If you’ve read any book review from a liberal outlet or even just paid attention to the mainstream discourse on literature today, you know that straight, white authors aren’t allowed to write about just anyone anymore. Woke pedagogues have turned the maxim “write what you know” into a mandate, insisting writers not presume to use their imaginations to create fiction outside their “lived experience.”

Ironically, we’re also told “representation matters” — and it does — but there are limits to who can represent whom. In an age of “sensitivity readers” and cancel culture, you’d think at least some of the demand for these strict new mores would be coming from readers.