Times Up Publishing World

By Cindy Layton

Oh, the world of publishing.

Isn’t it so different for women than it is for men?

I’m not talking about women writers authoring under their initials to avoid being tagged a “female author.”

I’m not talking about the pay disparity or the underrepresentation of women at the top of the publishing hierarchy.

I’m talking about the incidences of sexual harassment and assault.

Case in point: Philip Roth: The Biography, by Blake Bailey, was halted from publication by W. W. Norton in April after the biographer was twice accused of rape. This week it was announced that it now has a home with Skyhorse Publishing, Harvey Weinstein be damned.

Monica Hesse of The Washington Post wrote a blistering piece titled “Philip Roth and the sympathetic biographer: This is how misogyny gets cemented in our culture.” She notes a paragraph in the book where Roth is deep into his work when his wife interrupts him, asking him to make a run to the grocery store for parmesan cheese. Hesse writes: 

There’s a fascinating discussion to be had in that anecdote…about deciding who gets to be the genius and who has to be the hausfrau. But Bailey apparently didn’t see it that way. What he apparently saw was a man under attack. 

Bailey told an interviewer with the Los Angeles Times, “Even at his worst, when [Roth] was ranting and raving at his ‘b---- of a wife,’ he was charming and funny and essentially benign…..” 

She writes this on the collaboration between Roth and Bailey: 

And so what he (Bailey) wrote was the story of a great man named Philip Roth, and a collection of women who were often either harpies or sexpots. 

This is how a misogynistic culture is conceptualized, created, cultivated and codified. It doesn’t happen because one dude does a bad thing. It happens when like-minded dudes are allowed to be one another’s gatekeepers, and the gatekeepers of broader culture, when faults are allowed to go unexamined, and so they instead spread… 

Biographers may bring their own slant to the life of the subject, but when the biographer is also accused of sexual assault, well, that gets pretty close to the definition of a world view that shapes the narrative. 

It’s possible that publishing hadn’t gained such notoriety since Junot Diaz had the victory of the Nobel Prize in Literature ripped from his outstretched hands. However, consequences have historically been the exception when it comes to authors accused of sexual harassment or abuse.  

A quick search will call up lists of controversies that cover the gamut of the industry: Fiction, Y/A, Children’s etc. across broad spectrums of circumstances: literary conferences, classrooms, online, etc. (See this article in Vox by Alexia Underwood). 

The world of publishing, it turns out, is no different than the worlds of film, journalism, business, medicine, sports, academia, the military, and any other industry.  

If there is a difference, it’s that each industry supports its own inbred structure that facilitates the abuser. In academia, the teacher grooms the student, in the military it’s the ranking officer over the recruit, in sports it’s the team “doctor” examining the teenage gymnast, in the immigration detention center it’s the gynecologist over the migrant detainee, in film making it’s the producer over the actor needing a break, in publishing it’s the agent/editor/established author with connections over the new writer looking for their query to be read.  

There isn’t a problem in the military, or the film industry, or the publishing industry.

There’s a problem in our culture. 

So, yes, publishing is different for women.

But so are all the other fields in which women work.