Substacking While Female

A Perfectly Uncontroversial Post That We Expect No Pushback On Whatsoever

Dear Republic,

We’ve been wondering for a bit about how different the experience of being on Substack is for women as opposed to men. The ever-interesting Liza Libes has been thinking about this as well.

-ROL

SUBSTACKING WHILE FEMALE

Last week, I was “trending” on Substack.

To tell you the truth, I don’t know how this whole thing started or the details of how it played out. I don’t come from the hyper-online breed of humans, so I only noticed that I was “trending” on Substack after enough of my friends sent screenshots my way.

I had caused some nondescript backlash over an article I’d written chastising a set of men who had been bullying me over the last several weeks.

I had no idea that simply calling out a few cyber-bullies—and not even by name, mind you—would create such a backlash. I didn’t know who these people were, and I had never even heard of them until they started poking fun at me. I assumed that they were bots or Internet trolls, but it appears that they were minor personalities in obscure literary circles.

My bad.

In reaction to my observation that societally useless men are doomed perpetually to pick on their more successful female counterparts, the Internet came ready with its pitchforks, conjuring all sorts of juvenile monikers in an apparent race to see who could come up with the most clever Liza Libes insult. After several hours—when it became clear that no one was going to say anything of substance or actually engage with my ideas—the mob ended up proving the original point of my article: people with no ideas of their own can only gain prominence by pulling more unique thinkers down.

So maybe my article was cringe; maybe it wasn’t. But one thing is certainly clear: the mob’s reaction to my response was leagues more revealing than my original criticism.

Because if the backlash—a wellspring of hate posts against yours truly in response to one (1) article—wasn’t a “cringe” overreaction in itself, then I don’t know what was.

It was an enlightening experience to say the least, and now that it’s all behind us (luckily, internet fads have a lifespan of just several afternoons), I got to thinking about what it all says about our hyper-online culture. Why did these mysterious men attack me in the first place? What did I do to blister their egos other than exist with my commentary on literature, publishing, and the humanities at large? Sure, I have some controversial takes—but nothing that should have warranted such an artillery of snide posts. Part of it doubtless came from jealousy—I established a name for myself virtually out of nowhere just from disseminating my ideas—but that in itself doesn’t explain why they chose to go after me in particular. Lots of people have attained Substack fame in short intervals of time. Sure, I’m quite opinionated. Again—lots of people are.

I was also a woman.

I was a successful, opinionated woman.

Bingo.

I’m not saying that there aren’t many other successful, opinionated female writers in the Substack universe—of course there are. But many of the successful women I know writing on Substack are typically writing about sex, marketing, fashion, dating, parenting, or culture. With the exception of a few bigger names who have been around for a while, there hasn’t been quite a disruption to the Substack literature world from a woman in a hot minute. Couple that with brains and strong opinions, and you have the classic recipe for making insecure men feel threatened.

I’m just speculating, of course, but whenever the established order of things gets disrupted—in any domain—there is bound to be an uproar.

Perhaps I was such a disruption.

There are certain “categories” of writers on Substack and in the world at large. For one, there’s a certain “type” you think of when you think of the “Substack bro” (fellow Substacker Michael Mohr informed me the other day that they are colloquially referred to as the “lit bros”). This type shares many traits with the sorts of people I described in my controversial article. For the “lit bro,” everything is ironic and nihilistic. There’s probably a cigarette, a fedora, and a black-and-white profile pic involved. There’s also a weird cult following somewhere in the equation. This sort of writer is certainly not mainstream, and he claims he would rather die than become mainstream (likely because he knows he won’t ever get there).

The persona in question is likely to be a man.

The same holds true for the mainstream side of the aisle. Your household Substack names—Rob Henderson, Ted Gioia, Matthew Yglesias, to name a few—tend to be male. But because they’ve made such a name for themselves already, few people dare to touch them. And the several mainstream female writers who do enjoy a respectable following—your Abigail Shriers or Kat Rosenfields —are typically writing about politics or culture.

So what about literature?

Because the Internet literary world—both the mainstream circuit and its more obscure niches—is male-dominated, successful, opinionated women can’t be “opinionated” or “bold.”

No. They can only have a “meltdown.”

Notice the gendered language here—this sort of description would only ever be applied to a woman speaking her mind. Imagine, after all, telling a man on the Internet who came out with a series of posts that he was having a “meltdown!”

A man who speaks his mind online is “provocative,” “fearless,” and “sharp.” A woman, on the other hand, is emotional or unstable. This explains why it was primarily men who came after me—and why women primarily came to my defense. My fellow female writers understood exactly what was going on. As one of my supporters wrote, “there’s a certain energy” to being “dark, feminine and independent,” suggesting that it was this very femininity coupled with independence that ticked off the entire Internet.

After all, the argument I made in my article was almost identical to the argument that Ben Shapiro makes in his most recent book, Lions and Scavengers—which is, in essence, that there are, indeed, many people in our society who profit off of bringing others down.

In other words, if a man had written the exact same article (and many have!), it is unlikely to have caused such a storm.

Because a man with opinions is intelligent, but a woman with opinions is unstable.

Look. I don’t even subscribe at all to the whole “I’m oppressed because I’m a woman” narrative. In fact, I don’t think I’m “oppressed” at all. The fact that I’ve been able to make a name for myself in such a short span of time suggests the very opposite—that there is little female “oppression” going on here. But while “oppression” itself is not at play here, there are undeniably certain nuances between the way our society views male and female intellectuals, writers, and cultural commentators—and the fact stands that it is still much more difficult to be taken seriously as a woman in these spaces.

Personality psychology explains part of the discrepancy. Studies mapping the “big five” personality traits across male and female responders, for instance, routinely demonstrate that women are significantly more agreeable than their male counterparts, creating a dynamic in which an authoritative woman disrupts a certain equilibrium. After all, a woman can be insightful or reflective, sure, but the moment she becomes declarative or critical, she violates a certain societal expectation—and the pitchforks emerge. In other words, a woman is allowed to interpret culture but not to define it.

That is why the second major criticism levied against me was for daring to voice my takes about the state of our literary culture.

After all, authority in literary spaces is still predominantly coded as male. When we think of serious literary critics, we think of Harold Bloom or perhaps George Steiner—the archetypes of the “literary voice” who brim with unapologetic confidence. But when a woman writes about the decline of literature, she has no right to—at least not without first being published herself, according to some comments I saw.

This argument, of course, is ludicrous. By that logic, all movie critics should all be directors, all music critics should be signed onto major record labels, and all sports commentators should be pro athletes themselves. Furthermore, I am not yet 30 and have lots of time to get published; waiting to speak my mind until after I do would be a pretty stupid career move, if you ask me.

What we have here is textbook silencing of the female voice. Men, after all, can just “do” things. Women need to have all of the credentials for it—and must fight to earn their spots as cultural authorities.

But the substance of the “I don’t have the right to critique or culture” argument wasn’t even that I don’t have the “credentials” for it (though if two Ivy League degrees in English literature aren’t “credentials,” then I don’t know how to help you) but that I was simply a woman voicing my opinions. What people reacted to was not my argument, therefore, itself but the fact that I made it unapologetically. Because people were expecting me to back down.

And that is the part that saddens me the most from all of this: many women would have backed down in response. After all, that was the goal of the haters—to get me to relinquish my claim upon the cultural commentary stage.

But I’m not backing down.

The “lit bro” stereotype exists for a reason—because there is one predominant “type” of voice that comments on literary culture. But when only one side of the equation is accounted for, an entire society suffers from a narrowing of culture.

At the end of the day, I was picked on because I challenged the status quo—because I dared to put my foot down and call out the pseudo-intellectualism that has infested the literary and art world. At the end of the day, I was picked on because I’m not a “type”—I’m an independent thinker who was only ever speaking her mind.

All of this is to say that our society still doesn’t know what to do with women who are unapologetically firm in their beliefs.

Maybe it’s time that we learn.

Until then, I’ve certainly learned my lesson. Don’t mess with Internet junkies with tiny cult followings.

Liza Libes is the founder of Pens and Poi­son, a unique multi-platform project that promotes the love of literature and the humanistic tradition.