'I heard a horrible story about sensitivity readers, and a novel written by a middle-aged woman about middle-aged women. The women want to meet and talk about their problems with their husbands. They are going to go to a Chinese restaurant. One of them says: we probably shouldn’t go there, because of the MSG. And someone flagged that as racist — you can’t have that. So they made the writer move the scene to a coffee shop. I really don’t want to be a part of that.'
Yet:
'I had dinner about two months ago with three millennial men in their mid-thirties. One was a socialist actor, two were tech bros, who had sold their company for a fick a lot of money. All three of them said they had never read a novel. I said, I don’t know what you mean. You’re all college graduates. How is that possible? Oh, yeah, they told me, we were assigned novels. We just did our essays from articles on the internet. We have never read a novel.'
OK. Publishers are vetting novels via 'sensitivity readers' who are themselves probably as literate as the average budgerigar. (Well, you would have to be to take umbrage at a fictional situation in which middle-aged women discuss restaurant menu ingredients. Insane, even.)
But paradoxically, no one is reading books anyway.Interview published in UnHerd magazine 4 February 2023.
I was just now reading a discussion about sensitivity readers in a writers' group on Facebook. I didn't even know this was a thing until two minutes ago. How hideously depressing. I sincerely hope that this nonsense will drive more writers to indie publishing. More and more of what I read is indie rather than trad (as the lingo has it).
ReplyDeleteI’ve been dreading the return of censorship after studying the historical trends of such movements and what drives them - authoritarian governments driven by constituencies newly empowered by some contemporary social movement - in this case it is ‘social media’ which encourages wildfire-like outbreaks of half-educated but fully self-entitled mass judgments, like some senile Supreme Court committee of voluble dunces.
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