All worked up about Julia Allison.
As usual, Ms. Allison’s post below makes me feel a mixture of pity, shame and loathing. And then I had a thought:
Maybe Julia Allison is just America’s Rebecca Eckler?
I remember having the same response to Eckler when she had her National Post column - reading her write 1,000 moronic wds about, say, pedicures or jealous friends, and then feeling enraged knowing she made $80,000 a year (reportedly). Now, besides the odd gig in Maclean’s, Eckler is has-been who can’t get work. Eventually, whatever editors were dazzled by her realized it was an embarrassment to them to publish her.
Good news is, the industry Allison is in doesn’t want to hear what she’s saying after she turns 30, which is in 3 years, I think. Dating advice or celebrity gossip can only legitimately come from young people who don’t have enough experience and maturity to know that both conceits are totally fucking retarded.
Unless she develops her journalistic skills beyond narcissism and braindead muck-raking, she’s done for. I’m not saying I condone that her industry has no time for over-30 women, but I’ll be damned if it ain’t true. No one wants to hear about Jessica’s Simpson’s lipgloss from someone who’s old enough to know there are more important things in life. It draws painful attention to the pathos of the whole affair.
So yeah: 3 years, a short-lived blog about planning her wedding, and then via con dios, Allison. She doesn’t appear to have any plans beyond catching a man and blogging about herself, so I don’t see how she’ll continue to get work. I know that’s fucked up, but I didn’t make the rules, Jules: fact is, if you want to be taken seriously, you have to offer insight and wisdom to others, which most clearly, you do not.
Sigh. Sometimes I read her blog and I am really tempted to email her. The transparent attempts to manipulate men are so painful - the casual mentions of ex-boyfriends that she seems to think *don’t* stick out as out-of-context attempts to make her seem desirable, the mentions of vapid “interests” when it becomes clear to her that she’s shown too much of her hand, man-trapping- wise. The passive-aggressive behavior is made all the more astounding by the fact that she refuses to cop to it. She genuinely believes that she’s pulling the wool over people’s eyes. On the deluded index, she’s up there with those obese women on Jerry Springer dressed in spandex mini’s, screaming “Y’all just jealous” at their loved ones who’d like them to cover up.
As I’ve said to you before, she’s creeps me out because you just know she’s “pictured her wedding dress since she was 5” and all that other ridiculous crap that women do to set their whole happiness to finding a man.
I may sound bitter, but Jesus, when this woman walks around claiming to be a feminist and a writer, and then betrays the basic principles of both, then I get fucking mad. Allison’s cloaking of her scheming narcissism in the guise of women’s liberation makes it that much harder for the rest of us to be respected as writers or even as a woman in general. Equality of gender may mean that both sexes can be self-absorbed assholes if they want to, but what I object to is that she’s given the opportunity to promote her lifestyle of me-firstism as some sort of empowerment to the female gender at large.
Manipulators like Julia Allison, who are given platform to spread their toxic, regressive views, are the reason that reasonable women have to spend so long convincing dudes we might like to hang out with that our sole ambition isn’t trying to trap them with our vaginas.
E.C.
Okay now I’m mad too. I should really stop reading her blog. All the above notwithstanding, she’s clearly a lonely person looking for love. I will spend the rest of the afternoon searching my soul for an ounce of compassion for her.
