Your Fave is a Hot Mess, But You Don’t Have to Be
In every revelation that yet another man of publishing is #TheWorst I continue to see the same conversations and patterns emerge: general horror and dismay, outcry, followed by a cooling off period where people (usually women because it seems like only in kidlit do we constantly offer up dudes as proof that our own work matters) muse about continuing to hand sell or recommend these problematic men. And honestly, it’s the last part that becomes especially galling as we continue to go through this merry-go-round of terrible kidlit dudes, because it’s the easiest part of the problem to solve. We can’t make awful, sexually aggressive men respect the boundaries of women and non-binary folks, but we can definitely lift someone else up instead.
And let’s be honest: there is a huge difference between carrying a successful book on a shelf because it is a guaranteed seller or because patrons request it, whether because of movies/television tie-ins or general popularity, and recommending it to readers. It seems a little extreme to expect bookstores to purge their shelves of Awful Man of the Week, but I don’t think it’s above and beyond to expect booksellers and librarians to recommend readalikes in their stead.
There is a huge gulf of effort between stocking a book by an Awful Man and recommending it. The former is just business sense. The latter is a tacit approval of whatever terribleness The Awful Man of the Week has done. When we discuss big ideas like sexism or gender disparity we can hand wring and tsk-tsk systemic inequality as though we have little to do with the overall system of injustice because it’s sometimes harder to point to individual actions driving the whole of the nastiness. But when it comes to something like placing a book in a reader’s hand, that’s a little less murky. That is an actual effort to ignore any accusations, no matter what they might be. That is you, as a person, saying to the world and a reader “This person is #TheWorst but the quality of their writing is such that we should ignore that and still enjoy their books. I believe this book, and enjoying it, it more important than the pain of the people hurt by this Terrible Man.”
You can try to philosophize it, justify it, whatever helps you sleep at night. But there is no way around it. You are putting a book ahead of real people, a book that can easily be replaced by one of a million other books that are just as beautifully written and thrilling. Not because you Have to, but because you Want to.
And I guess that makes you #TheWorst as well.
