The Mirror

Female Media Writer: ‘At Work, I Was Sobbing. After Dark I Was F**king’

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Betsy Rothstein Gossip blogger
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Interacting with men while being an editor in the #MeToo era isn’t easy.

And considering what is about to be unleashed here, that is the understatement of 2019.

Just ask Columbia Journalism Review‘s Lyz Lenz, who just wrote a very very personal essay for Glamour about all the men she fucked (her word) by night and all the women she wept for by day— including herself — because of the way men had treated her and them.

Lenz’s story could be the setup for almost any “Law & Order: SVU” episode. Then again, she writes a newsletter called “Men Yell At Me,” which her website describes as the following: “From getting yelled at by the founder of Axios to lactating in front of Anderson Cooper, Lyz’s weekly newsletter shows the weird, fun, horrible reality behind a lifetime of writing.”

Another description reads: “Behind-the-scenes stories from a life of reporting and making men mad.”

She has a flair for writing probing, personal pieces — about herself. In July 2018, Lenz wrote about how her then-husband hid a bunch of her things during their marriage and made her seem like she was losing it. He once hid a sign that read, “Drink Up, Witches.” Later in the story, she cries.

In September 2018, she wrote the strangest profile of sorts on Fox News contributor and Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson. The story starts out with him “shouting” at her because this is her thing. Get it? She writes about the men who yell at her, so obviously, Carlson was going to do just that in her piece. The story is more about her than him. Which is an odd thing to do in a profile.

At various points in the piece on Carlson, she breaks into a mini-personal essay:

I’m a single mom, a freelance writer with two kids, swiftly facing a future with no healthcare. I’m cobbling together ghostwriting jobs, but it’s not enough. I tell Carlson this and he tells me it’s ‘all impressive.’ The implication is clear. It’s fine for me, but he’s not good at that sort of thing.” A few sentences later, she wrote about how she just applied for a job at Starbucks. She ends her piece by plugging her brand: “All I know is he was definitely shouting.

In the most recent Glamour piece, she starts off daydreaming about what she wants to do with men in a Lyft. Not X-rated graphic. More like R or PG-13.

But it was 2017, “a very bad time to be in love with men.”

By day, she consumed stories from women who had been “hurt” by men. “I would edit them and cry,” she wrote, not explaining how she knew which stories were true, which ones were exaggerated or which ones weren’t true at all.

She apparently automatically believed them all.

Lenz wrote about her divorce, during which her then-husband wrote her letters telling her how “horrible” she was.

At work and at home, men were ripping her apart at the seams. But somehow, all Lenz wanted to do was “touch them, taste them.” She “craved” them.

She had shared this much. Why stop there?

Lenz wrote about her lengthy virginity, the man in college who made fun of her for everything under the sun, including her crooked teeth. He was particularly vindictive— after she dumped him, he slept with a bunch of her friends. No talk of how shitty her friends were. He was the bad one. She also dated a dreamy man who turned out to be gay.

She plodded through her marriage and divorce. She also paints him as the bad guy, which perhaps he was given what she says about him.

Which brings us to all that fucking.

She dated “bad men” who sent her dick pics and sometimes wore condoms.

“At work, I was sobbing,” she wrote. “And after dark, I was fucking.”

Lenz introduced us to her litany of men — the poet, the lawyer, the politician, the married guy, the professor who left bruises and more. Which brings us to her Christine Blasey Ford moment from college.

“I sat on my bed and sobbed,” she wrote.

She ended her piece on a sour note about hemorrhaging her desire.

Earlier in the essay, she described a difficult childbirth in which she hemorrhaged and made a joke about Omaha Beach and all that blood on the floor.

Nothing about this gut-spilling essay is pretty, nor was it intended to be.

This is, however, what passes for brave writing in the continuing #MeToo era.