Why I'm Glad Publishing Destroyed Itself

How woke, groupthink, and incompetence ruined literature.

It is well known that those teaching English literature degrees have long been at war with English literature.

Apart from rare exceptions like Harold Bloom, a passionate advocate of the Western canon, English departments have been dedicated to deconstructing literature into oblivion via postmodernism, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, and any number of other ‘posts’, usually imposed upon innocent students by weird French nihilists via Marxist professors.

This was the case even when I was at university, and is of course much worse now. For a while, though, it seemed the world of mainstream publishing hadn’t quite caught up with the madness of the academy.

Publishing was still concerned with things like the Great American Novel, which was high in ambition and word count, and usually written by a gifted and somewhat curmudgeonly middle-aged bloke. Yet there was still plenty of diversity: the bloke could be either white or Jewish.

But then woke reached the publishing world and that was the end of all that. Now publishers were suddenly only interested in non-male, non-straight people with names no Westerner could confidently pronounce. Those largely responsible for creating this great tradition were kicked out on explicitly racist and sexist grounds, and simply didn’t get to be writers anymore.

But as sickening as that was and is, it got much, much worse. With wokeness came ‘sensitivity readers’, obscure eunuchs who were intent on wiping out not just white men, but the occurrence of anything remotely human in any work of fiction.

Well-established novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner was asked by an editor to remove a female character’s description of herself as ‘fat’. He refused, the book was rejected, and he ended up publishing it for free on his website. Bret Easton Ellis informs us a female writer was asked to take out some jokes about the use of MSG in Chinese restaurants. Presumably in a bid not to victimise the country that might soon end up the world superpower.

Ellis himself was asked to reduce the sex scenes in his recent novel, The Shards. As if they didn’t know what they were getting with Bret Easton Ellis by now. Though perhaps they didn’t. I’m not convinced these people are aware of a world before George Floyd. Perhaps that’s why they have accidentally ended up back at the Puritanism they presumably would think lame in another context (a context where at least it is backed by a coherent moral system).

In yet another bizarre example, Liza Libes (AKA Pens and Poison on YouTube) was asked to include more exploration of ‘privilege’ in her novel, and was told that it ‘wouldn’t resonate with contemporary audiences because it contains depictions of supportive men’.

So far, so woke. But it turns out there is also a culture of plain incompetence in publishing, where grindingly slow decisions are made by committee, publishers no longer have in-house editors, and general Zoomer flakiness reigns.

This is covered in all its infuriating detail by writer Ross Barkan in a recent Substack piece. Barkan eventually managed to get published despite being a white man, which, as he admitted on the Bret Easton Ellis podcast, was for a long time a brick wall for new writers. But even then, agents and publishers ghosted him for no reason, forced him to change endings and titles, and generally messed him about for years. And this is someone who is friends with leftist darling Zohran Mamdani, so imagine how much worse it is for those of us with normal political views.

Although Barkan argues we are now post-woke, there seems to prevail an ultra-censorious, risk-averse legacy that must be in part a result of woke cancel culture. Anything offensive in a book could potentially be pinned on the publisher, and is thus best avoided. And this is coupled with the philistinism and literalism of our age, which believes everything in an artistic work must be the author’s view, and that said view must be ultimately political.

Everyone is afraid of the mob, and that is the worst possible place from which to approach literature. Publishing used to be one guy or girl with a hunch and a big helping of ‘f*** you’ spirit. That’s how so many writers people revere today were published. Ellis’s Less Than Zero was a controversial gamble. Douglas Coupland, who coined Gen X, was discovered from a postcard he’d written to a friend which she had stuck to her fridge. I am not making this up: that was how it worked.

Now we have a bunch of ultra-conformist, scared children vandalising a priceless literary tradition. They have no clue what literature is or what it’s for, and to the extent that they do, they want to destroy it.

I have occasionally found myself wishing that one could still publish decent work somewhere. I recently caught myself lamenting, as I have many times before, the pogrom against white men, along with the entire woke orthodoxy. But, catching up with the current state of publishing, I am reminded of a line from the first Mission Impossible movie: ‘Relax Luther, it’s much worse than you think’. Publishing is now so bad that I can almost forget about it, because in wishing for it to be different, so much would have to change that I may as well wish the moon were made of cheese.

The industry would have to stop being aggressively racist and sexist against white male writers, and also cease to be woke in all other regards. Hired readers would have to stop trying to sanitise language. Publishers would have to be actually competent and understand literature. And ideally we’d have to go back to the Gen X days where you could make money from writing, and books actually meant something in the culture.

Given all that, the reality is it’s often better to just publish on Substack. I still miss the ‘monoculture’; I miss people who cared about literature and understood it; I miss when riskiness and edginess were valued over the insipid desire to never offend even a Chinese chef. I hate what these woke publishers have done to literature, and genuinely think most of them should be in prison. But in compensation we now have platforms like Substack precisely because these gatekeepers have let everyone down so badly.

Still, with great power comes great responsibility, so for anyone who may be offended by anything in this article, I would just like to say that white privilege isn’t real, men can be supportive (okay none of my friends, but that’s mere coincidence), if you’re fat you should consider eating less, and if you go to a Chinese restaurant be warned that the food will be absolutely smothered in MSG and communism.

And if your instinct is to remove any of that paragraph, then literature is probably not for you. Which means—congratulations—you probably work in publishing.