editorial sexism

[realthog]

Among many great ones, there are some abominably stupid editors out there (I just hope too many people don’t too often regard me as one of the latter), but the experience related here by writer Bev Vincent must surely take the biscuit. It seems the editor concerned has a peculiarly ignorant, myopic and dimwittedly simplistic take on the range of human behaviour and is busily stamping it -- or attempting to stamp it -- on the rest of the world.

All power to Bev Vincent's elbow for refusing to allow such crap.

[[48-page thoggish rant omitted]]

Thanks to cussedness for posting the link I followed.

Comments

[thisplacehere.livejournal.com]

That is one of the most stupidly myopic and presumptious things I've read in quite some time.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Frightening that the editor concerned apparently has prestige and clout, isn't it?

[thisplacehere.livejournal.com]

Speaking of clout... Further to your exchange with Fledgist down the page, I wonder what this editor would have made of Shirley Crabtree..?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

And it's nervous-breakdown time if the author's name is Terry . . .

[realthog.livejournal.com]

I am, incidentally, reading a book by a female Fred at the moment -- Fred Vargas, whose 'tec The Chalk Circle Man has just won the International Dagger. She's by day a French archaeologist whose full forename is Frederique.

(It's a true fab book, by the way. You'd love it.)

[thisplacehere.livejournal.com]

Someone at the Guardian agrees with you about Fred Vargas. I think I'll definitely be investigating (maybe not just yet, though; I've acquired more than enough new books lately...).

[realthog.livejournal.com]

That's got to be one of the most inaccurate Grauniad pieces of all time. The journalist gets the names of both central characters wrong (Adamsburg/Adamsberg, Dangland/Danglard) and also which boom introduces the Adamsberg: it's The Chalk Circle Man, even though this is the most recent to be translated, not the later novel Wash This Blood Clean From My Hands.

And this is just from a quick read of the article . . .

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Okay, I walked into that: for "boom" read "book". But I'm not getting paid Grauniad rates . . .

[thisplacehere.livejournal.com]

Oh dear, perhaps I shouldn't have linked to it...

[al-zorra.livejournal.com]

“Most men don’t think deeply about the dewy greenness of nature.”

Let's not speak of Walt Whitman or Thoreau in the U.S. for instance, or in the UK, oh, say, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Scott, D.H. Lawrence, the P.D. James character, Inspector and poet, Adam Dalgliesh -- ooops, he's created by a girl author.

How is such an idiot an editor?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"How is such an idiot an editor?"

One for whom the adjective "blithering" would seem to have been invented, I agree.

But what's perhaps as bad, on later reflection, is the behaviour of the editor who originally solicited and accepted the story -- just turning round and bending over, and apparently insisting her/his authors do likewise. In my day (insert phthisic wheeze here) one of the duties of editors was to stand up for their authors.

I kinda wish Vincent would name names, so we'd all know who to avoid . . .

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Let's not speak of Walt Whitman or . . . Adam Dalgliesh"

Or, for that matter, me. Come to think of it, I know men in the fricking Armed Forces of two different countries who are sensitive to nature like this. The editor really must be living on a different planet.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Any man who has spent a reasonable amount of time working in the countryside has a reasonable sensitivity to nature and appreciation of dewy greenness.

Bloody hell, Shakespeare wrote believable women, and, for that matter, I have no trouble with, say, Ursula Le Guin's men.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Bloody hell, Shakespeare wrote believable women, and, for that matter, I have no trouble with, say, Ursula Le Guin's men."

To be fair, I don't think the editor's saying people can't write their opposite gender. Rather, the editor's crime is (a) having an incredibly simplistic, halfwitted view of gender differences and (b) attempting aggressively to impose that view on others.

The fact that Bev Vincent is in fact male merely serves to spotlight the editor's folly; but the folly itself is the editor's assumption that all males are jockrot-scratching insensitive dumbbells-on-legs ("walking dildoes", in Valerie Solanas's immortal phrase), and the insistence that others accept this illusion.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

One wonders how the editor manages to put one foot after the other.

[pds-lit.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, an editor from planet Stupid. My guess is under 30, arrogant and doesn't know it head from from the end of where its brains are.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

That would be my guess too.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

“And I can’t think of many guys from [setting] who call home every Sunday afternoon to talk to their family”

As a divorced father who does just that (and still do even though my sons are in their twenties), I'm gobsmacked.

I wonder what the editor in question would have made of Evelyn Waugh, or of my teacher Tracy Strong?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"I wonder what the editor in question would have made of Evelyn Waugh, or of my teacher Tracy Strong?"

Or of the great UK literary agent Hilary Rubinstein, or of anyone in the UK called Robin, or . . .?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

...Laurie Lee?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Or for that matter Marion Morrison.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Who, for some reason, is always the American right-winger's standard of manliness.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

"Who, for some reason, is always the American right-winger's standard of manliness."

Despite being quite obviously a girl.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

What does one say about Greer Garson?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

How can I possibly answer that question when my wife might read this page?

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Are you insinuating that Pam, who calls you her Dearest, might heat up to, oh, two or three million Scoville units, if you were to admit to a vicarious affection for a movie star who's been dead for thirteen years?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Ssssh!

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, good grief.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Nothing good about it . . .