January's reader complaints

My responses to the most common and most noteworthy complaints I've gotten this month.

It’s here! Welcome to January’s Complaint Box. This is now a mostly-monthly feature. You can find previous editions here.

I have a confession: I think publishing these complaint boxes is deterring the more unreasonable complaints, because each month that I have published them, the number of nonsense complaints I get has decreased.

There’s a sort of bad faith objection that tends to go on in feminist communities. A person identifies a small area of disagreement, magnifies it, then endlessly harangues you about it. Or they misrepresent your argument and then demand that you respond to their made-up strawperson argument. It’s exhausting, because at first blush, it seems like they’re arguing in good faith. But then it becomes clear that the argument is the point.

I’m thankfully experiencing fewer such interactions, so some of these complaints are a lot more substantive than usual. I hope you enjoy reading through them!

Here’s what I’ll be covering in this post:

• Various objections to my parenting and gender neutrality article

• Complaints about the Substack platform/canceling membership

• ‘You’re too political’

• You’re making my son hate himself

• Everything is behind a paywall. Also, you shouldn’t charge for your work.

• I should be able to weaponize patriarchal abuse against women I don’t like

• The copyright thieves