I have been avoiding blogging about this lady for a while so as not to seem like a psychotroll, and also because I could write a fucking book on the psychodrama that is her current anti-marriage schtick, the TLDRness of which would surely lose me many followers. 

But yowza, parsing time:

So if it isn’t clear: I am a complete and utter mess. I’m incredibly scatter-brained and would never, ever get anything done if I didn’t live with Patrick. We are, in many ways, embodiments of our respective cultural stereotypes — me, the flaky, disorganized, overly emotional writer and him, the stoic, efficient, neat freak German.

And I’m not just saying this because it’s so super endearing and oh watch me go frolic in my La La Land of carelessness. It’s actually annoying as fuck that being clean and together doesn’t come naturally to me. Taxes every year are a nightmare because I keep all my receipts in a cardboard box. (And I’m a freelancer. Who has to itemize deductions. FML.) …

Anyway, I say all this not to solicit affirmation that I am, indeed, an adult, but to debunk the notion that I am soooo together and soooo perfect and someone to aspire to be. Because occasionally, I meet some lovely people who read my blog and express the above lovely sentiments, and I’m afraid that my online persona does not accurately reflect the reality. Which is that I am not together and not perfect and probably not someone you actually want to emulate. (I mean, really, have you seen my Google results?) And as much as I would love for y’all to marinate in my wonderfulness, I think it’s totally a necessary experience to see someone you idolize fall flat on their face and emerge as a real person, because hello, who needs idols? I’m just a girl with a blog.

I suppose there are worse women than Lena Chen for teenage girls to idolize. And her acknowledgment that one must wield that power wisely and delicately is admirable. But dude, telling a bunch of 17-year-old budding feminists that “OMG I don’t clean my room either!” is not the enlightened path to humility and full disclosure.* These teenage girls look up to Lena Chen not because her life is perfect—although, in a shallow sense, I can definitely get how it could appear that way to a casual reader—but because she pretends to have the answers to everything all the time. The girls who write into her don’t seem like dumb groupies, but like genuine young women who want answers to really difficult questions about sex, relationships, education, feminism, ethics, and politics. Lena is all too happy to provide these black-and-white answers without the caveat that maybe she doesn’t know what the fuck she is talking about, or is wrong sometimes, or on occasion reconsiders her assumptions and values.** 

So I don’t know, maybe the first step to handling fawning fans with care (or the second, after admitting you live like a college sophomore) would be to acknowledge that as a 23-year-old who’s like 3 days out of college, you don’t have the answers to all of life’s big questions. Lena is in a good, even enviable, position to push debate about those questions in a productive direction, but to pretend she is authorized to answer them is borderline irresponsible.

And yes, I know that Lena Chen is a personal essayist/blogger who is entitled—under first amendment rights, feminist principle, and the general cost-effective space-filling techniques of women’s lifestyle website editors—to voice her experiences and opinions (even though she wants to have it both ways by calling all criticisms of her articles that address that highly subjective framework “ad hominem attacks”). But I cannot, for the love of me I cannot, read another piece on the validity of marriage for everyone everywhere by a 23-year-old who doesn’t have kids, doesn’t want kids, has faced no major financial crises, and whose longest relationship has lasted three years.*** Just because some Chinese relative was pestering her about getting hitched doesn’t mean the rest of the world considers her to be a super-subversive spinster-by-choice. She hasn’t sacrificed anything for her op-ed ideas: she’s barely had time to live them! As a young person prone to talking shit about shit I don’t fully understand, I know this when I see it. And wow, is it the worst.

*Also, you’d think a full-time freelancer who writes a regular series on how to be a freelancer would be filing her taxes quarterly, but I guess the IRS and I will have to chalk that up to another one of Lena’s humanizing imperfections.

**One of very few things I’ve learned post college is that we could all benefit from this, periodically. The ability to grow and change and adapt your values to your ever-accumulating life experience, without being psychologically paralyzed by that process, is one of the hardest things I’ve had to learn, and I’m still working on it.

***And before I get the husband-crazy-dumb-bitch eyerolls: I’m the first to admit that marriage hasn’t changed my relationship (short of this year’s tax return). But that doesn’t mean that events and circumstances won’t drastically change or test our relationship down the road. And that is why you make commitments, like marriage or other legal/personal contracts! From one writer to another, the limits of this woman’s imagination and empathy (at least as they come across on the page) terrify me. Her inability to conceive of why you should support gay people’s right to marry even if you think marriage is the worst is actually the source of 95 percent of my LC-related rage. (The other 5 percent stems from the fact that I never won the dildo giveaways.)

For more in the series go here, &c. &c. Or just stop now.

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