There’s been some words in the medja about sexual harassment in Canadian publishing. Now the talk has turned a strange bend, on the one hand a self-congratulatory not me says the Duck, on the other an alarming portrait of young women tolerating creepy male writers they’ve no need to and so why do they?

It’s clear the male writers concerned target these women because they’re impressionable, which is a reflection of how weak such men are. We all experience people enamoured to an idea of us, rather than who we are, but why the need to actively proceed and profit off this when it is clear you’re trading on power and a sense of entitlement? How about having some middle-aged cop on?

Also if it is endemic in publishing culture, well the culture is not very old in this country, so when did it start? In the early years it appeared to run on a fiver and hand printing press, so did the onset of this kind of exploitative behaviour correlate with the 90’s spate of pillow case sized advances?