How to Sell a Shark Book

the first in a series of columns by Phoebe Maltz Bovy

my Ikea shark asks to be excluded from the narrative

Hello friends, a favorite writer of mine named Phoebe Maltz Bovy has recently shifted to freelancing, so I reached out about writing for me here. Should everything look good the first couple of times, the plan is to have a monthly column from her. Don’t worry, I’ll always be writing the large majority of what gets published here, and don’t plan to slow down my publishing pace. (At least, any more than I already have due to my healing shoulder.) But Phoebe’s a perceptive and irreverent writer and I’m thrilled to be able to fund some of her work, thanks to my much-appreciated subscribers. Be kind in the comments. Subscriber-only post from me tomorrow as usual.

It happened, as these things usually do, with one of those threads getting shared onto my Twitter timeline. Someone I had never heard of, Miriam Forster, had a take that was equally new to me. She (Forster’s Twitter bio lists she/they pronouns, but as her seemingly up-to-date website uses “she,” and she uses “we” when referring to women, I will follow her lead) shared some thoughts on the place of white American women in political activism, in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade:

If activism is a business, then white women need to think of themselves as interns. We don’t make the rules, we don’t set the policy, we don’t organize the events. We make the copies, we learn everything we can, and we don’t expect to get promoted for at least a couple years.

Not feeling admonished enough, white women? Forster elaborates: “No intern is going to become a senior employee overnight. And no inexperienced white women is going to become an activist overnight. Think of it like a job. Find the office, apply, do what you’re told. And don’t scold the actual employees or management. They know more than you.”

Using a pro-boss analogy to make an ostensibly progressive take is, one could say, a choice. Who’s the audience for this, this bashing of uppity low-level (perhaps unpaid) workers, in language distinguishing the “intern” from “the actual employees”? The whole thing reads like a parody of neoliberalism, insofar as it reads as anything coherent at all. Not since ‘your privilege is showing if you have the luxury to go on strike’ has any purportedly leftist argument been so reactionary, but this takes things to a new level.

What wasn’t new here: the thing where a white woman declares white women the source of the world’s problems.

For all their sanctimony, for all their self-anointed pseudo-allyship, the Good White Men have nothing, alas, on the Good White Women, who rush to let you know that they (or maybe it’s those other white women) are in fact worse than white men. Writes Forster, “The way white people, especially ww [white women], are taught to view and interact with the world is antithetical to long-term organizing and justice work.”

Why “especially ww”? Because that’s the thing these days. From disgraced girlbosses to ordinary women afraid of being labelled Karens, the nation is full of progressive white women who prefer self-flagellation to solidarity. They’ve been at this for ages, doing things like holding white women Hillary Clinton voters accountable for the fact that other white women (if not quite the initially estimated 53%) voted for Donald Trump. Their reasoning seems to be that everyone imagines women, as women, are all good liberals or progressives (but: does anyone imagine this?), whereas actually there are women represented on all points of the ideological spectrum and subcultures, with the possible exception of Men Going Their Own Way. The idea is that when white women are bigots, it’s a sneakier form of bigotry, the famous weaponized fragility.

Blown away by their discovery of the (one would think) obvious fact that white women can be and historically have been racist, too, they devote their energies to schooling their fellow white feminists in how not to be a White Feminist. The all-time champ in this arena is White Fragility author Robin DiAngelo, who’s built a lucrative career on eliciting and then denouncing white tears, but any rando with a social media account and the willingness to begin a thread with an abrasive, “Okay, I’ll say it,” can get in on the action.

I started feeling sorry for Forster, a non-famous person who was undoubtedly the day’s (that morning’s) Twitter main character. But then something struck me, and that something was Forster’s Twitter display name. It is not Miriam Forster. It is, I cannot emphasize this enough: “SHARK BOOK OUT NOW.” In all-caps.

It took me a moment to put this together, but Forster, it seems, has a shark book to sell. An illustrated (she’s the author, not illustrator) book about the sea creatures in question.

Book publicity is an awkward business in the best of times. Authors, people inclined to staying in and writing, must self-promote, and must do so in ways that make them stand out from the hordes of other creatives screaming BUY MY NEW THING. In recent years, this has often involved a writer offering up tragic, lurid, or identity-centric personal essays. These essays, though, will typically have something to do with the topic of the work in question. Maybe they’ll offer up a biographical detail that ‘qualifies’ a novelist for having chosen a topic. Their agents and editors may insist they use social media, even if it’s not their thing, because it’s what constitutes networking for writers these days. But what does white-woman-bashing have to do with sharks?

I cannot read Forster’s mind and say for sure that she set out to do a megaviral thread in order to sell shark books. But “SHARK BOOK OUT NOW” suggest, at the very least, that she is not averse to this outcome. Being a white lady prepared to tell other white ladies to buckle up for some hard truths about white ladies is a reliable path to virality. Someone, somewhere, will doubtless notice the shark book for sale, think, huh, that author’s name sounds familiar, in the context of sharks, and bingo, a sale.

There is, however, a far bigger problem here than that there’s a white woman being irritating on the internet. (Someone of every demographic is doing this at all times.) American women—“ww” included—lost their reproductive rights. Now is exactly the moment not to be shaming women for being new to activism, or for telling them to know their place. If white women, too, are outraged, this should be encouraged! The more the better!

The only way Forster’s thread makes sense is if it’s an anti-abortion psy-op. But I suspect that’s too interesting, and that the whole thing really was just about moving merch, merch being the shark books.

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