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
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 had my first ambulance ride at 27 this summer because I had stroke-like symptoms and I was freaking the fuck out. It was a holiday weekend and all my friends with cars were out of town and my roommate was working a job he couldn’t leave. He called my upstairs neighbor who I met ONCE and she came with me in the ambulance so I didn’t have to go alone until my roommate could meet me at the hospital after work. My out-of-town friends still talk about how absolutely guilty they feel that they weren’t IN TOWN to give me a ride there.
If my friend “disappeared” in a bar and I “assumed” she went home (which I would never do before searching every nook and cranny or getting cell-phone conversation) and then called me from the sidewalk saying she was drugged (which this girl did first) I would either pick her up myself or meet her at the hospital. If I didn’t get the sidewalk call and just got a from-the-hospital call I would be there in a heartbeat. I would kick my own ass the entire way for leaving her behind. I would also make sure that a rape kit was done and drug testing (you know nagging the docs til it’s done). Then I would find out if the cops have launched an investigation and if my friend wants one, make sure that that gets started.
As a single woman who has NO family in this city I am disgusted by the idea that because I have no nearby family and no man I should be stranded in a hospital. Disgusting.
When I read this:
“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.”
I wanted to post just this:
I love you.
That paragraph is exactly what I love so much about this site and why I so value the advice you write. The fact that you get that most people are coming at you looking for empathy, and that where the facts are sometimes fuzzy, the emotional truth (good or bad) is there, is just, well, it’s a damn sight beyond most columnists and people in general.
The thing is, I think you strike the balance so unbelievably well. I don’t want to read an advice column where the columnist presumes assholiness on the part of those asking for advice, but nor do I want to read a column where the columnist doesn’t use common sense and critical thinking and who is afraid to call bullshit sometimes. It’s not easy, but you’ve just captured it; it’s all about empathy. You can be empathetic without actually agreeing, and I think that often gets confused. I think often people ( I’ve certainly done it) see empathy as some complicit endorsement of people’s behavior, when really it’s just an acknowledgement of fellow humanity. You can be empathetic and still be raging pissed at someone. You can be empathetic and still vehemently argue your (opposite) point.
GOD, I feel like someone flipped the switch to the lighted carnival in my head. Somehow, I’ve known this, but this discussion has now made it intensely clear. I’ve often felt extremely guilty for feeling empathetic toward certain people, but now I see that it’s not a mutually exclusive thing, this empathy. And I see it because of this forum. And because of Sars.
WOW. I’m clearly Having. A. Moment. Once last thing before I take my crazy Friday ass out of here, and that is: it’s a testament to the caliber of folks who comment here that we can “get meta.” I love it.
@Stormy, your story nearly made me cry. Probably because I was remembering how, when my father was killed in a car accident and I called my best friend in the world to tell her & let her know I’d be flying back to MN for his funeral (I live in CA, she’s in AZ) – she had already figured out her plans to fly right there and be by my side as I buried my father with my family.
When her father died 4 years prior, I did the same thing. Wild horses wouldn’t have stopped either of us from being there for the other.
Because that’s what BFFs do. And we were both married. Now we both have kids – but when she needs me again, damn right I’ll be there. In fact, I just reprimanded her for not calling me when her dog died.
So I can call you at 4 AM to come pick my drunk ass up then? Great. I’ll be at this bar in Gowanus…
Hee, just kidding. Thanks for the kind words, @Sara. (And everyone else.) Given that I started The Vine as a joke, and spent like three months answering questions about whether gout is contagious and how to sabotage the vending machine at work, it’s kind of a miracle that it’s lasted this long.
(Gout isn’t contagious. Just in case you’re friends with, like, Charlemagne or something and are worried about that. Also, if Charlemagne disappears at a club, make sure he’s okay before you bounce on home. You’re welcome.)
In addition to all the good points everyone has made, I’d like to add that Rosenfeld’s presumption that Drugged’s friends were not needed in the ED (it’s a department, not a room) was also wrong. Having worked at a hospital for the last 10 years, I believe that everyone needs a friend or family member with them whether they’re in the ED or admitted as a patient. When you’re sick and scared you need someone who is not sick and scared to be there to ask questions and advocate for you as a patient.
@Sars: Given that I started The Vine as a joke, and spent like three months answering questions about whether gout is contagious and how to sabotage the vending machine at work, it’s kind of a miracle that it’s lasted this long.
Wait, there are Vine tips on how to sabotage office vending machines?! I think I need to go through the archives again!
Seriously though, Sars, I love your advice column and TomatoNation as a whole ever since I first stumbled upon it way back in 2004, as a homesick exchange student in Australia. I’ve forwarded so many of your articles and columns to family and friends that they probably think I get paid for it (but they’re also donating to Donors Choose so it all works out!)
As a famous practitioner of the Irish Goodbye, I can tell you that even casual acquaintances won’t stand for losing someone at a party. I get an earful every time I realize I’m too drunk to remain somewhere and quietly catch a cab home.
I once had a guy I’d only met twice leave a party and drive all over town looking for me and calling every name he recognized in my contacts list, trying to figure out who had seen me last, if I’d talked to anyone remotely sketchy, where I lived so he could climb the three flights to ask my roommates if I’d been home. Meanwhile, I was just spending an insanely long time in a stall trying to be dignified about drinking too much, but the fact that I was missing and I’d left my phone behind had him in a terror.
I also had an at-that-time-ex-friend drive me to the hospital in the middle of the night when I couldn’t breathe. She stayed by my side the entire time, filled my prescriptions, and drove me home.
So even almost-strangers and people who aren’t even your friends anymore are better than the letter writer’s friends and the columnist. Because most human beings don’t drive by someone bleeding on the side of the road without offering to help. It’s not even a matter of defining “friendship” to me, it’s a matter of remembering the golden rule.
Psst, Sars: should the subject of said story right in is possibly not what you meant.
Otherwise, I agree with the idea that even if the facts aren’t all 100% true, there’s another kind of truth there that’s worth addressing.
I read the column and all of the comments here, and finally decided looked at the original column. The thing that made my blood boil, which I don’t think has been mentioned here, was this line: “For one thing, it’s not even necessarily safe—depending on where you live and how far you live from the hospital—for a woman to head out alone at that hour.” But you know, if it’s the woman’s boyfriend or husband or dad or child, of course she’s supposed to venture out into the scary, dangerous world of 4 am, because, you know “family.” gah.
For what it’s worth, I told this whole story tonight to a friend of mine who’s married and has kids, and not only did she think the Rosenfeld response was the stupidest thing she ever heard, she assured me that I was right that she would expect to be called if something were hospital-level wrong in the middle of the night. She also laughed and said, “I can imagine situations when I might call you before I’d call my husband.” This is because we are friends. That doesn’t mean that if you wouldn’t do this, you aren’t friends — people make different deals. But not everybody expects to exit your calling circle because they’re married and have kids, and not everybody expects you to limit your calls to your single friends (who, I guess the thinking is, have nothing else to do at four in the morning except come to the hospital).
The more I think about it, the more I think the friends are just asses for the whole “Oh, you disappeared, and we assumed you left by yourself” business in the first place. I’ve had people treat me with more care than this when I didn’t even know them all that well. In fact, it causes me to recall having somebody pour my sad, pathetic, genuinely helpless behind into a cab years ago and somehow managing to get me pointed in the right direction in spite of not really knowing me THAT well at the time. And OH THAT’S RIGHT it was Sarah. (Effing white wine.)
I agree with everybody’s comments about the advice columnist. Ugh, those attitudes about friendship are really not for everyone.
But Sars’ response and some other comments made me think, because often these letters about how horrible someone’s friends are DO seem a little bit sketchy. Like this one…look at all the comments here, all the people who find this behaviour unfathomable. The idea that *more than one* of this chick’s friends would behave in this manner? Out of nowhere, after a decade of friendship? It seems off to me. The letters about nasty friendships, I often feel outline thisbehaviour which is so obviously beyond the pale, anyone would answer ‘dude, they are jerks!’ So, I don’t know if these people just really haven’t realised how bad it is, I’m sure that’s true some of the time. Sometimes though, I get the idea that we’re not getting the full story, and by picking and choosing bad behaviour,t hey cast themselves in the victimized-by-evil-bitches light.
I looooove advice columns and the Vine is my favourite – for all the reasons people mention; the fact that you can read the whole, real letters, the fact that you have empathy but aren’t afraid to be tough, the awesomeness of the commenters. It has also introduced into my life the endlessly helpful phrase, “I’m sorry you feel that way”, and taught me so, so much about asserting my boundaries with others. Please don’t ever stop writing it.
(Okay, “ever” might be a bit much… but I love this shit, dude.)
I’m with the majority on this one, Rosenfeld’s responses were truly terrible, and speak more of the author’s issues than anything else.
That sign-off of “If you don’t like the column, don’t read it!” would be appropriate if she was writing op-ed stuff, but an advice column where people are pouring out their hearts?! WTF?
It’s one thing to gently challenge a letter writer’s self-perception, it’s a whole other thing to assume they’re a liar, and piss all over any notion of common human decency.
The point that really got under my skin is, in her weird hierarchy where family and romatic partners always trump female friends, presumably anyone with ABUSIVE romantic partners/family is – well, to use a technical term, screwed.
No knight in shining armour to save you = not worthy of being saved, end of, in her little bubble of blame-the-victim unreality.
I’d never read XX before, and I most certainly never will again.
@Cath: “The Irish Goodbye,” that’s great. My friends used to know it as “the Bunting bail,” and I still get shit for it.
@Karen: Ack! Fixed.
@Linda: HA! For the 700th time, it wasn’t that dire. Or not only dire on your part.
“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.”
This quote from Lucinda’s site has been stewing in the back of my mind while reading through the comments. And now that there’s been 64 awesome comments worth of time to let it percolate? That quote is pissing me off, big-time.
If, as Moonloon noted, you pour your heart out to Lucinda, go to her for advice about something that’s really troubling you, she won’t even touch your plight unless she can use it to score major drama points for her site? Really?
I realize that advice columnists can’t answer every letter they receive, but flat-out telling her readers that offering useful advice doesn’t interest her as much as the controversy she can get get out of “solving” their problems seems pretty damned cold. I may be reading too much into it, but that stance just smacks of, “I will feast on your sorrows and they shall bring me power! And attention!” (with evil villain cackling and rubbing hands together-ing).
I guess I do have to give Lucinda points for consistency. Since her stance on problems beyond “sick cat” or “boyz r so stupid!” seems to be “take it up with your husband or suck it up in silence, you spinster loser,” her responses to Drugged are in line with that mindset.
Except…if her readers actually follow that advice, and only send Lucinda the sick pet and sitcommy “this problem should come with a laugh track” relationship issues, she won’t publish them because they won’t generate drama on her site.
Looks like an advice columnist just advised herself into non-existence.
Not to belabor the good points already made, but I find the behavior of those ostensible friends particularly loathsome and inexcusible in light of…how many news stories have there been, anyway? You know the ones, in which a young woman is seen ALIVE FOR THE LAST TIME acting disoriented at a bar? Sweet smokin’ Judas, you heifers–your friend quite possibly could have disappeared that night, to be found in a landfill months hence, and your concern is getting calls at 4 a.m. that AREN’T from a homicide detective? Suck it, girls. Whether or not there was anything else going awry in the life of “Drugged”, “teaching someone a lesson” is sort of moot if they’re among the ranks of the disappeared or dead. The Natalee Holloway story ALONE is enough reason to take better care of your friends than that.
Sorry for piling on at the last, there. But my head was singing “Ave Maria” in 2/4 time on this.
I feel the need to address the queston of how someone’s friends could all behave so badly without provocation.
As I discovered a few years ago (with help from Sars), one’s perception of how deep one’s relationship with one’s friends is not always accurate. The people I considered close, deep friends really only considered me a coffee/clubbing buddy, and if I called them at 4am from the hospital, they probably wouldn’t have come, either. That situation would have been a little too “real”.
What I lacked was a sense of self-awareness and knowledge of what a true friend is and how friendships are developed. In this day and age, at least in my urban metropolitan area, it can be difficult to develop friendships that go beyond the superficial, considering the demands of career/family/etc.
So, I have to empathise with the “all my friends abandoned me” letter-writers. While some of them surely have poor relationship skills, I’m sure many of them have been legitimately blindsided by the fact that their “best friends” turned out to not be so much.
I’ve been reading these comments and didn’t think I had anything to add (most of you have covered the bases pretty well). But then I realized there was one other very important reason those said “friends” should have high tailed it to the ER. Information. The LW didn’t remember what had happened to her and the events leading up the drugging. The hospital staff (and police) might have wanted to know if they saw anything suspicious or knew anything worthy to an investigation (Benson and Stabler certainly would have talked to them). Granted, the hospital staff or police could have called the friends to interview them but even still, if it were me, I’d want to go down there to offer as much information as I could so that maybe, just maybe, the person who drugged her could get caught (because if that person has done it once, they’re likely to do it again and a pattern of reported incidents could help catch a predator).
I think even if Sars’ hypothetical response to this letter had ultimately taken the same “I suspect the problem is you” direction, it wouldn’t have been so offensive to the reader, and probably not as directly insulting to the writer, because as one of the early comments said, Sars, on those occasions where you do question a letter, you give your thought process; you point out the parts of the letter, as written, that hint that something’s being left out or exaggerated. It seems more fair to specifically say “Even for bad friends, this is almost unbelievably nasty behavior, and because of that I do wonder about what you’re not telling me” than just to start from the assumption of “You’re not telling me something, and that something is that you’re a junkie and an asshole”.
This past summer I got the 3am call . . . from my 19-year-old stepdaughter, who was drunk, high, and abandoned at a gas station after some guys she met a party dumped her there and stole her phone. I drove so my partner wouldn’t crash the car, he was so upset. It so happened my best friend was visiting us that weekend, and her response the next day was — who are these “friends” who were okay with stepdaughter going off with rando guys in the first place? Ultimately we both thought one of the most disturbing parts of stepdaughter’s downhill slide was her inability to choose people to be around who would care about her general physical well-being, which I don’t think is too-great an expectation, even in chemically-enhanced situations.
What’s so sad in this case is that Drugged’s 4am ED visit could have been ameliorated or maybe even avoided if the friends had adhered to the “no wo/man left behind” code.
Besides any issues about Drugged’s truthfulness or situation, my god, that was the WORST advice response. If anything, this just reminds me of why I only read The Vine and no other advice column (not usually being a fan of them anyway). Even in the few times I have disagreed with Sars’ response, there was always a point of view I could recognize and appreciate. The idea of women being only dependent on their male partners for support is so appallingly retrograde, it being on a website calling itself “unabashedly intellectual but not dry or condescending” is laughable.
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/removelucinda/
I signed it, because maybe if she’s no longer an “advice” “columnist”, she can move on to her true calling, which probably involves a fear of garlic and sunlight.
In her follow up letter to Double X, Drugged clarifies that her ‘friends’ were in a snit because she apparently came back from the bathroom and danced with a Boy who Friend #2 had confessed to ‘liking.’
Apparently you can legally drink alcohol AND be in sixth grade!
If someone were really my BFF and started dancing with a guy I liked, I’d like to think I’d wait for her to finish and ask her about it before stalking off and leaving her at a bar alone. If she were just trying to CYA for dancing with Boy, I can’t imagine her taking it to the point of lying down on the pavement and taking a nap till the police came by.
The one part that confuses me is didn’t Drugged say that her friends told her to go back to the club and they would call an ambulance — but that she called them after she woke up in the ER? She wasn’t defending or further explaining that in her follow up letter so it obviously made sense to her in some way.
Here’s the thing. In my opinion, if you’re friend is in the hospital, you just go… That’s what friends do. If you’re asked, you go. I’ve gotten that 4am call from someone who I was not even that close with, as in, we live in a reeeeaally small town and everyone knows each other. She had just been in a car accident and was ejected from the car. She was so drunk she told me the wrong hospital so when I got there she wasn’t there, I then drove to the other hospital. (this made it about an hour of driving to pick her up) When I got there, she had not allowed them to treat her and had a 4 inch gash in her forehead, I put her in my car and ignored her pleas to just drop her off at her house, called all of our mutual friends, and had them waiting at my house to convince her she really did need to be treated, at which point I then drove her to the other hospital where she got a stupid amount of stitches. I sat with her the whole time and then I took her home… it’s what you do. Sure after we all talked to her about her drinking and the possibility that she maybe shouldn’t do it anymore… but at the time? No, you just help.
On another occasion a close friend of mine was attacked, and had his ear and part of his nose bitten off (yeah I did just say that… oh btw, it was over a disagreement about ART) while we were outside waiting for the cops and ambulance he tried to convince me that I should leave him there, so I didn’t have to “deal with” talking to the police… did I? No, I was a witness, and also? He’s my friend. I followed the ambulance to the hospital, gave my statements, and guess what? I’ll show up in court to testify too… sure I’d rather be sleeping, or at work, but it’s what you do.
My friends are my family, I would do anything for them and they would do the same for me. That’s why we’re still friends after in some cases more than 20 years. Also, I’m in my 30’s and I’ve had 2 ambulance rides, one due to a major car accident and one because I had a stroke (ladies, take that no birth control while smoking seriously!) and both times it was my friends who picked me up at the hospital…
Look, even if these people aren’t Drugged’s “friends”, being a bar buddy has certain obligations and that includes not assuming everyone is OK. Husband and I went out for dinner with my strapping 20 year-old nephew recently and nephew was teasing me because I insisted that he text me to let me he know had walked home safely (and his text was “unfortunately I was murdered on the way home”), but we were all out together, so that puts him on my watch.
And yeah, I have a young child and a demanding job and if I rubbed a bottle and a genie came out, my first wish would be the biggest, comfiest bed you’ve ever seen and George Clooney, but only so he could stand by the door and see that I am not disturbed, but I would still go at 4am, because one night without enough sleep is not the end of the world. Well, not unless you’re piloting the space shuttle or something. If it was someone high maintenance, I’d bitch about having to do it and probably think it qualifies me for sainthood, but I can’t imagine just rolling over and going back to sleep after that call. I’d be awake anyway, dammit.
But all of this proves, like we didn’t know already, how awesome Sars is at the Vine, because she understands the difference between saying “well, perhaps you need to consider…” and “suck it up, lying junkie slut”.
And, as if I haven’t gassed on enough, when it comes to “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” bit, ugh. As a writer I have used that line, but only when I get letters of the “I read your column every week and you suck” type and even then I write back and say “I’m sorry you don’t like it, other people tell me they enjoy it, so perhaps you should just view that page as a free birdcage liner” or some such. I would never, ever use it as a glib response to someone offended by a specific point I had made and it suggests that Rosenfeld had no actual comeback.
I’m frankly appalled at Rosenfeld’s attitude of “it’s my job to provoke a response!” or whatever the fuck it was she said along those lines. If your post is to helm an ADVICE column, your job is not to “provoke” anything except to get the letter to listen and behave accordingly. There is no place for a provocateur in a serious advice column; you either give advice that you’d be prepared to give your baby sister in the same situation, or you don’t run the letter. If the advice happens to be provocative in the service of being honest and useful, the point is that it is…honest and useful. “Advice columnist” and “shock jock” are, yes I am recalling an earlier essay from Sars: NOT SYNONYMOUS!
Christ on a motherfucking corndog, what an irresponsible piece of work. She has limited but very real power with the people who write to her, and the people who read her column, and if she is not prepared to advise them in good faith, then she needs to find a different gig. She can’t control what those people leave out of their letters, and she can’t do anything about how they respond to what she gives them, but she needs to fucking OWN what she gives them.
I feel uniquely qualified to chime in on this one. Three years ago, I attended a bachelorette party at a club with one (I thought) close friend and a few casual friends and friends-of. (I was apparently close enough to be invited to the party.)
Anyway, after two cocktails (TWO!) I started barfing and lost pretty much all muscle control. Apparently I started asking for my husband. The ladies were kind enough to drive me back to the friend’s house and abandon me in the gravel driveway; Then-Friend’s then-husband, and my still-husband, carried me to my parents’ house a block away, and from there we set out for the hospital. My BAC was around 0.20; hospital staff said the savant tending bar had managed to cram six shots of SOMETHING into both of those girl-drinks.
The rest of the party? They continued club-hopping, with some of them also upchucking at some point over the course of the night. When Friend’s husband called to ask her to pop in and speak to police, she whined that she didn’t want to. Both husbands, my parents, and everyone else were pretty disgusted. We still talk about it now.
My actual (and still) best friend was not a party guest. She got the early-morning phone call and hightailed it to the ER to make sure I was OK. On a weeknight.
FWIW, Friend bailed on her husband a year later and declared she was living a lie and never liked any of us at all. We should have had her character pegged already, right? I recognize that my experience was probably radically different from Drugged’s (luckier, in a lot of ways) but looking back, this sort of thing is really where you separate the women from the girls.
I’m frankly appalled at Rosenfeld’s attitude of “it’s my job to provoke a response!”
Rosenfeld’s defensiveness on that point is misguided, but I have actually written an advice column for a newspaper, and I can’t speak for all section editors, but in my experience they do want letters that attract attention and provoke discussion. There’s a conflict there, though, because they also want the letter, and your response, chopped down to the bone for reasons of column inches; the columnist often has exactly zero room for nuance, either finding it or providing it. I have the luxury of printing the letters in their entirety and meandering through my own answer until I find the sweet spot; many columnists don’t, and while this is, now that I think about it, the reason I don’t read other advice columnists, I’m sympathetic to the problem. When you get 200 words total for question and answer, defaulting to glibness is a danger you can’t always avoid.
So, again generally, Rosenfeld’s argument that her mandate is to raise a lightning rod for controversy is not horseshit; this probably is her mandate. It isn’t relevant to her response here, though.
I think of the couple of times I’ve ended up in the ER/ED (once for a gall bladder attack, once because stitches from the subsequent surgery had ripped), and how PISSED my friends were I didn’t call them.
I drove myself/ didn’t want to bother anyone. Yes, I was (and sometimes still am) and idjit. I am lucky to have a network of friends to be my Ersatz family when I live far away.
Rosenfeld’s response…. yuck. Myabe she and Camille Paglia can go collaborate themselves. I won’t be reading her column, since her “apology” was basically saying “suck it.”
To the author of the letter… I hope she was not assaulted, did not contract anything, and doesn’t hang out with those 2 selfish, self-involved bitches she thought were her friends. This holds (as far as I’m concerned) whether this is the 1st or 7th time this has happened. If it’s the 7th, though, I hope that she gets some help. From some real friends.
So, again generally, Rosenfeld’s argument that her mandate is to raise a lightning rod for controversy is not horseshit; this probably is her mandate.
Is it wrong of me, a non-journalist, to say that, if that really is her mandate, then her section editors are freaking irresponsible? I get that they need to protect their publication’s assets and attract readers, but, surely a balance can be found between callousness and dullness? Is that unreasonable to ask of an advice column?
As someone who has blacked out on two separate occasions (years apart), due to an unfortunate trifecta of taking my antidepressants later in the day, eating a light dinner, and one beer more than normal, I can believe that Drugged’s friends were that assholish, based on my own experiences.
I am a total wallflower who doesn’t flirt and is shy in bars and at parties with people I don’t know well. On this occasion, after blacking out, I apparently flirted hardcore with the ex-boyfriend of a casual friend (in front of her). I had never met this guy before and didn’t know he was her ex. I don’t know what happened after that, as apparently I went home in a taxi (I have no idea if someone put me in it or I did it myself). I woke up in my own bed the next morning (thank god), although with a gash on one finger that looked like I slammed it in a car door, and various bruises on my legs.
I also woke up to a pissy message from the above-mentioned casual friend, who well knows my non-flirty, wallflower nature, for being a slut towards her ex-boyfriend. Which was how I found out that it had happened to begin with. All I know of the night is what she told me, as I was too embarrassed about blacking out to ask people what had happened, or how I’d gotten home. This particular girl refused to have anything to do with me again, despite my explanation, and the unusualness of this behavior.
I apparently didn’t occur to her, or anyone else at the time, that anything was out-of-the ordinary about this behavior for me. No one called or texted to check up on me that night or the next day, aside from that pissy email. None of my close girlfriends were at the bar that night (the ones I would trust to take care of me), and I had no sign that any assault had happened, thankfully. But it taught me that we can’t assume that other people will watch out for us.
(And I learned that from now on, if I’m not in my own home, one beer is the limit.)
unless there is a pattern of abuse/bad behavior, i agree- friends do these things.
one morning, i was walking to the bus to get to work, tripped over the curb around some construction, managed to twist my ankle when i fell, causing blood to rush out of my head and me to faint, right there by the construction. i managed to grab a fence rail, keeping me from falling and knocking my head, but still causing a long jagged cut on my neck. i came to with very nice cinstruction guys and passersby checking up on me.
through a stroke of luck, i was actually right in front of a good friend/ex-roommate’s building. they called up to her, and luckily she was still there. she called in late to work, stayed with me outside until the paramedics got there and checked me out, and then walked me back home and tucked me into bed. i’d do the same for her. friends do those things.
I’m glad to see this discussion here, because when I originally read that column, my first thought was “Hmm, either the writer isn’t telling the whole truth about what happened, or she needs to ask herself some hard questions about the people she calls friends.” And when I read Rosenfeld’s response, my thought was, “Wow–Sars would have handled this much better.” Until the letter writer responded with the additional information, there were some holes in the story, but Rosenfeld just filled them in with worst-case blame-the-victim vitriol, rather than just asking questions about the things she didn’t know.
Also, I don’t agree that one’s “life situation” should move you further down the call list. Unless my “situation” is that I have two broken legs and can’t get out of bed, my friends better damn well call me if they need help at 4 am. I’m married with kids, but that doesn’t change how I feel about my friends, and I have a husband who is an adult and perfectly capable of taking care of his children while I help a friend in need. If one of my married-with-kids friends needs help, then I’d hope that her husband would call me to stay with their kids while he went to the ER at 4 am, because I know they’d do the same for me.
Rosenfeld’s idea that girlfriends are only useful until you have a boyfriend or spouse is insulting and antiquated.
I am powerfully reminded of an episode of “WKRP In Cincinnati” when Jennifer (Loni Anderson) was drafted to helm an on-air advice segment. She got flip and basically said “Well, dump him” to a woman who turned out to be in an abusive and dangerous relationship, and boy howdy was there follow-up and remorse. I remember this ep thirty years after it aired, so – yeah. One needs must be careful about glibness, no matter the “professional” (and *ahem* to that usage, in Rosenfeld’s case) constraints. Good lord.
Sars, you ARE pretty excellent, and we’re glad you get to do the Vine on your own terms. They’re good terms, considerate of your readers and letter-writers. Thanks.
I see the “if you don’t like it, don’t read it” and the “it’s my job to provoke” as kind of the same thing. In both cases, she’s not really wrong; as Sarah says, nobody chooses advice column letters they think nobody will care about, and it is in fact true that when you choose to read things, you are not a draftee in the Army, and you are not put upon just because you may not like it, which is how people frequently behave.
But even though those are both very understandable things to think, neither of them answers the complaint, “You gave this woman bad/insensitive advice.” If somebody’s saying, “You’re stupid week in and week out and I wish you’d never been born,” then it’s kind of logical to ask them why they read your work knowing they will hate it. But if it’s a substantive disagreement, you can’t really argue it can be solved by “don’t read it.” And provoking a good response without compromising the content is, frankly, the writer’s problem to solve. It’s really challenging and I think many writers sympathize, but if people think you missed the mark editorially, they’re not going to care that you feel what are ultimately commercial pressures.
small point to clarify for Nina, who said:
“The one part that confuses me is didn’t Drugged say that her friends told her to go back to the club and they would call an ambulance — but that she called them after she woke up in the ER? She wasn’t defending or further explaining that in her follow up letter so it obviously made sense to her in some way.”
According to her letter, she came to in the ER, called her mother and her erstwhile companions (NOT friends!), and finally got a begrudging ride home. She later pieced together events of the evening, and learned that she had called the companions while disoriented in the street, and that they had arranged for an ambulance. So, when she called them from the ER she was apparently unaware that she had already called them earlier.
It does surprise me that she didn’t mention, in her original letter, the reason the companions got pissy and left her there. However, I assume that either she didn’t have that information at the time she wrote the original letter (she says it fell into place “later” but I’m unclear as to how much later, or later in relation to what), OR that she was trying to keep it as neutral as possible and didn’t want to sound like she was trying to “influence the judges,” as it were, by painting the companions as the hateful, emotionally-stunted rejects they seem to be.
I *hope* it was that she didn’t know about it at the time, because it pains me to think she might have known that was their “reason” but still felt conflicted as to whether their behavior was acceptable.
For most people I consider friends, I would be there in a heartbeat. However, there are a few people with whom I am friendly – not friends. I would never leave a bar or club without making sure they were accounted for and fully functional, but on the other hand I would probably not answer a 4 A.M. phone call from them either. This is in part because we’ve had the same “rescue-me” scenarios over and over and over, and in part because I know for a fact they have multiple other 4 A.M. resources – I’m usually the first one on the list, because I work from home, so they reason that I “don’t have to get up for work in the morning.”
However, I have to say honest to God, I think if I answered a 4 A.M. phone call from A WRONG NUMBER that someone was disoriented and weeping in the street or terrified and alone in the ER, I would go. *Extremely* cautiously just in case, but… once you answer that call, as far as I am concerned, you’re In It. If you aren’t willing to be In It, then you don’t answer.
Well, I’m glad I’m not the only shameful nun who made it past 27 without a trip in an ambulance.
I had a close friend–who had two young children and was pregnant with a third–reprimand me for not calling her at 4 a.m. I was also pregnant and discovered that morning sickness + stomach bug = hours of uncontrollable vomiting. I finally decided to drive myself to the hospital (1/2 mile away) while my husband stayed home with our sleeping one-year-old because I didn’t want her hanging out in the ER with a bunch of sick people. We live 2,000 miles away from family, and I didn’t want to bother my friends with kids, so I just went. I got some drugs to stop the vomiting and drove home (against the doctor’s orders) around 4 a.m. When I talked to said friend the next day, she got on my case for not calling her, because that’s what friends are for, even if they have kids.
I also had another friend with a kid help me in a pinch. I had an IUD appointment go awry, and I had to be carted off to the ER along with my six-week-old baby. My husband was at home with our toddler, and I had the only car and both car seats for the kids. This friend drove 20 minutes to the doctor’s office to pick up the toddler’s car seat, drove 30 minutes to my house to get my husband and daughter, drove 30 minutes back to the doctor’s office so he could get the car, then followed him across the street to the ER I was at and then took our toddler to her house for the rest of the day until I was cleared to go home. Yeah, it wasn’t the middle of the night, but it was an all-day thing, and she didn’t hesitate to help–because that’s what friends do, and I’d have done the same for her.
In fact, the moms’ group I used to be in had a whole network of volunteers in place in case one of the members needed help with pregnancy problems, family emergency, etc. It was in Phoenix, which is a very transient place, and many of us didn’t have any family in the state. These women, who all had very young children, were volunteering to be an emergency contact for some future event for some person that they may or may not have known well. It actually makes me a little sad for Rosenfeld that she thinks “friends” aren’t obligated to help out if it’s inconvenient.
I landed in hospital for the first time in my life this year and I’m 31. So clearly I was doing something wrong in my twenties, accorting to this woman. The nature of my work involves short contracts, and I go to where the work is, which means I often end up in new cities with only colleagues, no friends or family. This was the case when I ended up in hospital. I arrived at the hospital at 5am, hoping I would be seen and discharged relatively quickly since the waiting room was empty. Hours later, I was still waiting, so I had to call in to work to let them know I’d be late. My colleague immediately decided I needed someone with me, wouldn’t take my protests seriously, demanded to know who I was friendly with in the company, and within half an hour my boss came in to sit with me. She stayed the whole time I was in there, even though she should have been at work, just keeping me company. She then drove me home, made sure I had food, and relevant drugs, then called at intervals to check up on me. And this was a non-life-threatening medical thing, no suspicion of molestation or anything that would require emotional support. It’s just what you do, and I am still hugely grateful for it.
That said, the tone I got from Rosenfeld’s original response was less mean-spirited vindictiveness, and more that she had just shot off a quick, not-well-thought-out answer that unfortunately revealed some underlying prejudices.
@k.a. — I got the same sense from Rosenfeld’s initial response, that she sort of ran with her initial gut reaction of “I bet her friends thought she was lying, she’s probably pulled stuff like this before” and hadn’t really thought the situation, or her answer, through a whole lot. Which is why I think the “apology” was actually the larger offender. It’s one thing to dash off a slightly thoughtless response on deadline; it’s another to bust out such a snotty defense of your thoughtless response after having 24 hours and a large number of angry comments to help you reflect on the issue.
Are the women at XX just all damaged, and only associate with with similarly damaged people? The tone of this article from today is absolutely infuriating. http://www.doublex.com/blog/xxfactor/devaluing-daughters What kind of people does she hang out with!? I have an older brother and yet my dad still took me and my sister out shooting, showed us how to change the oil in the car, put in a light fixture, etc. If anything, we were pushed to go to college and become professionals even more than our brother was.