Reviews and Comments

Look, I'm sorry, but there are some major question marks that I have on the essays that someone consciously chose to include in this book. I have major questions because I know those essayists could've been replaced by people who were engaging with the whole equation of issues... but they weren't.

Most essays were anodyne and trite. Even when I agreed with the premise, the argument was made so awkwardly that I was baffled by it. Nothing was particularly revelatory, especially as someone who had experienced a good chunk of this stuff. The complete closure of the already few queer spaces in my teenage and young adult years in the rural US because of the redirection of resources towards a single issue has not left me with a positive feeling toward the political cause of gay/same-sex marriage; I empathise with this highly. The frustration of watching queer people demanding and spending so much time on getting Don't Ask Don't Tell repealed... and not acknowledging their own complicity in a colonialist-imperialist project ever (and sometimes getting a little too happy to feel secure in their being while slaughtering people). I get that. It's all resonant.

But like... I need someone to explain to me why Bill Andriette is included here, especially when there have been other people asking similar questions but without the weird commentary or odd focus on adults having sexual relationships with children and teenagers. It's also pretty interesting that, despite him having been a spokesperson for NAMBLA, the "about the contributors" entry completely erases his history as a "pro-pedohile activist." That context is necessary, and it also explains why some people might come away after reading that one essay feeling that—and this is despite any useful points he wrote—there is something very wrong with it.

A similar issue happens within James D'Entremont's essay, which includes the following sentence:

One was the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), originally focused on relationships between adult men and adolescents, now demonized out of all proportion to the varied predilections of its minuscule membership.

Which is... weird? Because the rest of the essay outlines how things can go so wrong in terms of policing queer people, particularly within the realm of the Satanic Panic. Beyond a few things from the 1990s, a handful of things from the 2000s, and one article from 2016 about the NEA's Decency Czar getting gay-married... I can't find anything else out about him, as I kind of wanted to know what his more updated views would've been. Would that sentence from a 2012 piece still ring true more than a decade later?

But it's because that essay follows (not immediately) Bill Andriette and the knowledge of Andriette's work and the framing of Andriette in that essay at all... That it makes me even more uncomfortable with it than I already was.

And for me, this is the second data point that creates questions about Ryan Conrad. There is no way he didn't know about any of this; everything about Bill Andriette is old hat and has been easy to find for decades, even decades prior to the publication of this books. Why would you include that? And why would you decontextualise who Bill Andriette is in the "about the contributors" section if you didn't think that someone would question something? Why consciously include something and then consciously erase the context?

I also say this is the second data point because I've read other work where Conrad has cited known CSA apologist Steven Angelides (this was done in his essay that was featured in Queering Anarchism), and that has been in the context of blaming feminists for the erasure of children's sexuality. This is strange to me because... other than people adjacent to NAMBLA or PIE or Prostasia (all groups that have disgustingly and knowingly conflated pederasty with queerness), the only people that I see writing about creating and supporting spaces that enable safe and healthy exploration of sexuality for children and teenagers... are predominantly feminists.

I do not have the patience to deal with this book, and I think it requires a great deal more than patience to endure it. I like the concept of it, but I find it tedious beyond measure. The repetition is fine until it feels excruciating. Reading this felt like my ability to enjoy a book was being destroyed, even as I kept pushing myself to read because the premise is something I know I enjoy.

I have to wonder how much of that is the responsibility of the translation. I often find myself wondering this with Russian books because the translations often feel so incredibly flat and dull in their presentation, even of interesting events, that I'm baffled by it. This has rarely been the case for me with books translated to English from any other language, so I do have to wonder to what extent this translation made the story less enjoyable (because I cannot know, as I can't read Russian).

A few things as I've been going back through my highlights to collect notes of things I wanted to go back to.

1. I hate how none of these people question the school or university. They talk about cuts to public school and the development of private/charter schools, focusing on how workers cannot unionise and "worse outcomes" for students. But I have to wonder what that means when public schools were already questionable and have always been. There's a lot of "question the state" in other areas (we should), but none of them really care to question it within the public school or consider how it is that people grow up with certain ideas... as if they didn't spend a formative time in an institution that propped them up. (Homeschooling gets this criticism all the time because people conflate all homeschooling with the Christian Nationalist variation of it, since they overtook the conversation. But... why doesn't public schooling get it? Because the propaganda is there, whether people acknowledge it or not.)
2. Same applies to academia. Most of these essays are written by academics, and academics (even anarchist ones) seem to forget to critique their institution. (There's also a preemptive response to potential criticism about publishing these essays as a book because it meant that they were "formalised" and could be included in the academy. No questioning of what that means, btw.)
3. Some essays... have little bits that backtrack. "We've since received these responses and..." Which I think harms their points and even power. Maybe I'm not empathetic enough, but I don't like that there are essays that are like "Well, we're sorry we were so harsh on the topic of gay marriage, and we heard how some of you benefited, so..." I think we should be harsh on the topic of gay marriage because we should be harsh on marriage as a whole. You can recognise the "good" something does in the short-term while saying we wasted a lot of time on something that can be so easily destroyed.

This book is the "war on science" instead of being about the war on science, which is unsurprising because of how many of the people in it are absolute bigots (racist, misogynist, every flavour of transphobic). The amount of abuse minimisation that is done to obfuscate what people actually did is... amazing.

For example, one of the "renowned scientists" is Christian Ott. He is a man who pushed to fire a student who he fell in love with, he creepily wrote and posted Tumblr poetry about her, he repeatedly abused his position of power over others, and he was very clearly such a terrible advisor that most of his students either transferred to other advisors or didn't complete their degree. He tries to claim he was "cancelled for what people say he did," when the truth is that he did what people say he did and there was ample evidence.

Everything in this book is just... garbage. There's so much of it, that I'd rather defer to Shaun's video on the book for people to endure. Also, Jordan Peterson's entire section is literally naziism (though he utilises Mesopotamian culture instead of Greco-Roman culture in the way of more known nazis). That's not a surprise, but it's worth highlighting.

Losing my mind just on the basis of the structure of this book. Literally feels like reading the same essay over and over at varying lengths, where they reference the same things and each other time and time again. And it's even worse on that repetition aspect because not only do all of the essays sound the same, the essays repeat themselves within themselves. Just... All of it is terrible writing.

And a lot of it is obviously nonsensical. Gribble's essay complains about flattening women into this horrible concept of "people" or "individuals." A lot of the phrases that she takes issues with either sound fine when placed within a context (e.g., "If you have a cervix..." or "someone who menstruates," though she hates the word 'someone' for some reason). She also seems to conflate other so-called replacements (e.g., a particularly egregious example is her complaining that "pregnant women" was replaced with "service users" and just... sorry, but that sounds like it'd be fine within a context? like on the sign of a clinic or as a later reference in a paper).

Just... ugh. Absolute tool.

Oh, and then there's the whole thing complaining about how gender neutral language (and then using some of the most absurd examples that sound more like cishet people who aren't trying to be malicious but are making ridiculous errors as evidence)... is US cultural imperialism. And then pretends that the current structure of gender isn't, to some extent, part of colonisation. Absolutely pulling the whiny argument of queer people inflicting our US cultural imperialism on other people... which is bullshit. Entirely.

Upon starting the book, once you're introduced to all the characters involved, it becomes frustratingly obvious who is going to be the person 'whodunnit'. At some points, you're hoping there will be a small twist and that you'll be wrong, but it keeps getting glaringly obvious with every passing page.

And it's not a fun kind of obviousness, either. Sometimes I can forgive that if there is a wider story or theme at play or if there's a good reason for making the murderer the obvious candidate, but this was just... meh.

I also distinctly feel like the author didn't really care about her characters. I don't think she needs to like them as people, but I do think she needs to care about them as people... and then write them as people. So many of these characters were frustrating caricatures of stereotypes, which is also fine in a specific context but... Moncrieff doesn't do anything with it. There's no real commentary happening, and even the ending fails to engage with the topics it brings up as anything more than something superficial.

Disappointing, to say the least.