So, over the weekend, content extortion site Huffington Post (motto: “All The Exposure You Can Eat!”) picked up a piece that had been making the rounds on Medium. This piece, entitled “Love Will Be The Death Of Us: Notes From The End Of A Relationship”, is basically everything that’s wrong with the personal essay subgenre that I call Sad Boner Confessional.

Said sad dude’s name is Ian Mackenzie. I’m going to call him by his social media handle of @ianmack for the rest of this blog, because it’s disturbing to me that both of his names are first names of major characters in my writing. His tale is the story of what one dude learned from cheating on his infertile wife of 10 years, then pressuring her to accept an open relationship as a “solution” to the problems of their relationship so that he can “explore his sexuality” without guilt, and how this inadvertently freed her to learn she was far, far happier with someone else than she’d ever been with him.

You can tell you’re reading a Sad Boner Confessional when the language suggests a high wire act where the author is trying to achieve some delicate balance between “I’m a sensitive man” and “BUT I’M A MAN” and wants you to sympathize with the contortions he puts himself through as  a result. You can tell you’re reading a Sad Boner Confessional when a man is describing the worst trauma of a woman’s life purely in terms of what it means about him. You can tell you’re reading a Sad Boner Confessional when a man is telling you everything he’s learned from the mistakes he’s made but none of those things are accountability or personal responsibility. You can tell you’re reading a Sad Boner Confessional when all admissions of past sins have a sheen of humblebragging about them.

For example: here’s how @ianmack describes the time of his life when he actively and repeatedly betrayed his wife:

These interactions weighed heavy on my soul. I could not make sense of them. On the one hand, each felt appropriate, life-affirming and needed. Surely these could not be considered “cheating.” What was a kiss anyway? On the other hand, such interactions were beyond the boundaries of our monogamous partnership to which Katherine and I had vowed. In my uncertainty, I waited, hoping somehow the situation would resolve itself.

It kept happening, you guys. Somehow, it kept happening. He kept meeting worthy women, Athenas, goddessesses, and he kept kissing them. I mean, kisses happened. He concedes on a purely technical level that he has transgressed against a vow, but not against the person to whom he made the vow.

The only person who has ever written worse Sad Boner Confessionals than the aforementioned piece by @ianmack is Hugo Schwyzer, and that’s because Schwyzer literally wrote essays about the important moral and emotional lessons he learned from sleeping with students and raping and/or trying to murder his intimate partners (the takeaway from that last one was “Hey, we’re all human.”), and they were wrapped up in enough language that suggested he was sensitive and progressive that a lot of people with big feminist publishing platforms celebrated them for a while.

I like to think that Hugo Schwyzer’s very public meltdown and the erosion of his reputation did something to inoculate the circles of commercial feminism/progressive writing against the worst excesses of the Sad Boner Confessional.

That was probably naive of me.

Now, the thing about Medium is that it’s primarily a social media site that depends on other social media sites for circulation, which makes it easier for things to go viral within select narrow circles on it, and so first version of the @ianmack essay managed to attract a lot of positive attention for how “powerful” and “honest” it is.

I’m not sure I’d call it honest. One tick that he has is using the verb “craft” to describe the act of creating a message: he crafts a love letter, he crafts a confession, he crafts a poem. I think this is a winking admission that, as a self-identified storyteller, he is putting a lot of thought into how the messages he sends come off. Perhaps he feels—as many do—that acknowledging the artifice behind his sentiment makes it a cool creative choice on a level that makes it genuine rather than artificial.

But knowing the artifice is there just makes it more glaring why he goes so far to explain his first kiss with his future wife as something that just happened; it primes the reader to accept that in his life, a kiss is a a thing that just happens. That’s part of the frame for the narrative of everything that happens afterwards, including kisses with other women.

He also talks about his repeated infidelity and their inability to have children together in a way that weaves them together not causally (because if he were to say “Of course I strayed, my wife is barren,” he’d be an out-and-out villain) but rather in a way that encourages the reader to subconsciously conflate the two issues, so that we forget that the real issue endangering the future of their relationship is his unfaithfulness and so that we accept that his push to open the marriage up to polyamory is somehow a solution to the childlessness.

(If you haven’t read the piece, you might be thinking, well, polyamory could be part of a solution to infertility, but the conclusion of the story makes it clear that the idea they might have children together with other people was never on his radar.)

Anyway, it’s a horrible tale, horribly told, but because it initially circulated in protected waters it achieved some acclaim and some notice, enough for HuffPo to bestow upon it the highest honor it can offer (i.e., exposure). Being published in the internet’s content aggregator of record does not appear to have worked out well for Mr. @ianmack, though. While his piece is being circulated widely, it’s not exactly attracting positive notice. The comments on the HuffPo posting are pretty uniformly negative. The needle on his patreon (which is promoted at the end of the piece) has not moved at all since I first read it yesterday.

As soon as I read the piece, I knew I couldn’t leave it alone. At first I was just tweeting observations on it, likening it to (infamously bad fanfic) My Immortal and commenting on the more pretentious touches. Before long, I “somehow found myself” on Medium, “crafting” a full-length parody that highlights the more problematic, disturbing, or hilariously bad parts of the original. Family plans took me AFK for most of the day, so I didn’t publish the article—entitled Infidelity Will Be The Death Of My Marriage: The Unbelievably Brave Story Of One Incredibly Sensitive Man’s Intensely Personal Journey Towards Divorce until yesterday evening.

I had some misgivings about actually posting it. The number one question in my mind was: is this actually necessary? I mean, there are a lot of people writing self-important blather on the internet. They don’t all need this level of reply.

What made up my mind were the facts that HuffPo had picked him up, and that he’s apparently using this piece to try to launch a whole career of what he calls “new paradigm storytelling”, and it’s like, did we not learn anything from Hugo Schwyzer?

The responses I’ve received even in just the first 12 hours have convinced me I made the right call. People who were creeped out and unsettled by the original have thanked me for validating what they were feeling. People who could not make it through the original without ragequitting have thanked me for giving them something to laugh about in the whole mess. People who have friends and family who thought the original piece was “powerful and honest” have thanked me for helping them find ways to explain their problems with it.

Just overnight, the piece has already become my second-most-read thing on Medium, and probably my most widely shared thing there. I hope it keeps circulating. I hope it reaches more people. I hope it dogs the footsteps of the original until no one ever shares the saddest of the Sad Boner Confessionals without someone else seeing it and posting a link. The satirist’s curse is that the notoriety of our work will almost always be a fraction of that of what inspires us.

But if I can help turn this insipid trend in creative nonfiction writing into the laughingstock it deserves to be? Dang the torpedoes and full speed ahead.