> 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).
Yeah, it's not like he spends 10 or more subtle paragraphs explaining both why he feels the phrase was important (despite needing editing for other reasons) and why he felt the shame (despite knowing he had not done anything shameful, except under a puritan gaze: he felt the shame because he was forced to view his prose under a different culture's understanding of sex).
It was bad writing and the editor removed it. The fact that he felt shame doesn't make his assumptions any more valid.
That's because the editors they worked with, and others he discussed such things, had a pattern to cross off specific things (regardless of whether both author and editor agreed they were bad), and those "crossing offs" revealed not just an editorial hand, but also an underlying ethics/ideology behind what they chose to focus on...
>It was bad writing and the editor removed it. The fact that he felt shame doesn't make his assumptions any more valid.
Way to miss the whole argument. It's not even like he didn't spell it out...
That's obviously not exclusively true. Otherwise the sole purpose of the editor would be pure ideological shifts. That would be dumb. Ergo I conclude most of the edits are just competent editor edits.
> Way to miss the whole argument.
And I'm saying the author seems like a sensitive soul that has jumped the gun far too quickly. His argument is incorrect.
That wasn't the argument I've made. I didn't say every edit suggestion was based on ideological shifts. I said that (actually, merely summed up the author's experience) they discovered a tendency for editors to also (keyword: also) make suggestions that not only result in ideological shifts, but have an ideology/ethics and not "how best to serve the text" or aesthetics as the underlying drive.
And some those corrections can even coincide with a "better expression" edit.
To make the claim perfectly clear:
(1) editors make mainly "better expression" edits
(2) they also make a certain class of ideology/ethics edits. Some of them they make them explicitly with ideology in mind (e.g. they find situation X, that is acceptable to a French sensibility as yucky because of their culture), and other times unconsciously as mere not understanding the point of the text (but again, not because it doesn't have one, but because of conceptions rooted in their culture about what is included, not some "universal" needs of the text).
(3) they make enough of the latter that the writer can see a pattern - also shared/expressed by other writers of the same culture as him (different to the editor's culture)
(4) many people reading about those, can't even understand that the latter kind of edits are of that kind, not only because the change might be suble subtle and they can't understand what's at stake, but also because they share the same ethics/ideology (in short: culture) with the editor.
It's not a convincing piece of evidence to point out that an editor removed a nonsense statement as evidence that the editor has ideological motivations. It's not proof that they don't have ideological motivations. It's just an irrelevant edit of a bad phrase.
This feels like the classic Community scene in which Chang is trying to pitch "Bear Down for Midterms" as the school's slogan, and everyone says "What does that mean?" to which he tries to defend by asking if their issues with it are a race thing.
The author's thesis can be correct even if his evidence and persuasive reasoning are bad.
Yeah, that's how editing works. Both I and the author know this.
On top of that, however, an editor can have other causes in mind for flagging a sentence (either explicit or unconscious motivation), besides it "being crap". And if they do this frequently enough, one can discern a pattern.
To put it another way, a cigar is something people smoke. But sometimes (to reverse the know quote) a cigar is not just a cigar.
Similarly, an edit it's not always an edit - sometimes it's imposing an ideology behind the editing.
>It's not a convincing piece of evidence
Part of the essay is about how for some of those cases there's no evidence, but you can see it if you come from the right (constrasting to the editor) background. And where it's more obvious, there's still "plausible deniability". It's about about the emerging pattern of editing decisions.
And like many things in life, you either see it or not. It's not a court case, or a math proof, it's more like a joke. You can't prove it is funny to someone, you can just find it funny or not.
The author explains the term and agrees it needs editing.
> "the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement
It makes the author's comment about his wife sexual. The author is suddenly fully clothed and mocking his naked wife, instead of sharing in their shared hungover, underdressed state.
You also fail to mention the second example which is explicitly sexual. It seems as though you didn't read it all.
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.
>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.
Reviewer: This block of code is a bit confusing. Could you replace with a simpler and shorter version like this? (Suggest edit)
Reveiewee: I agree with you. But nah I will keep it. Oops shipped!
Reviewer: I don't like this code - so we don't need it. Take it out.
Reveiewee: Umm what? I can clean it up, but it's kind of essential
The section on editing is about 2/3 of the way through, although the whole thing is a great read.
TLDR: writers don’t like being edited (particularly by bad writers acting as editors)
(not weird because they're guillemets, just kinda weird because they're in an English language article and being used for emphasis instead of quotations)
It means drinking inside the house into a blackout stupor (actual or not but meant for effect) during covid nights where you couldn't get outside.
>"the usual briefs and t-shirt" is not a sexual statement.
It's not to you, because of what the author already covered: you want sex to be a story, not a fact hanging in the air.
In other words, you look whether the description has an explicit a sexual purpose.
But this introduces nakedness and the human body without explicit sexual purpose. The sexuality is a background, not a plot, and the details help paint a picture, don't tell a story, and don't serve as plot devices.
That's also what the american editor couldn't understand - and for the same reasons.
>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.