Last Wednesday, the Globe and Mail published a column by Russell Smith in which he offered his unique and slightly controversial take on what the paper calls “Penguin Canada’s sex scandal.” I say “slightly” because the reactions I witnessed were divided into enthusiastic nodding, Hey, that’s not the whole story…, and sarcastic remarks about the columnist congratulating himself for not being a creepy douchebag. Smith gave a synopsis of the industry those of us inside already know well — young, nubile ladyfolk get hit on by older, entitled, lecherous dudes, blah blah blah, mostly because we all drink a lot, go to bed real late, and write about sexy things. Oh, and we’re hot. Smith explains that yes, he’s oft been tempted by “shockingly beautiful” girl-flesh, but he abstains because he’s smarter than everyone else. His conclusion can be summarized as “Canadian publishing is full of hotties, but be like me and keep it in your pants!”
Someone more rational than I (and incidentally a fan of Smith’s writing) pointed out that my cynical reaction to the piece probably stemmed from the fact that I had lived the very things it describes. While Smith’s argument is a simplistic overview of a complex and dangerously flawed industry, a band-aid proposal that doesn’t examine the expectation that women are required to be up-for-anything, flirtatious bombshells with graduate degrees (uglies need not apply), I actually appreciate his sentiment. This idea that we can actually try not to be jerks. And it’s inspired me to write my own personal overview of Men Who Are Not Russell Smith.
I don’t consider myself a “total unbelievable hottie” by his description, but after a decade in an industry where I’ve played the roles of novelist, publicist, editor, and marketer, I feel like I’ve been trained to successfully navigate and tolerate the tricky drunken terrain of strategic innuendo and ass grabbage. Admittedly, I am also a relentless flirt. I’m not sure if I was like that to begin with or if publishing has made me that way — I’m guessing the latter. (A therapist once asked me, with genuine concern, why I was “out until four a.m. with strange men,” and the only response I had to offer was, “’Cause that’s my job.”) Sadly, the late-night cocktail of flirtation and suggestion seems to be the lubricant that gets book deals done.
My initiation into publishing’s “wear something low-cut, soak liberally with booze” world came when I was only seventeen. A very famous male author who I idolized (in that way only teenage girls can) made a rare appearance in Toronto for an intimate, swanky book signing at a bar. Over the age of seventy and recovering from a recent stroke, the author was generally considered to be reclusive, and I knew this was once-in-a-lifetime chance for hero worship. I used my summer camp–counsellor earnings to buy a black dress at Le Chateau, lied to my parents, and drove downtown in their car with a fake ID and the boy I would later lose my virginity to. My only literary experience to date was writing bad poetry in a Scarborough Coffee Time, so everyone in that bar seemed remarkably sophisticated, with their expensive cocktails, tailored suits, and grown-up drunkenness. In retrospect, as a seventeen-year-old innocent, I was a trusting hen in their fox house.
The (ahem, married) author, in a rumpled beige suit with a red carnation pinned to the lapel, was absorbed in conversations with people far more qualified to talk to him than me, but the boyfriend pushed me to sit in an empty seat at his table and wait my turn — which came in the form of the author putting his palm on the inside of my thigh before I even introduced myself. More than half a century older than me, he turned, fingers creeping under the hem of my dress, and mumbled with a voice marred by his stroke, “You’re the devil. You could make me do very bad things.”
Imagine a teenage girl in a little black dress discovering that a previously inaccessible writer who had moved her with his words, who was world-renowned and had appeared on multiple best-of lists, was powerless to her inner thigh. That in a world where girls were practically invisible, literary influence could exist under the hem of a little black dress. Dangerous knowledge indeed. Eventually, after talking to me about becoming a writer and lamenting the fact that he couldn’t sleep with me (because that would be, you know, “wrong”), the author signed my rumpled paperback edition of a novel he wrote almost twenty years before I was born and sent me on my way.
Thus commenced my education in the world of publishing: not only could you meet your idols, your literary crushes, but they might actually want to touch your girl parts while talking to you about your writing.
In Smith’s discussion of this reality, he argues that avoiding lechery is “not so difficult as to make it impossible, though. If you’re smart, you keep a close eye on it. And a lid.” Ten years in magazine and book publishing and I’ve met many men who, unlike Smith, did not keep an eye or a lid on “it.” Early in my career I worked for a publisher who encouraged me to have a threesome with him and his wife. At the time I thought they were cool and “progressive,” but was thankfully too green to accept the invite. Later on I worked for someone who thought it was acceptable to bring up my cervix in an office environment (a positively Smith-ian colleague and writer came to my defense by asking, “Did you really just say that in front of seven witnesses?”). A prominent literary academic once touched my breast in front of his very angry wife at a work-related fundraiser. Another time, while I was on the clock at a book festival, I had my ass discreetly grabbed by four separate male writers in one evening, concluding with a very drunk writer inviting me to run away with him the following morning. And when a writer I had worshipped shamelessly for ten years kissed me in an elevator after his reading that I’d staffed, I felt the simultaneous elation and shame of enjoying it.
And here’s the rub; when you’re young and marginally published, when you’re proving yourself to an industry that deems you expendable and dime a dozen, you don a (low-cut) black dress and yearn to feel special and accepted. You are constantly told you are lucky to be a part of this party you’ve somehow snuck into. No one is listening to you but they are looking, and it’s difficult not to appreciate the crumbs you’re being thrown. You spend your youth highlighting passages in paperbacks, and then all of a sudden you’re surrounded by the same celebrated men who crafted your teenage daydreams, the men who penned the books that you read and reread, and you are tasked with making sure they have a drink in hand and are enjoying themselves. They want something from you and you have their attention.
What Smith missed in his column is that for some of those publishing “hotties,” sexuality is a tool used in pursuit of respect — and there is a deep sadness that sets in with the realization that so few really care about your manuscript or your theories or what you studied at university, but instead are deeply interested in how well you “entertain.”
There is also the subsequent shame that you participated at all. That you fell for and dressed up for the momentary pleasure that attention brings. Kissing your idols in elevators makes for a great martini-induced anecdote, but it also brings on a realization that this publishing culture, despite the fact that it is overwhelmingly populated by women, is still defined and governed by men. This is the lie of the patriarchy — that even though our workplaces are staffed by women, our books authored by women, our bylines, titles, and accolades given to women, we still function under old rule.
You may ask why not just slap the ass-grabbing offender in the face at the party populated by everyone you work with or for? I think that question is asked and answered. Publishing is world of relationships, of bridges built and never deliberately burned. Because it’s unclear “who works for who,” if an author gets a little filthy during cocktail hour, he tends to fall more in the category of pervert than abuser of power. God forbid someone accuses you, the receiver of unwanted advances, of being difficult to work with. Under the threat of “you’ll never work in this town again,” we learn to live with it, become amused by it, enjoy it as cliché and archetypal. We even get a little elitist thrill that we are more enlightened than most because we think we understand it.
But as I grow older and perhaps more jaded the lie wears thin. I have long-since learned the eye-rolling, strategic avoiding, and placating that gets you through the shift. What else is the solution when the only coping mechanisms seem to be laugh off the lechery or to leave the industry for good (like one anonymous blogger did)? Or, in Russell Smith’s exceptional case, to write a Globe and Mail column about refusing to participate, however impossible it may seem. Because I have more perspective now, I wonder if I am not complicit because I write fervently about sex and sexuality, because I speak the language of innuendo, because I roll eyes and fail to slap faces. Am I not still nurturing an environment that is difficult for women ten years my junior who are just starting out?
We gossip about the publicist who slept with a writer, we make mock-shocked expressions about the author whose reputation for conquest is legendary, and then we laugh and pour another drink. Damned if you don’t, damned if you do; the publishing “hotties” get heard and ahead, but they also get slut-shamed by their peers. We take this hyper-sexual culture, both consensual and not, all too lightly, and we fail to think or talk about what it actually means. And we do absolutely nothing to change it.
Over a recent (pre-Davidar case) pint with an extremely virile writer friend, we discussed this very quandary. That we forgive the culture, the errant behaviour of writers, the highly inappropriate workplace, the playtime discussions, because we’re programmed from a young age to believe “that’s just the way writers are.” That the artistic temperament is a free pass to live outside the boundaries of self-control, and that it’s the price we pay for loving this culture we call “books.” In a rather inspiring, emphatic, drunken moment, he slammed his empty glass on the bar and rightly exclaimed that a writer had no authority to use clichés as an excuse for a rabid, insatiable appetite for debauchery, that such excuses for a lack of restraint were “bullshit.”
A pint later, he told me I had great tits.
But, hey, good on him for trying. Russell Smith would be pleased.
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