Several hundred replies. Most of them furious. A handful genuinely, uncomfortably correct about something I got wrong.
A column I published last week generated considerably more furious online response than anything I have written in a genuinely long while, several hundred replies across various platforms, the overwhelming majority of them angry, a handful genuinely, substantively critical in ways I have spent this week trying to actually sit with honestly rather than simply reaching for the defensive, dismissive response that is always, always the easier option when a piece of your own writing gets this much public pushback this quickly.
I want to be honest that my very first instinct, reading through the initial wave of responses last week, was almost entirely defensive, a specific, familiar rush of certainty that most of the criticism was simply misreading my actual argument, taking a single sentence out of the considerably more nuanced context I thought I had built around it, the standard, well-worn set of defensive moves any writer with enough years in this business develops fairly automatically once their work starts attracting genuine public scrutiny at any real scale.
What made me actually stop and reconsider, a few days into the response, was noticing that a specific, recurring critique kept appearing across otherwise genuinely different corners of the response, from readers who clearly had not read each other’s comments, who approached the piece from meaningfully different political and personal starting points, and who nonetheless kept landing on remarkably similar language identifying the exact same specific problem in my original argument. That kind of independent, convergent criticism, arriving from genuinely different directions rather than simply one coordinated pile-on, is, I have learned over enough years doing this, usually worth taking considerably more seriously than the more reflexive, less specific anger that also inevitably arrives whenever anything gets this much attention.
The specific critique, once I actually let myself sit with it properly rather than immediately reaching for a defensive counter-argument, was genuinely fair. I had made a broad generalization in the piece that, while true of my own specific experience and the experience of most women in my own fairly narrow social and professional circle, did not actually hold up nearly as well when applied more broadly, a genuine blind spot in my own perspective that several considerably more marginalized readers pointed out with real, specific detail about how differently the exact situation I was describing plays out for women whose circumstances differ meaningfully from my own.
I have been a professional writer for a long time now, long enough that I think I had started, somewhere along the way, to assume my own accumulated experience and platform meant my instincts about what counted as a genuinely universal experience were more reliable than they apparently, actually are. This week’s response was a genuinely useful, if uncomfortable, corrective to that specific assumption, a reminder that a large platform does not automatically confer a correspondingly large, accurate view of experiences meaningfully different from your own.
I published a follow-up piece yesterday, genuinely acknowledging the specific blind spot rather than simply moving on quietly and hoping the whole controversy faded without any direct response, a piece that was, if I am honest, considerably harder to write than the original column, precisely because it required actually naming my own error clearly rather than simply defending or quietly walking back the original argument in vaguer, less accountable terms.
The response to that follow-up has been considerably more mixed than I expected, some readers genuinely appreciating the direct acknowledgment, others feeling it did not go nearly far enough, a handful accusing me of simply performing accountability rather than genuinely holding it. I do not think there was ever going to be a version of this specific follow-up that satisfied everyone, and I have decided, this week, that writing the most honest version I was actually capable of producing has to be enough, even knowing it will not fully resolve every reader’s specific, entirely valid frustration with my original piece.
I have been thinking, in the days since publishing that follow-up, about how rarely writers at any real level of public visibility actually model this specific kind of accountability clearly and publicly, as opposed to either digging in defensively or quietly, privately revising future work without ever directly naming the original error to the readers who caught it in the first place. I do not think I handled this perfectly, and I suspect some of the criticism of my follow-up as insufficiently thorough is itself entirely fair. But I think there is real value in at least attempting the harder, more exposed version of accountability publicly, imperfect as my own specific attempt this week clearly turned out to be.
I am trying, going forward, to actually build this kind of check into my process earlier, before publication rather than only in the considerably more painful aftermath of a piece already having caused real, avoidable hurt to readers whose experience differs from my own. That will not prevent every future misstep, since I suspect no amount of care fully insulates a columnist writing regularly and publicly from occasionally, genuinely getting something wrong. But I think it is a genuinely useful, concrete lesson to actually carry forward from this particular week, rather than simply absorbing the discomfort and moving on unchanged.
More from this author at Caitlin Moran, prat.uk.