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Young Women Acting Unbecomingly

Emily wonders whether what would once be seen as merely "youthful error" is far more perilous to a girl’s reputation in the Internet age than it was a decade ago when Emily was in her 20s.

Lizz Winstead’s video interview with Jezebel's two founders, Tracy and Moe, showcasing the edgy young bloggers' drunk appearance on Winstead's oxymoronically named stage program "Thinking and Drinking,” turned into a full-out public trainwreck after Winstead ungenerously uploaded the conversation over at HuffPost.

The raw nature of the self-exposure displayed by the two inebriated women reminded me of a young exhibitionist woman in Emily’s age cohort, Elizabeth Wurtzel, the talented but personally undisciplined author of three memoirs. Wurtzel’s 1994 Prozac Nation, subtitled “Young and Depressed in America,” was a self-indulgent best-seller published when she was 26. She went on to write two more confessional books, Bitch in 1998 (which featured the naked author on the cover), and, perhaps predictably, by 2002, a sad chronicle of Wurtzel’s struggles with addiction.

Fortunately for Wurtzel, now 40, F. Scott Fitzgerald was wrong.  There are second acts in American life.  Wurtzel, who complained to a Canadian reporter that the outpouring of grief following 9/11 was misplaced (“I just felt, like, everyone was overreacting”), was favorably profiled in the New York Times last year. She had re-invented herself and was attending Yale Law School. In March, in a Los Angeles Times editorial, Wurtzel counseled college coeds that spending “spring break in a shower with your roommate in Daytona Beach” for the cameras of Girls Gone Wild is a bad idea. So, Emily, though your concern for Tracy and Moe is well-founded, we can be optimistic they will withstand public approbation and recover nicely. Apparently even overexposed divas eventually grow up.