All she does on her socials is bite bite bite it must get so boring for any followers who actually were interested in her
It exhausted me in the early days. I made excuses for it at first: "OK, so her communication style might not be my cup of tea, but she still says worthwhile things", "Would the bull-headedness bother me so much if she were a man?", and "She's probably so abrasive because she had to fight to get to where she is, and she's still finding her feet professionally - she'll change as her confidence grows." The idea that my discomfort was rooted in internalised misogyny was something I balked at even as I suggested it to myself - I knew perfectly well that if it were a man constantly speaking to people like this I'd think he was just an aggressive
hole, and I certainly wouldn't keep making allowances for him. The other excuses took time to shift.
The idea that she was saying anything worthwhile began to disintegrate when I read
Why Women Are Blamed for Everything and realised I was holding a poorly edited copy of her PhD thesis, most of which I'd already read online, with blog posts added. Now, when I was working on my first academic book I had two very eminent professors as mentors, whose distinction in their field was matched by how incredibly kind and supportive they were to early career researchers like me. They told me not to worry about getting it perfect, that no one's first book should be their best book, it's a launchpad for a research career rather than the final destination, etc. I remembered their words and asked myself if I was being unfair to Jessica. I reminded myself that she was the ECR now while I was a more established researcher, and perhaps I'd lost sight of what a daunting project a first book is. But my brain would not buy its own excuses this time, firstly because she'd been talking about this book as if it were the most revolutionary thing ever and suggesting it contained a decade's worth of material from her "practice", which meant I was hardly unreasonable for expecting something special (or at least something better than what turned up); and secondly because there is a significant difference between "not your best work" and work that's just...mediocre. I really wanted to believe the best of her because of my own politics - victim-blaming is the scourge of the criminal justice system, and I'd support anyone trying to bring about meaningful change - but I basically read books for a living and I just couldn't kid myself that this was a good one.
Even when I gave up trying to excuse the poor quality, but I still didn't lose my sympathy for her, not at first. I thought she might be a little embarrassed by the book's standard later in life, and I felt bad for her that she hadn't had the benefit of a skilled editor and thoughtful peer reviewers to give her a more solid start. Then it all came tumbling down. She was acting as if she had nothing left to learn now, as if receiving her PhD and self-publishing her manuscript had been a moment of anointing: all hail Jessica Taylor, the Greatest Psychology Expert of Them All! Any critique (a staple of academic life) was met with yet more hostility and aggression. I ended up muting her for a while because I couldn't cope with the relentless onslaught of angsty tweets that were clogging up my entire timeline. Then two women stepped forward to say their painful trauma stories had been quoted in her books without full informed consent, and that fact and how Jessica handled it was the point of no return for me. My undergraduate students would have known better. They'd face disciplinary proceedings for doing far less than she did. There was no way to explain it, no way to excuse it.
Ultimately I think it's the lack of originality that will be her undoing. You're right, it's just boring now - the same thing like a broken record on repeat. She will get aggressive online to try and stir up some clicks and controversy whenever she senses the attention waning, but at this point it's like a tadpole thrashing about in the hope of launching a wave. She's burnt her bridges with the academic psychology world. Large swathes of the feminist community are wary of her. All she has is social media, and her engagement there has dwindled.