Aaron Lefkove gave us a great interview with Emily Gould over at Jewcy.  I’ve gotten a ton of good feedback about it, but some of the comments and various tweets I’ve gotten in response have been, eh, unfriendly.

From the interview:

What is it that gives people a license too hide behind some wall of virtual anonymity and really just rip into someone else?

When my boyfriend’s book came out he did this great interview with Young Manhattanite and he said something that I think about a lot, which is that “I know exactly what kind of asshole I am, and it’s a different kind of asshole from the one depicted on Gawker, etc.”.  It’s hard to have insight into why people feel they have license to be so awful and also just as hard to see why people also have such really extreme intense positive reactions, which happen in equal measure although the people with the really positive reactions don’t seem to be as vocal on the internet because they are sane and happy. There is all this stuff swirling around about this horrible fear that people have about the amateurization of what used to be a professional field which is writing and also issues that people have about women being honest about things like sex and money where fear just gets transformed into hate.

From a comment:

She’s a creepy, disturbingly passive/aggressive woman, and yet she
has the audacity to play the role of confused innocent as to why there
are so many darn meanies out there.  And there’s Aaron, completely
ignoring the elephant in the room.

So what’s the deal?  Gould is a smart, articulate person, and before I handed off her book to the Aaron for the interview I thumbed through it and it seemed interesting.

So why do people get so kvetchy about her?