The Grift That Keeps on Grifting
Reactionaryism and the Sale of Books
A few months back, I wrote a substack about one of the voice actors for the popular mobile game Cookie Run whose statements inflamed the site formerly know as Twitter enough for people who had no idea who he was suddenly recognize his name. That’s what reactionaryism does, after all—it makes targets out of people who generally wouldn’t be targets otherwise. The difference between some reactionary responses and others is this: some targets are inadvertent and some targets are screaming and waving their arms around looking for the horde to descend upon them. But…why would they do that? What person wants to be “canceled” in this day and age?
Think about it. Why else? It gets the eyes. I’m certain most people have heard the term “no publicity is bad publicity” and these people have heard it and really internalized it—if they can’t get famous, they’re going to get infamous. Joshua David King, the voice of some half-baked sentient dough creature would have been absolutely nobody to me had he not said whatever it was that he said and been openly and flagrantly wrong on the internet (a heinous crime…or at least, it was on the late Twitter). But if you recall the previous article, King did it all on purpose in order to promote a product he was in the midst of creating. He invented a reactionary response to help guide sympathetic eyes to his page so that he might work that sympathy to create paying customers. After all, money that is given because your customer felt bad for you looks and spends exactly the same as money your customers paid you because they thought your product was good and worthy of their money.
The “inventor” of the hashtag #ProtectCleanFiction on Instagram and the protectcleanfiction.com website, Abigail G Thompson, has certainly adopted this tactic, her campaign to promote “purity” in all-ages fiction could be the product of a starry-eyed ultra-religious teenager, but could also very likely have been designed to rile up those who adore their “dirty” books in order to bring awareness of her own products to those who prefer “clean” books. All this to gain followers to her instagram page in order to get more eyes on the books and blog posts she wrote herself. Thompson, who has two books available right now on Amazon, states on her website that their initiative strives to “educate” readers about the “harm” of “smut.” Her blog, which has but a single lonely post as of current, has three “tiers” of content with the third being the most interesting, claiming that Tier 3 posts “[…] should be read with caution and content warnings. These will mostly be exposing the sickening truth and consequences of the ideals that are being pushed.”
“Pushed”? By whom? The internet has been (rightly) sniffing out the reactionary “groomer” rhetoric here and the relatively close connections to the current waves in evangelical wars against fiction, but at the same time, they’re promoting her book. Unsurprisingly, Thompson’s website “speaks” in its content warnings with the assumption that her words will be read by children, assuming indeed that her writing will be reaching a target demographic of kids. Though Thompson is 17, she’s “preaching” to children and talking to them about smut. (Weird.) The current blog post is a “Tier 2” entitled “Is Smut in YA Novels Bad?” which warns children under the age of 14 to consult an adult before reading but then immediately invokes the spectre of Colleen Hoover (whose books are clearly labeled for their age demographic profiles).
Thompson goes on to make bone-headed statements about how self-publishing makes smut more accessible to child readers, as if children like myself in the early 00’s weren’t walking into used bookstores and libraries to read Stephen King and Catherine Coulter (ever read Devil’s Embrace?) with no problems at all, not to mention the Fabio romance novels that used to litter my grandmother’s house with steamy scenes certain to make me happy to be a voracious reader. Thompson’s arguments collapse entirely when morality comes into it. Subjective, biased, and ultimately useless, morality arguments are simply not a one-size-fits-all for every culture and every family, something that evangelicals seem to often forget. Thompson especially forgets this as her post continues, her argument devolving into semantics (utilizing the word “porn” rather than “smut” to create a greater reaction) before tumbling back into a morality-based structure as she descends into the rabbit hole of “porn is dangerous.”
So, does she actually make a good argument that porn is dangerous? Her very first sentence in that section provides a decent clue: “The reading or viewing of porn causes your brain to release a surge of dopamine which overstimulates your brain and goes beyond normal pleasure activation levels.” I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Abigail, but “normal levels” is a subjective statement and unfortunately for you, it’s completely and entirely false as there is no such thing as “normal” and if you were to use this argument for pornography, you would have to use it for…running. That’s right. Runner’s High would be just as bad as pornography. She also directs this argument into the common suggestion that porn is addictive, the mind constantly searching for newer and more exciting (read as: degenerate) to get the rocks off. While this is possible, it’s also possible to get addicted to eating toilet paper—it certainly doesn’t happen to everyone and it’s not a porn problem, it’s a people problem—not to mention, “smut” isn’t real. If your fantasies aren’t spilling over into the real world, who cares how weird they get? One of her sources is from a popular evangelical software company called “Covenant Eyes” which is a type of spyware willingly installed to prevent evangelicals (and sometimes convicted predators [and sometimes both]) from accessing pornography without accountability from a “buddy.” We can be certain anyone from Covenant Eyes has a totally normal positon on pornography, right? Right? Bueller? We can wrap up the concept of a “good” argument when we get around to Thompson equating the erroneous misconception that “everyone” consumes porn to the genocide of Jews by the Nazis. That was a choice.
The rest of the post reads very much like a wordy Chick Tract decrying the evils of fiction and imploring children to read biased articles and lording over them the concept of being a “good person” whose goals include marriage and starting a family rather than whatever it is she thinks “bad” people do (read smut and go to hell?). It’s really no wonder that some evangelical military brat has bad opinions on smut in fiction (and a hard time formatting her blog to be more readable for that matter) but in the end it’s all very telling that such a thing should be spearheaded by a girl who’s struggling to get eyes on her books—of course she might blame the fact that everyone wants smut in their fiction and she can’t bring herself to write it. It’s okay if your book doesn’t have smut in it!!! That’s not the reason it’s not selling! It’s likely not selling because there’s just not enough proper marketing happening or it’s badly written! In any case, this is a great way to get your book review-bombed on GoodReads but also bought by sympathetic evangelicals and anti-shippers whose ideologies are honestly the exact same.
Was Abigail G Thompson’s website and bad takes manufactured to create an avenue for potential readers to buy her books and provide good reviews based on indignant defense? Maybe! Was it just naive bullshittery created by a dumb teenager on the internet whose bad ideas were clearly enabled and funded by her kooky religious parents? Yeah…probably. But this naive bullshittery may have a body count and not in the fun porno kind of way. The utilization of shame upon young impressionable children is often uniquely harmful to their mental and social development. Want examples? Just listen to the Duggar children talk about their upbringing in a household that was not only abusively shame-focused but also broadcasted on the TLC network for the majority of their childhood. Shame did not seem to prevent their eldest brother from his run-ins with immorality either, his transgressions eventually landing him in prison where he remains. Whole communities of former Mormons or Evangelical Christians have popped up on Reddit and other social media to talk through their religious trauma and the abuse and shame they experienced as children, convinced that they would be dragged into a lake of fire or forever doomed for a naughty thought. So the real question remains:
Is Abigail a victim still trapped in the perpetuation of a shame-based ideology intending on recruiting and grooming children online toward a political and religious goal? This is the most likely scenario. Abigail is the victim of a shame-based cult. She is 17 and she is trapped and the worst part is that she doesn’t know she is trapped. She may never know. But you know. Educate your own children in the truth about sex and sexual issues. Enable them to be open and clear about their feelings and thoughts. Do not use shame as a tool against your children. And for the love of…God…(haha), please don’t send death threats to a brainwashed 17 year old.