Maybe there's something in my original post that is causing people to think I'm saying something I'm not. So many triggered people! I would've thought it should be obvious that I am not for censorship nor for "horror without horror in it," or anything like that, but I have to remember this is social media after all, and any chance of being construed in the most contorted and ridiculous fashion imaginable is always highly likely.
My point was and is that, first of all, all else being equal, if you put out a call for submissions you are going to get a lot of stuff centered around sex (especially non-con), violence, politics, and also religion, gore, and genre stereotypes (which is probably where the above restriction on "ye old English" comes from). In fact you are going to get so much of this stuff that it starts to become a monoculture. Not just in horror but in all genres and over on the "literature" side of the fence, too. I can say this from my experience paying attention to the industry (i.e. listening to what people inside it are saying), from submitting my work to magazines (and observing the commonness of these kinds of restrictions, sometimes with explanations given as to why), and from being both a literary magazine editor and a newspaper opinion section editor myself, where I directly observed the high proportion of content that gravitates toward these subjects naturally.
My point was therefore furthermore that this is why that particular horror magazine would have put those restrictions in place. I think a lot of people misconstrued me as saying here that all magazines should have these restrictions in place, which I do not believe and did not say. I think magazines should set their criteria based on what they want to publish.
(And here's a little piece of trivia: Oftentimes, the restrictions are "soft" rather than "hard"; if a story is compelling enough it can get away with containing some restricted content. The restrictions have the effect of weeding out a lot of the unpublishable stuff, but with soft restrictions there's nothing stopping a writer from writing in to ask about their specific idea, or indeed from submitting their piece anyway. In my experience, a good editor is always more flexible than their submissions criteria.)
Virtually all of the responses I've gotten on this have been from an ideological standpoint, but I was speaking practically. Editors are often beset by the double-bladed curse of not getting enough submissions but also getting a high proportion of really bad submissions. When you're editing a magazine, you figure out pretty quickly the general feel of the submissions, and you use your submissions criteria both to channel people's writing into a form you are more likely to publish, and to help the writers themselves have a better chance of being published. An editor is not the enemy of their submitters; a good editor is a developer of their talents and a curator. The submissions criteria are a key tool for this (together with the existing body of published work as a reference and the overall vibe of their website, and, if applicable, social media presence).
If another magazine is all like "Send us ya freakiest shit!" then huzzah! I'm all for that. But when magazines restrict that stuff, I'm just saying "Here's why."
It does tend to become a monoculture. It does reduce the diversity of storytelling. You (and others) asked, basically, "What even is horror if there's no sex, violence, politics, etc. in it?" And that kind of question really sends me spinning, because I'm like, "Have you ever consumed a horror story?" Moreover, I never actually said that those things don't belong in horror (or anywhere else). I said they tend to overtake and dominate, like an invasive species. This implies, and I will state explicitly now, that I think there is a place for it to exist proportionally, both at the level of individual stories (i.e. with some sex, violence, etc., but not completely dominated by those things), and at the level of the industry / genre as a whole (i.e. where some individual works can be highly dominated by that stuff, but on the whole most works are not dominated by it). And I am all for magazines and other publications setting their own guidelines on this; I am not saying there should be a proclamation on this from the top of the pyramid that everyone must follow. The way a free speech space works in this regard is that, if enough publications accommodate this stuff or even actively pander to it, then both the diversity of human demand on the audience end and the diversity of artistic vision on the publisher end will be such that other publications will arise with the sorts of restrictions that actively weed out that kind of content in favor of other types.
Anyway! I wouldn't have reblogged the very first instance of this thread if I'd known I was poking such a hornets' nest, and I believe this concludes my participation in the thread.
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