Publishers must stand up to the mob

Suppose you’re a writer with a self-destructive proclivity for sticking your neck out. Would you sign a book contract that would be cancelled in the instance of ‘sustained, widespread public condemnation of the author’? Even cautious, congenial writers are working in an era when a bland, self-evident physiological assertion like ‘women don’t have penises’ attracts a school of frenzied piranhas. So journalists would be fools to sign a document voided if, in a magazine’s ‘sole judgment’, they were the subject of ‘public disrepute, contempt, complaints or scandals’.

These are the ‘morality clauses’ arising in standard publishing contracts in the wake of #MeToo. Primarily a Hollywood weapon of the 1930s and 1940s, morality clauses were used particularly to frighten actresses from disgraceful hanky-panky. So savour the irony: this legal loophole was designed to oppress women, especially in regard to sex. In consequence of a movement meant to thwart the oppression of women, especially in regard to sex, the clauses are sneaking back.