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Book reviewer quits over 'increasing sexist violence'
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/6431386/Book-reviewer-quits-over-increasing-sexist-violence.html
Comments
Has it not crossed their minds that perhaps there are women out there who enjoy writing this stuff as much as men?
Just because Natasha Cooper and Ms Mann, dont like it, doesn't mean every woman feels the same way.
Can't remember a time when I read about a woman being eaten though. Although I think she has a point if she means Val McDermid [she killed one woman - a prostitute - with a dildo that had razor inserted]
Cue every woman crossing her legs! That was when I stopped reading her books. There is a line when violence become gratituous and we start revelling in it.
Some people like it, some people don't, so you choose to either read them or not.
As for resigning over it...I'm not sure what that will accomplish.
While I agree with that Dora, I do still wonder if many women writing in the genre, do think that they need to include the gruesome to be able to compete with their successful contemporaries.
I do sympathise with the reviewer too. As a reader you choose which authors you read and you gauge the level of gore you are willing to read with the choice of authors you choose.
The reviewer doesn't have that choice in the job, so if all the writers whose books you have to review are full of the same types of stuff, then you might start to feel that way too if you don't get any variation...
Now, when I first started writing I did resort to excessive violence - but that was down to flaws in the story and trying to plaster it over with gore. The marks of a very bad writer!
**** Joseph slowly turned back to me; his eyes were narrow blue chips of ice in the half-light. He crossed the room and hit me hard across the face with the back of his hand, grunting with the effort of the strike. The smack left a painful and bruising impression on my cheek, and I blinked rapidly as tears sparkled in my eyes. There was a high-pitched ringing in my ear.
My orders were to draw no blood, he hissed, rubbing his knuckles. But I think that allows for a whole lot of hurt, dont you?
I didnt recognise the girl in the mirror. That girl was in pretty bad shape, with shiny red welts raised and oozing across her neck and chest, and purple bruises blooming on every visible inch of her pale skin. One of her eyes was swollen shut, the other blackened, and she was cradling an arm bent at an unnatural angle beneath her restraints. ****
It felt unnecessary to show a long, brutal attack scene (I can see it in my head, and 15-year-old girls don't need to see that).
I've done the gore-fest when I was in uni, but one of the most violent things I wrote then, I can't even read now. It's that gruesome, and I can see now why my tutor didn't like it.
*SA*
Yeah, that's what my most violent thing was. A very pretty girl, who's a bit promiscuous, is picked up in a bar and goes home with the man, who ties her to the bed as though they're going to have a good old session. Turns out he's a masochistic serial killer, and he spends the rest of the night torturing her to oblivion before hacking her up and dumping the pieces all over the place. Personally, the part I was most disturbed by at the time was when he chops off her hair (I've had nightmares about that sort of thing, like that girl who was on holiday, and a couple of lads climbed in her balcony while she was drunk asleep and chopped half of her hair off. *shudder*), but now it's all of the other stuff. It was like "Saw", just graphic ultra-violence. The writing was okay, just the plot was poo, and I made up for it with blood by the bucketload. ;)
*SA*