Advice columns are one of those cultural phenomena where I recognize them as enormously and enduringly popular, but I still can’t really fathom the appeal. Kind of like reality tv, Victorian costume dramas, and live musical acts where a hundred backup dancers do the same moves in unison synchronized to a pre-recorded track. They’re really huge and people whose tastes I otherwise respect seem to like them, but they just utterly miss me.
It’s probably not an accident, then, that I was weirdly fascinated by Bennett Madison’s Gawker piece “Help! I Couldn’t Stop Writing Fake Dear Prudence Letters That Got Published.” (This is Nü Gawker, so it’s in a slightly less irritating style than the original.) I was honestly a little surprised by this— not that some of the letters they run were fakes, but that they were genuinely faked by someone outside the organization. I’ve always half believed that the crazier letters were secretly being written by junior staffers or summer interns, but the idea of somebody choosing to fake these as a hobby is an extra level of baffling on top of a thing I already don’t really understand.
Madison’s letters linked from the piece don’t really stand out as all that much more batshit than any of the rest of what runs in those columns, though, which leaves open then question of how many of those were faked by similarly bored people. Then again, it’s a big country, so maybe there really are a lot of weirdly indecisive people out there facing personal crises that seem implausibly contrived, and Madison is just good at imitating them. And then, of course, there’s the “fractal babushka doll” theory that Madison is faking being a faker:
This incident also interacted oddly with a couple of parenting-during-Covid pieces that have been shared into my feed a zillion times the last few days, one from the New York Times and the other from the Washington Post. They’re not really advice columns per se, but end up having something of the same feel. Despite being in a very similar position to the parents in those— SteelyKid at 13 is fully vaccinated, The Pip at 10 can’t be, so there are a lot of things we’re not comfortable doing at the moment— I can’t entirely identify with their level of freakout. I’m much more annoyed at how long it’s taking to approve vaccines for the under-12 set than I am anxious about what we can and can’t do. I end up wondering to what degree their anxiety and indecision are being played up either for or by the writer.
Another regular not-an-advice-column-but-similarly-puzzling-to-me source is the academic trade press, particularly the opinion columns at Inside Higher Ed. These are less a matter of anxious people writing in to ask for help and more opinionated people offering unsolicited advice for how to solve problems that often wouldn’t’ve occurred to me as something that anyone would need help with.
A part of the problem in this case is a sort of collapsing of context that happens with op-ed sections (and social media to a large extent) where the rotating selection of authors published by the same outlet creates an impression that everything is coming from a single, badly conflicted source. It feels like the work of someone who is simultaneously perfectly certain that sacred principles of academic freedom give them the absolute right to say blisteringly stupid things on Twitter about current events, and yet in need of reassurance that they are allowed to set their own policies regarding homework grading or ground rules for classroom behavior. Or that the same people who write soaringly about the nobility of grappling with deep questions that have no clear answer are also demanding perfect clarity and bright-line rules to govern even the most trivial of campus interactions.
In reality, those pieces are all from different authors, they’re just showing up in the same RSS feed or pushed out from the same institutional Twitter. Nobody actually holds all of those positions at the same time, but it’s hard to shake the impression of some amorphous blob of faculty who are wildly inconsistent and indecisive.
Then again, maybe there’s some tenure-track Bennett Madison out there using burner .edu emails to place crazy essays in the academic trades. Once he or she gets promoted to Associate Prof, they’ll spill the beans in whatever the academic version of Nü Gawker is. If so, I look forward to reading it.
I’m not sure there’s really a coherent point to this, but it’s been a long week. If for some reason you would like to read more of this kind of thing, or know somebody else who would, here are some buttons:
And the comments will be open if you just want to sound off.