9 ms·

How Americans edit sex out of my writing

• JaceLightning 4y ago
  "How Americans edit my writing"
• jandrese 4y ago
  The missing piece of this article is where his writing was going to end up. Was he writing for Readers Digest? The New Yorker? A trade paperback? I feel like the editorial process would be considerably different based on the who is publishing the work and the intended audience.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • bla3 4y ago
    "In 2020 I was asked by my friends at the magazine n+1 to participate in an homage to their office in Brooklyn"
  • ghufran_syed 4y ago
    The first example is the following magazine: https://www.nplusonemag.com/ https://www.nplusonemag.com/ “n+1 is a print and digital magazine of literature, culture, and politics published three times yearly The second example is the english translation of his novel: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374720889/thewomenilove https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374720889/thewomenilove
  • f1shy 4y ago
    I must agree. The most important thing for a writer would be the audience: "For whom am I writing" It may be very well the case, what he was writing was not correct for the audience targeted by the editorial. The generalisation "americans" is twofold wrong: first, I do not think that the whole US editorial market is exactly the same. Pretty sure there is place for pornographic writing. But second, especially coming from a writer, he should say "northamerican". May sound pedantic, but we are talking about people influential in cultural scene.
    • manuel_w 4y ago
      > I must agree. The most important thing for a writer would be the audience: "For whom am I writing" It may be very well the case, what he was writing was not correct for the audience targeted by the editorial. Yeah but why is it "not correct" for the targeted audience? According to the author, prudishness.
• isodev 4y ago
  I’m always flabbergasted by the things US movies and TV shows choose to beep/cut. It feels like many “normal life” topics have been transformed into a taboo, even the very mention in public would be subject to stigma.
  • H8crilA 4y ago
    Never watch "Eyes Wide Shut" in the American cut! Also, never watch it on a plane. Otherwise it's a great movie :)
• gbasp 4y ago
  Tangentially related to the topic but I find American cultural attitudes towards sex very bizarre from the outside looking in. The view America projects of itself to the world through media is that it's the land of "Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll" and Americans love having fun, but internally America feels culturally like a deeply prudish country, much more than in Europe and Asia.
  • np- 4y ago
    Prudishness and Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll are just two sides of the same coin. They both need the other side to exist to stay relevant.
  • lasfter 4y ago
    It's because American media exports are mostly produced by a small group of people in California, one of the more socially progressive parts of the country. A significant portion of the country's 330 million people are indeed prudes.
    • acdha 4y ago
      There’s more nuance to it than that, however: consider how the standards of film ratings diverge from the people making films. “This film is not rated” dug into that at some length, and I think it’s worth considering how much that has skewed the entire public discourse. We’re missing out on a lot of great movies because everyone knows that you can get approval for violence much easier than a healthy relationship. I’d also note the difference between the public moral image projected and what they practice in private. We have far more hypocrites than prudes.
  • ff317 4y ago
    It's the underlying prudishness at various layers (some of it is only historical, some of it lives in the present to varying degrees in various sub-populations) which makes the rebellious "Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll" thing a thing at all. If there was no prudishness in the first place, there would be no space for it to be popular to revolt against it.
  • 4y ago
• a2tech 4y ago
  The editors are not being puritanical. They're trying to illustrate to him that his writing (when read by an American) is adding context that he may not be trying to add. For example, the bad parenting example at the bottom. He clearly illustrates that the author is simply capturing a scene as he imagines it, but the modern interpretation of an adult smoking and drinking in front of their child in the middle of the day is going to be interpreted as them being bad parents. If thats what he means to express, no one is going to complain about the inclusion of those details. If he doesn't WANT them to be cast as bad parents, don't include those details because they're not helping with the scene.
  • A4ET8a8uTh0 4y ago
    Hard disagree. One of my earliest memories is my parents having breakfast that consisted of coffee and a cloud of smoke. If by puritanical we understand the mores inherited by Americans from Puritans then this absolutely qualifies. Unless the goal is to make the sentence palatable to Americans only, it could be understood as editing to make sure the author's point is preserved, but otherwise it is merely hiding what some believe life "should" look like.
    • rrwo 4y ago
      Yes. And even if it's "bad parenting" why can't someone write a scene where this casual bad behaviour happens in the background, without having to explicitly point it out as bad?
  • moron4hire 4y ago
    With what we've known about 2nd hand smoke for decades now, I think we can universally say smoking in front of your kids is bad parenting. So it's a really interesting example, what it says about the author that they don't think they are portraying bad parenting. And is it just an American thing? I haven't noticed that English, Irish, or Scottish people smoke all that much. But visiting Germany and seeing the blase attitude towards public smoking was definitely a culture shock.
    • 4y ago
• treis 4y ago
  This is kind of a weird article. There were two cuts: >There were mornings following marriage blackout nights Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means. The second cut was taking "the usual briefs and t-shirt" out of this sentence: >The other day I was sitting on my bed, the usual briefs and t-shirt, camera on the lines of my face and the new grey of my beard, when my wife came in the room as she was taking off the t-shirt she’d slept in "the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement. From what I can tell they've taken edits meant to improve the flow of the paragraph and, for reasons I can't see, taken them as editing sex out.
  • manuel_w 4y ago
    > Maybe it's just me but I don't understand what this sentence means. I've never heard of a "marriage blackout night" and can't parse what it means. The author explains a few lines after: > In my version, that writer is also in his underwear, and the reader is informed that the couple is having some sad, drunken nights (« marriage blackout nights » doesn’t sound right and would have needed editing anyway, but bear with me). These are two expressions of, well, vulnerability.
    • treis 4y ago
      Ah okay. IMHO the editors suggestion is way better. It's more impactful and to the point instead of diverging for a sentence about sad drunken nights: >We used to do it without video, but last March we started feeling the need to be visible to one another. The need to be seen and acknowledged by people you respect. >We used to do it without video, but last March we started feeling the need to be visible to one another. There were mornings following marriage blackout nights where you only wanted to be seen and acknowledged by people you respect.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
    Agree, the writing seems off as an American, and it seems there are some comma splices. A good editor will tighten up the writing.
• 3pt14159 4y ago
  I'm trying to read through this piece but its difficult because I don't really buy the underlying premise that this is indicative of North American editors generally and even specifically I find it hard to imagine that it is this extraneous at all as often to comment about. I tend to believe writers and their point of view on the editing process. I've been published in a small number of publications and I know the process. My biggest gripe is the cultural norm of not being able to pick or have veto power over the title, not editors that are completely inflexible and stacked with their own moral code which crushes over the prose. At the end of the day this seems like there was no meeting of the minds between the editor and writer before they started working together, but I do not believe it is at all this prevalent anyway. Yes, I'm a Christian too, like the derided editor, but I know the difference between literature and trashy erotica. While I appreciate the former and avoid the latter, I would never brow beat a writer as an editor over the choice of having parents smoke cigarettes in front of their kids and I simply wouldn't take up the task of editing work that was outside my moral boundaries. I like fiction that rings true. Reality includes all sorts of bad parenting. There is a type of writing that is in vogue lately where preconceived biases get validated through a juicy narrative that is obviously unjust and thereby justifying the reader's pre-held notions. I hate it. It's my one concern with the Substack / filter bubble way of doing things. A thousand avid fans can prop up work that is mostly meritless and divisive. Or they can prop up valuable work that the public generally ignores. If only it didn't cut both ways.
• codazoda 4y ago
  I feel like this was just a misunderstanding about the words that were removed instead of re-written. I thought “marriage blackout nights” was some cultural thing. Turns out the author was talking about the trend of a married couple who often got blackout drunk. But, I completely missed that meaning on my first read.
  • mywittyname 4y ago
    Agreed. My takeaway of the first passage was quite different than what the author had indented to express. The editor wasn't censoring the author, she was making cultural translations. The author's obsession with the balcony passage is hilarious, and it gives me a good insight into his general attitude. It's as though he feels that his prowess is being questioned and that he needs to be defensive and attack an entire culture. I mean, in response to a minor edit, he literally called up a "friend" out of the blue to ask her details about sex they had a decade back. That's Grade A insecurity. It's likely this insecurity is seeped thoughout his writing. And his editor is doing her best to legitimately improve his story telling.
• jansan 4y ago
  It is always fascinating to me how different sex in literature, cinema, etc. is treated in the USA compared to Europe. My favorite example is the movie "The Fabulous Destiny of Amélie Poulain" (which btw is awesome). It has an "FSK 6" rating in Germany, which means it is free to watch for children six years or older. In the US it is R rated, which means children unter 17 have to be accompanied by an adult to watch the movie. The reason for the R rating is that one of the characters, Nino, is working in a sex shop, and in one scene Amelie enters the shop and you can see Nino applying price stickers on adult toys, which in the US seems to be dangerous to the soul of teenagers, while Europeans would not even think about this for a moment.
  • H8crilA 4y ago
    I remember she was getting banged in one scene, which the narrator commented something like "sex - Amelia tried it, meh". Maybe the scene was cut entirely.
    • jansan 4y ago
      Duh, you are correct, there was a sex scene. Maybe the most harmless sex scene ever created in cinema history, but there was one and I forgot about it.
      • asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
        Wasn't there another scene where the proprietor of the coffee shop had an orgasm and was screaming? And also some sex talk I remember. R might have been too much but I don't think pg13 would be unreasonable.
        • jansan 4y ago
          Yes, also nipples.
      • muwtyhg 4y ago
        Wasn't there a montage of orgasms as well?
• scandox 4y ago
  For me the most important point in this is nothing to do with sex. It's the fact that a generation of readers and editors are coming up who find the description of moral weakness without a counterbalancing punishment or redemption problematic - to borrow a term.
  • pvillano 4y ago
    That kind of editing implies the audience is incapable of their own judgement, which is a little insulting. Then again, supposedly some people idolize the Joker, Walter White, Don Draper etc.
• xen2xen1 4y ago
  He lost me at the "it made me feel bad" part. Is that your only concern.
• nonrandomstring 4y ago
  A long, sometimes tedious, but subtle and interesting piece on the relationship between the real world, of messy, complex adult humans, and the plastic world we try to construct as we wish it to be. In this case it's a novel writer and a prudish editor. I can relate to this when editors tone down my attacks on unethical tech companies who might be advertisers - generally though I get a free hand because most editors seem sympathetic to the same concerns. But it could equally be a magazine Photoshopping a model's blemishes, or a company PR department putting a gloss on research work. Anyone who has worked where an intermediary interprets ones work to an audience has experienced this doctoring at some point. The role of the sanitiser, filter, censor and arbiter of taste is ever present. We seem to live in age of form over substance, appearance above reality, and wishing into existence a world that won't offend imaginary others.
• kodah 4y ago
  > Yet when the editor showed me their notes, I felt bad, I felt I was wrong. I felt that mentioning my briefs was wrong. It was as if I were being called out for a misdemeanor. The editing was so subtle and penetrating, it sent me on a tailspin. How can I explain? In my version, I was in my underpants, and that specific shame was inherent to the portrayal. That shame was existential yet not political. Putting my underwear on the page was a way to show vulnerability, but without making it too clear a predicament, a way of adding the warmth, the sleaze, the camaraderie, the confusion. In their edit, though, it became something altogether different: my making ironic fun of my naked wife was now unfair—even unjust—as it was now coming from a presumably fully-clad person. And without the hint of our drunken blackouts, we now had no shared sadness and exhaustion, and also no affection and complicity. This paragraph really hits home for me with respect to what people refer to as a "chilling effect" on expression post 2015. This American editor almost feels like a metaphor. When juxtaposed with our values, it's clear how things got this way. Social media lets us casually evoke, and even moralize, these judgements. When cast en masse with hash tags, threads, and replies it looks like a very unsafe world for us to be ourselves. Suddenly, things look less free than they used to be. A man must be poking idle, unpleasant fun at his barely dressed wife. A parent must be bad if there's beer or cigarettes observed, but not when hidden - that's a different kind of ill, right? All these little cliches add up to a larger story, and that's what I'm reading. Our tendency for clear villains and heroes leaks into everything we do - even to how we shape our literature.
• bloak 4y ago
  Surely "my wife came" is the bit they should have cut! More seriously, and boringly: I would have corrected "my wife came in the room" into "my wife came into the room". The former sounds like bad English to me.
• zwieback 4y ago
  Maybe he's right about his editors being a bit controlling but he also sounds like a douche.
  • skrbjc 4y ago
    He is a writer :D
• coldtea 4y ago
  >It was easy to edit that orgasm out. The passage sounds better without the uselessly controversial bit, so the reader can concentrate on the experience the two characters are having. In fact, the opoosite was gained: the american editor forced it to be a story without the fun - two, if not sinners, then desperate people, slamming their bodies onto one another. For all we know, they get nothing out of this. With the orgasm detail in, it becomes fun sex - and dirty. Same way adulteresses had to be punished for it in Noir films, or they wouldn't pass the censorship.
• asdfasgasdgasdg 4y ago
  To me it's interesting that the Americans did not in fact edit sex out of any of the writings. In the case of the wife in the bed, it seems like the American editor was trying to punch it up and bring into focus what they believed was more salient. Mistakenly maybe, but no sex was edited out. In the case of the balcony scene, it's hard to guess what the editor was trying to accomplish. Maybe enhance the realism? It's a well known fact that most women do not orgasm via penetrative sex alone. But this is rarely shown in media, written or otherwise. I don't really see the need for the edit, or how the edit is characteristically American, because unrealistic depictions of female orgasm are by far the norm in American media. But perhaps the editor is trying to improve the situation? Maybe the author means the Americans are making their writing less sex-y?
  • fsckboy 4y ago
    I'm guessing the pot smoking got edited out? But the clunker of a line is the bit about "both of us mysteriously unaffected by vertigo". Unless it was prior established that there should be vertigo, and vertigo is a useful metaphor for illustrating other elements of the overall story/something about the protagonist, that line contributes nothing and doesn't belong, especially followed by orgasm: an orgasm which included no vertigo? In tight writing, very phrase and clause of every sentence should serve a purpose toward the overall story, and hopefully frequently more than one.
• pwinnski 4y ago
  Oh look, a writer disagrees with their translator/editor. As writers nearly-universally do.