BlogHer - The End of Innocence and Making It Big: The NYTimes spins yet another lost girl tale of innocence, regret and discreetly hot sex - Comments

Rebecca Traister on Gould and NYT

Jill Miller Zimon — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:56:04 -0500

An interesting piece. Don't agree 100% but she does make some good points.

I know

Jill Miller Zimon — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:50:12 -0500

Professor Kim caught that tidbit in the Globe and Mail. But I was told that that's actually on the low end for the NYT Mag. :)

Jill
Writes Like She Talks

Playing With Blogs Will Make You Go Blind

kyranp — Fri, 30 May 2008 08:39:57 -0500

Hey, Susan, thanks for inspiring today's post: http://www.notestoself.us/2008/05/warning-playing-with-blogs-will-end-in.html

Kyran, Notes to Self

blindfolded taste test

kyranp — Fri, 30 May 2008 07:09:04 -0500

I read the article online yesterday, sans photographs, so it didn't occur to me that Gould's looks were at all a factor in the salability of the piece.

I read it as an opportunity for print media to tut-tut and say, "I told you not to play with those dirty blogs"

I couldn't see any other rationale for something so unremarkable being given so much column space.

The Wurtzel comparison is a good one. Excellent commentary, susan..

Kyran, Notes to Self

That['s why we read them

debontherocks — Thu, 29 May 2008 21:56:17 -0500

The damsel is only one variation of the NYT "fatal flaw" confessional. Nannies, addicts, and damaged egos of all types fall for the bait and throw down so that we can play Greek chorus as they--and the Times for that matter--relive and repeat their obvious plotlines. An offer to write a memoir piece for them should be viewed the same way you would a call from the Maury Povitch show--with extreme caution, as a red-flag of self-canabilsm, and as an alert to up your therapy appointment to at-least every other day.

Deb

www.debontherocks.com

when life throws you on the rocks, it's time to get your rocks off

Can't bring myself to read it.

Liz Rizzo — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:53:36 -0500

Clearly that puts me in the minority and I probably *should* read it, but I just get so angry about anything that makes all blogging seem sordid because of the actions of one blogger. Putting people down for writing about their lives, like "who do you think you are?" Or worse, "Who told you you could have a voice and speak?"

I think I'm me, thanks. And I am and always have been driven to write personal commentary. Don't read it if you don't want to.

And I agree with your analysis of their choice of stories and how they run them. And I'm glad someone's pointing at that situation so clearly.

Finally, $15,000??? That's *a lot* of money to me - I'm not surprised she agreed to do the piece.

Liz Rizzo

I blog at Everyday Goddess.

$15,000?!?!

Suzanne Reisman — Thu, 29 May 2008 17:00:37 -0500

Seriously? That is how much they paid for that? Now I am truly depressed.

Suzanne Reisman, Contributing Editor - Feminism & Gender
Campaign for Unshaved Snatch (CUSS) & Other Rants

Thanks for these ocmments,

susan mernit — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:58:20 -0500

Thanks for these ocmments, everyone. Someone at another site just dismissed this piece by saying I was of a generation that sees all women as victims. I said this sounded like an efficient and fast way to dismiss me.

I think the discussion is more interesting than whose interpertation is most "right."

Susan Mernit, Susan Mernit's Blog

follow me on twitter: twitter/susanmernit

friendfeed: friendfeed.com/smernit

That's what I (rathern

Wyliekat — Thu, 29 May 2008 16:15:14 -0500

That's what I (rather incoherently) tried to point out - that it really does impact all of us, and really does require some earnest thought about what we're doing here and why we're doing it.

Thank you for being much more pointed and concise about it.

Why I Write About My Life on the Internet

sarahdopp — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:39:19 -0500

Heh... I saw your story getting praised on Twitter the second i added my own story to the pile:

Why I Write About My Life on the Internet

I don't doubt that Emily had some hard and scary experiences that carried lessons worth learning, but I do share your criticism of how NY Times positioned it.

And more importantly, i'm concerned about personal blogging becoming a scapegoat for mainstream media and public opinion. It's not that sharing stories is bad. It's that there's a lot of personal responsibility required in the process.

Dopp Juice.
http://www.doppjuice.com

Awesome analysis, Susan

Koan — Thu, 29 May 2008 13:29:47 -0500

I read Emily's article - and pondered on it for hours - and I couldn't have captured my thoughts and opinions as succinctly as you have done. With the caveat that I haven't read everything you've ever written, I have to agree with Lisa, too.

Bravo Susan Mernit

Lisa Stone — Thu, 29 May 2008 12:05:22 -0500

This may be the best piece you've ever written. Particularly this paragraph:

While much of the media criticism and the consumer comments have focused on Gould’s narcissism and opportunistic use of her beauty, sexuality and position, and the aggressive marketing of her subsequent prettily teared up regret, no one has talked much about the cold-blooded cynicism of the Times in assigning and publishing what is just the latest incarnation in an ongoing series of sensational stories by attractive young women who struggle.

For an organization that insists their news and information cannot be gendered, they are doing a terrific job in these pieces on Wurtzel, Gould and others in painting an appallingly one-side picture of young women using technology.

Such hypocrisy. Thank you for pointing it out.

Lisa Stone
BlogHer Co-founder
Surfette

YUCK

Cynthia Samuels — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:45:44 -0500

When I was in high school I read the piece that Gloria Steinem wrote about going underground as a Playboy Bunny and ranted to my mom that she was a big showoff (or some other mature designation.) My mother responded "You're just jealous." (I was always going to be "a writer.") She was right.

So when this piece appeared I thought hard about whether there was anything in my hostile reaction besides honest disgust. Couldn't find anything. Just anger and sadness.

In my view this isn't just about stereotyping women or beautiful young women, this is a craven story of one women and a universe that is NOT what we all treasure about our blogging lives. GAWKER was going to be that kind of experience; no way it couldn't be. In my former life as a news producer it would have been like going to work, not even for Entertainment Tonight but for David Spade's old show. There was nothing to expect except shallow nastiness - she was being paid to deliver it.

Young people do not always know what they are getting into. It can end like it did in The Devil Wears Prada or it can end like this. But where the blog-specific issues are concerned - the exposure - she had real warning of the consequences - through Henry and others who responded with such dismay.

It's a tough question.
In my
own posts about this I have quoted Michael Chabon

" Literature, like magic, has always been about the
handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction and the marvelous liberation
that can result when they are revealed.

Telling the truth, when the truth matters most, is almost always a
frightening prospect. If a writer doesn’t give away secrets, his own or those
of the people he loves; if she doesn’t court disapproval, reproach and general
wrath, whether of friends, family, or party apparatchiks; if the writer submits
his work to an internal censor long before anyone else can get their hands on
it, the result is pallid, inanimate, a lump of earth.

If he's right, then it's all much more complicated. Art requires truth; that which is revealed is often what provides insight and compassion in the reader. I don't know where that leaves Henry, or many of my mommy blogging friends who worry about this, or any of the rest of us but it is certainly part of the equasion as we determine how to respond here.

In short, this piece offers a complicated set of lenses through which to view not only the life of a single blogger but also the conflicting values that greet all of us. That's why, I think, this piece has raised such a ruckus, and why Susan has done us such a service in raising it here.

Cynthia Samuels, Partner
Cobblestone Associates, LLP
Blog and Media Strategies and Content Development Online and on Television
http:dontgelyet.typepad.com/dontgeltoosoon

Just Like Any Other Paper..

Sue Walsh — Wed, 28 May 2008 22:54:57 -0500

The Times wants to attract readers. Despite it's high brow appearance, even they know that sex and lurid expose's sell. I also feel the true victim is Emily's ex Henry. The poor man deserved better.

Wedding Tips Blog

yes!

merlotmom — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:46:23 -0500

I agree with both of you! I'm over the whole thing.

merlotmom

The End of Innocence and Making It Big: The NYTimes spins yet another lost girl tale of innocence, regret and discreetly hot sex

susan mernit — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:57:01 -0500

Despite the provocative photo (and the big ass tattoo), the cover essay in the Sunday New York Times Magazine starts sweetly enough. Like a proper miss in a Jane Austen novel, editor and writer Emily Gould describes how back in 2006, she is happy in her cozy circle in Brooklyn, dreaming big dreams in a little world and blogging sweet stories of puppies and unicorns (okay, not really).

“Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn,” Gould writes, but the rest of her story, all 8,000 words of it, is a drawn out and oddly detailed story of her ascent to success as the co-editor at Gawker, the immensely popular pop culture and snark blog that seems a strange and somewhat sensationalistic choice for the NYTimes Magazine.

You see, the game in this story, like it so often is in the media, is shame and repentance, with the pretty maid, lower lip trembling, visibly upset. By 2007, you see, things were not so rosy. As Gould tells it, while she was experiencing great visibility and perhaps success at Gawker, she also began to experience an uncomfortable degree of anxiety and even panic attacks as she, ever more visible, pandered to the crowd by playing on her sexuality, whoring out her dating life, and transforming herself into an ambitious snark-mistress hottie/link whore.

Enter regret, soon to be followed by remorse.

You see, while the innocent reader might think Gould was trying to trade on her notoriety and success in the form of a TV show, book deal, editorship or some other of the spoils that previous Nick-Denton-touched writers like Jessica Coen, Elizabeth Spiers, and Choire Sicha had achieved, she’s writing this long article and painstakingly detailed article to share the reality that her own behavior—what she dubbed “oversharing”--was making her literally sick. Sick to her stomach, sick of writing, sick of life.

Writing about the end of this era, when she’d left Gawker, but was still trading on her personal life to get attention, and yet growing increasingly uncomfortable with her ways, Gould writes: “I slumped to the kitchen floor and lay there in the fetal position. I didn’t want to exist. I had made my existence so public in such a strange way, and I wanted to take it all back, but in order to do that I’d have to destroy the entire Internet. If only I could! Google, YouTube, Gawker, Facebook, WordPress, all gone. I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed for an electromagnetic storm that would cancel out every mistake I’d ever made. “

Poor Emily Gould! And lucky New York Times Magazine!

Is there truly any less foolproof way to sell the Sunday issue that to get huge viral buzz from a damsel in distress story played out in that most modern of locales, the blogsphere?

Call it cynical on my part, but I can just see current NYTMag editor Gerald Marzorati looking back over the upper-middle class waif stories (and media sensations) of Joyce Maynard and later Elizabeth Wurtzel and wondering if Emily Gould’s sob story of error and reform would generate the same page views and buzz those two highly manufactured heroines achieved.

While much of the media criticism and the consumer comments have focused on Gould’s narcissism and opportunistic use of her beauty, sexuality and position, and the aggressive marketing of her subsequent prettily teared up regret, no one has talked much about the cold-blooded cynicism of the Times in assigning and publishing what is just the latest incarnation in an ongoing series of sensational stories by attractive young women who struggle.

Reading Gould’s accounts of trading online barbs with a former boyfriend (who outed their relationship in a much-discussed piece in the NYPost), I am reminded of nothing so much as articles the New York Times Magazine had previously published--notably Joyce Maynard’s revelations that she wrote to JD Salinger, went to his farmhouse and then spent some time as his much younger sweetie, and Elizabeth Wurtzel’s revelations of her life as a suicidally depressed Harvard hottie and girl about town.

As a blogger who has long been interested in issues of privacy and identity, and as a writer about sexuality and relationships who has sometimes had a difficult time managing privacy in talking about my own life (and respecting others’ desire not to be portrayed), there’s no way I can’t spark to this essay, and feel respect and compassion for Gould’s struggles. And yet, at the same time, as a person with some life experience and history, I also can’t help feeling that running this story amounts to some editor at the Times taking a calculated, sensationalistic assessment of Gould’s looks and persona and deciding to put that kettle to boil as a way to make the paper of record seem hipper, more relevant, and a place where buzz happens (yellow journalism be damned.)

Or, to put it another way, as much as I am uncomfortable with the ways these writers describe how each of them acted in the pursuit of fame, fortune, audience and approval, I am more uncomfortable with the Times’ consistent publication of stories—like Emily Gould’s—that pretend to discuss high brow issues, but are really just sensationalist reads that give Sunday magazine readers a chance to be sexually titillated voyeurs.
Given that half the known universe has read this piece, what are your thoughts on it? In particular, can you please share your views on whether or not Gould is crying wolf one more time, whether you scorn her behavior or feel compassion as she regrets her mistakes, and whether you feel white middle class privilege is central here in that she’s pretty, privileged and talking about her love life?

Comments, please!

RELATED POSTS
There’s a ton of commentary in the blogosphere on Gould’s piece, including the following, all worth a read. Here’s a bit to check out:

Gawker: We are all Emilys
Commentators Cassandra and TheDismal Science, elegantly debate whether Emily Gould’s self-obsession reflects her own personality or her entire generation’s narcissism.
“ And none of this is as bad as the fact that her writing, initially, seemed genuine, raw, and destined for something larger. Instead, she's already hooker her perpetual media motion device meager dark energy of her "persona" and doesn't seem to be concerned that, absent intervention, the height of her journalism career might be the time she dueled her ex-boyfriend's article with her own.

Huffington Post, Rachael Sklar, Emily Gould, New Gloss on an Old Story
“It's the NYT's call, to be sure, but I can't help thinking they got snowed; it's the third magazine piece on Gawker, and the second on the star-cross'd Gould-Stein hookup.”

Illuminea, Miriam Schwab: Emily Gould, Gawker, and privacy vs. publicity on the web
“Her piece is fascinating and disturbing, and raises a lot of questions about the boundaries we set up and break down between our real-life identities, and those of our online personas.”

sweet rickey: a line in the sand
“Can't we use the internet as a tool of our own self-defense, to build a presence and image that is under our control, rather than having it only be used as a weapon against us, to steal or manipulate our identities? Like it or not, privacy is being redefined in the 21st century, and having a controlled internet presence which represents you and can be referred to as a tool is one way to use the technology in a constructive, rather than destructive way.”

Erica Perez: Fish out of water--NYT story on blogging, overexposure and, well, the world today
“The comments were the most interesting part. By Wednesday evening when I read the story, it had more than 800 comments, 90% of which were scathing, criticizing Gould for being a narcissist, an idiot, a bad writer and a horrible person, and taking the NYT to task for running the story so prominently when, for example, people are suffering in China and Iraq.”

Megan’s minute: Emily Gould: A Blogger More Than Exposed
“ But what I didn't get was a genuine sense of where she was in the world and what her aspirations might be based on the experiences in those ten pages.”

Megan McArdle, asymmetrical information: the saga of Emily gould
“Gawker both expanded her horizons and terribly limited them; from the perch of her overflowing inbox, she could see everything in the world (or at least Manhattan). Yet quickly enough she became the only thing she cared about within it. The entire city of New York mattered only insofar as it was a reflection of Emily.”

Green Sparrow Knits: If you have the strength….
“Why in the name of all that’s sacred, would a responsible adult, who has already damaged a relationship by blogging, do the very same thing over again? It’s refusing to learn, and that I do not have sympathy for, no matter how melodramatically it is phrased.”

Woman of experience: The online Hotel California
“The panic attacks became more frequent and the poor thing 'lost the will to blog' - a phrase for our self-obsessed times if ever there was one. Unfortunately she hadn't lost the will to write: somewhow this deeply damaged young woman, living on a knife edge, managed to come up with 8,000 words for the New York Times for which we can only admire her courage and fortitude.”

Cherries on Top:Emily Gould, SuperBlogger: A Cautionary Tale
“But I’d shrivel up with embarrassment if I knew that certain family members, co-workers, random acquaintances and any stray cyber stalkers had a direct line into my day-to-day life, loves, prejudices, foibles and spasmodic idiocy. I certainly wouldn’t e-mail a childhood classmate, as Emily Gould reportedly did, stating, I started a blog about my sexual exploits.”