Best-selling YA author, John Green, caused some commotion this week when he responded to accusations that his novels have some pedophilia intent– that the material is written for and aimed at young girls in an attempt to lure them to him. Quite a heavy accusation to make, not to mention hurtful and wildly damaging.
The anonymous online poster that caused this particular stir stated that The Fault In Our Stars author is a “creep who panders to teenage girls so that he can amass some weird cult-like following… It’s always girls who feel misunderstood, you know, and he goes out of his way to make them feel important and desirable.”
Below is the full post:
But on Thursday night, Green responded with a long Tumblr post:
Throwing that kind of accusation around is sick and libelous and most importantly damages the discourse around the actual sexual abuse of children. When you use accusations of pedophilia as a way of insulting people whose work you don’t like, you trivialize abuse.
I think at this point it’s impossible to continue to use tumblr in the way I’ve used it since 2011. My life is different (in ways that are both good and bad); this community is different (in ways that are both good and bad); the world is different (in ways that are both good and bad).
Here is the full post:
Meanwhile on Twitter, one fan expressed concern about Green using the word “retarded” in Paper Towns, the book that has recently been adapted into a film and will be released next month.
Green responded in a two-part tweet by saying:
“Yeah, I regret it. At the time, I thought an author’s responsibility was to reflect language as I found it, but now … eight years later, I don’t feel like a book about humanizing the other benefited from dehumanizing language.”
He also promised that the word would not be in the film adaption, nor would he ever use it again in another book.
Not many authors have received the kind of celebrity-status fame Green has, and we all know how much constant scrutiny and backlash being in the public eye can bring people. (Not to mention the amount of direct, hateful comments that have been made possible through social media.)
We have to respect John Green, an insanely talented and gifted writer, for taking the opportunity to handle the matter on his own and respond personally to these sort of comments, concerns and accusations.
