Hate-reading's uglier cousin
/An irritation: people talk now about “hate-watching” a movie or TV show or “hate-reading” something, be it book, newspaper, magazine article, or blog post, “with the intention,” per Dictionary.com, “to mock or criticize.” That’s a very soft definition. Mockery and criticism both have their places, as does reading or watching something you know you’ll disagree with. You can’t grow intellectually or artistically unless you encounter and engage with things you disagree with or find lacking in one degree or another.
But the hate-reader or -watcher does so purely for performative spite and scorn and in anticipation of the approval of right-thinking comrades. This habit or hobby is widespread. Visit Goodreads sometime and you’ll see plenty of splenetic, fevered one-star reviews, sometimes with the same reviewers plowing through an entire series just to savage each and every book for misogyny, racism, homophobia, inadequate representation, cultural appropriation, fat-shaming, ableism, ageism, writing with too many adverbs—whatever sin the reviewer is particularly concerned with. I’ve had to repent of hate-reading myself in the specific case of Dan Brown, whose work I decided some years ago simply to pass by.
So hate-reading and -watching is annoying, but it’s not the irritant that’s on my mind—rather, it’s a related phenomenon that needs a name.
Browsing Goodreads reviews of the recent polemic Forget the Alamo, a predictably tendentious attack on the “heroic Anglo narrative” of the Texas Revolution, I came across this plum introduction to a five-star review:
When I started reading this book, I couldn't help but think of all the die hard Alamo fans who would foam at the mouth about it.
Here’s spite not at the authors of the book (and Forget the Alamo somehow took three people—all apparently Anglos, for those who care about that sort of thing—to write), but at imaginary political or ideological opponents, people so benighted that they have animalistic physical responses to things they disagree with. Not reading in spite but reading to spite. And in the last few years I’ve probably seen as much of this as I have pure, simpleminded hate-reading.
I’m not sure what to call this, and I’m also not sure if, in its pride and condescension and utter lack of charity, it’s not actually uglier than hate-reading.