Thread by @AlexandraErin

Here's a thing: if you write an essay about your warm and complicated feelings about your husband, and it has a headline, lede, and deck about how awful he is and how much you hate him, AND the essay is behind a paywall?

Most people who see those things won't read the essay.

That "Oh, nobody is reading critically these days, readers are so stupid and gullible." take is missing the point. You can talk about how a savvy consumer should know better than to fall for false advertising, if you want, I guess, but this isn't a question of literacy.

Very possibly not.

And arguably the sardonic, self-deprecating (by way of family-deprecating) approach to the essay's intended point is valid, if a terrible idea given the current state of the art/the industry.

But the essayist wrote it in this world.

https://twitter.com/zem42/status/1479551977134563333

I will never -- EVER -- agree with the "It's your fault for not reading the article." brigade when it comes to articles, op-eds, essays, etc., that have been deliberately mislabeled and mismarketed for purposes of generating outrage.

Because the thing is, the people who *do* make those decisions are very good at knowing how to word things and position things in order to provoke specific responses that they're going for.

And in fact, they're so good at it that even a lot of people who *do* read past the headline and the opening paragraph come away with an impression that is colored and shaped by the way the piece was presented to them.

That's not a flaw in reading comprehension!

If you were the greatest sandwich artisan in the world but your sandwiches were being sold in packaging that said, "Caution: This sandwich tastes like shit because it is made with shit. 100% real organic feces in every bite." and most people didn't want to look past the label?

Would you be mad at the people who don't want to eat the thing that is being sold to them as a literal shit sandwich, or would you want to maybe revisit the question of how your delicious, hygienic, food-safe sandwich made out of the finest normal undigested ingredients is sold?

Now, I will be the first to tell you I didn't read the essay. Why would I? Somebody came up to me on the virtual street and said, "Would you like a bite of this shit sandwich?" No. Why would I?

And maybe if I did read it, I would find something of value in it, but the way the author and her defenders spoke about the issue in public on Twitter didn't convince me I was missing out on anything I'd enjoy the taste of.

Because the pro argument I saw being made wasn't, "Oh, people aren't understanding your rhetorical devices and are misreading your tone."

The arguments I saw were... well, to put it bluntly, very healthy and realistic impulses in a relationship, expressed in unhealthy terms.

Like, to paraphrase, "Sometimes, marriage requires earplugs."

Which, okay. I get this. I have Doomed Edgar Allan Poe Protagonist levels of hearing. I don't sleep in the same room as anyone else but if somebody is snoring in this house, I can hear it from any room.

When I'm trying to sleep, I can hear the slightest noise from anywhere inside the house and worse, for my feverish gothic imagination, I can hear the slightest noise from anywhere just outside the house, too. So I sleep with earbuds in and music playing, or I don't sleep.

These problems take on a special added dimension when I'm trying to sleep, but they don't disappear during the day, so I wear noise canceling headphones in my office, or if I'm moving around the house, I play things over my open-ear bone conduction headphones.

And I recently had a conversation with my boyfriend about a habit of his that has stressed me out, in this area, and it was a good, friendly conversation where I resolved to put music on my headphones more often and he resolved to work on the habit.

And this, I'm sure the author's defenders would be quick to say, is exactly the kind of thing they (and the essay) were talking about. Sometimes you need to be able to tune things out. Sometimes you need space. Sometimes you need a break.

All good, all healthy.

But the idea that this should be phrased in terms of hatred... not even of the thing that is happening but of the person...

I said this at the time, but: people were having a conversation about healthy boundaries in terms of "necessary hatred" and not as part of loving someone.

I literally saw people saying that if you don't hate your spouse/partner on a regular basis then your feelings are fake, your love is fake, and you're a Stepford spouse settling for "mere happiness" instead of loving a whole person with your whole self.

And I tell you... the most unhealthy thing I have done in most of my life was think, feel, and act like it wasn't worth asserting a boundary unless I was at an absolute breaking point.

That the loving thing to do was suck it up, and to stop doing so required hatred.

The thing is... the essay in question wasn't written to be read under clickbait marketing and behind a paywall on the New York Times Dot Com. It's an excerpt from a book, which hopefully eases the audience into the author's style and has a more specific intended audience anyway.

And maybe in the context of "This is a Heather Havrilesky essay from a Heather Havrilesky book, in which devoted readers of Heather Havrilesky can enjoy the typical Heather Havrilesky emotional ride she takes them on." it's a really great piece?

But except from a purely "There's no such thing as bad publicity" point of view, this New York Times excerpt deal didn't do her any favors.

And from a "There's no such thing as bad publicity" point of view... mission accomplished. Everybody involved got what they wanted.

I'm sure way more people have Havrilesky's name and the existence of her book bobbing around in their consciousness than would have, if not for the decision to disguise her writing as a sandwich made of shit and see who wants a bite. I hope she and her team are very pleased.

But the thing is, if this is your marketing strategy... if this is something you accept as part of your marketing strategy... you don't get to be mad at the people it works on. You don't get to wag your finger at people who made the mistake of believing the salescraft.

Multiple people are replying to this to say they *did* read the essay and they're not seeing the warmth or complexity.

I have my doubts as well, but as I haven't read it, I was not prepared to argue with the piece's defenders.

I should also clarify that this thread isn't prompted by anything new from Havrilesky, but from a response piece to the responses called "Have we forgotten how to read critically?"

Which I do not want to give clicks to but the title should bring it up.

Anyway. This just hits on two of my biggest, hottest buttons: the idea that needing a break from your partner or a boundary in a relationship is an act of hatred, and the idea that it's fault of "numbskulls" for the way the Legitimate Media markets its own products to us.