Jezebel Editor Jia Tolentino Joins the New Yorker

The banality of casual smartphone use has obscured a thrilling modern day privilege: we can read wherever we like. Whereas residential toilets have doubled as studies since the advent of the out-house, now bar restrooms and port-o-potties afford a dip into news or gossip, pulp or The Canon. Memories of reading, in turn, invoke bygone places — conversations overheard, sights seen, and yes, odors endured.

This is all to say that I remember exactly where I was when I read Jia Tolentino’s “No Offense,” one of the best essays published on the internet last year. Hunched over my iPhone, I zoomed down the Amazon river on a 60-person pontoon boat. Dense rain forest sprawled in every direction. Grey clouds collected overhead. Drizzle began slowly, then picked up.

I didn’t stop reading.

Late last week, Tolentino announced her departure from Jezebel, where she has worked as an editor, and frequent contributor, for the past two years. She embodied the best of blogging, a carnivorous mind with alternately bracing and elegant prose that turned anything it touched — and I mean anything, from a Chipotle Burrito to gender politics to hair bleach — into gold, then mold, then gold again. For Tolentino, everything is high stakes; for Tolentino, nothing is too grave for a joke.

She is perhaps best known for wading into the controversy over the so-called child molestation described in Lena Dunham’s memoir, “Not That Kind of Girl.” To this day, if you google “Jia Tolentino,” the sixth item listed links to an article called, “Does Jia Tolentino of Jezebel and The Hairpin Support Sexually Abusing Children?” by conservative blogger Matt Forney. All anyone needs to know about Forney is that, on his website’s “About” page, he counts “traditional sex roles” as one of his thematic preoccupations.

After calling Tolentino an “abhorrent individual,” Forney concludes with a heartfelt admonition: “Any magazine or website interested in publishing her writing would be advised to think twice.” The New Yorker — Not Any Kind of Magazine — has kindly demurred. Tolentino will soon join its website as a staff writer.

Upon hearing the news, I exulted. THE NEW YORKER?! The move wasn’t entirely surprising, since Tolentino had already freelanced for stalwarts like the New York Times Magazine, and even the New Yorker itself. But still, THE NEW YORKER?! As Bob Dylan, embracing his inner hallmark card, might say, she built a ladder to the stars and climbed on every rung. She made it.

But anxiety over the move soon followed. The ethos of Jezebel — owned by the petulant, if ailing, Gawker Media — runs counter to the stodgy, risk averse, obsessive grammarian that is the New Yorker. Old Media has pilfered one of New Media’s best. The anarchic promise of the internet has yet again capitulated to the stable hierarchy (and higher pay) of an aging institution. Rather than perk up at a new, long Tolentino piece uploaded to my iPhone on the last gasp of wifi before a pontoon boat trip, I’ll receive her work in predictable fashion — once or twice per week — in careful rations of groomed New Yorker prose.

Tolentino appears to share at least a hint of my misgivings. In a final Jezebel post announcing her departure, she revered “Gawker Media’s horizontal organization and editorial independence” which “facilitates mistakes and transgressions and also makes possible every single good thing we are able to do.” This is something no one has, or ever will, say about the New Yorker. Far from any semblance of horizontal organization, its offices reside in a building 1,776 feet tall.

So why, then, did she go?

Besides the fact that workers in any profession should go wherever they damn well please; and besides the fact that, for generations, a writer’s choosing to work at the New Yorker has never begged further explanation; let me posit a theory.

It brings us back to “No Offense.” Tolentino’s magnum Jezebel opus, the piece harshly criticizes the “’get offended at this post” which she calls “a classic Jezebel category” that “has always been overrepresented by virality and exacerbated by the problem of tonal register.” She derides the genre not so much for its cheap thrill but for the thought-policing on which it depends. She hates telling women what they should hate. “It’s easy to look around at the unappealing buffet of identity and establish who you are by deciding first who you don’t want to be,” she wrote. Skeptical of consensus, she thrived on contrast for contrast’s sake. Sure, sometimes her articles drew a line, albeit squiggly, between feminism and its opposite, but just as often they sought out the rich ground upon which reasonable, empowered women (and their male allies) can disagree. Or she shifted the terrain completely, as in her report on UVA sorority rush after the debunking of Rolling Stone’s “A Rape On Campus,” in which she devoted almost as much attention to Greek life’s racial divisions as she did to its gender ones.

In “No Offense,” she seems exasperated. Her voice hoarse from screaming. “The offense model has failed, and dramatically,” she laments. She is suspicious of easy consensus, as she associates it with the patriarchal demand for conciliatory women. Instead, she craves individuation. “The only person who will ever perfectly agree with my politics is me,” she asserts, offering up a tautology so obvious as to be revolutionary within the confines of the outrage-industrial complex.

Maybe she left Jezebel for prestige or a broader beat or the chance to work alongside two women — Kathryn Schultz and Emily Nussbaum — who won pulitzer prizes in 2016.

Or maybe she no longer was the kind of girl that Jezebel needed her to be.