WRITING
Caustic comments can cremate caucasian coquette copywriters
I like the engagement between writers on Medium.
I like leaving comments on articles.
But I think I’m going to leave fewer comments on articles written by women.
Women can take comments very personally. I learned that in the newsroom.
We had a lot of female typesetters.
A lot.
We learned we had to be very gentle with them. Very gentle.
When I began writing for a living, I had, in my first two newspaper jobs, two horrendous publishers- not that they were bad publishers- but they could be awful people. Both learned their trade under some adversity.
One publisher was a fellow hated by the community he was covering. Hate is an accurate word here. My first job at the paper was to make peace with everyone in town, the town office, the police, the businesses. Everyone.
When I arrived for work on the first day, I understood no one in the town office would take his calls, not the mayor, not the town councillors, not even secretaries. They were all pissed off with him.
Another publisher I had that wasn’t much liked was an East Indian Muslim, who, when he bought his newspaper, met with a little racism.
He lost two key staffers who didn’t want to work for him as soon as he bought the paper.
Some key advertisers didn’t want to advertise with him as soon as he bought the paper.
So he had an uphill struggle.
He was, quite seriously, a total asshole at times- really beyond the pale- and I have many good stories about that, but I’ll leave those for now.
Suffice to say he and I could yell and lock horns over a headline or a single sentence, over its accuracy or shade of meaning.
We had a lot of female typesetters in our newsroom. We had them one at a time, but we had a revolving door of female typesetters.
Typesetters were the staffers who created ads.
They designed that side of the paper. Their job was to have their noses buried in a computer screen all day.
In our newsroom environment, when we’d make our point known by yelling and locking horns- which we didn’t do often, but it happened on occasion- we would lose a female typesetter.
They would just leave.
One was a stripper.
On her days off she would take her clothes off at various bars, some of them in remote communities-a little bit of a drive for her.
She came into work one Monday, showing us her cut up thighs. She said the stripper pole on stage had a metal burr on it she discovered after her first couple of upside-down twirls.
She left.
She couldn’t take the atmosphere of our newsroom- apparently it was worse than being in a remote Canadian bar hanging from a stripper pole that cut up her inner thighs.
We lost so many typesetters, we men- aside from the typesetters it was an all-male newsroom- were bringing them coffee, asking them how they were, smiling at them, doing some of their work for them, bringing them more coffee to their desk with a smile, asking if they needed anything else.
We were doing everything we could.
We had one typesetter- there’s really too many stories to tell- who had the unfortunate experience on her first morning, witnessing a yelling match between a writer and the publisher.
“Is it always like this?” she asked me, eyes wide.
“No, no. This is pretty mild.”
At noon she got her coat and purse, told us she was going for lunch, and we never saw her again.
