The Vine: October 16, 2009
Hi, Sars,
I’m writing to ask what you think about some advice given by a fellow advice column writer, Lucinda Rosenfeld over at XX. A recent column of hers has caused quite a bit of controversy.
Long story short: the letter writer claimed to have been drugged at a bar after she was left behind by friends. She woke up in the ER, and these same friends refused to come visit her and were “angry” about having to pick her up from the ER in the morning. Rosenfeld seems to disbelieve that she was drugged, and said that friends are not obligated to visit you in the ER late at night.
I found her advice pretty frighteningly bad, but perhaps, since she has so much experience giving advice, she was able to suss out the situation better than I can. Your advice always seems spot-on to me, so I thought it would be great to see what you thought.
In case you had not heard about this, the women over at the Broadsheet blog in Salon did a great job of summarizing everything and providing links.
I know you’re busy keeping up with TN, and the Donors Choose contest (not to mention your day job!), so feel free to declare yourself too busy! To be honest, the first thought I had when I read the letter was “I wonder how Sars would have answered this?”
Thanks! (Also, I’ll be donating to the contest soon — still budgeting for the month!)
Meredith
Dear Meredith,
I’ve never read Rosenfeld before, so I don’t know if the alienated take — for lack of a better description — she had on Drugged’s letter is her usual attitude.Rosenfeld’s follow-up is, in my opinion, the larger offender here, for two reasons.
First, Rosenfeld takes a specious defensive position by arguing that she’s not insensitive to the possibility that Drugged was sexually assaulted — by saying we have no evidence that such an assault occurred.Well, we have no “evidence” that any of this occurred, except Drugged’s word, and as the Broadsheeters noted, a mickey isn’t generally used just for funsies.If Drugged got a date-rape drug, it’s not exactly ridiculous to assume that a rape was at least attempted.
Second, there’s this: “But how many of you would actually, honestly get out of bed and get dressed at 4 a.m. and drive to the hospital to keep your close friend company while she recovered?”A close friend, who called me for help, after she was found lying on the sidewalk by the cops?Uh, yeah, I’m getting up.
…Unless this isn’t the first call like this that I’ve gotten.Unless it’s the seventh or eighth time that it’s happened.Unless, as Rosenfeld mentions in her initial response, I have reason to believe that she’s making up stories so that “I got passed-out drunk and wound up in the ER; can you come take care of me?” sounds a little more plausibly tragic and not her fault.
I think Rosenfeld ran into trouble by seeming to assume, without proof either way, that this is the case here; I think she may have gone too quickly to blaming Drugged for the fact that her friends bailed on her.
But whenever I get a letter like this, in which friends treat the author really horribly, seemingly out of nowhere, it does raise a small flag.My first thought is, “How is the author still friends with these people?Behavior like this doesn’t come from nowhere — why did she expect them to come through for her in the first place?”My next thought, though, depending on how the letter is phrased and the situation it describes, is sometimes, “Why are these people still friends with her?”
Rosenfeld makes some ridiculous generalizations that don’t apply; you do get out of bed at 4 AM for friends.I’ve done it before.They’d do it for me.It’s not fun, and you do a little grousing on the way to the car in your overcoat and pajama bottoms, but you do it.It’s not an unreasonable expectation, or at least not as unreasonable as Rosenfeld posits.
But nor is it unreasonable to wonder if there isn’t perhaps more to the story than Rosenfeld was told.I don’t think the original author is lying, necessarily, but I’ve written The Vine for nearly a decade (…good God), and it’s not that people lie all the time, although they sometimes do; it’s that, a lot of times, they want to paint themselves in good lights, or they want certain answers from you, or they want you to approve of their feelings or take their sides, so you get a version of the story that, should the subject of said story write in, might look completely different.It’s totally natural, but it also means you have to fill in the blanks, or connect up behaviors that don’t make sense right away.
One of the charges against Rosenfeld is apparently that she was insufficiently sensitive to Drugged as a likely victim of rape, and again, it’s maybe not where I would have gone first, but I don’t think she’s wrong to question Drugged’s claims, or to wonder why her so-called best friends might have acted so callously.They ditched her in the bathroom; they wouldn’t drive her all the way home; they refused a plea from Drugged’s mother to pitch in.Either these women have suddenly revealed themselves as monstrously selfish, which is possible, or they have gotten fed up with a pattern of substance abuse and failure to take responsibility for her personal safety and actions on Drugged’s part.And maybe the question Rosenfeld should have asked in her follow-up is whether her readers would “actually, honestly” get up and go to emergency at 4 AM…for the seventh time.
One more thing: Rosenfeld did answer the question she was asked.Her answer is more blame-the-victim-y than I’d like, but Drugged didn’t ask her about the incident that led to the bad behavior; Drugged asked her if she’s expecting too much from her best friends.And Rosenfeld said, basically, yes, you probably are.I would have said something more like, no, you certainly aren’t — provided this is the whole story, which, given the extreme nature of the friends’ coldness, I question.
A reader’s reaction may differ, but as an advice columnist, I do feel obligated to defend Rosenfeld on that one small point — that we’re trying to answer the question we’re asked, and not necessarily every question raised, based on what is by definition subjective and incomplete information.
Rosenfeld handled this poorly, and according to Drugged’s follow-up letter, she’s wrong on the merits (Drugged’s one friend comes off like a bratty six-year-old) — but going in that direction generally is not a crime against the sisterhood.
I hope this windy answer is somewhat clear; I welcome discussion in the comments. What do you guys think? Sometimes y’all think a letter is fake when it hasn’t occurred to me, or come up with scenarios that hadn’t occurred to me. How skeptical are you, not just about this particular letter but about letters to advice columnists in general? My policy is to assume that each letter is, at the least, true emotionally, and that often the primary rationale for writing is to get some empathy; do you think that’s part of the job?
Let’s get meta.
Tags: Ask The Readers boys (and girls) friendships Lucinda Rosenfeld rando
Yeah … the answer to “would you get out of bed at 4:00 AM if your friend was in the hospital?” may not be “Yes, always,” but it is certainly not “Well, no, not if I’m honest.”
I can think of ten friends off the top of my head I would get out of bed at 4:00 in the morning for if they needed help and were in the hospital. It’s getting out of bed, for God’s sake. It’s not that big of a deal.
I absolutely reject the opening of Rosenfeld’s column, in which she posits that single female friends owe you less than boyfriends. I think that’s a bizarre idea, and she kind of takes off from there. I’m not sure saying that the friends’ extreme callousness suggests they didn’t believe the LW is out of line; I think there’s a decent chance that’s true. I am more disturbed by her sort of hierarchy of relationships in which friendships fall below family and romance. I think that’s a super-weird analysis that simply doesn’t hold for everyone. Perhaps it’s true that “there are limitations” on friendships because they aren’t romances or family, but I don’t think those “limitations” go as far as “you can’t expect your friends to get out of bed for you if they’re sleepy.”
Oh, and Rosenfeld totally sinks herself with that “If you don’t like it, don’t read it!” business, followed by “I’m just trying to provoke a response.” Poor form, in both cases. I don’t actually think her responses are THAT bad (though not considering the possibility of an assault was kind of clueless), but she’s not yet prepared for what being an online advice columnist is going to mean.
Sars, I think you’re being awfully forgiving of this columnist. Lucinda Rosenfeld’s initial response to Drugged makes her sound like she doesn’t really have close friends of her own. For example, this comment — “BFFs are great when you’re upset about a boy/sick cat/whatnot.” — tells me her friendships a bit on the shallow side.
And you know what? If it had been the seventh time I got a call from a friend in that situation? I’d bitch about it but I’d probably still go. I would absolutely tell her that her behaviour worried me and that I couldn’t keep bailing her out but I’d still go. It’s what you do for friends.
Something’s wrong with that woman. Seriously.
“…but I’ve written The Vine for nearly a decade (…good God),” Thank you, Sars.
Even if a letter IS fake, the heartfelt advice you give is still great: thoughtful, well-considered & amusing. And it helps us out here on the other side of the screen consider what we’d do in the writer’s shoes. Does it matter if the letter is fake when the advice is very very real?
I’ve held a whole bunch of hands in the ER, slept in many chairs or on the floor in a friend’s hospital room, and have talked two rape victims into pressing charges and stayed with them through the whole ordeal. I think Drugged friends are petty,vengeful, cold, selfish bitches. If they saw that thier friend was a little off-kilter and didn’t even bother to ask, they are lousy friends, and Drugged needs to seek a better class of women. Damn.
Not having read Lucinda’s column until this story was linked by Jezebel, I was unsure myself whether that’s just her normal tone or not. And no, it didn’t quite make sense to me that the letter writer’s friends would react that way; I found myself thinking “now if you had written in to TN instead, Sars would have described her thought process and pointed out the obvious elephant in the room: is there something else going on here that we don’t know about that would shed some light on your friends’ reactions?” But I don’t really think Lucinda considered that at all – her response came off as “of course all women lie, of course you got drunk or stoned and got yourself into trouble and wanted your friends to bail you out and you can’t expect them to do that. Rely on family or get yourself a boyfriend for situations such as this.” It was almost as if the questionable chain of events made no difference to her – the point she was trying to make was that friendship doesn’t come with the expectation of help when needed, and that’s what I found objectionable.
Thanks so much for asking the question, Meredith, and thanks for answering Sars. I had the same thought: “What would Sars say?” I also thought Rosenfeld had an “alienated take” and was offended by the idea that your good friends wouldn’t be there for you in that situation. As a single person, that whole idea that you don’t have a spouse or family nearby to rescue you means you are aloooooone and doooooomed is so annoying. My friends are firmly there for me and I for them. Rosenfeld may have put all her eggs in the matrimonial basket, finding her friend’s needs inconvenient, but she can suck it.
Meanwhile, Drugged may not have been telling the whole story but I like Sars’ policy of assuming a level of truth in a letter. And I especially like that even when she is giving someone a talking to for bad manners or whatever, she’ll still make a point of saying “I can understand how you’d feel that way” or “I can see how you’d be frustrated.” The empathy in the Vine is always clear to me while Rosenfeld doesn’t seem to care about her correspondents much.
Ug, shut up, Rosenfeld.
I would absolutely get out of bed at 4 a.m. for any of my girl friends in this situation, and if any of them wouldn’t say the same about me, then I would consider her more of an acquaintance than a friend. Not only would I get out of bed at 4 a.m. for a friend who’d been drugged, needed medical attention, and feared she’d been assaulted, I’d take her to the hospital, stay with her in the exam room, take her home, and stay with her as long as she needed, because that’s what I would want a friend to do for me. Why is this less of an “obligation” if I’m not her boyfriend or spouse? Why is it an “obligation” at all? To me it’s being a good friend.
Generally, I’m not that forgiving of her; I agree with Linda that her hierarchy of relationships is…let’s say “not universal.” On the specific charge that Rosenfeld shouldn’t have even considered the idea that maybe Drugged’s friends had their reasons, though, yes, I am forgiving of her — because in my experience, “the friends are cold-hearted bitches” is not the only possible answer. A likely answer, but not the only one possible.
Another possible answer is that, after years of watching, managing, responding to, and picking up after emotional and medical crises derived from substance abuse or emotional vampirism, sometimes you just can’t get up for the fight anymore, metaphorically speaking. And to have that selfish and cold a response to Drugged’s obvious distress…I mean, either you’re just an almost inconceivable asshole, or something else is going on.
Everyone’s different, of course. Rosenfeld’s reaction to it on various different levels is foreign to me, and just kind of weird, but in the very particular part where she feels like she isn’t getting the whole story, I don’t have a problem with that. (And: she didn’t. Drugged’s follow-up letter filled in a number of gaps in the original.)
The original letter smacks of bullshit to me. I don’t know about every single hospital ever (obvs) but the one where I’ve worked for six years discharges people without a ride. If you don’t have someone who can come get you, then you don’t. You’re not a damn prisoner.
And for real? She called her mom and her mom called her friends? My family members do not have my friends’ phone numbers. So, she called her mom and *told* her to call the friends, at 4 IN THE MORNING, to go be at her bedside. That right there tells me that there is something up. Like, if you call FROM THE ER and that doesn’t work, then they’re not coming. So call someone else. Why is she repeatedly calling the bitches who left her drunken ass without a ride? Why would she call again when they didn’t want to come to the hospital? I don’t have a huge social circle, personally, but there are at least two different phone numbers I can dial in emergencies.
This girl sounds like a mess, to me. She woke her mom up and made her panic at 4am. These girls get phone calls asking them to take their drunk asses to the hospital when they are obviously either too mean or too drunk or too stupid to be real friends for her.
Four AM is a lot to ask of someone. I would go to the ER if someone *needed* me at that time, but not if they just *wanted* me. I mean, friendship is important and you can’t just whatever people when they are upset, but jesus. People presumably have lives and jobs and children and shit to deal with at four o’clock in the morning. This woman didn’t really seem like someone I would be out of bed for, and if that makes me a terrible friend, I guess she’s better off without me.
Hey Sars,
I’ve been reading your site for a long time and I really enjoy it a lot. I haven’t always agreed with your advice but even so it’s always well thought out and reasonable.
I think your point about it being the seventh time is spot on. I’ve actually had this kind of thing happen at least three times. On two occasions I got the dreaded 4 AM “I’m in trouble” call and once I was the one who disappeared. Both times I got up and went to help, and the time I was in trouble my friends came and helped me. That’s just what friends do. The thing is, you don’t decide to teach someone a lesson when they are actually IN the ER and abandon them there. You help them out PERIOD. If this is recurring behavior, you wait til they are sober and ok and then talk to them. When your friend is sober you can say ” Look, your behavior needs to change or we need to reevaluate our friendship”, but you don’t do it when they are actually in the ER.
I gave up reading Friend or Foe after the first few columns specifically because of the type of advice that the author provides. This response is pretty consistent with her usual advice, which is frequently of the blame-the-victim or you’re-too-full-of-yourself why-are-you-bothering-me type. I don’t believe I’ve read one response that was truly useful; they always come off to me like Rosenfeld is trying very hard to be “cleverly” callous.
Wow. You weren’t kidding — the “apology” is miles worse than the original answer.
Rosenfeld seems to instinctively identify with Drugged’s friends, and (this is pure speculation) I find myself wondering if she herself used to have a friend who made the 4am hospital call one too many times, and was projecting that onto Drugged.
The initial response was somewhat cold, and had a pretty limited view of female friendships. I agree with the commenters who said Rosenfeld was being sort of passive-aggressive by obliquely implying that the letter-writer was lying without actually saying it — “well, SOME people say they’ve been drugged to cover up how drunk they got, not that I’m accusing YOU of doing that…” Sars, if you think you’re not getting the full story, you call the writer on it, instead of being all coy and insinuating like Rosenfeld was in her initial response. And your characterization of the ridiculous assumptions and generalizations she made in her follow-up was right on. If someone I’d been friends with for 10 years was found passed out on a sidewalk and her mom called me to say she was in the hospital and had been roofied, eff yes I’m getting out of bed. At the very least, I’m going to drive her home myself instead of dropping her at her car the next morning. Who does that?!
My take on letters to advice columns, or requests for advice on message boards, is generally that the letter-writer is telling the truth, but that he/she may not necessarily be telling the *whole* truth. So while I think it would have been valid to ask if there was more to Drugged’s story (namely, had she done this or something like it before?), Rosenfeld’s implied accusation that Drugged was lying about being roofied was assuming facts not in evidence, and was a pretty crappy way to respond to someone who had clearly been through a really upsetting experience. I’m not a big fan of the DoubleX blog anyways, so I’m happy to stick with the Vine for all my advice-y goodness.
I keep reading Friend or Foe because I am addicted to advice columns but Rosenfeld is one of the worst I have ever read. She really does seem to see women only as competitors and every single, childless woman as secretly jealous of her married/mommy friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if she has no friends because she doesn’t seem to know what an actual friendship is.
This is a really, really small point, but @cake alluded to it …
I have a husband & 2 very young children. The time has passed for me to be available to friends at 4am. At that time, I’m at the disposal of my family only.
The difference is, my friends are all in the same position — families of their own who take precedence over the needs of friends. I would never call them to join me at the hospital at 4am — that’s my husband’s job, or, barring him, my parents’. My friends and I are all in about the same place in life, though, which seems like a different place than Drugged and her “friends.” I think when you don’t have an immediate family (like, sleeping in the same house with you) then your friends do assume that role when it comes to 4am tragedies.
So I don’t think ‘true friends’ would, necessarily, get out of bed for one another at 4am — depending on everybody’s life situation. But I also don’t think that you’re on your own at 4am if you don’t have an immediate family to do the getting out of bed for you.
Regardless, I’m kind of suspicious of the whole sitch, even though I think Rosenfeld was somewhat more unsympathetic and dismissive than was compassionate.
cake – actually, victims of assault, or people who have been drugged, are frequently not discharged without a ride, for safety reasons and for liability reasons. I know of several local hospitals for which this is the case. I mean yes, she probably *could* just walk out, but that can cause all kinds of problems with hospital bureaucracy, besides which she was alone, and scared, and probably didn’t want to disobey what the hospital workers were telling her.
Also, my mom *does* have contact information for my emergency contacts. And they have her information, too. In fact, *all* my emergency contacts have each other’s contact information. That way if something happens to me here, my friends know how to get in touch with my family three states away, and if my family can’t get in touch with me for a while, they have someone local who can check in on me. It’s… not that weird.
And “she woke her mom up and made her panic”? Seriously? She had been drugged, possibly assaulted, and woke up in a hospital with hours of memory missing, and it was inconsiderate of her to call her mom? My mom would want me to call. All of my friends’ moms would want them to call too.
Wow. I can’t really think of anyone I consider a friend who I *wouldn’t* jump and run to if they were in the hospital and needed me. Isn’t “being there when you need someone” part of…being a friend? And if they were her “best friends” for a decade, and these late-night hospital trips had become something of a pattern, wouldn’t her best friends have already had words with her about it? Oh wait, that’s not boy troubles OR a sick cat, so I’m sure friends are also not responsible for Life Lessons.
And Personally? What really chaps my hide is that, by her standards, I have the reasonable expectation of no one coming to the hospital if I needed them, because I am 1)single and 2)don’t have any family within a 2,000-mile radius.
Well excuse me right to hell, then, I guess.
Also – I’m definitely no saint, but I’ve managed to make it to 27 without an ambulance ride…another mark against me, I suppose? My nun-like ability to have avoided accident and overdose THUS FAR?
The whole tone of her letter reads like one of those terrible, “Well you must have done *something* to deserve the beating, honey” kinds of things, blaming the victim. Makes me see red. (not in a good way.)
I agree with you here, Sars; I think that the veracity of the retelling is one thing, and the advice for situations like this is another. But even if the friend is a mess, if she needs my help, she will get it. When the crisis blows over, maybe we’ll talk, and maybe we won’t be going to see the band together again, but I’m still on my way. I’ve been alone in hospitals, and it’s not something I’d want another person to go through. I wouldn’t punish someone for bad behavior in such an extreme way.
It was the tone of Rosenfeld’s reply- she didn’t seem to be suggesting the LW needed to reflect on their own actions so much as she was sneeringly calling her a liar who deserved to be left to her punishment.
I had already stopped reading Rosenfeld’s column before this reply and I won’t be starting again. It seemed especially strange that on a women’s blog there should be a columnist who thought women were only good for bitching at and backstabbing each other.
I think as an advice columnist who opens herself up to questions, you have an obligation to the advisees to be honest and fair. You shouldn’t coddle them, but you shouldn’t assume – as the XX writer did – that the writer is lying or willfully hiding something to make themselves look good.
As someone who just recently had you answer a letter I wrote (“Places†in the October 1 Vine), I think you do a good job of addressing the question raised, and the questions implied in the letters. I had nothing to gain by being dishonest, or writing to you with a made up problem. (I do admit, though, that one of my secondary reasons for writing was not only to have your advice in my situation, but for others might not know how to find help and could benefit from your thoughts.) I respect you enough to ask for your help. As a letter writer and reader, all I can hope is that you respect me enough to respond in a thoughtful and helpful manner, even if you think I’m wackadoodle for doing something.
While you weren’t correct in my case about one of the implied questions – that I was avoiding the hard issues – I understand why you went there, and even if it wasn’t applicable to me, hopefully your advice on that will help someone else. And while at first I was really taken aback that you thought I was avoiding the hard parts of therapy, having you raise that question made me consider it, and realize that no, I’m not avoiding it – I was frustrated that the people I had seen weren’t getting to the real issues I need help to explore, which lead me to back to how to find someone who would help, which you answered before delving in to the implied issue that was apparent to me on re-reading my letter.
While I wasn’t expecting where you went with my letter, you could have said the same things in a way that made me feel like a complete loser who was beyond help. Instead, I felt like you were trying to point out something I may not be aware of, and that you wanted me to know so that I could make better choices.
I had actually started seeing someone new a few weeks before you published my letter, and your advice to my implied questions led to an honest discussion with him about what my expectations are, and things are going better this time. It’s certainly not easy, but it’s been worthwhile, and will hopefully in time help me find my way out of my depression. (And, for the record, many of my problems are health related, and I found the new therapist by asking one of the MD specialists I have to see if he could recommend someone good. Who knew it could be that simple?)
Sorry to be long winded , but this looping circle that now leads me back to the basic idea – Good job, and thanks for the advice! Yours is an example of what good advice columns are about, and the XX column… isn’t.
@Bitts: The “depending on everybody’s life situation” part is the key. Anyone who gets a 4 AM call from me is going to understand why they’re on the call list, if that makes any sense; if I have to call someone with little kids at that hour, I hope they know I felt like I had no choice. (And it goes both ways; if I get a call like that from a married friend, I’m assuming the spouse is unavailable.)
The larger point is that most close friendships have these arrangements and understandings as a given; friends understand each other’s lives. These friends were on completely different pages with it. The whole source of the disconnect in the original letter was “I consider these women my close friends; they treated me like a smelly in-law who stole from them. What do I do?”
It’s not that, if we were RL friends, I would feel like you had to drag ass down to the hospital and get me just because we’re friends. It’s that we would understand where we both were with the late-night emergency phone tree…because we’re friends.
I’m definitely no saint, but I’ve managed to make it to 27 without an ambulance ride…another mark against me, I suppose? My nun-like ability to have avoided accident and overdose THUS FAR?
I didn’t mention this, but: yeah, the ferk? The tone of that was, like, “You just have to have an ambulance called every now and then, ya big baby.”
“What really chaps my hide is that, by her standards, I have the reasonable expectation of no one coming to the hospital if I needed them, because I am 1)single and 2)don’t have any family within a 2,000-mile radius.
Well excuse me right to hell, then, I guess.”
Ha! Exactly. It drips with prejudices and with the assumption that everyone else sees friends the same way she does. I have friends — married and not married, with and without kids — who not only would come to the hospital at four in the morning for me, but who would be both irate and deeply hurt if I were at the hospital at four in the morning, failed to call them and wandered home in a taxi because I didn’t want to bother their precious behinds with my “just a friend” problems.
I think what this demonstrates is that everybody’s responses are different. For some, the idea of calling your mother when you’re in the hospital seems intrusive; for others, NOT calling your mother would seem thoughtless. The entire point, to me, is that these are individual decisions, not structural decisions. There’s no such thing as “friends do this; family does this.” Relationships are individual and difficult to categorize, and I think that’s what the advice didn’t take into account.
From Krissa: “I’m definitely no saint, but I’ve managed to make it to 27 without an ambulance ride…another mark against me, I suppose? My nun-like ability to have avoided accident and overdose THUS FAR?”
I thought that part of Rosenfeld’s response was weird too. I’m 26, am the clumsiest person I know, a terrible lightweight at drinking…and I’ve made it 26 years without having to go to the hospital in an ambulance. That’s not to mention all the other times one may need an ambulance ride: car accident, bad slip ‘n fall, some other random health scare, etc. I guess my luckiness just makes me a prime candidate for the nearest cloistered order in Philadelphia (sarcasm goes here).
The letter writer just had her response printed in Double X. Anyone curious should read (http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/response-friend-or-foe-letter-writer) but as to why her friends acted the way they did, she later found out (from asking them) that while she was drugged, she started dancing with a boy her friend liked and her friends thought she was acting weird–overly drunk, etc.–but were annoyed at her flirting and therefore did not look for her very hard. None of which she could have initially relayed to Lucinda, as she does not remember any of this. She also came to the conclusion, herself, that clearly she and these friends are not nearly as close as perhaps they’ve all been acting and it’s better to put them on the “casual aquaintance” plane.
My question to you, Sars, is one she brings up in her response: do you ever contact letter writers to get more info? I’ve often seen you write “I can’t tell X,Y, Z from the info you’ve given me and so can only go with what’s on the page”, which I think is great and Lucinda really should have tried to do more–but do you ever write back before publishing and try to clarify?
Without writing a novella, I tend to think that Rosenfeld was way out of line here. She wasn’t wrong to consider that maybe there were answers other than “these friends are cold-hearted bitches,” but, in general, her response to Drugged was staggeringly badly handled.
As it goes, I suspect that Drugged probably was already aware that her friends are selfish but may not have realized that they were selfish to such an extreme extent. Many of us – particularly women – will take a lot from our friends. (I’ve certainly been guilty of taking much more than I should have from someone I considered a friend, and who considered me the same.) For Drugged, it looks like this may have been the Rubicon between “oh, that’s just the way [“friends”] are” and “WTF?” I feel bad for her that, in addition to everything else, she had to find out in this situation that these other two women were the kind of people they apparently are.
(Speaking of “WTF”: At least one of her friends clearly recognized that something was wrong but were still so angry that she danced with a guy while in a clearly altered state that they left her there in high dudgeon because she “violated the sacred bonds of friendship,” but refusing to either provide company to or give THEIR friend a ride home FROM the ER after she has been drugged and raped doesn’t violate those sacred bonds they are apparently so invested in? WTF?)
Also, I’m 24 and my only ambulance ride so far has been because I went into cardiac arrest a few summers ago. (Turns out when you assume that the symptoms of what turns out to be pneumonia are, in fact, seasonal allergies, and continue to do so for a month, it leads to badness.) (But then, according to Lucinda, “pneumonia” probably secretly means, “I didn’t do my homework and didn’t want to go to class.”) Feh.
Lastly: that “apology” was terrible. “My job is to provoke debate so I didn’t handle that badly!” Shut up, Lucinda.
Aaaand I… wrote a novella. With anecdata, even. Back to emails!
I agree that you call the people you think can and will help, and not indiscriminately phone around – I’ve luckily never had an ER visit, but, living hundreds of miles from immediate family and boyfriend, have mostly called the friend who lives alone and sleeps with her phone on when I’ve had late night emergencies (stolen purse with house/car keys and phone, car towed, etc.). I sleep with my phone on for the same reason. My mom has the phone numbers of key friends like that so that she can give them to me if I lose my phone and so that she can get in touch if there’s a huge emergency and she can’t reach me any other way.
But, that’s not really the point here. Drugged called those women in particular because they’d been out with her that night. I imagine that’s why her mom did as well. If I had a daughter call me from the emergency room who had been abandoned by her friends and drugged, damn straight I’d call those friends up and tell them to get down there and get her, no matter what their “life situation” was. Actually, I’d probably say quite a lot more to them.
As far as Rosenfeld herself, I feel like anything I could say about her response to the actual letter has been/will be covered. However, I want to point out the same thing Linda noted, the childish “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” closer. If she hadn’t already lost me by that point (she had) that would have sunk her alone. I HATE THAT. That “Don’t read it if you don’t like it” is such patent immature Internet attitude bullshit. “Yes, I will put up my opinion on the Internet and solicit people to read it and comment on it, because I want attention. But only positive attention. You aren’t allowed to disagree or criticize what I wrote, you are only allowed to tell me how brilliant I am. If you have anything else to say, I tell you not to read anymore.” Shut up, Rosenfeld.
To the larger question Sars asked in her final paragraph…when I respond to a Vine letter, I know that I’m only hearing one person’s side of the story, and that consciously or unconsciously they’ve probably colored the facts, or been selective about which facts to include, to encourage me to take their side. But from the standpoint of actually responding and providing useful advice, unless the letter is OBVIOUS bullshit, I take the letter’s version of facts as 100% correct. If you don’t, you can just spin off into considering so many alternate theories of what’s really going on that its overwhelming and you can’t provide any useful feedback.
Its like how TWoP used to be really careful in reality show discussion threads of letting people use the “the editing could have made it look this way, but actually it probably happened this way” argument. You can do that until the end of time, and the discussion can quickly derail because everybody has an alternate theory and nobody can prove or disprove anyone else. Sooner or later, you have to base your discussion on what the viewer actually SAW-and I think the same principle applies to Vine letters. You have to take what was actually written as the facts if you want to get anywhere.
Yeah, before reading “Drugged’s” follow-up letter, I heard Sar’s voice in my head going “You disappeared, and when you called from the ER, no one was freaking out that you’d disappeared?” That would have started Sar’s “let’s look at what might be missing here” advice and pointing that out. So yeah, even if Drugged had made a habit of it, Sars still would have been more geared toward trying to get the letter-writer to look a little more objectively at the situation, instead of victim-blaming like Rosenfeld.
I was a little appalled at how Rosenfeld dismissed the ER visit when the letter-writer was clearly freaked out about it (which would indicate it wasn’t a normal experience).
I agree that it can be tough for advice columnists to really answer the questions asked, but I’d argue Rosenfeld didn’t do that. Rosenfeld belittled the LW basically for asking a dumb question – of course you shouldn’t expect your friends to bail you out, women suck, don’t you know? So that, to me, is a crappy advice columnist.
And, lo, I’m 33 and have never ridden in an ambulance either, so suck it Rosenfeld.
Is there anyone else who thinks that *every* piece on XX is a little off-kilter? For a while, I would click on interesting looking teasers on the Slate website, read half of the article, and be totally put off. Now, I’ve started checking before I click the link, and if it has the XX tag, I don’t bother.
I would think that I’m right smack in the middle of their target demographic (mid-thirties woman), and the fact that I dislike every single article there that I’ve looked at makes me wonder if I’m totally atypical.
I think the XX columnist’s response just shows that there are different kinds of people in the world (I won’t go so far as to say good and bad, let’s say giving and selfish instead). There are people who would get out of bed for anyone they know calling from the ER – my feeling is, if they feel that I’m the person they should call at 4am, then I should get up and go and figure it out later – and the people who think they don’t owe anyone anything if the situation isn’t life-threatening.
My question is this – is there really any person alive who, when put in that situation (blacking out for ANY reason, rufied, drunk, whatever), would not call anyone at 4 am from the ER? The ER is a terrifying place no matter what the situation, it is a scary place full of scary sick, injured, frantic people, and it is a horrible place to be, I can’t even imagine what it’s like to be there by yourself. And I can’t think of anyone I know who wouldn’t call someone. I don’t think most people’s thought pattern is “I have no significant other or available parents, guess I’ll just call a cab and suck it up.” And I can’t fathom the mental state anyone who had spent several hours blacked out would be in. They make Law and Order episodes out of lesser stuff than this girl has described. When you tell the cops you’ve been rufied, they investigate it, being drugged is not something to brush off.
I get the feeling if a reader wrote a letter to Rosenfeld saying she got raped after flirting with a guy and wearing a low-cut shirt, she’d deserve it. And women like Rosenfeld are the reason women don’t report sexual assaults.
I didn’t realize how strongly I felt about this until I posted this comment…
Ack, that last paragraph should say:
I get the feeling if a reader wrote a letter to Rosenfeld saying she got raped after flirting with a guy and wearing a low-cut shirt, *she’d tell the reader she deserved it*. And women like Rosenfeld are the reason women don’t report sexual assaults.
The thing is, you don’t decide to teach someone a lesson when they are actually IN the ER and abandon them there. You help them out PERIOD. If this is recurring behavior, you wait til they are sober and ok and then talk to them. When your friend is sober you can say ” Look, your behavior needs to change or we need to reevaluate our friendship”, but you don’t do it when they are actually in the ER.
I agree with this 100%. A not particularly well liked acquaintance threatened suicide on Christmas Eve over something… really dumb. And I was 90% it was trumped up. But I got in my car and went. Because that’s not the time to teach someone a lesson. And that’s what I’d do for an acquaintance.
I don’t run an advice column, so I don’t know how I’d handle that particular letter, but I imagine one is always writing to a more general audience than the particular letter writer. It’s in an advice column because one can imagine the situation can be generalized, right?
So the general lesson from Rosenfeld’s column is: you owe your friends only superficial favors, if you’re single you’re just screwed, if you have a substance abuse problem you deserve to be raped on a sidewalk, and that 4am at ER is a good time to teach people a lesson.
I feel like that’s not compassionate, and I feel like it’s disturbing to say to an audience in which there are certainly people who have been sexually assaulted that if you are annoying or have an addiction (or maybe you don’t) then you don’t deserve help after an assault.
Sars, I think you’re right on both counts: Rosenfeld jumped to her conclusion too quickly, but it’s not an unreasonable one… the way she handled it was ridiculous, though.
I recall several Vine letters from the friend on the opposite side of the phone call, people who’d rushed to someone’s rescue time and time again, even when the friendship itself started deteriorating under the strain and the general “life span” clause, and you advised them to jump ship and save themselves. Because some people are vampires, and some people have serious problems that can’t be solved through the power of friendship, and at some point you have to recognize that you can’t help them.
gchristina is absolutely right, though: if Drugged’s letter had come here, you would have said more or less what you say here. “Absolutely, your best friends should help you out in this situation… unless it’s the twelfth time and what you really need is a stint in rehab.” In which case, I think best friends would probably stage an intervention instead of letting their friend get alcohol poisoning for the twelfth time and then walking off all “sorry, drunky, you should’ve figured out you have a problem by now.”
I’d have gone. I just would have. I can be overly empathetic, overly compassionate, and I find myself doing things that I could swear I’ve done before while telling myself that I was never going to do them again, but, isn’t a little of that what makes friendships? Not *too* much, mind you, but a little of that is what makes the friendships I have special to me, different from the folks that I just exchange holiday cards with – the knowledge that when called upon, my group of friends has gathered from great distances for sickness and breakdowns and funerals and not complained. (To me, at least – of course, we all complain to each other.) That’s a big part of what makes that group of people really special to me. And I’ve have expected my friends to have done the same – I wouldn’t have called someone that I didn’t think would be willing to get up and grumble their way to my bedside.
Anyway, as Marv suggested, it’s just bad timing. I’ve had friends that I felt required too much of me, but if you’ve been putting up with someone long enough to get to the point that you’d think of not getting out of bed when they called from the ER at 4 in the morning, then you can suck it up and do it one more time. Then you wait for a less dramatic opportunity to start pulling back, or you wait a couple of weeks and get together for coffee or make a call or whatever, and have a Vine-scripted conversation, saying something like, “Look, I’ve noticed lately that you….”
I pretty much stopped reading Friend or Foe after the very first column, for the reasons @avis states. I found her opinion of female friendships, especially the automatic single-lady-baby-jeallousy, pretty insulting. Still, on occasion, I’d skim the column once in a while when I had a few extra minutes. Not anymore. I don’t need to bum myself out by reading such sad, offensive notions of friendship.
This made me think of one of Linda’s recaps of the Amazing Race back in season 3 — http://tinyurl.com/ykvhs34
(starting at about halfway down the page). The teams got to call home, and a married teammate completely dismissed his single brother’s desire to talk to his family. I highly recommend reading Linda’s thoughts on the matter, she says it much better than I could.
That was my big objection to the “advice” — friends are for crying about boys and sick cats? …really? So single people should just suck it up? If you want somebody to be there for you, you have to get married? GAHHHHHHH.
I read about this over on Gawker today, and I came away from it thinking that the girl in question needs new friends. If I get a call from a close friend who is in the ER, I am going. I don’t even need to hear why – and if the “why†is “The cops found me on the sidewalk,†then of COURSE I am going. I’ve done it. I haven’t been thrilled to do it, but I’ve done it, and I would expect that it be returned. (In fact, I walked myself to the hospital at 2 AM a couple of years ago when I woke up with an excruciating pain in my eye coupled with extreme sensitivity to light – I’d never had these things before and they scared me, so I went to the hospital. When I told close friends about it later, the response was “Why didn’t you call me?â€)
My answer to Drugged would probably have been something like “From friends, no, you’re not asking too much, but from THESE friends, yes,†because the behavior described indicates a pattern of selfishness, and life’s too short. The things you do for people that you love (and I do love my dearest friends) are different from things you do for people that you like, and in this case, both parties weren’t on the same page with that. I think that’s what I’d focus on, had I gotten this letter. And in the follow-up, Drugged says as much, that these women didn’t behave in a way she thought friends should, so she doesn’t consider them friends anymore. I think that’s right on.
There is an air of self-absorption and dismissiveness to Rosenfeld’s responses. I wonder how deep her friendships are? If she were my friend and I called her from the hospital and she said no, for no reason other than “I’m in bed,” she’d get downgraded on the spot.
@Jennifer: Thanks for relinking Drugged’s response (I thought I’d tagged it in my own response). I don’t follow up to get more info; I just hope the author shows up in the comments to clarify (sometimes it happens, sometimes it doesn’t). I do say so when I feel like I don’t have enough information, but at times, the lack of information is itself information.
As I said before, a lot of it is trying to guess at whatever you haven’t been told, and whether that means anything.
Then you wait for a less dramatic opportunity to start pulling back, or you wait a couple of weeks and get together for coffee or make a call or whatever, and have a Vine-scripted conversation, saying something like, “Look, I’ve noticed lately that you….”
Exactly. And “I” statements, and so on. And when a friend is fucked up, even if that’s the cause of everything in the first place, any lessons you try to teach them in that state will not “take” anyway.
But if that had been the case with these friends, that they just plain got fed up…it’s not the handling of it that’s ideal, or most effective, but that situation can just really get to people.
A friend of mine called me at 4am when I was really ill with a stomach bug. (She didn’t know I was ill.) I woke up, but didn’t answer the call, because, hell, I was really ill with a stomach bug and could barely stand up.
I called her the next day to say I’d missed a call from her and see what was going on. Turned out her boyfriend had ditched her at a club and gone walkabout and she wanted to know if I had any idea where he could be… but I presume really she just wanted reassuring that everything was OK.
I STILL feel shit about not answering that call. If I’d been well and answered the call I would have gone straight round and waited with her until he showed up. Even if I’d had work the next day.
That will change if I ever have kids – but I assume I would drop down her ‘middle of the night call’ list if that happens. But if she ever calls under those kind of circumstances I’ll still do what I can. Hell if she needed a lift home (in ANY circumstances) in the middle of the night and I had an infant at home so couldn’t go, I’d be sending the hubby. He’d complain bitterly, but he’d do it.
I’m sad for people who assume only family are this important.
Kriesa says:
Is there anyone else who thinks that *every* piece on XX is a little off-kilter? For a while, I would click on interesting looking teasers on the Slate website, read half of the article, and be totally put off. Now, I’ve started checking before I click the link, and if it has the XX tag, I don’t bother.
I would think that I’m right smack in the middle of their target demographic (mid-thirties woman), and the fact that I dislike every single article there that I’ve looked at makes me wonder if I’m totally atypical.
Kriesa, that makes at least two of us. I’m in my late 20s, and I’ve pretty much written off reading anything with the XX tag.
The problem I have with XX is more or less summed up by the part of Rosenfeld’s “apology” where she says, “I sort through scores of letters in search of ones that will provoke debate on the site. Apparently, this one has done exactly that. So maybe I’ve done my job, after all.”
I have no problem with controversy, or with writers taking a provocative stance on a charged issue. But on XX, I get the impression that the the editors and writers value “provocative” over “thoughtful” and “accurate.” It’s like they don’t care if an article is well-researched or compellingly argued, so long as it gets tons of hits from angry commenters. That’s just my two cents on XX, anyway.
I had the unnerving experience of recognizing a letter once, and being somewhat on the other side of it (it was from a very close friend of mine’s ex, about him and their relationship) and I must say that while I was rolling my eyes throughout her letter, as I had a lot of information from the other perspective that was definitely not included (it was not included in her point of view, not that she was lying or even omitting on purpose) I still thought your advice was well-considered and fair. Some of the comments from the peanut gallery were a little enraging, as many of the readers tended to take her story a bit more at face-value than you did, but I think you always do a really professional and fantastic job of looking at the whole picture and giving the best advice possible given the extremely limited view you’re provided with.
There’s a reason this is the only web site I’ve read for nearly ten years straight :)
I’m sad for people who assume only family are this important.
And why can’t we make our own families out of whomever we want? Not everyone has a family, or maybe their families are assholes; you still have the right to a 4 AM call circle, even if you don’t share DNA or have a ring on it.
@AnonymousJIC, your check is in the mail. (Hee. Thank you for the compliments. I try.)
As someone who has been drugged and raped, Lucinda Rosenfeld’s response to Drugged sounded uncannily like 95% of people’s response to my trauma.
She managed to perpetuate every myth about rape and rape victims while later denying she even thought rape was a possibility. She managed to compound it with some good old fashioned stereotyping about women’s friendships and squeeze in a smidge of single-bashing for good measure. The whole column dripped with judgement.
Surely she has a responsibility to offer advice rather than thinly veil her own feelings as an answer?
I wonder what Lucinda Rosenfeld would think of my friend: My sister was hospitalized but stable but serious condition in Portland Oregon and my parents were with her. My mom called me from the hospital at my apartment in Missoula Montana at 11:30 PM. I called a friend just because I needed to have a general freak out session and say “she’s going to be fine, she’s going to be fine” about 20 times out loud and did not want to further burden my mother. Not only did my friend listen to me for about 1/2 hour, approximately 20 minutes after I called her she showed up at my door with her car and a packed bag ready to drive me to Portland so I could see my sister and feel better.
Yeah, calling me at 4:30 in the morning because you need someone to drive you home from the ER, not a problem. As someone mentioned above my friends and I would likely be more offended if you did not call us.
I’ve gotta say, Drugged’s follow up letter said it all for me.
I’d make a terrible advice columnist. I like to post in the replies, but only after reading Sars’ advice first and thinking about it from there. It never would have occured to me to question a woman being ROOFIED or the idea that she makes a habit of dangerous, self-destructive behavior. It just wouldn’t. I guess I’m sheltered–and I haven’t been getting letters for nearly a decade for an advice column.
However, I do think about the replies I post, and I get the impression everyone else does too (Sars does a masterful job, I’m sure, filtering out the troglodytes that like to do nothing but screech and rave with poor spelling, punctuation, and emoticons). I can’t fathom anyone I’ve read here, from Belladonna to Ferretrick, (and everyone else in between, of course), writing such a scathing, mean spirited reply, even if they didn’t agree with the letter writer’s take on things. Even Jack and his can of tomatoes would have recieved a line or two about improving his life and outlook between hilarious, TShirt worthy raves, had he ever written in.
I think that this whole “BFF are for sick cats and boy worries, but only family and BF is for real support in real crises” belief explains why Rosenfled believes all single women are jealous of all married women. If you think that the only place you can find real genuine love and support is in a marriage, then not being married is a horrible place to be.
She’s wrong. Emotional connections are important, whatever the type of connection. Supporting the people we love is one of the greatest gifts we can give, both to them and to ourselves. And, yes, I’ve gotten out of bed at 2 in the morning to help out a married-with-small-kid friend who was pregnant with her second child and having breathing problems (and who almost died that night from a DVT — and she certainly would have died if someone hadn’t come to her house, packed up her and the kid, found someone to take the kid, and then driven her to the hospital where I stayed with her for almost 24 hours). That friendship later died for unrelated reasons, but I don’t regret having done that, and I can’t imagine what it’s like to live in a life where you WOULD regret doing that.
You know, there are some people in my circle of acquaintances that are there because they are good friends with a good friend of mine, but I personally can’t stand ’em.
But if even *they* called me at 4am from the ER? I’d go get ’em. Geez, it’s just “come pick me up at the ER”, it’s not “donate a kidney”!
Now, if they asked me to help them pack and MOVE all day Saturday, that’s an entirely different question. :) Hee.
You know, the more I think about this, I wouldn’t have jumped out of bed if I got that 4 AM call. Because I wouldn’t have ditched the girl in the first place. I’d never go home without making sure a very inebriated friend (or even aquaintance) got home okay. And yes, even if she had inadvertently pissed me off.
It just bothers me that there are people out there who are so cold and thoughtless.
You know, I’ve been in her shoes. Well, not as bad, but close enough to have an idea behind the situation. I was out with two girls I work with, we all got stupid drunk. Yes, it was my fault for not counting my drinks, but at the same time, we’ve all been there. Anyway, we got separated and I found myself drunk off my ass, barely able to stand, all alone on the sidewalk at 3am. I was with it enough to figure out what happened and it was scary as hell, I can’t even imagine if you add in the extra crap and feelings of personal violation (whether physically assaulted or not) that come with unknowingly being drugged.
Luckily for me the bouncer at the club was an awesome, huge-hearted guy who saw me sitting on the curb and told me not to move, he was calling a cab and sat with me until it got there because he didn’t want any slime ball thinking he could take advantage of the situation (his words). The next day the two girls shrugged and told me they saw me talking to a guy at the club so they both figured I’d gone home with him when they turned around and I wasn’t right next to them. Yeah, they are not friends. They’re not bad people, but they are not friends. Friends leave no man behind, that’s how it is.
As someone with a dicey family situation I have made a secondary, and often more important, family out of my friends, including a core group that I’ve been friends with for 25 years. One who lives very close to me is married and has a kid now would probably beat me to near-death with a swiffer if she found out that I’d been in the hospital and didn’t call her, if only to check on the animals.
I had a flashback to a couple of years ago when I met a couple of girls at a club and we spent the summer hitting the bars together. I called them “friends”, and we spent a lot of time together, but the friendship was far from profound.
And yet, we had a system of texting each other when we got home every time – every time! – to make sure we’d all made it ok. And if someone had ended up in the hospital, we would have been there. It’s just the price you pay, being regular drinking buddies, in my opinion.
I, too, am very bothered by “I sort through scores of letters in search of ones that will provoke debate on the site. Apparently, this one has done exactly that. So maybe I’ve done my job, after all.” The thing she fails to recognize is that *the letter* isn’t really the “provocative” element here; it’s her response and hamfisted followup. Among the zillions of comments spread between the various places this letter has been discusses, it doesn’t appear to me that there’s much polarization in people’s reaction to Drugged. People seem to pretty uniformly support the idea that yeah, the friends behaved badly and that You Just Go in situations like this, possibly with followup later if there’s a bad pattern emerging. There’s no debate, just scores of people telling Rosenfeld she’s an asshole. That’s not the same thing, and it’s certainly nothing for her to celebrate with a Look What a Great Journalist I Am attitude.
Like others, I’m so troubled by her view of single women. It says so much about her that she seems to see unmarried women in their 20s as though they were all sent up to the set of a rom-com from central casting. Boy troubles and sick cats? And de riguer ambulance rides, apparently. Nice.
Actually, the more I think about it, the more I think part of the problem here is that Rosenfeld doesn’t/hasn’t gone out drinking with friends before. As others have noted here, you DO NOT leave people behind. You just don’t. That’s the first place Drugged’s friends let her down. A few months ago, I was woken up in the middle of the night by a phone call from one of the attendees of a bachelor party, looking for my husband. They were all in Vegas, and my husband had stayed behind at a club with another guy because they were looking for a friend who disappeared. The caller (groom’s brother) thought he was calling my husband’s cell phone – and he was calling to get the message across that the missing dude was sound asleep in the hotel, having wandered back there on his own (actual message from the brother “tell him he doesn’t have to look for D anymore, because D is asleep here on the couch like a little snoring pussy.” heh). Drunk guys, bachelor party, Vegas – even though they could have easily gotten in a cab and ditched the missing man, they stuck it out until they knew he was accounted for. It meant they didn’t get back to the hotel until something like 4 that morning, but it didn’t matter because they wouldn’t leave their friend behind. It’s just…what you do. It doesn’t matter how comfy your “beddie-bye” might be, if your friend disappears in the bathroom at a club, you don’t just shrug and ditch her ass.