"You don’t like it because you don’t get it, you don’t get it because you’re not ___________"

Submitted by JohnTaylorson t3_11sxykk in books

Anyone else experience this in relation to book criticism? A number of times in book groups I’ve attended, someone has to attempted to annul another person’s valid criticism of the book because of their gender/race/sexual orientation/social status. “Your point is invalid because you’re not [victimised group from the book].”

Of course it helps that characters are relatable and obviously it is difficult to understand oppression or persecution if you haven’t experienced it yourself, but in my opinion, even the most righteous and noble-intentioned of books can be complete drivel if they're written poorly. In fact, if the book is supposed to shine attention on an important subject, there should be even more emphasis on good research and strong writing to support the message.

Anyone else experience this? Has anyone ever said to you "You just don't get it because you're not ____"-? Have you been reluctant to give criticism of a book for fear of backlash? Do you think this attitude has gotten worse in recent times?

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Samael13 t1_jcg317j wrote

I've seen it both ways, tbh. I've seen legit criticism dismissed out of hand because "you don't get it..." and I've seen people whose criticism didn't seem very legit, to me, because they clearly didn't get the book.

> In fact, if the book is supposed to shine attention on an important subject, there should be even more emphasis on good research and strong writing to support the message.

Meh; I don't know about this. "If your book is trying to tackle an important subject, you should be held to a higher standard than other books" is weird, personally.

All that said, I think that being empathetic to other readers is valuable. A book that I might not enjoy but that clearly resonates with a group because it tackles discrimination against that group (for example) might deserve a little bit of a kinder critical eye, I think. Like, if it's really resonating that much with people who have actually experienced what the book is talking about, maybe there's something there? I might not like the writing style as much as some other book, but that shouldn't prevent me from appreciating what the book is doing and how it's finding its audience, and maybe it should inspire me to look more closely at why it's resonating with folks?

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jcg5hoh wrote

That's a very good response, thank you. I get what you mean about if a book has resonated with a number of people it must be doing something right. I should have stressed- and might edit- in my original question is the importance of the fundamental writing itself- the structure, composition, language used, research of the subject matter etc rather than the plot itself. I suppose popularity itself if a win, if it gets people fired up about something.

That said, my comment regarding the greater importance of strong writing for books on 'worthy' subjects comes from a couple I've read that tackle tough, emotive, controversial subject matter, but are written so poorly and researched so badly all I can think is "these authors are charlatans who got cut a book deal purely because of the subject matter". To me this seems like the most shameless of scams and does not give the subject the justice it deserves.

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Additional_Fail_5270 t1_jcga81t wrote

I think sometimes people don't distinguish between subjective and objective criticism. So sometimes people subjectively don't like something and so they assume it has absolutely nothing to offer anyone. And then similarly sometimes something appeals to someone's subjective tastes and then they decide that anyone else looking at it MUST have the same reaction because any other reaction is somehow threatening to your ability to feel positively about it. So like, someone should be able to read a book, and it doesn't relate to them at all on any level, not one of their most exciting or stimulating reading experiences, but still acknowledge that it's well written. And vice versa, someone should be able to read a book and it blows their mind, is a window into their soul, changed their life, but still acknowledge yeah you know, issues here or there that might be more significant to a reader not having the same emotional response I am.
But you know, for a culture so obsessed with how complex identity is, we're not great at engaging with any kind of duality

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munkie15 t1_jch6eyh wrote

That’s a great breakdown.

I think the problem lies in how most information is communicated, electronically. I think this mode of transmission conditions people to react very quickly. This quick reaction does not bode well for any sort of in depth discussion, on any topic, let alone a very complex topic.

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Additional_Fail_5270 t1_jcjdrcj wrote

100% agree. I also think platforms like Twitter, with their character limits, have conditioned us all to go for punchy and reductive, and like you say, put so much weight on our gut reaction to things there's no room to let an idea sit for a while and tease it out fully

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munkie15 t1_jck9i73 wrote

Exactly. I’m currently reading “Stolen Focus” by Johann Hari. He talks about this very thing. It’s pretty interesting so far.

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dawgfan19881 t1_jcg38m4 wrote

The idea that white men only possess the capacity to understand what it’s like to be a white man and nothing else. Whilst every other person on the planet seems capable of understanding others plight has always been puzzling to me.

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Character_Vapor t1_jcgxb7w wrote

>The idea that white men only possess the capacity to understand what it’s like to be a white man and nothing else

I don't think this is true at all, but what I have encountered time and time again is white men who have little to no interest in putting in the effort to understand what it's like to be a non-white person. Their white-dudedness is the default POV for everything, and if a piece of art doesn't speak to them in that capacity, it must be the fault of the art.

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dawgfan19881 t1_jch0ofh wrote

In your opinion can a straight white man know what it’s like to be a woman? Or a person of color? Or trans? If the answer is no. Why wouldn’t they see themselves as default? It’s all they possess the capacity for. If I can’t understand what it’s like to be these petiole of course I reject art that depicts those groups of people. What could art that I can’t understand possibly do for me?

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Character_Vapor t1_jch22f4 wrote

>In your opinion can a straight white man know what it’s like to be a woman?

A person can make an attempt to divorce themselves from their default programming to try to empathize with the lived experiences of other people on an emotional level. It's not about some didactic correct answer of whether anyone can truly "know" so much as it's about how people approach art and how people think about this stuff. In the US at least, people of color tend to have a better ability to do this, because it's a skill they've had to cultivate growing up in a landscape where the majority of the popular media they consumed was very much not directly speaking to their lives and experiences, in a multitude of small and sometimes big ways.

I'm a white dude, and for much of my life I was pretty much the default target audience for the majority of popular culture, but even back then (and more so now): not every single piece of art exists with the objective of pointing itself directly at me all the time, because I am not the center of the universe. Now, could I simply encounter this stuff and write it off because I perceived that gap between the art and my immediate connection to it, and dismiss it as some flaw on the part of the art itself? I guess so, but that would be pretty lazy. The more rewarding thing to do is to try to bridge that gap, to meet the art where it's at and put in the effort to think about the ways in which it might speak to experiences that are unlike my own, and then try to empathize with those experiences to the best of my ability. Engaging with art and storytelling should not be a passive process.

We all have default programming, and pre-prescribed ways of looking at the word and constructing meaning from experience. But part of the process of growing up and becoming a well-adjusted person is making the active effort to break away from that default programming, and to cultivate a more broad-minded perspective about the world and the lives of people around you.

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terraformed_ t1_jcr5oba wrote

My entire life, 90% of the literature I had to read in order to graduate high school was written by a white male.

Maybe it has something to do with that?

Or the fact that men don’t read books written by women, to a hilariously insane extent:

https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women

The vast majority of men I meet do not own a single book written by a woman of colour.

A man who actively reads may have a little poetry by Maya Angelou but it’s unlikely.

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CrazyCatLady108 t1_jcgsthq wrote

i think there are two conversations here. 1. is your opinion on the book valid if you do not belong to the target audience? and 2. how much is your like/dislike of the book based on you being the target audience?

  1. is your opinion valid if you are not the target audience? yes and no. you certainly have the right to an opinion. however, that opinion might be uniformed. for example, you think a certain book makes no sense, but it makes no sense to you because you do not get the references. someone form the target audience would get all the 80s trivia references and think it is great, or not but at the very least it would not be nonsense to them.

  2. you don't like the book, is it because you are not the target audience? there is a book i read recently that was very violent. i did not enjoy it, because of the violence and other reasons, but the target audience (some) said the book was very cathartic and while it was unnecessarily violent it scratched a certain itch. would i have enjoyed the book more if i was the target audience? maybe, but it is something i will never find out.

people's opinions on stuff are not gospel. yours should not be discounted because you do not belong to the target audience, but neither should you feel that your opinion is the only valid one.

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jckb1n0 wrote

I've read my nephew's YA books of varying degrees of quality and I've read childrens books to my daughter that range wildly in standard. I'm in the target audience for neither bracket, but if the writing is sub-par/lazy and the research it slipshod, criticisms of these things shouldn't be invalidated because I'm not the key demographic.

I agree there should be some reference to the target audience when it comes to subject and themes- for example I can't dismiss a book about, say, social media influencers as being absolute rubbish as it must appeal to someone (and that may not be me)- but if said book is poorly written, has a poor grasp of structure, vocabulary, nuance, relies on telling, rather than showing etc my criticisms would be absolutely valid and shouldn't be dismissed just because it wasn't written for someone like me.

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CrazyCatLady108 t1_jcl6ej6 wrote

you are conflating two things. a book being not well written and how much someone enjoyed the book are separate things.

let me use food to demonstrate. say you really like strawberries. your mother makes you a strawberry cake. it is raw in the middle and burnt on the edges, but your mom made it and you love strawberries, so you eat it and you like it. someone comes by and says "that cake has poor grasp of structure and lacks the nuance to be called cake" and you tell them "shut up, i like it. i am the target audience."

back to books. people can have a reason to like something that is, in your opinion, poorly written because it has something else that makes them enjoy it. and your insistence on something being poorly written is not concrete objective criticism. sure, sometimes the steak is raw but some people prefer it that way. (mixing up my food metaphors here)

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jclju9g wrote

And that was my point in the original post: it's not necessarily about liking or disliking a book, rather having a legitimate criticism of it (ie how competently it's written) invalidated because the subject matter may not be something that directly affected you, as a reader, in real life.

If we're going down food metaphors it's like ordering coq au vin in a restaurant, finding the chicken undercooked and badly prepared and being told 'You just don't like it because you're not French.' Maybe some people somewhere may like it that way- tastes are, after all subjective- but there's also a good chance the chef is shit and your legitimate critisisms shouldn't be dismissed out of hand because you don't fall into a particular demographic.

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CrazyCatLady108 t1_jclrg34 wrote

but your criticism that something is poorly written is not an objective fact.

raw chicken is consumed in some cultures, you can get raw chicken sushi in Japan. so yes if the coq au vin was from a fusion restaurant referencing a style of cooking from a culture you are not familiar with, you are not the target demographic and there is nothing wrong with your dish. similarly, if you find a bug in your food it might be because the restaurant is incorporating novel sources of protein.

back to my original comment. you might think the book sucks because you do not have the background knowledge needing to understand what the author is referencing. or the author could legitimately suck. barring some extreme cases, your opinion that something is terrible is not any more correct than another's opinion that something is awesome. that's how opinions work.

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jclwxf9 wrote

I'm not saying it's an objective fact. I never once did. I understand how opinions work.

Nor am I saying that my opinions should be taken as the gospel truth. Often I have a shit take. I'm sure you have the occasional shit take. Everyone can have a shit take.

I'm saying my SUBJECTIVE opinions on a book I've read - anyone's subjective opinions for that matter - shouldn't be automatically and blindly invalided because the person offering it doesn't belong to a particular demographic.

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CrazyCatLady108 t1_jcm0x7v wrote

>blindly invalided because the person offering it doesn't belong to a particular demographic.

and i never said they should be. my point is that there may be less weight to your opinion than you want simply because you are not familiar with the subject matter. so your opinion being invalidated could be because it is, in this case, a Shit Take and not a subjective opinion.

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jcmb1tx wrote

>and i never said they should be

Well, that was my original point, so I guess that's that.

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TheBSisReal t1_jcgqdju wrote

As with a lot of things: it depends. This definitely happens, but sometimes people really do miss the point about what makes something special. Call Me By Your Name is special because it’s a romance between two men where the story still somehow isn’t about that. I had someone dismiss the story (the film, but that doesn’t really matter) because “if it were a man and a woman, no one would bat an eye at this movie.” Sure, maybe, but that’s completely missing why people responded to this particular story. So in this example, the criticism really does come from just not understanding it, which may very well stem from the critic in this case being a straight man.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t valid criticisms that can be directed at CMBYN.

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unlovelyladybartleby t1_jcg4c9p wrote

I think a good book will be relatable even if the reader has no shared or relevant experience. So maybe it's just a shitty book?

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jcgac8y wrote

Aye, that's the size if it. Good intentions or not, at the end of the day, a shitty book is just a shitty book.

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DafnissM t1_jcgal7r wrote

Yes, the relatability of something does not depend on the gender or race of characters, but in the ability of the author to make them emulate real human emotions.

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Character_Vapor t1_jcn0vmw wrote

But reading is not necessarily a passive experience, either. The reader has to be willing to put in the work as well.

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NebXan t1_jcg9u19 wrote

Exactly this. I'd hold up Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart as an example of a book that's especially impressive in this regard.

The ideas woven into the story are universally accessible, so anyone who reads it can "get" what it's about, and it accomplishes this while still remaining an authentic expression of the author's lived experiences.

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VividBed414 t1_jcg5vsp wrote

Haha yes! I was not male and as such not clever enough to get the book in question apparently. Needless to say that person is very very single. Fairly sure the author in question wasn't on speaking terms with very many women either...

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jcga1nb wrote

Oh man, now I'm super curious about what the book in question might be...?

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VividBed414 t1_jcgc2oi wrote

I actually went back to my Goodreads to try to find it but I was on a bit of a classic sci-fi bender at the time so the majority fit the bill I'm trying to think of anything more specific about the plot other than how bewildered it left me

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JohnTaylorson OP t1_jcgcun2 wrote

Super crazy curious now. So this guy thought a perceived gender divide prevented to from 'getting' this classic Sci Fi book?

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VividBed414 t1_jch4qm6 wrote

The book was brave new world by Aldous Huxley. I just didn't enjoy it. It just wasn't for me. I had read A Handmaid's tale, 1984, Fahrenheit 451 and I preferred those.

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AtLeastThisIsntImgur t1_jcizk05 wrote

If someone told me 'only men can understand BNW' I would just assume they are a misogynist

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AtraMikaDelia t1_jchsriv wrote

There's one quote by Terence, some Roman guy, that I like.

>I am human, and I think nothing human is alien to me

Obviously him being an old Roman guy doesn't mean he is inherently correct, but that its still relatively known after all this time should at least signal that many people do agree with it.

I also generally dislike the idea that many people seem to have where they gain the ability to draw massive insights into someone's character simply by looking at what books that person likes. Ie, if you like X book, or X kind of books, or books by X author, then you must have this personality or trait. What you're talking about seems to be going the other way, that if you don't have a certain trait you won't be able to properly like a book, and I'd say its equally nonsense.

Of course I usually just see this online, the people who would be making these comments aren't really the people I'd be talking a lot with in real life. So I'm not really scared of any backlash because I don't care what anyone thinks of /u/atramikadelia, although I would probably be a bit hesitant in some circumstances. Especially if someone likes a book that I disliked, I might be a little more willing to praise a book they hated.

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Pipe-International t1_jcitocn wrote

I’ve said this before concerning what I believed to be cultural appropriation or something akin to it. I’ve also said similar things about a book that depicts elements of colonisation and native peoples.

In both instances though I was the one who was being criticised and invalidated for having come into those books with a different perspective/experience.

I think so long as this topic can be discussed civility it’s fine. But I also think there’s nothing wrong with saying, look, you’re not from this experience so the flags are going right over your head.

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Chaotic-and-bored12 t1_jcjid97 wrote

Sometimes people don’t like things because they don’t get it. Often. Nobody wants to hear that though because of Death of the Author and other shit that tells you to disregard authorial intent.

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Sumtimesagr8notion t1_jck74w9 wrote

To be fair, I've seen plenty of people dislike a book for not understanding it, or not understanding what the book was trying to do.

Just check out r/badreads

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sumquy t1_jch044q wrote

not about books, but people say that to me every time i say that inception was stupid.

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Grace_Alcock t1_jcihtzn wrote

A theoretical physicist.

That’s usually the case with me. Sometimes, a theoretical mathematician.

As a political scientist, I see a lot of people say really ignorant things that make me want to smack them with an intro to comparative politics textbook.

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Zeshui0 t1_jcg1r6f wrote

That's not just in reference to books. That's what's happening all over the world whenever you try to discuss or create anything.

EDIT: Although most prominently in the west.

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J-blues t1_jcg64sl wrote

Same with acting now, you can’t pretend to be someone your not.

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