Is Penelope Trunk Too Old For The Overshare?
If you’re at all plugged into the blogosphere, you might have been privy to this week’s tempest in a teapot – the brouhaha surrounding career expert/blogger Penelope Trunk’s tweet about experiencing a miscarriage during a board meeting and her expressed relief at the fact that this meant she wouldn’t have to schedule an abortion.
No small part of the umbrage is moral in nature (and this isn’t the time or the place to deconstruct those critiques), but even among those of us who ARE strongly pro-choice feminists (I’m most certainly in this camp), there are many who couldn’t help but raise an eyebrow at Trunk’s TMI. I took exception to her overshare for a couple of reasons.
Trunk bills herself as a career expert (full disclosure: I enrolled my other site in her Brazen Careerist social network a few months ago, but am not an active member), but tweeting about one’s health issues and/or announcing to one’s board of directors that you need to take time off from work for an abortion doesn’t seem like savvy workplace behavior. Rather, it reads like a tone-deaf lack of judgment. What happened to the conventional edict about not mixing business and personal? It’s frowned upon to make out with a coworker in the copy room (not that I’ve necessarily ever worked with anyone I’d deem make-out worthy, but still), but discussing your colonoscopy appointment, plans for a vasectomy and/or need to have that boil on your lower back lanced should be viewed as a dose of much needed frankness? No, we shouldn’t treat workers as robots and our fellow employees as caricatured cardboard cut-outs, but at the same time, the work environment defines certain limited roles for us. There’s collegiality and support and then there’s discussing your wife’s gambling addiction or the details of your brother-in-law’s gastric bypass surgery around the water cooler to the mortification of your fellow cube-dwellers. The need for a line is clear and I can’t think of too many scenarios in which real-time, on-the-job tweeting about your graphic health issues wouldn’t constitute crossing it and actually contribute to creating an impression of yourself that hinges on factors other than your actual job performance, accomplishments and workplace social skills – all of which I’m guessing most people would still prefer to retain as the currency in which their careers are valued.
Also, we tend to associate TMI with people who aren’t old enough to know better. Miley Cyrus posing on the cover of a magazine wrapped only in a sheet, your 17 year-old sister posting facebook photos of herself double-fisting jello shots, Vanessa Hudgens sending nude pics to her former Disney co-stars, these moves all smack of youthful folly and lack of common sense. Stupid stuff, but we’re inclined (for better or worse) to write them off as short-sighted mistakes, the fallout of which should serve as an object lesson against repeat offenses.
Those in their teens and early 20s have grown up alongside burgeoning digital technology. They can hardly (if at all) remember a time before the internet, cell phones, social networking and their understanding of the boundaries between the public and the private spheres are profoundly different from those of use who have clearer memories of a pre 24/7 global connectivity world. Believe it or not, kiddos, there was a time before online behavioral marketing, before deep packet inspection, before the Patriot Act, before Google drove by to take candid shots of your front door. God, I’m not even 30 and I can remember this bygone era as if it were last week. And my memories of a world with greater anonymity and more clearly defined and upheld definitions of personal privacy color my interaction with technology.
I hold no illusions that I don’t have an electronic trail as long as my arm and I accept that I can’t keep former flames and high school classmates from reading my blog, but I do try to keep whatever e-privacy cards I still hold as close to the vest as possible (hint: opt out of everything now. Go ahead, I’ll wait). That’s at the root of why I assumed a successful 42 year-old professional who bills herself as an expert in her field and has devoted a blog and social networking website to helping Gen Y develop and manage their personal brands would exercise a little more caution about how she chooses to shape her own.
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Penelope is my cousin, so I’m biased on most questions involving her. That’s my disclosure.
That being said, if you think she’s too old for oversharing, well, I’m not sure you get her whole thing. Penelope has been oversharing since the mid-90s when she published a hypertext ‘book’ online. It’s just what she does.
And I think the idea that ‘oversharing’ about ‘personal’ issues sort of tracks to a pair of issues that Americans in the workforce don’t like to confront.
First up, our country works way too hard. When you consider our national vacation time deficit, the idea that you have a vast amount of ‘personal’ space in your life just doesn’t add up.
Second, we still rely heavily on this ‘employment at will’ model where employers can fire you for just about any transgression.
I think Penelope is arguing, if not as persuasively as she might because she so often gets tripped up by the tangled shoelaces of her personal life, that there are situations when we need to have a certain amount of care for personal issues in our offices. Especially with more and more women having more and more senior positions in the workforce, and the complexities of reproductive health, it just seems humane to me. Perhaps Penelope is not the best leader on this issue, for a variety of reasons. But she’s at least a powerful agent provocateur in a world where a lot of women still hit ceilings in their climb because they also want to have babies.
You raise a good point, Michael. And it’s one that I’ve been giving a lot of thought to, but didn’t address in the column because A) it deserves its own full treatment and B) I’m still wrapping my head around the central thesis, namely the differences in intellectual space and tone afforded male vs. female experts in the blogosphere (hate the word, but what can you do?). Can women be seen to write authoritatively/prescriptively for a unisex audience without having to edit themselves for any and all discussions of the female-specific challenges of the corporate world? Is there a difference between the sexes in the qualities we value in a subject area expert, i.e., relatability vs. a facade of infallibility? Etc, etc. I do agree that Penelope Trunk’s writing, whether she intends it to do so or not (and much credit to her if it is purposeful), tests these assumptions and possible biases and serves as a very interesting case study.
I went back and read her post about this. I agree with her on one key point — which is how hard it is get an abortion. She was shocked by that. She was shocked that everyone’s reactions to this post focused on her oversharing or how gross it is (please, a miscarriage is just as gross as new moms who consistently overshare about all their pains and leaks for mass readership.)
Abortions need to be easily and quickly available to women who need them. That’s her underlying point and it’s gotten buried in this faux drama. That’s worth about a dozen blog posts right there.
Women should write whatever they think is interesting — as men do — and let the chips fall where they may. The one thing blogs do better than any print publication I’ve ever read is let women speak their bloody minds, unedited, unPC-ed, unsanitized by what other women editors (and men, but women exert tremendous peer pressure on one another) think is a fair topic of conversation. I give her credit for being smart and honest, not just pandering and titillating.
I agree re: the barriers to abortion and the need for that to be the takeaway message (although I’m not sure if that was the original aim of PT’s tweet vs. a post-hoc framing). If that was her aim, I think a blog post using the miscarriage as an object lesson would have achieved that end, allowed PT more direct control over the message and have significantly reduced the amount of issue-obfuscating media static and debate (for better or worse?) her 140 characters spawned.
So the medium — a tweet — ruined the message? I don’t use Twitter nor follow it, partly because the reduction of one’s arguably complex life to 140 characters (or whatever) seems bizarre to me, no matter how wildly popular it is.
IMO, the 140-character constraints of Twitter absolutely mean that it isn’t the medium through which to have a robust discussion of a given issue or present a thesis that requires any sort of persuasive unpacking (different rules apply for breaking news, obviously). Good for linking to such a discussion or perhaps retweeting it with your opinion as a frame, but nothing much more substantive than that.
In response to another comment. See in context »I don’t think Twitter is a problem here. If Penelope only used Twitter and refused to communicate over any other medium, I might catch your drift. But she started the discussion there, expanded upon it on her blog, and kept it going on CNN. She’s a multiple media threat who uses all of these platforms interchangeably.
Saying Twitter is the wrong medium is like saying someone shouldn’t tell you they got a new job while running into you on the street for a minute and then having to go. You can call them up later, and continue the discussion when you have more time, finding out about what the job is, what your friend actually does, whether they like it, how much they get paid, etc.
And I’ll note, after seeing all the people who called Penelope a pig, an attention whore, etc., in the comments of her blog, having more than 140 characters doesn’t strike me as being a necessity for having a kinder conversation.
In response to another comment. See in context »While she did blog about the issue, that was days after the tweet and in response to the unanticipated “uproar” (her word). Would she have blogged about it if it hadn’t created said uproar? I have no idea. Did she send that tweet knowing that it would garner the attention that it did and that she could use this attention to discuss the issue of access to abortion? I don’t see evidence of this, ergo my suggestion that an initial blog post would have been a more expedient way to raise this issue vs. trying to harness and direct the media maelstrom. Caitlin’s comment sums it up nicely, “If your point is that important, say it in a format where people will take it seriously. I doubt that a tweet is the first, best choice for anything of this sort.”
My original objections remains – A) I don’t think this is a savvy example to follow for someone (male or female) at the bottom of the corporate ladder (aka her Gen Y audience). B) I take the revealing of highly personal digital details to largely be the domain of the young and naive and would assume a greater correlation between age and regard for offline privacy. Obviously, PT blows this thesis out of the water (and has throughout her writing career, according to Michael). My points aren’t predicated on the substance of her tweet. I would have had the same reaction to what I deemed to be an overshare on the part of a male blogger of her stature.
In response to another comment. See in context »Whoa there… while I can appreciate your irritation with Penelope’s candor and understand your objection to her giving this much personal information as a career expert (for Gen Y especially), I think you’ve gone a bit overboard here. I could be your age–if you were in your 40s, let’s say, and had to deal with a miscarriage while at work (like I did years ago), you might be more open to seeing that although the two topics seem wholly unrelated, they actually aren’t as wholly unrelated as you want them to be. Unlike you I am one of those strongly pro-choice feminists (and come back to me when you’ve got a daughter of your own who deserves the right to control what happens to her body). And for me, I’m open to considering that Penelope may have crossed a line, but I like and admire her. Her writing about divorce and kids and dating–in addition to her workplace advice–has been entertaining and comforting to me. She’s got a terrific voice–she’s not afraid to say what’s on her mind, because I think she knows it’s on a lot of other minds too, and that we don’t always have the courage to write what we really think.
As a woman I find it far, far more upsetting that’s it’s so damned hard to end an unwanted pregnancy–safely and early–in Wisconsin and other states. Her tweet may have been a little coarse for the boardroom, but that’s reality. There’s a lot that doesn’t belong in a boardroom–like old boys’ clubs, sexism, etc.
To clarify, as I stated in the piece, I absolutely and unequivocally AM a pro-choice feminist. Period. Full stop. I would hate for there to be any ambiguity on this point.
In response to another comment. See in context »There is no way to have a lucid or thoughtful conversation about abortion in a tweet or a single blog post. So I disagree about Twitter — and feel free to educate me some more on this point.
If you tweet something, maybe you are convinced you’re so deeply interesting people will in fact return for the details of the longer/nuanced/thoughtful version — as in your conversation at a later date analogy.
But where’s the proof of this assertion? Really.
Hey, it’s great that Penelope has access to so many channels of distribution for her ideas, but she’s hardly typical and assuming that CNN is going to call you you up are give you some airtime to expand your original point would include .000002% of people out there trying to make a point on anything.
I, too, have ridden the media wave, going from the NYT to Brian Lehrer show to CNN on one hot topic within the space of four days. Whole lotta airtime to make my points, right? Not. Sound bites are still only sound bites, no matter how many platforms you can find. And people will still distort/edit/twist your original message(s) to suit their needs.
What seems to happen most often when some provocative/gross idea goes viral is some bizarre catalytic combustion where emotion and opinion take over like a raging wildfire, drowning out all vestige of the original point Trunk made (and this is hardly unique to her), and whatever more subtle ideas she had hoped to actually convey. At that point, who cares? Really? It’s so much more amusing to most people to trash and burn rather than discuss a complex issue.
I think it’s hopelessly naive to think or expect people will come stampeding back to your original post(s) — especially if they’ve never heard of or read Ms. Trunk (I am one of them) — after hearing the insanely titillating/judgmental/nasty gossip about what she said. It’s sooooo much more fun to slag someone and keep it going than, hmmmm, find out what it was they were actually trying to say in the first place.
If your point is that important, say it in a format where people will take it seriously. I doubt that a tweet is the first, best choice for anything of this sort.
JMH,
I think what makes it a problem is who she shared with. The whole world. A tweet, a blog, an interview, anyone can find them. I was recently reminded of this myself, and it is a little intense to realize that what we say can be seen by ANYONE. Therein lies the problem in this case. Its not like she was sharing with her good friends, pals she has developed that kind of relationship with.
I’m coming to this conversation a full two months late, but I feel so strongly I had to leave a comment. Pen is my friend. We met on a career-writers panel at some godawful PR luncheon years ago. I found (and still find) her wicked smart and funny and so completely without pretension that I wondered if it was an act.
Michael is right: she’s all about the TMI. It’s her thang. Her career advice is usually contrarian. Who cares? She’s thoroughly entertaining and passionate and true. And I’d rather read her blog than any other, including my own.
I guess what I’m saying is: lay off, sister.