It’s the age of personal experience. But once you share, you no longer really own your story
“I thought that review was judgmental and talked about me as if I were an idiot and not a journalist and not somebody who has written bestselling books and award-winning articles,” said the (for the record) bestselling and award-winning writer Nancy Jo Sales on the Femsplainers Podcast, in what was definitely the most revealing interview I encountered last week. Sales, probably best known for her work in Vanity Fair, has written a book, Nothing Personal, about online dating culture, following on from her documentary, Swiped, and 2015 Vanity Fair feature on the subject. In all of her takes on this issue, Sales concludes that these apps are bad for women, and she bases this at least partly on her own experience: “I realised this is really not fun in the way sex is supposed to be. A lot of it is bad for women. The guy doesn’t know you or care about you,” she said in the interview.
I fully own up to not having read Sales’s book yet. But, judging from what she has said, I gather it focuses on her online dating experience, and she hasn’t particularly liked some critics’ take on that. The review she described as “judgmental” was in the New York Times, and her Femsplainers interview didn’t go much better. The interviewer, Danielle Crittenden, said maybe the reason Sales, 56, found the apps so dismaying was that, despite saying she was looking for “companionship”, she said in her dating profile that she was looking for men in their 20s, and she would then invite them over for casual sex.
