Proofing Porn

Thessaly la Force highlights a few paragraphs from Katha Pollitt’s entertaining Learning To Drive wherein she talks about her experiences copy-editing erotica:

On the plus side, unlike the writers I had encountered in a brief stint proofreading at Esquireshort men who swaggered through the office like Latin American generals and whose names I still remember by the linguistic atrocities that used to send us, the women of the copy desk, into fits of resentful hilaritythe authors at Beeline never complained if you fixed up their prose a bit as you went along. They never said things like “I used “thrusting” ten times in two pages on purpose, it’s part of my rhythm.”