that they think and think and think about. That’s much more calculated and foreboding than corporeal impulse, much more historically informed and interesting to unpack. “Pick me” is a device within that milieu, a product of the same materially-informed thinking its use is aimed to ridicule. And, I want to be picked; I want my book to sell, my pitches to work, and to be called upon to write for Crackpots, leaving my entitled ex in the dust. But I also want Sarah Hoover to invite me to her apartment in Soho, and for girls on Substack to think I’m doing the right thing. Maybe that means I’m ideologically weak and egotistical, or maybe it means I’m a person, i.e. the only thing that can create ideas with political or artistic value. I think if more people admitted this, talking to each other wouldn’t be so hard, and the world wouldn’t be quite so big a disaster.