Letters to the Editor
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Too Mean!
Ya'll are mean. Give the poor girl a break. Sloane, honey, if this has upset you, you can come over and see me. I can provide you with tea and sympathy (and solve this long running problem while you are here;))!
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RE: Ashley
Take a clue from Diablo Cody: quit stripping and make some art.
Juno wasn't art.
As for this piece, I'd read it if I was in a waiting room, hell, I read it now, but a whole book of stuff like this? Who would read that? It's competent enough but that's about it.
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sorry, it's tedious
The point in criticizing is not to be "mean" to the author, it's to voice an opinion about a trend in contemporary writing. Coming-of-age stories can be good, and the topic of contemporary sexual mores is potentially interesting. But as you read this piece, you can't get away from an awareness of how pleased Crosley is with her self-portrait. The charming flourishes and clever anecdotes aren't as charming or clever as she thinks they are and it becomes distracting.
Good writers are able to write about themselves without being narcissistic. But it requires you to keep the audience in the forefront of your mind--will this really seem illuminating and resonant to people who don't know me, or who don't necessarily live in my world? I'm sure this would be a sparkling piece to Crosley's circle of friends, but it's tedious to those who don't live in that world.
Crosley is young and it shows. Young writers get better by recognizing how their writing reads to outsiders.
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i liked it - might buy the book
All of you uber-critics (those of you who've been published oh-so-many times already) need to shut up and get a life.
It was funny and more intelligent than a lot of what is published these days.
Seriously, what is up with the people posting on salon.com lately? - I feel like I'm reading little green footballs every time I see the comments on this site . . .
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With all respect, XOXO....
You're wrong. This wasn't written by some demobilized African boy soldier. I mean, it's kind've obvious. The obsession with young women? The overly cute phrasings? The whole literariness of the whole thing and the complete lack of touch with reality, as if the author has been hidden up in New Hampshire for the last forty years?
It's J.D. Salinger.
Good try though.
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One-night Stand
This article really goes on doesn't it? I could pretty well summarize my one-night stand experiences thus: I went to a bar, had some drinks, met a woman, we had sex. Why complicate things?
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I feel like i'm taking crazy pills
This essay is about a trite topic. But thats what makes it great! She took a topic that is boring as Hell for most of us and made it into nothing like I've ever read before. I laughed out loud. The thing with the catamarans,The ending wasn’t my favorite (very wink, wink) but I honestly thought the rest of it was basically brilliant. This isn't an essay about sex at all (which made Salon's homepage a bit disappointing, frankly) but it is about something different with an ORIGINAL voice...I can't WAIT to read the collection, assuming it's a bit more varied than this,
non-bitterly yours,
BJ
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Sigh of relief
I was just glad I didn't appear among Crosley's million little pieces. Even I have evaded more than one fragile lit chick with needs--or at least bargained her down to "everything but." If the author really wants a zipless fuck, she needs be less Jong and more Girls Gone Wild. Offer to fuck his body, not his soul. Make whore not love. "Romantic notions" and "one-night stands" are phrases that do not comingle in the same sentence.
OK, there are exceptions. But as a guy, I don't kiss and tell. Or at least not tell to sell. Until my memoir. (I think I'll call it Shattered Ass.) A million bloggers may be giving it up for free, but I admire Crosley's ability to get paid for (not) getting laid.
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Lighten up, people!
You bitch and criticize about this article yet apparently your life is so empty you can not only 'waste' your time reading an article you hate, but you post a detailed bitchfest about the article.
Sad, sad little people.
I thought it was quite a good article. Partly because the first thing I thought (as a 34-year-old man who's never had a one-night stand) was: "She's cute. How hard could it be to have a one-night stand? All she'd have to do is ask me."
I did think it was funny that she intends to have sex with a guy she just met after deciding that he wasn't a 'rapist.' If you're willing to have sex with him, it's impossible for him to be one!
Sloane, keep writing whatever you feel and don't let these bitter people (rejected writers?) get you down.
"These are my opinions...if you don't like them, I have others." - Groucho Marx
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Meh!
Another graduate of the Velvet Jones School of Technology.
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sorry to add to the negativity but...
This story was NOT well-written as many have pointed out. Where are the smart writers?!? And I'm surprised the regular grammar police didn't catch this one: "single-handily". Isn't it supposed to be "single-handedly"?
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Oh, PLEASE.
Sorry, but the "Sexual Adventures of White Girls" genre is annoying for reasons that have nothing to do with the jealousy of unpublished writers. Salon has published many good, provocative essays about sex and searching. This isn't one of them.
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What's so bad about this?
I actually quite enjoyed this piece. Yeah, it's fluffy, but how many times does it need to be pointed out that Salon offers a variety of topics and styles every day; it you want hard news all the time, go to the news sites. Yes, it's obvious Crosely is a young writer; yes, there are shades of callowness and naivete; yes, she'll probably hate this piece in 20 years. But so what? I think it's well written and quite funny, and a nice antidote to the "Girls Gone Wild" view of young white women and sex.
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The topic isn't the problem--the lack of complication is.
The problem isn't the topic--sex can be very interesting. The problem is the lack of complication in the exploration of the topic. Basically the whole essay she is looking for a one-night stand, then at the end, she realizes--surprise, surprise--that she doesn't really need a one-night stand after all. If she had approached the same topic in a less chick-lit way, I think she could have come up with something interesting--there's obviously something complex going on between her desire to be slutty and her fear of being slutty (because, let's face it, without that fear, she would have had her one-night stand the first semester of freshman year). This could be an interesting look at the modern version of the Madonna/Whore complex--but instead it's just light and glib and shellacked in something like Lip Smackers Petal Pink Lip Gloss.
For those of you who suggest you can't criticize unless you can write something better yourself: do I have to be a musician to critique Brittany's latest single? Do I have to be a director to say that "The Patriot" isn't such a great movie? Do I have to be a cook to send my steak back in a restaurant? People have the capacity to judge even what they cannot themselves do.