On Moral Panic

April 1st. April Fool’s Day. Our birthday. Today Misery Tourism is eight years old. We officially launched on this day in 2012 as a way for Rudy and me to share our weird, despicable homebrew tabletop role-playing games. Back then, our tagline was “terrible games about terrible people in terrible situations.” Obviously, quite a bit has changed since then: we launched a (moderately) successful kickstarter campaign for a collection of our games, let the site go fallow for awhile, attempted and then abandoned a mostly aimless site redesign, left everything to rot for a few more months, came back and began an entirely different redesign (which we actually completed), ran some weird quasi-satirical clickbait pieces mixed with a bit of our own fiction and poetry, launched a poorly edited film podcast, and, finally, in a rare moment of clarity, got ourselves listed on Duotrope and began accepting submissions from other miserable writers and artists. It’s been a long and mostly incoherent journey, but, in all that time and through all that experimentation, we’ve stuck to one ironclad rule, one unquestionable (and unquestioned) principle: We’ve never run a fucking thinkpiece.

We’ve carefully avoided ideological commitment. The internet is a fertilizer lagoon and ideology is the shit we’re all drowning in. We can’t open our eyes without being subjected to someone’s (usually wrong-headed and deeply obnoxious) pseudo-political grandstanding. We can’t open our mouths to breathe without inhaling a mouthful of someone’s greasy moral excrement. Reading anything—news, reviews, criticism, tweets, message boards—about anything—politics, film, video games, music, inane pop culture gossip—is the act of subjecting yourself to endless self-righteous pontification. We are taught to identify our intellectual enemies immediately, at a glance, and to respond ruthlessly and reflexibly. (Even now, as you read this, some of you are imagining that I must be your bugbear of choice: alt right edgelord, Bernie Bro, Intellectual Dark Web egomaniac, privilege-blind centrist. Whatever.) Given this larger climate, I’m proud of the restraint we’ve shown. And I’m ashamed of what I’m about to do. I’m about to take a stand, on fucking principle. I’m done with moral panic.

Isabel Fall was the last straw. If you’re tuned in enough to the independent lit scene to be reading this particular niche, outsider publication, you’ve probably already heard the story: a talented, young trans author, with no previous publication credits to her name, managed to do the nearly impossible and get a short story published in Clarkesworld. According to Duotrope, Clarkeworld publishes less than a quarter of one percent of their submissions, a fairly standard number for a high profile publication that pays at a professional rate. (Our industry, if you can call it that, is completely and profoundly, broken. Most publications, present company included, make no money and cannot afford to pay their authors anything at all.) It’s no exagerration to call this a miracle. You’re more likely to have your cancerous tumor successfully removed by a psychic surgeon than you are to be published by Clarkesworld as a transwoman without an established reputation and with a non-existent CV. And, what’s more, the story, titled “I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter,” was a wildly unique and unpretentious dissection of gender, sexuality, and our culturally fetishization of the military. It was good.

And so what happened? Outrage, of course. The usual mob of social media rabble-rousers, controversy-mongers, and virtuous parasites derided the story as transphobic, often apparently without reading more than title. Fall was insulted, harassed, and accused of being a fake transwoman and a white supremecist. (That last claim was based exclusively on the birth year, 1988, listed in her Clarkesworld bio.) Ultimately, Fall asked that the story be withdrawn from publication, and Clarkesworld complied, issuing a mealy-mouthed non-statement implying that their sensitivity readers had failed, rather than opting to make an unambiguous statement in support of the author and work that they had choose to publish. And so, today, Isabel Fall once again has no published stories to her name. The crabs prevailed in dragging one of their own down from the rim of the bucket. Professional jealousy and resentful ignorance have won another resounding victory over inspiration and art. And Fall is not alone. The weaponization of moral panic has become a ubiquitous feature of the literary universe as it struggles with its own growing poverty and cultural (and economic) irrelevance. It’s sad and it’s sickening.

And here, I suppose, is where I’m supposed to talk about the chilling effect, about how all speech and all speakers are victimized equally by moral panic, all quaking together in fear of the unstopped (and uncompromising) retaliatory power of quote-unquote “cancel culture.” But that’s simply not true. Because, if you’ve got the right connections, moral outrage can be a (wildly successful) marketing strategy. Joker, the notorious incel call-to-arms that was actually a stock standard supervillain origin story with no coherent political ideas at all, capitalized on the entirely baseless pre-release freakout about its dangerous message and broke box office records. Dave Chappelle’s Sticks & Stones standup special, which (unlike Joker) was legitimately brutal and brilliant, was an unprecedented success for Netflix, thanks to critics shamelessly pimping the old “comedian known for telling offensive jokes tells offensive jokes; please be offended” routine. Louis CK is back on tour and selling out venues. Moral panic, like so many other things, is not only useless when used against those with power and influence, it’s actively counterproductive.

The victims, as always, are those who were already weak: new artists with no social connections, ethnic and sexual minorities, the poor, the mentally ill, those who have seen the inside of a prison or a mental hospital, the outsiders, the outsiders, the outsiders. The same people who literature has always undervalued.. The same people, who, historically, have been most likely to be at the forefront of transgressive—call it “offensive” if you want, call it “degenerate” if you don’t mind the company—art. The same people who always get exploited. The same people who always get fucked.

So, with that in mind, our theme for April is “moral panic” and we’re putting out an open call not only for transgressive and subversive works, but for art of any kind (pictures, stories, poems, games, whatever) that has been withdraw, censored, or buried in the name of mob outrage or good taste. We want stories that other publications have pulled or unpublished in the face of scandal. We want pieces that other publications explicitly rejected for ideological reasons. We want previously self-published works that authors and artists were bullied into taking down, or refused to take down in the face of bullying. We want pieces that have no home, not because they’re poorly crafted, but because the world is full of well-intentioned cowards. We want your best worst shit.

If you think you have something that would be a good fit, please send it to submissions@miserytourism.com, along with a brief account of the circumstances under which it was rejected, unpublished, bowdlerized, or otherwise molested. We’ll respond as quickly (and considerately) as we possibly can. As usual, we’re also open to completely new artistic interpretations of moral panic that haven’t been published elsewhere or sparked any controversy (yet), so feel free to send those along as well.

We’ll begin publishing works in this series next week. Thanks for bearing with me while I debased myself. We’re all entitled to one (self-administered) birthday blowjob, right? I promise, I swear, I will never be so disgustingly sincere again. (April fools?)