Objectionable on so many levels

Others have weighed in more eloquently (and likely less eloquently as well) but for the 2 people who haven’t at least heard about it, I think the NYT’s “Modern Love” column has sunk to a new low:

OUR former nanny, a 26-year-old former teacher with excellent references, liked to touch her breasts while reading The New Yorker and often woke her lovers in the night by biting them. She took sleeping pills, joked about offbeat erotic fantasies involving Tucker Carlson and determined she’d had more female sexual partners than her boyfriend.

How do I know these things? I read her blog.

She hadn’t been with us long when we found out about her online diary. All she’d revealed previously about her private life were the bare-bones details of the occasional date or argument with her landlord and her hopes of attending graduate school in the fall.

Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn’t want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I’d just as soon not have to face as well.

I hadn’t exactly been a stranger to the sexual shenanigans of our previous baby sitters. One got pregnant accidentally by her longtime boyfriend and asked me for advice. Another was involved in a mostly off-again relationship with a fidelity-challenged college football player. Yet those were problems I could feel superior to and that made me grateful for the steady routine of marriage and children.

This was something else entirely.

Let’s see. We’ve got an embittered freelance journalist who, I dunno, hasn’t had too many articles printed in newspapers lately (the only ones I could find date back to the late 90s) and when her nanny — probably in the interests of being transparent, not self-serving — gives her the URL of her blog, OMG! She goes bananas. She finds constant references to sex and drinking and can’t handle it any more. And even after firing the girl, she’s still reading her blog. Why? As an exercise in masochism? Because she can’t stop? Very weird.

Now, there are always two sides to every story, and “Tessy” is trying to defend herself after being besmirched in the Gray Lady, but to air this out like this? Something tells me it’s going to be awfully difficult for Ms. Olen to hire a new nanny now…