Jennifer Senior

There was an obvious irony to his story, a karmic boomerang: Jackson, who is black and gay, often worked as a “sensitivity reader” for major publishing houses, which meant his job was to flag just the sort of problem content for which he was now being run out of town. He was Robespierre with his own neck in the cradle of the guillotine. One of the captains of “cancel culture” — which urges people to shun the insensitive, the oppressive, the morally questionable — got canceled himself.

As often happens with these things, the online pile-on was mainly led by people who hadn’t read Jackson’s book. It did start with someone who had — a reader who’d written an intemperate, if highly impassioned, review of an advance copy for the community website Goodreads. But it most likely would have remained just that, a pan from a citizen critic, had the review not been noticed by that corner of Twitter that’s obsessed with YA fiction. Even by Twitter standards, it’s a hothouse subculture — self-conscious, emotional, quick to injure. Not unlike teenagers themselves.

I have read Jackson’s book. Before I get to the actual contents, let’s get this out of the way: What happened to Jackson is frightening. Purity tests are the tools of fanatics, and the quest for purity ultimately becomes indistinguishable from the quest for power. In the Twitterverse, ideologues have far more power than moderates. They have more followers; their tweets get more traction (studies have shown that emotional tweets pretty much always have more traction); they set the terms of their neighborhood’s culture and tone.

But this does not mean they have better judgment.

This episode is proof of nothing if not of Twitter’s asymmetrical power: A semi-anonymous mob (the leader of the charge was someone with the handle @flightofstaz) can sufficiently scare an author into withdrawing his book, even though it received a starred review from Booklist and was a Kids’ Indie Next pick. (Not a small deal, that.) The die-hards in this army of crusaders will argue they’re doing it in the name of diversity, but it’s really just the opposite: If Twitter controls publishing, we’ll soon enter a dreary monoculture that admits no book unless it has been prejudged and meets the standards of the censors.

What Jackson’s case really demonstrates is just how narrow and untenable the rules for writing YA literature are. In a tweet last May, Jackson himself more or less articulated them: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people. Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during life-changing times, like the AIDS epidemic, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

In a live Q&amp;A; for an online children’s literature conference in January, Jackson explained that he was at one point tempted to write tangentially about immigration,but his Latino friends talked him out of it: He’d be encroaching on their turf, poaching their spot on the shelves.

So he didn’t. But his first novel, “A Place for Wolves,” is not exclusively populated by gay African-Americans. His two protagonists are gay teenagers, yes, and one of them is black. But his secondary characters are ... Serbs and Albanians. The book takes place in Kosovo, during the early days of its civil war in the late ‘90s.

Let’s stop to contemplate this for a moment. When Jackson was left to his own devices to create and dream — rather than to simply read books for possible cultural violations — his natural, irrepressible reflex was to write about something that went beyond his own experience. Because that’s what novelists do: conjure other worlds, imagine their way into other realities, guess at the texture of other people’s consciousness. It’s part of the pleasure of inventing stuff for a living.

Did he always get it right? His bibliography is notably short, featuring books published by obscure presses. (Would it have been too much trouble for him to read the work of Tim Judah or David Rieff?) But strict historical fidelity has never been required of any art form. What raised people’s hackles was that an Albanian Muslim is one of the book’s villains, when it was the Albanian Muslims who suffered disproportionately during the Kosovo war. That, and the idea that two comparatively privileged American teenagers could be the focus of the book.

Did Jackson do this out of malice? No. It was his explicit intention, according to an author’s note, to complicate the reader’s picture of a tragic ethnic war. There’s nothing wrong, per se, with making a victim a villain, or a hero a jerk: Art is filled with antiheroes with redeeming qualities, whether they’re Humbert Humbert or Tony Soprano. Nor are two American teenagers in a war-torn country, on the face of it, a bad premise for a YA book.

The book’s real sin is that Jackson didn’t do what he set out to do. Though he can write with charm and the authentic sass of an American adolescent, much of the book is painfully clumsy and poorly paced — which makes it a fairly typical debut novel, by the way. His job as a sensitivity reader also shows: “Sounded a little Eurocentric to me,” is a not unrepresentative observation by the narrator.

If the book-buying public had found “A Place for Wolves” as criminally distasteful and insensitive as Twitter did, it would have sunk the novel in slower, more deliberate ways. Librarians would have read it and taken a pass. Bookstore owners would have decided it wasn’t worth the space. Book critics would have savaged it — or worse, ignored it.

It should have failed or succeeded in the marketplace of ideas. But it was never given the chance. The mob got to it first.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/08/opinion/teen-fiction-and-the-perils-of-cancel-culture.html" id="e49c059e-8dc6-3bb3-a58f-3b5f8843bb52">The New York Times</a>.

Late last month, a young man named Kosoko Jackson became the second young adult author in five weeks to pull a debut work just before it hit the shelves. His book, “A Place for Wolves,” ran afoul of the sensibilities of the Twitter gatekeeping class, which deemed it insensitive to Muslims and unduly focused on people of privilege.

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

The allegations by Lucy Flores — that in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada, the vice president touched her shoulders and kissed the back of her head — cannot exactly be dismissed as an outlier, given that another allegation of guerrilla nuzzling followed just 72 hours later (this time from 2009) and that multiple photo montages online suggest a similar pattern.

And so we have another debate about male decency and respect, trying to weigh creepiness against over-exuberant affection, handsiness against glad-handing, all the while remembering that this is Joe Biden we’re talking about, a retail-politics guy from another era, known for arm grabs and bear hugs (you’d see this all the time on the Senate floor — the shoulder squeezing, the close-talking).

He is, by nature, a physically expressive fellow. Hugs are not unfamiliar to him, and he seems to sense when people are feeling fragile, as Stephanie Carter, the wife of Ash Carter, a defense secretary under Barack Obama, wrote in an essay for Medium, noting that the “creepy Uncle Joe” photo featuring her as the recipient of a shoulder rub was quite welcome, thank you very much.

These gray-zone allegations are of course still worth examining. But because they are salacious — because they are embodied, because we can actually see them — I wonder if we spend more time discussing them than another gray-zone problem that, in my view, is far more pervasive and often less easily solved with a sharp rebuke or a complaint to human resources: not being taken seriously.

Because here’s the truth: Some of the women I know have #MeToo stories. But most of the women I know have stories about feeling dismissed, invisible, less-than.

What are they talking about? They’re talking about seeing their ideas gain traction in a meeting only after a man has said them. Or being told after they’ve asserted themselves in a meeting that they dominated it — or at the least talked too much.

They’re talking about seeing weeks or months of work being casually dismissed by their superior after he’s had a 10-minute conversation with a male colleague.

They’re talking about being mansplained.

Personally? I’ve been mansplained about my own book. And about Congress, which I covered on and off for 20 years. You know what didn’t help? Saying Hey, I wrote a book about that! Or Hey, I started my career at The Hill!

They’re talking about contradicting a male colleague and watching him get really mad.

They’re talking about being called boastful when they’re invoking a necessary credential.

They’re talking about having their recollections dismissed until they’re Googled.

They’re talking about being given soft or detail-oriented responsibilities while the fellas are delegated the big think.

They’re talking about chatting with another woman and a male colleague walks by. “Planning a rebellion?” he asks. (That, admittedly, happened early in the careers of most of the women I have talked to. Have men stopped doing that, I wonder? [Maybe. Hopefully? Probably not.])

Many of these problems are happening in organizations with supposed enlightened politics. They can still have feudal habits.

Note what I’m not mentioning: Ambition = pushiness. Too obvious.

Or a national policy that guarantees only three months off with a newborn, unpaid, if you’re lucky enough to work for an organization to which the Family and Medical Leave Act applies.

Or that we have no subsidized child care, and often get looked at as if we’re nuts if we ask for reimbursement for it when we work extra hours.

Younger women sometimes look at women of my generation — I’m 49 — and wonder why we may be a little wearier, a little warier, a little less noisy. But it’s not, I don’t think, a matter of false consciousness, or that we don’t know our rights; nor is it that we’re resentful about having had to swallow our own stories as we were coming of age. (Even ancient infractions of a minor variety are, in this climate, the functional equivalent of a loaded gun.)

It’s that some of the more ambiguous #MeToo experiences might seem more manageable, or maybe just more ridiculous — and certainly less insidious — than the subtler biases many of us have faced in how men think. They’re about an attitude. A mindset, hiding in plain sight.

Sometimes the two are connected. It can be a short leap from taking physical liberties with a woman (even if they’re minor, even if they’re done out of sheer obliviousness) to dismissing her ideas. Both involve a certain inability to see.

Maybe my younger peers have been fortunate enough to see most of these behaviors melt away. But I suspect they haven’t, and they, too, deserve our attention, maybe their own hashtag. I don’t care what it is, just so long as they’re discussed. They’re common. They’re powerful. They’re corrosive and confidence-pulverizing. They’re every bit as real.

This article originally appeared in <a id="53172ecf-8cc9-4b91-af16-c5117c6dc982" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/opinion/joe-biden-metoo-president.html">The New York Times</a>.

What we're not talking about when we talk about Joe Biden

This past week it’s Joe Biden’s turn in the #MeToo barrel, and like many Democrats, I’m torn about what to think.

And perhaps you, like me, have witnessed your darling child’s transformation from cuddly, relatable quasi-innocent to meme-spewing, floss-dancing obsessive.

I sometimes wonder whether my 11-year-old son dreams in Fortnite. I know he browses for new costumes in the item shop with the same zeal with which my mother once combed the racks at Loehmann’s. And when he is not playing Fortnite, he is often watching YouTubers play Fortnite, yowling men-children who go by names like Ninja and Tfue and Fearless, spelled Fe4RLess, narrating their virtual exploits.

But after several months of careful observation — during which I have not merely mom-tolerated Fortnite but actively spectated and interrogated and (yes! even!) participated — here is what I’ve concluded:

Not without qualification or caveat. But I’ve lately decided that many of us are thinking about this game the wrong way — including Prince Harry, who declared on Thursday that it really ought to be banned.

A brief tutorial for the Fortnite unlettered: Think “The Hunger Games,” but with less gore and more contestants. Each player is dropped onto a candy-colored island and armed with only a pickax. He or she joins 99 others — some friends, perhaps, but mostly strangers (and mostly adults) — and spends the rest of the game scavenging for weapons, building fortifications, hiding, exploring and laying waste to everyone in sight. The last person standing wins.

Also, it is officially named Fortnite Battle Royale. But no one calls it that.

As a mother, I’ve never been much of a calamity howler, and having once written a book about parenthood, I know enough about the history of childhood to understand that most new forms of entertainment are met with gales of protest that in hindsight seem ridiculous. In the 1920s, social critics believed movies would turn our children to lives of wild delinquency. In the 1950s, a Senate Judiciary subcommittee held hearings about the moral dangers of comic books.

But part of me, I’ll confess, was at sixes and sevens about the sudden appearance of this game. Why — and how — had it so quickly become the rabid preoccupation of so many?

A great deal of the answer is that Fortnite is social. More than social, actually: It is, as the tech writer and developer Owen Williams has written, a destination, an actual place. “It’s like going to church, or the mall,” Williams explained on his blog, Charged, late last year, “except there’s an entire universe to mess around in together.”

Which explains a certain wisecrack my son likes to make when he peels off to play. “I’m going to see my friends now,” he says, though he’s in fact joining them on his headset. Jumping into a game of Fortnite is paying a social call, the equivalent of dropping in on a cocktail party.

That Fortnite is its own place — specifically “a third place,” or lively harbor for communities outside of home and work — matters quite a lot. Middle-class children today don’t have much freedom to find such places. They’re rigidly scheduled and aggressively sheltered — parents of my generation are more inclined to roll their children in bubble wrap and tuck them on a high shelf for storage than allow them to wander off to parks or shopping malls on their own. Gaming is their form of self-determination, a means to take control of their constricted, highly regimented lives.

I’ll toss in at least one paradoxical, unanticipated benefit of this socializing, at least in my house: My son now demands to see far more of his friends in real life. All that socializing via headset has whetted his appetite for embodied interaction. (Perhaps he’s an outlier. But Williams says the same thing has happened to him.)Sometimes those play dates don’t even involve Fortnite. But when they do, they’re far more social than meets the eye. The kids aren’t just plugged into their devices, but to one another — barking orders, exchanging intel, passing joysticks, cracking jokes.

“There’s just this nonstop talk,” said Clive Thompson, author of the excellent new “Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.” “It’s like two people who are watching a sporting event together. Except they’re the athletes.” The classic mistake that adults make, Thompson adds, is that they focus entirely on the screen when they see children huddled around iPads and Switches, Xboxes and PlayStations. “What they don’t focus on,” he says, “is what’s happening inside the room.”

A terrific article on Axios last Christmas articulated something I’d had a hard time putting words to: Fortnite is its own social network. It’s Facebook for a new generation of adults — and tweens, like my son.

In a cage match between Facebook and Fortnite, I’ll choose Fortnite, thanks, where people actually talk to one another in real time.

Are there unlovely, habit-forming aspects to the game? Yes. When I reached Owen Williams by phone, he said the game was devilishly good at lulling players into believing they’re closer to winning each time than they probably are. Psychologists call this the “near-miss effect,” which incentivizes players to keep playing. And every two weeks, there are subtle shifts in how the game is played (with new weapons added, for instance, or taken away), a seductive trick.

But the world my son is entering is already a blinking bazaar of distractions, engineered to hot-wire our attention. Instagram, Twitter, group texts, email, Gchat — all of them can turn us into compulsives if we’re not careful; all require self-regulation. Whenever adults fret about their children’s inability to control themselves, I think of psychoanalyst Adam Phillips’ observation that perhaps it’s because adults identify so very well with this loss of control: We’re the ones who are alcoholics, gamblers, serial killers. Not kids. “Excessive behavior,” he wrote in “On Balance,” “is not so much something we grow out of as something we grow into.”

Excessive gaming is just one more thing to guard against if you’ve got a teenager, along with alcohol and drug use. The problem existed long before Fortnite darkened our consoles.

Here’s what I learned from my son: The real harms of Fortnite do not come from the game itself. He explained this once in a comment so casual and epigrammatic that I knew it instantly to be true. “When people are behaving badly during the game,” he said, “it’s 10 percent because of their personality, 10 percent because the game is getting stressful and 80 percent because they’re imitating YouTubers.”

On YouTube, there are countless videos of adults playing Fortnite. They’re the game’s hidden influencers. Many of our kids, unbeknown to us, are taking their behavioral cues from them. Some are harmless, but some are not. YouTube, as we know, is algorithmically designed to show you the ugliest content in a hurry. Which generally means, in Fortnite’s case, a lot of trash talk and sore losing — and in the case of the fringier types, hate speech.

So if we want to guard against the hazards of the game, maybe we should screen which videos our kids are watching. Or maybe just tell them to turn off YouTube altogether — and play more Fortnite instead.

This article originally appeared in <a id="e12912a9-8e3e-436f-819b-a03d3a7326da" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/05/opinion/sunday/fortnite-social-play-children.html">The New York Times</a>.

How I learned to stop worrying and love Fortnite

If you have a child, particularly a boy, particularly a boy who’s a tween or teenager, you are no doubt acquainted with Fortnite, the third-person shooter game that never met a platform it didn’t like.

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Jennifer Senior

Articles written by the author

Teen Fiction and the Perils of Cancel Culture

What we're not talking about when we talk about Joe Biden

How I learned to stop worrying and love Fortnite