When I was growing up in a conservative evangelical community, one of the top priorities was to manage children’s consumption of art. The effort was based on a fairly straightforward aesthetic theory: Every artwork has a clear message, and consuming messages that conflict with Christianity will harm one’s faith. Helpfully, there was a song whose lyrics consisted precisely of this aesthetic theory: “Input Output.”  

Input, output,
What goes in is what comes out.
Input, output,
That is what it’s all about.
Input, output,
Your mind is a computer whose
Input, output daily you must choose.

The search for the “inputs” of secular artwork sometimes took a paranoid form—such as the belief in subliminal messages recorded in reverse, or in isolated frames from Lion King where smoke allegedly forms the word sex. Most often, however, the analysis was more direct. Portraying a behavior or describing a belief, unless accompanied immediately by a clear negative judgment, is an endorsement and a recommendation, and people who consume such messages will become more likely to behave and believe in that way.

[Read: Defining evangelical]

This theory underwrote the whole edifice of Christian contemporary music, which aimed to replace a particularly powerful avenue for negative messages. One of my running jokes for many years has been that all Top 40 music is effectively Christian contemporary music now; American Idol confirmed the hegemony of the “praise band” vocal style. More clear is the fact that all mainstream criticism—especially of film and television—is evangelical in form, if not in content. Every artwork is imagined to have a clear message; the portrayal of a given behavior or belief is an endorsement and a recommendation; consumption of artwork with a given message will directly result in the behaviors or beliefs portrayed. This is one of the few phenomena where the “both sides” cliché is true: Left-wing critics are just as likely to do this as their right-wing opponents. For every video of a right-wing provocateur like Ben Shapiro decrying the woke excesses of Barbie, there is a review praising the Mattel product tie-in as a feminist fable.

Here, however, I am more concerned with the critical practices of my comrades on the left. Among leftist publications, Jacobin stands out for its reductive and moralizing cultural coverage. Addressing the other major movie of this past weekend, for instance, the critic Eileen Jones worried in a recent column, “If you’re already convinced of the dangers of nuclear war, superseded only by the ongoing end-times series of rolling climate catastrophes that now seem more likely to kill us all, this film is going to lack a certain urgency.” Sadly, instead of an educational presentation on nuclear war, film audiences will instead find a biopic that takes some liberties with its subject’s life and character for the sake of creating a Hollywood blockbuster. Jones finds more to like in Barbie, despite “the familiar, toothless, you-go-girl pseudo-feminist pieties that Mattel has been monetizing for decades, alongside the nostalgic how-can-our-consumer-products-be-bad affirmations of Barbie as some sort of magic, wholesomely progressive uniter of generations of mothers and daughters.”

This trend is not limited to one publication. It is pervasive in online culture, above all on social media. For instance, over coffee on the morning after the epic Barbenheimer Friday, I learned some disturbing facts about Oppenheimer on Twitter. At least one viewer was worried that the film about the man who created the nuclear bomb did not include any Japanese characters. Indeed, it did not even directly portray his invention’s horrific consequences. Surely this aesthetic choice was meant to minimize his actions by rendering his victims invisible. (An article in New York magazine drew attention to the same absence.) I also learned that the area surrounding Los Alamos was actually cleared of Indigenous and Hispanic residents, another bit of history that is effectively erased by the film.

[John Hendrickson: Oppenheimer nightmares? You’re not alone. ]

Let’s imagine, though, that those complaints had been anticipated and addressed. Let’s imagine an entire subplot of a family going about their business in Hiroshima. We get to know and like them, to relate to them as our fellow human beings. Then, shockingly, they are incinerated by a nuclear blast. One can already hear the complaints. If the family were portrayed as too morally upstanding, it would be a dehumanizing portrayal that idealizes them as perfect victims. If they had moral flaws, the film would be subtly suggesting that they deserved their fate. And either way, the film would be attacked for offering up their suffering as a spectacle for our enjoyment. The same would go for the displaced population of Los Alamos—by portraying them as passive victims with no agency, critics would surely complain, the film would be reinscribing white authority.

Obviously leftists do not have to be as paranoid in their quest for messages supportive of the status quo as Christians playing their records backwards in the hopes of finding satanic content.  And of course we are a long way from having anything like the real-world thought police of Stalinism. During that dark era of Soviet history, writers and artists were expected to subscribe to the standards of socialist realism—which, instead of portraying the sordid and brutal reality of the present, anticipated the future reality of socialism by showing heroic workers building a utopian society. Those who fell short of those ideological expectations could expect a personal phone call from Comrade Stalin, if not worse. By contrast, it seems relatively harmless to hope that films and TV shows might reflect one’s own politics and to lament when they fail to do so. Yet the very fact that the demand is so open-ended that it is impossible to imagine an artwork meeting its largely unstated and unarticulated standards shows that something has gone wrong here.

To be clear, I don’t want to defend Oppenheimer in any way. I have not actually seen the film. Nothing anyone is saying is necessarily wrong; it’s just not interesting. Like most film and TV viewers, I read reviews because I want to decide whether or not to see a given movie or show, or else to think it through from a fresh perspective. For example, I note that Oppenheimer is very long—how is the pacing? Does it maintain a clear focus throughout, or does it indulge the common vice of biopics by trying to cram too much in? The type of critical literature that concerns me does not address such basic aesthetic questions, or does so only incidentally.

Even more insidiously, though, the logical goal of such very narrow standards could be to create artwork that is straightforward political propaganda. We’ve seen how badly that turned out for the evangelicals (and, indeed, for the Stalinists). Even if we are unlikely to face the scourge of a Leninist equivalent to VeggieTales, however, this style of criticism infantilizes its audience members by assuming they are essentially ideology-processing machines—unlike the wise commentator who somehow manages to see through the deception.

Political problems cannot be solved on the aesthetic level. And it’s much more likely that people are consuming politics as a kind of aesthetic performance or as a way of expressing aesthetic preferences than that they are somehow reading their politics off Succession, for example (“Welp, I guess rich people are good now. Better vote Republican!”). Just as the reduction of art to political propaganda leads to bad art, the aestheticization of politics leads to bad, irresponsible politics. That’s because aesthetics and politics are not the same thing. They are not totally unrelated, obviously, but they are also and even primarily different. A political message can be part of an aesthetic effect, just as a political movement can benefit from an aesthetic appeal. But we get nowhere if we confuse or collapse these categories.

This story was adapted from a post on Adam Kotsko's blog, An Und Für Sich.

When Megan Nolan published her first novel, fellow authors warned her in “ominous tones” about the website Goodreads. The young Irish writer looked at the book’s listing there in the winter of 2020, the day the first proof copy arrived at her house. “Nobody but me and the publisher had seen it,” she wrote recently. “Despite this, it had received one review already: two stars, left by someone I had inconsequential personal discord with. It was completely impossible for him to have read the book.”

The terrible power of Goodreads is an open secret in the publishing industry. The review site, which Amazon bought in 2013, can shape the conversation around a book or an author, both positively and negatively. Today’s ostensible word-of-mouth hits are more usually created online, either via Goodreads or social networks such as Instagam and TikTok.

Publishers know how important these dynamics are, and so they send out advanced reading copies, or ARCs, not just to independent booksellers who might stock a title, but also to influencers who might make content about it. “There’s an assumption that if you receive an ARC that you will post about it,” Traci Thomas, host of the literary podcast The Stacks, told me—“whether that’s on your Goodreads, on your Instagram, on your TikTok, tell other people in your bookstore, or whatever. And so that’s how it ends up that there’s so many reviews of a book that’s not out yet.”

Many book bloggers are conscientious about including a disclaimer on their posts thanking the publisher for giving them an ARC “in exchange for an honest review.” But disclosing freebies is far from a contractual requirement or even a social norm. So you can’t easily discern which early reviewers have actually read the book, and which ones might be reacting to social-media chatter (or, as Nolan suspected in her case, prosecuting a personal grudge).

That matters because viral campaigns target unpublished books all the time. What tends to happen is that one influential voice on Instagram or TikTok deems a book to be “problematic,” and then dozens of that person’s followers head over to Goodreads to make the writer’s offense more widely known. Authors who reply to these attacks risk making the situation worse. Kathleen Hale—who was so infuriated by a mean reviewer that she tracked down the woman’s address—wrote later that the site had warned her against engagement: “At the bottom of the page, Goodreads had issued the following directive (if you are signed in as an author, it appears after every bad review of a book you’ve written): ‘We really, really (really!) don’t think you should comment on this review, even to thank the reviewer.’” Most authors I know read their Goodreads reviews, and then silently fume over them alone. Because I am a weirdo, I extract great enjoyment from mine—the more petty and baffling the complaints, the better. “I listened to the audiobook and by chapter 3 it started to annoy me the little pause she made before the word ‘male,’” reads one review of my book, Difficult Women.

When the complaints are more numerous and more serious, it’s known as “review-bombing” or “brigading.” A Goodreads blitzkrieg can derail an entire publication schedule, freak out commercial book clubs that planned to discuss the release, or even prompt nervous publishers to cut the marketing budget for controversial titles. Last month, the Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert withdrew her upcoming novel The Snow Forest from publication because of the backlash she received after revealing it was set in Soviet Russia. The Goodreads page for The Snow Forest, which has since been taken down, accused her of romanticizing the Russian soul. “I’ll cut the job for you—they don’t have any,” wrote one reviewer. Another wrote: “Just like her characters in this nover [sic] are unaware of the events of WWII, Elizabeth Gilbert herself seems to be unaware of the genocidal war russia is conducting against Ukraine RIGHT NOW, because I’m sure if she knew, she’d realise how tone deaf this book is.”

[Read: Eat, pray, pander]

The book had been scheduled for release next February, but in a video announcing that it was “not the time for this book to be published,” Gilbert essentially endorsed the Goodreads criticisms: “I do not want to add any harm to a group of people who have already experienced and who are all continuing to experience grievous and extreme harm.”

Now, I don’t know whether The Snow Forest romanticized the Russian soul or would somehow have caused “harm” to Ukrainians. Like my colleague Franklin Foer, I find the allegations hard to believe. But the plain fact is that neither of us know, because—and this should be obvious, although recent events suggest it is not—you don’t know what’s in a book you haven’t read. You also don’t know what’s in a film you haven’t watched, an album you haven’t heard, or an article you haven’t clicked on. That used to matter. It no longer does, because we live in a world where you can harvest likes by circulating screenshots of headlines and out-of-context video clips, and where marketing campaigns are big enough that they constitute artistic statements in themselves. (Barbie, I’m looking at you.)

Unfortunately, the artworks most likely to run into trouble in this viral hellscape are those that explore complicated, incendiary topics such as sex, race, and identity. Another Goodreads drama played out recently over Everything’s Fine, a debut novel written by Cecilia Rabess and published on June 6. Its plot centers on a young, progressive Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white man in the lead-up to Donald Trump’s election. “It obviously tackles some lightning-rod issues about race, class, and politics and identity in America,” Rabess told me, and so she expected strong reactions on Goodreads and similar sites. “But I think people certainly hadn’t read the book. And so I don’t know how they came to the conclusions that they did—that the book didn’t handle these topics carefully or thoughtfully or intentionally.”

Chalk that characterization up as writerly understatement. “It’s not enemies to lovers if you use it to excuse racists,” a typical one-star review read, referencing a common romance-novel trope. “Some authors shouldn’t be authors bc wtf is this!?” another offered. “i haven’t read this book nor do I plan to but having read the synopsis, I’m rating it 1-star,” a third confessed.

In the case of Everything’s Fine, the pile-on appears to have started on TikTok, where a handful of prominent creators criticized the book. The swell of anger then migrated to Goodreads, where those creators’ fans could register their disapproval. “i didnt and will not even read this i came from tiktok to say i hope the sales are so bad the bookstores have to throw away all inventory because it refuses to sell. anyone who gets an ARC of this should be ashamed,” noted another one-star review.

For Rabess, the experience was brutal. “As an artist, you’re prepared for people to not resonate with the work,” she said. “But I think it feels different when people decide that you yourself are problematic, or you yourself are causing harm, or whatever language they use to describe it. It feels a little bit surreal.” The backlash might have flourished on Goodreads, but it soon escaped to the wider internet. Rabess, who is Black, received angry direct messages and emails, as well as abusive comments under any social-media posts she made. “They said nasty things about me, about my children. Called me coon, other really unpleasant slurs. Told me that I’d be better off dead.”

The anger was scattershot. The commenters using racial slurs clearly knew Rabess’s race, but she wondered if some other online critics assumed that she was a white author intruding on territory they felt should be reserved for writers of color. While authors are sensibly told not to read the reviews—and certainly not to engage with critics—that’s harder when the critics come right up in your (virtual) face and shout their opinions at you.

[Read: The companies that are killing creativity]

As it happens, the podcaster Traci Thomas was among those who disliked Rabess’s book—albeit after reading an advance copy, back in January. “It’s an icky book,” she told me. She objected to what she saw as the moral of the story: Love conquers all, even being a Trump supporter. “The boyfriend in the book, Josh, is wearing a MAGA hat and, like, saying racist shit to [the female protagonist]. And she’s like, It’s fine. And the big revelation for her is that she can still choose to love him. And I’m just like: Okay, cool, go off—and I’m gonna tear this book to shreds.”

Ultimately, Thomas concluded, “I don’t know that the book needs to exist.”

Despite her own strong feelings, Thomas told me that she sometimes felt uneasy about her own reviews being surrounded by knee-jerk reactions and “performative allyship,” even by people whose politics she shared. “There are people who are new to anti-racism work or supporting LGBTQ people, or disability activism or whatever. And they feel it is their job to call out things that they notice without perhaps understanding the bigger historical context.” To illustrate the point, she gave an example: Imagine an author writes a book about Black children riding tricycles, “and then I’ll see a review that’s like, ‘This book didn’t talk about Black preschoolers who ride bikes, and they’re also at risk.’”

That dynamic explains one of the most initially counterintuitive aspects of viral pile-ons: that many seem to target authors who would agree with their critics on 99 percent of their politics. A strange kind of progressive one-upmanship is at work here: Anyone can condemn Ann Coulter’s latest book, but pointing out the flaws in a feminist or anti-racist book, or a novel by a Black female author, establishes the critic as the occupant of a higher moral plane.

The net effect of this is to hobble books by progressive authors such as Gilbert, and by writers of color such as Rabess. The latter is philosophical about the controversy over Everything’s Fine, seeing the backlash as representative of the political moment she was exploring in the novel—of “people feeling a dearth of community and connection, and just wanting a way to connect, a way to express themselves or express their anger.”

Of course, if Goodreads wanted to, it could fix the review-bombing problem overnight. When services that rely on user-generated content are only lightly moderated, it’s always a conscious decision, and usually a cold commercial one. After Gilbert pulled her novel from publication, The Washington Post observed that Amazon, which reportedly paid $150 million for Goodreads, now shows little interest in maintaining or updating the site. Big changes to a heavily trafficked site can be costly and risk annoying the existing user base: Reddit has recently faced down a moderators’ revolt for changes to how developers can access its tools, and Elon Musk’s tenure at Twitter—or whatever it’s now called—will one day be taught at business schools on a slide headlined “How to Lose Advertisers and Alienate People.” A purge of duplicate accounts might sweep up some fanatically devoted Goodreads users—people who can’t bear to share their opinion only once—and make the site feel less busy and exciting.

Goodreads spokesperson Suzanne Skyvara told me by email that the site “takes the responsibility of maintaining the authenticity and integrity of ratings and protecting our community of readers and authors very seriously.” She added that Goodreads is working to “stay ahead of content and accounts that violate our reviews or community guidelines” and has “increased the number of ways members can flag content to us.”

The main Amazon site has several measures in place to stop review-bombing: Reviews from verified purchasers of books are flagged as such to bolster their credibility, while the star rating is the product of a complicated algorithm rather than simply an average of all the review scores. Goodreads could adopt even more stringent measures—but then, it isn’t in the company’s interests to reduce volume in favor of quality, because its entire appeal is based around being a grassroots voice. “Goodreads really needs a mechanism for stopping one-star attacks on writers,” the writer Roxane Gay tweeted after Gilbert’s statement in June. “It undermines what little credibility they have left.” Traci Thomas agrees. In an email, she told me that she would like to see “verified users or reviews that get a check (or something) in exchange for proving they’ve read the book.”

If Amazon will not put the resources into controlling the wrath of Goodreads, then what fairness requires here is a strong taboo: Do not review a book you haven’t read. We should stigmatize uninformed opinions the way we stigmatize clipping your nails on public transport, talking with your mouth full, or claiming that your peacock is a service animal. A little self-control from the rest of us will make it easier for writers to approach incendiary topics, safe in the knowledge that they will be criticized only for things they’ve actually done.

In the 2000s, male artists routinely excavated the popular culture of their boyhood for imaginative repurposing in their art. Michael Chabon’s novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay traces the lives of two men who become comic-book creators. In Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, two boys find a magic ring they use to take on superpowers; the title itself evokes the fictional fortress of Superman. Back then, I remember feeling that the equivalent was not possible for women artists, that the popular culture of American girlhood (horses, dolls, gymnastics) was still considered silly, juvenile—impossible to recuperate as adult art worth taking seriously.

Greta Gerwig seems at last a counterexample. Her entire career as a filmmaker has, in a sense, been a campaign to make art of girlhood materials. Her 2019 film, Little Women, remakes the 19th-century girlhood classic, rendering it freshly urgent for a 21st-century audience. (“I’ve been angry every day of my life,” Marmee, the saintly mother of the novel, says in Gerwig’s version.) Her directorial debut, Lady Bird (2017), captures the angst of a 17-year-old girl’s coming-of-age in all its granular reality, taking seriously adolescent longing and anger.

And now here is the Barbie juggernaut. Barbie dominated the box office on its opening weekend, grossing a stunning $155 million: a post-pandemic high, and the biggest opening for any feature film directed by a woman. Grown-up art about girlhood really can be an economic and cultural powerhouse. In the past week, women I barely know and women I have known for years have texted me their excitement about the film—and then shared their response, which has been in many cases the same: They loved watching the film, and yet more than one felt oddly disappointed by it.

[Read: Greta Gerwig’s lessons from Barbie land]

Perhaps this is because, as the critic Dana Stevens noted in Slate, Barbie “never completely resolves the paradox at its heart”: The movie purports to be critical of Mattel while being enthusiastically sponsored by Mattel. The constraint is so obvious that Gerwig tries to turn it into a joke. The plot hinges on the conceit that all the Barbies mistakenly believe that their existence has turned the “real” world into a feminist paradise. But Gerwig knows that no one wants to watch a hectoring film about how the doll is bad for girls’ self-image. So she subversively jokes about the insidious side of corporate culture while visually celebrating the Barbieness of Barbie. In this way, Barbie really is, if not a wholly successful film, certainly a powerful monument to the strangeness of American girl culture, which remains impoverished in its vision of what young girls are and want.

At once a commercial for a toy and a delicious romp through the pleasures of childhood play, Barbie sits uneasily at the intersection of reality, fantasy, and critique. It is joyous, winking, frothily cinematic. There are lavish costumes, deftly choreographed dance numbers, and aesthetically sophisticated visual puns. Barbie, played by Margot Robbie, is wryly known as “Stereotypical Barbie”; blond and perfect, she showers and drinks without ever getting wet, walks on her toes, floats down from her bedroom to the street as if held by an invisible girl’s hand. The script is peppered with genuinely incisive and funny skewers of gender stereotypes. A key moment in the plot involves the Barbies allowing the Kens to “sing at them” while playing guitars; the preposition is pure genius.

Like many women before it, Barbie tries to be many things to many people. One trailer’s tag line was “If you love Barbie, this movie is for you. If you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” The line gets at the challenge here, adjacent to the one Stevens identified: How do you make a film for an audience that remains fiercely divided about the material you’re writing about?  

This conflict, one might say, is precisely what forces Stereotypical Barbie out of her dreamy pink home on a quest to understand a series of strange phenomena: cellulite, cold showers, melancholy. We meet Barbie in Barbie Land, where women rule, literally. There is a Barbie president; there are nine Supreme Court Barbies. Kens are reduced to supporting roles. They wait for Barbies to kiss them, notice them, long for them. But when Barbie begins having relentless thoughts of death, she and one of the Kens, played to deliciously banal perfection by Ryan Gosling, enter “reality.” It isn’t the paradise she expected; men ogle her and a girl calls her a “fascist.” As reality’s reality dawns on Barbie, she articulates a set of feelings at once amusingly framed and horrifying to witness: “I feel … ill at ease,” she says. “I’m getting undertones of violence.” (Cue women squirming in the audience.) Meanwhile, Ken is radicalized by his experience: He likes the attention he gets. He sees a new world, one where men are not second-class citizens, and returns to Barbie Land to brainwash the Barbies into serving the Kens. The former Supreme Court justices are now cheerleaders.

Rather than get angry at what has happened to Barbie Land, Barbie is crushed. She stops wearing makeup and lies on the floor in despair, waiting for another Barbie to take the lead in fixing her society. And so the second half of the film tells the somewhat incoherent story of her evolution from thinking she is not “good enough” to becoming a woman bent on self-determination. In the real world, she befriends a real woman named Gloria (America Ferrara), who delivers an impassioned motivational speech about how hard it is to be a woman in a world that demands contradictory things: to care tirelessly for your children but not talk about them too much; to act when action seems fruitless.

The challenge that Barbie, as a cultural object, presents Gerwig is how to mine the performative pleasures of clothes and dance numbers alongside the travesties of modern American culture while framing the story as if the two are wholly disconnected. She’s trying to show what it might really be like to go from a dream land to contemporary America, where Roe v. Wade has been overturned, parents still don’t automatically get parental leave after the birth of a child, and most CEOs of corporations (including Mattel) are still men.

Barbie is at once radical and conventional. It is radical in its light indictment of the patriarchy: One of the very best lines of cultural criticism I’ve heard in ages comes when Ken says, “To be honest, when I found out the patriarchy wasn’t about horses I lost interest.” (The movie might be best read as a brilliant portrait of aggrieved far-right masculinity.) It is somewhat more conventional in its vision of a dream girlhood and its idea of what Barbie is. And perhaps here is where Mattel’s influence is strongest. Despite the presence of Doctor Barbies and Supreme Court Barbies, Gerwig’s Barbies still largely conform to rigid beauty norms; a night of fun is a dance number in glittery and sexy clothes; and no conflict ever occurs, because the days are coated in a vapid gloss of fashion and pink plastic that corporate America has always been selling girls. This is the vision that led my second-wave-feminist mother to ban Barbie from our house. When my aunt gave me two for my fifth birthday, they mysteriously disappeared a few days later.

[Read: The surprising key to understanding the Barbie film]

To some degree, this vapidity is Gerwig’s point: Barbie must leave Barbie Land, as all girls must, to confront a messier and more complex reality. And yet Barbie skirts the deep cognitive dissonance the doll inspires in many girls. Thanks to my mother’s ban, I played with Barbie only at friends’ houses. I recall finding the doll boring, because she was relentlessly tethered to our world and to the culture’s expectations for adult me, ones that didn’t yet interest me (boys, houses, Malibu). Instead of playing Barbie, my friends and I disfigured her so she looked like the film’s Weird Barbie (Kate MacKinnon), a doll with a 1980s punk haircut who’s out of step with all the others. Like the montage in the film showing what a girl did to Weird Barbie, we chopped off her hair down to chunky sprouts, turned her head backward, covered her face in green marker. In the film’s lingo, Weird Barbie is weird because girls have “played too hard” with her, a telling evasion. Weird Barbie is not weird because someone played too hard with her. Weird Barbie is weird, as Gerwig surely knows, because some girl used her to express all her frustration at the confection of materialism and reductive beauty norms. Weird Barbie wants to raze Barbie Land, not just help Stereotypical Barbie see reality for what it is.

Barbie is a fascinating moment in the ascendance of girl culture, a brilliantly twisty dive into the core of the contradictory scripts shaping what it is like to grow up as a girl in America. One of those scripts teaches that girlhood isn’t a space of imaginative autonomy but a kind of prep school for a conventional consumer adulthood that will be shaped by hair appointments, shopping, and a job. Despite the constraints she faces, Gerwig tries to invoke a more capacious script for girlhood at the film’s end, in a beautiful montage of girls playing around the world, in muted visuals that starkly contrast with the Technicolor Barbie world. If the film emerges aesthetically scathed, that doesn’t mean it is a failure. I left delighted by how much Gerwig had achieved through humor, and by the conviction that Barbie can only help make room for more films by women about women. The film’s tag line is right. One can hate Barbie and still be glad this movie was made, because here it is at last: a movie full of jokes for us, the women and girls in the room. In that sense, nothing about Barbie is silly or juvenile.