#he wrote a whole tweet essay defending his bad opinions

[zazikels]

has this cretin had a single good take in his life tbh (he's talking about gale)

[aimmyarrowshigh]

aheavenlyrush replied to your post “I’ve been on tumblr since 2012 and I was even a John Green fan for a...”

i checked and it happened in 2015

aheavenlyrush replied to your post “I’ve been on tumblr since 2012 and I was even a John Green fan for a...”

i saw that jg post on my feed and i had no energy to comment on it but truly when i saw that you had i felt such relief!! i remember making that one post about stiefvater defending him and telling teenage girls to be quiet and the response to it still fucking haunts me i swear

Oy, was it really that recently? The last three years have taken 900 years. And yeah... Maggie Stiefvater’s post about it was a Really Bad Look, and iirc that was the environment that spawned the beginning of the batshit “Keep YA Kind”* concern-trolling thing (yep, also 2015) that was mainly used to silence girls and women and people of color whenever the four white cishet men in YA fucked up between 2015 and 2018, when it finally publicly came out that most of them were, yk, fucking up because they’re legitimately horrible people and maybe the people calling them out should have been taken seriously.

* The other notable “why the fuck is this happening???? why is HE the one getting the sympathy here?????” events from “Keep YA Kind,” which, listen, I would bet you anything that it was very very nearly called “Keep Kidlit Kind” until the only person involved with 1/4 of a braincell managed to realize the acronym on their Twitter handle looked REALL BAD:

Andrew Smith, a straight white adult man, says out loud with his human adult man mouth, that he knows he can’t write female characters well and relies on fetishization and stereotypes because he never really met a girl until his daughter (??? SO WHAT IS YOUR WIFE, ANDREW? CHOPPED LIVER?) and, being as that is Bullshit and also his books were also being lauded as though they were Infinite fucking Jest Jr. even though the interview in question was for a book in which mutant grasshoppers take over the earth and a teenage boy gets trapped in a bunker with a teenage girl who eventually has to git to birthin’ babies she doesn’t want and isn’t medically prepared to have safely For The Good Of Humanity, he’s called out.

He’s called out mostly on a technical, writing level at first, even! Like, “Here’s how to write a female character: you write a fully considered, well-rounded character. They’re a girl.” And Andrew Smith FLIPS HIS SHIT, does some op-ed about how his mother used to beat him so he can’t see girls as people, and makes his twitter private. The “Keep YA Kind” sycophants support him HARD.

And then this happens to pop up on a mysterious Twitter that just HAPPENS to start while HIS twitter’s offline...

NOTE: Jay Asher, author of 13 Reasons Why, was literally dropped from his publisher and SCWBI for being a sexual predator. So like, I don’t think he was bullied, I think his predation was being remarked upon. Like, idk, maybe that he was being called creepy or sth idk idk idk

And then when A.S. decided to unsockpuppet to promote his next book, The Alex Crow, which is about mutant crows and a bunker or whatever:

The “asshole” in specific that Andrew Smith was calling an asshole was delightful human being and fellow author Kate Messner, who, coincidentally, was one of the victims to come out against Lemony Snicket’s sexual harrassment, so she’s had a BULLSHIT time just trying to do her JOB of being an author while female.

Which leads to Tommy Wallach! All-around fucknut! Whose major interest seems to be being That Guy In Philosophy 101 Who Always Has To Be Devil’s Advocate, Even Though No One Asked, and has a deeply vested interest in making sure that teenage girl readers -- who are his target audience, because he chose to write YA, as an adult man who made a choice in what he wrote and chose to make it YA, and not, like, any of the hundreds of genres that AREN’T largely written about and for teenage girls, yk -- know that teenage girls are Dumb. Victoria Schwab actually wrote an essay for YA Books Central about the incessant problem that IS/WAS Tommy Wallach called “We Need To Talk About Tommy” back in -- you guessed it! -- 2016, but it’s offline now and I’m not going to go Wayback it rn.

I’m just going to copypasta YAinterrobang’s Wallach timeline because he’s exhausting, he reminds me of undergrad.

Wallach’s continual pattern of behavior is worth discussing, especially in the context of sexism in YA and the continual marginalization of “diverse” voices in the community despite the efforts of the We Need Diverse Books movement.

Wallach’s problematic behavior runs back over a year, starting with a defense of Andrew Smith where he ignores the opinions of author and advocate Tessa Gratton in favor of a dictionary definition of sexism. (Andrew Smith’s behavior and the fallout around his statements have, of course, already been documented on YA Interrobang in “The Curious Case of Andrew Smith, Twitter & sexism.”) Wallach postures that women are inherently “other” from men, accuses Gratton of “gin[ning]up the controversy” and explains that he is a feminist because he was “raised by a single working mother and she’s still my best friend in the world.”

[View Wallach’s defense of Smith and attack on Gratton as a .pdf.]

Fast forward to later that year. Author Justina Ireland takes to Twitter to discuss a book where she feels the black character is self-hating. Ireland, being black herself, is asked about the book in question; she says that it’s Wallach’s debut novel We All Looked Up. Though Wallach is not tagged, he swoops into the conversation and demands Ireland provide proof that his character Anita is self-hating before claiming that author Dhonielle Clayton, who is also black, is friends with him and “engaged” with him on the issues in the book.

Clayton later stated publicly that she had not done any sensitivity reading on We All Looked Up.

What brought Wallach’s behavior to the attention of the YA world as a whole came this past November in the wake of the horrifying terrorist attacks in Paris. When the hashtag #prayforparis went viral, Wallach responded with multiple social media posts and a blog post about how atheism was the only belief that could make the world a better place. (Though Wallach argues that it is not, in fact, a belief: “The fact that we have a word for it makes it seem like it’s equivalent to other belief systems, but it’s not. The absence of something is not equivalent to the thing itself.”)

[View Wallach’s comments on atheism as a .pdf.]

After Wallach Tweeted that he was a “a rabid atheist, and the world would be a better place if more folk were” – a Tweet he subsequently deleted before deleting his account in its entirety – he doubled down in a block post that outlined all the way religions failed and all the reasons atheism was awesome.

Those who tried to explain to him why this behavior was – to say the least – problematic found themselves quickly blocked or shut down; at once point, Wallach tried to explain anti-Semitism to Jewish author Hannah Moskowitz before claiming that “if [her]parents are atheists and [his]dad is Jewish, [he’s] as much Jewish as [her].”

(For those wondering, Wallach blocked me during this incident despite being friendly with me and having taken my advice previously; while he did believe me in regards to his behavior towards Justina Ireland, which you can see in Tweets above, my snarky comment to him about “the only good people are the people who are exactly like me” was, apparently, too much for him to take. As Wallach’s account has since been deleted and I purged my social media account in January, that interaction is no longer publicly available.)

Take this behavior in comparison to author LJ Silverman, who recently received a sea of anti-Semitic hate mail – including crude manipulated images of her in an oven – for Tweeting that she was worried about the upcoming election in the context of history. Wallach painted himself to be the victim, somebody “attacked” for insulting all of the religious folks in the YA community, while Silverman, who simply shared a worry plaguing her, became a victim of virulent trolls.

While Wallach deleted his social media accounts after this, there were no public consequences to his actions despite ill-will from the YA community at large. If another member of the YA community had spoken out – one of our Catholic or Islamic or Jewish or Mormon authors, for instance – the backlash would have been substantially worse, possibly career-ruining.

Wallach’s career, however, was not ruined; he recently landed a six-figure deal for a book trilogy centered around a “holy war.”

And thus, we return to Wallach’s dismissive comments on suicide – which, it turned out, were neither new or original. In a blog post deleted after it came to light during this discussion, Wallach rated “the top ten literary suicides (organized by emo-ness)” which included all of the characters of HBO’s Girls – “It’s really just a fantasy of mine.” – and, ranking at number one, Sylvia Plath – who is not a character but a real person who suffered from depression before taking her own life at a young age.

[View Wallach’s post on suicide as a .pdf.]

“I’m only going to talk about the fact that a successful YA author found it appropriate to glorify, romanticize, and mock what for many of his readers is among the highest causes of death,” wrote Schwab in her “We Need To Talk About Tommy” post. “That this author could be so very careless and flippant and insensitive about such a very serious issue is abhorrent. That two years after penning this post he still sees suicide as something to be made light of, to be used as a marketing tool.”

Simon & Schuster made no public comment about any of Wallach’s comments. His career, save for making enemies of some fellow authors, seems relatively unscathed by his callous actions.

Anyway, the moral of the story is, like, if you wanna read books by straight white dudes, go for it, but check them out from the library. Spend your book-buying money on books by women, nonbinary/other folks, and dudes who aren’t straight and/or white. Straight white men, PARTICULARLY in categories of literature that are largely targeted towards girls and women, and largely written by girls and women -- but published, edited, and marketed by other straight white men -- are lauded FAR above what they’re actually worth, as like, storytellers or human people go.

The Glass Escalator is a one-way trip to wonderland, but YA is a skyscraper that was built by women and I PROMISE you, whatever book by one of these dudes you’re considering reading, there’s a better version by a woman and/or person of color on the shelves nearby that just didn’t get 1/10th of the marketing money.

And of course there should be an effort to be kind on social media, but “keep YA kind”... to whom? To the people who were being silenced when they were pointing out legitimate problems with the behaviors of men in social power? (And one of whom, in the case of Jay Asher, was LITERALLY DANGEROUS BC HE IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR.) Like, really? There had to be a hashtag campaign to silence dozens of people with legitimate, not-bullying-just-pointing-out-problems-that-are-problems-with-stuff-you-did-dude problems, to make social media feel more comfortable for four middle-aged straight white men?

As though the outside world isn’t comfortable enough for middle-aged straight white men????