Warning: Playing With Blogs Will End in Blindness & Ruin.

I'm not going to comment on the literary/social merit of The New York Times Sunday magazine cover essay by repentant blogger Emily Gould. Gawker, the blog she wrote for, has never been my cup of tea, and as Ariel pointed out in the post that brought the piece to my attention, Gould is very young. Young women with an audience, particularly beautiful young women, need to be cut a lot of slack. It's something I am writing about at much greater length offline, in my memoir, So Far For Beauty.

What tickled me about the piece so much was the obvious relish with which it was delivered. I can't help but think that the NYT devoted the cover and so much column space to Gould's confession as a kind of public service message along these lines:



Children, heed your print media: nice girls don't blog.

---

You can read much more thoughtful commentary on the article from Blogher contributing editor Susan Merritt right here.

Updated to add the link to this Salon article on the same story by Rebecca Traister. I maybe love this enough to put it on my fridge:

We have to remember: There is nothing wrong with women writing about themselves, their youth, their indiscretions, their habits and values and personal development. Men have been writing about this stuff for thousands of years; they call it the canon.