Although Emin does not see herself as a celebrity, she has become somewhat of a famous figure, even outside the art world. She has laid her life bare, exposed her history of abuse and depression within her art, which, coupled with her drunken appearance on live television, has made her into an attractive subject for scandalized discussion. But Emin still finds herself surprised when she is recognized on the street. She says,

"When people recognise me, they say strange things like, ‘I knew it couldn't be you'...

"But it is me. Anyway I'm not a celebrity I'm an artist. I do something. A lot of young people think fame is a shortcut to success. They forget that the footballer has been training since he was 11 or 12, and has given up so much to be in that position."

Although Emin has divulged much of her past willingly, her ex-boyfriend has decided to reveal a whole lot more, without Emin's consent. He is auctioning off some explicit letters she wrote to him as a young teen. "That's iffy, isn't it? Selling a 14-year-old girl's love letters?" she asks. "People say, 'Oh you put his name in the tent,' but it didn't say whether I'd slept with him and now that tent's burnt anyway." (The tent Emin is referring to was titled Everyone I've Ever Slept With, and embroidered with the names of everyone she had shared a bed with between 1963-1995, including her grandmother). As Emin points out, revealing the name of a 22-year-old man she slept with (in either sense of the phrase) at 14 is rather different from auctioning off the explicit thoughts of a troubled 14-year-old girl. "I was 14! What was he thinking? I was up for it but even so. Someone who is 19 got done the other day for having a sexual relationship with a 14-year-old," she added. Whether or not Emin was "up for it" at the time (or whether any 14-year-old can be "up for it"), the fact that the same man who took advantage of her at a very young age continues to exploit Emin over 30 years after the fact is disgusting. It also raises the question, once you open the door with confessional art or writing, is it possible to retain a sense of privacy?

Emin's interview touches on another issue that has been on her mind a lot lately: Children. Emin is 46, and she says she has finally come to terms with the fact that she will not have kids. "It has been really difficult," she says. "For the last few years, I've been secretly hopeful." She says part of the difficulty comes from societal pressures:

"As an older woman without children, society sees you as pretty redundant. Especially because you lose your looks.

"But you have to force yourself to think, ‘Maybe the mirror's not so important.' Rather than thinking, ‘I've got to get my breasts raised or get some Botox,' why not think, ‘I'm going to learn French'?

"I learned to drive last year. It was the best thing I've ever done in my life. And now I'm going to learn how to speak French."

To this, Mirror writer Miranda Sawyer writes, rather patronizingly, "I think Tracey needs to do less, not more." But Emin has no interest in slowing down. She has just released a new book, One Thousand Drawings, and will open a major show in New York in November, and contribute to two others in London. Whether she likes it or not, Emin is only growing more famous as her career rolls on. Hopefully no other assholes come out of the woodwork to exploit this fact.

Tracey Emin: Art's Wild Woman Opens Her Art About On Tough Life Experiences For Her Work [Mirror]

Related: Former "Enfant Terrible" Tracey Emin Opens New Show, Reveals Even More

The John Edwards sex tape, or Tina Brown calling his dying fucking wife a crazy media whore?

Beholding the gross emails your husband sent to one woman, or to fucking five? The fact of the cheating, or the fact of him being an entirely different person in his emails to some woman sitting on the fucking beach reading fucking Alan Greenspan as the late capitalism he created implodes on itself who then has the audacity to call the hacking of her Hotmail account an "evil act" like, yeah, the invasion of your privacy is up there with North Korean labor prison! Or wait, the part where he blames it all on the fact that his wife had actually achieved shit in her life in contrast to his unemployed Stepford mother and her full fucking tank of light sweet crude "unconditional love," or how he used to work for Goldman Sachs, or the part where some cheesy ditz whose idea of banter is "You are so hot" also was not only the actual girlfriend but fucking muse of a celebrated American writer, and speaking of celebrated writers, what about how Dexter Filkins' ex-wife thanks him profusely and generously in the acknowledgements of her book when he was probably lying about not cheating on her because that is what men do but also there are about 976 names that come before hers in the acknowledgments of The Forever War?

Which is all by way of saying: look, if it is true that "the person who is brutally honest enjoys the brutality quite as much as the honesty, possibly more," as I read some witty dead person quoted by someone in my Facebook newsfeed the other day, then maybe it's just because we've had to learn to love the brutality. At least it is a little less insulting to our intelligence, right? And if a loved one's petty brutality gets your email posted to this blog, a Pyrrhic victory is the only kind you can really hope for with most dudes, right?

Which brings me finally to William* and Stephanie (also a pseudonym) who met in a class called "Shakespeare and Plutarch" - so she knew what she was getting into (and she never meant to get into it) - and one night about four years later got really drunk and woke up dating. They made big plans to move to New York and work in publishing (good thing it is so hard to be a pompous delusional alcohol-abusing permadolescent in this town!) but he fucked that up when he came in one night about four months in and refused to discuss what he'd been doing, which was Stephanie's "friend." William is still in Minneapolis according to MySpace, where she found the below a few afternoons later:

—-—-—-—-—-— Original Message —-—-—-—-—--
From: Myles na gCopaleen [Seriously dude? -Ed.]
Date: Apr 16, 2007 5:17 PM

Stephanie,

I haven't known what to say for too long already. But I did want to give you some air, some space from the bullshit. But let me say I'm not an insincere person. Despite the baldest lies, my feelings for you aren't phony, and so I'm sorry that I've shattered your trust. It was always good to be your companion and your lover and I care about you a lot. I'm sorry I wasn't honest about my need for non-monogamy, not to mention the times I flirted with it in your presence. I wanted things to stay as they were between us while I dated casually, which is naïve at best. That is, I wanted to date without anyone coming between us. Not being naïve, I was trying to keep what we had (which was almost all lovely) separate from ‘complicating' people. I didn't want to compete for you with others, and I didn't want you to feel like you had to compete for me. So I became a hider and a liar by degrees.

This isn't foreign to me, obviously. I've never completely broken from the cycle of behavior that formed in my teenage years with my parents, which consisted of intermittent rebellions in secret, justified as the only means to get what I wanted (and felt I deserved, more or less). Certainly, you're not controlling or smothering like my parents were, yet I still carry a self-justified ‘will to autonomy' that persuades me, ad hoc, to make compromises with honesty. Obviously, the means I use toward my ends nixes any real justification. It's a whole lot of barely-veiled denial.

You have always been generous and I regret that I returned your kindness more in words than actions. And my crankiness compounded by the lack of back massages in your direction. And all the gnarly outgrowths of my failed relationship with elizabeth that I refused to prune.

I miss your wake-up faces and your cheshire smile, sensibility, and rare abilities, if you catch that meaning. and I never felt like I was spending time with you, but sharing it. You've gone through a lot of hell lately and have a lot going for you simultaneously. I may have made it easier before I certainly made it worse; I think we have spark and potential yet, so I hope something can be salvaged. After all, it's springtime and there are walks to be had and picnics to attend to. Water and dappled spots to be found. The cinema, the stage, and this little city we live in. pictures I haven't seen yet. Stories I've already told you. Food to eat and philosophies to bleed. Biking, if I ever get one. I don't expect anything of you, because you obviously have every right to hate my guts and I don't want to fuck up your life. But remember, you were once a cheater too, and more importantly, I really could be part of your life without fucking it up. It's been made manifest that you needn't put up with anything from me so I'm at your mercy. Maybe distinct compromises need to be enunciated. when the time comes, Stephanie, things will be different by necessity and by will and from experience.

Call me, write me anytime, and anything I can do for you, I owe it to you. Not for any obligation, but for you,

-Wm.

*I named him after this guy, obviously.

Also, be sure to add Crap The Blog to your RSS reader because one of the days Georgia and I are going to start updating it regularly, and plus if you have any submissions we have a new email account, crap@jezebel.com for that.

Related: ‘Moveable Feast' Is Recast By Hemingway Grandson [NY Times]

Love letters are a tricky business: they're meant to be intense, personal, and as honest as possible. But the art of transferring love onto paper is a task that only a handful of people have mastered: the rest of us often sound like we've been crying for three days while listening to Disintegration (though that may very well be the case, depending on the type of love letter). As a very dramatic teenager, I used to actually write love letters and tack on one of Shakespeare's most emo sonnets, Sonnet 65:

Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O, how shall summer's honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong, but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

O, none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

Apparently, I just wanted everyone to know that my deep love for whatever-his-name-was would, I thought, live on through my wretched poetry. Good lord!

The last love letter I wrote was probably about 10 years ago. I was 18, and still pretty stuck in tortured poet mode, and I wanted to write one of those classic "I will love you forever even though we are at different schools now" letters before going to college. When I finished writing it, however, I read it out loud, and I was pretty horrified by how it sounded, because, well, it sounded insane. And not only that, but it sounded false. The feelings in a love letter are often words that we feel we're supposed to put down, expressions we've heard before, things we think the other person is hoping to hear. There is no real way to explain love, or to describe it, which is why so many people rely on poems and songs and movies to tack to their profiles in order to let the world know that their view on love is pretty close to whatever is being presented by a crew of hundreds of others.

That's not to say that all love letters are bad or stupid or poorly written: for the writer and the recipient, they mean a lot, they mean everything, and that's a lovely thing. But that's the weird thing about love letters, I guess. If you're not the one in love, they're just a silly collection of words that don't mean anything at all.

What say you, commenters? Is there any good way to write a love letter? Feel free to share your love letter experiences in the comments.

Earlier: The Mark Sanford Emails: A Textual Analysis

Hewitt has been linked to Craig Ferguson, Carson Daly, Joey Lawrence, Wilmer Valderrama, Patrick Wilson, Kip Pardue, John Mayer, LFO's Rich Cronin, ex-fiancé Ross McCall and now Jamie Kennedy. In January of last year, she penned a piece for Esquire titled "10 Things You Don't Know About Women."

For her book, Hewitt promises to share "the real story of what I've learned navigating the dating waters." She says: "Hopefully, in addition to having a good laugh, women reading this will learn from some of my hard lessons." Since very little information is available, we've chosen some chapter titles with familiar names and speculated what Ms. Hewitt will write about::


Chapter 1: Can't Hardly Wait
— In which we learn how much time is appropriate before calling/texting a guy after he's called or texted you.

Chapter 2: Party Of Five
— In which Hewitt describes the phenomenon known as "group dating." Arrange an evening where your friends and and the guy you like just hang out together. Revolutionary!

Chapter 3: I Know What You Did Last Summer
— Delving into your man's past for clarity and peace of mind. Sidebar on "men with a full past." See: John Mayer and Wilmer Valderrama.

Chapter 4: I Still Know What You Did Last Summer
— Learning to let go of the past.

Chapter 5: Heartbreakers
— Do you say to yourself, "He got the best of me"? Do you keep on going back incessantly? Do you wonder why he had to run a game on you? Should you have known right from the start he'd go and break your heart? Sidebar by guest author Mariah Carey.

Chapter 6: Ghost Whisperer
— Turning to the occult for love advice. Don't be afraid to use psychics, tarot cards or Ouija boards!

Chapter 7: The Time Of Your Life
— You've met a Mr. Right! Here's how not to fuck it up.

Chapter 8: Kids Incorporated
— First comes love, then comes marriage, then come rugrats in a $900 Bugaboo stroller.

Jennifer Love Hewitt Writing a Relationship Advice Book [People]
Earlier: The Esquire Map To Jennifer Love Hewitt's Dating History
Related: 10 Things You Don't Know About Women: Jennifer Love Hewitt [Esquire]

So in this piece in the Telegraph, Christopher Howse notes that the digital age is doing a number - not shockingly - on snail mail, and as such love letters are an endangered species. Which, he adds, is awesome. Because other people's love letters are embarrassing, and in any case good correspondence provides perfectly adequate reading-between-the-lines proof of affection without the slop, thanks very much. Quoth the curmudgeon,

perhaps love letters will be the last to disappear, for being in love preserves antique behaviour: dining out, dressing up, being polite, even writing poetry. The poetry will be bad, not for lack of feeling but for lack of skill, and so will the love letters. Like other people's holiday snaps, they suggest a whole world of shared experience that we outsiders cannot share. Digital cameras mean the death of old snaps and digitalia are killing love letters. And I, for one, shan't mourn them.

Unlike Howse, most of us are aware that the advent of email meant a resurgence in quotidian correspondence, and if there was a dry patch for a while there, well, now we've got as many revelations and day-to-day details and secrets as the biographers of tomorrow could wish for, at least as much of it preserved in perpetuity as the more ephemeral correspondence of yesteryear. Sure, stuff gets erased; but then, stuff used to get burned. But the man raises a good point: the internet doesn't really lend itself to love letters. For all the risks of drunk-emailing and the manifold indiscretions technology encourages, poetry doesn't tend to be one of them. Sure, there are unwise late-night confessions of interest, but is that really the same thing?

Weirdly, though, the breakup missive is flourishing. (See: Crap Email From a Dude...or that book Anna did!) I'm not even talking drunk, insulting ramblings, here, although I guess those are a sub-genre. Rather, we're discussing the antithesis of the love letter, a detached, deliberate statement of vitriol. Part of why breakups rate this, I think, is that such emails are often couched in terms of practicalities, like, "let's work out this rent issue, and by the way, here's why you suck as a human being." Email is also particularly well-suited to snideness; as everyone knows, it takes a ton of exclamation points and one smiley face more than you mean even to convey warmth; passive-aggressive curtness is so much easier. If you're a communal type, you can read it over, even get second opinions - something one would not do with a love letter. Most of all, email is casual: a dismissive email has the double effect of showing that you don't really care, whereas a letter would imply a telling expenditure of effort.

Best part? As a recipient, you can erase instantly. And without the risk of setting off the smoke alarm.

A Fond Farewell [Telegraph]

You probably feel like a fool. Ohhh, poor you! How do you think fucking Ron Burkle feels about that $55 million?? Ron Burkle, a man whose name is not exactly synonymous with "integrity"! Ron Burkle, a man who spent a few hundred grand trying to sabotage the career of a fucking gossip columnist who pissed him off.

That's why I entreat you to read the indictment, Anne. Sure, some painful memories will come flooding back: the custom-made suits from Milan. The "flowers, cosmetics, clothes, wine, expensive dinners, dog walking services and orthodontist expenses." The $30,000 housecall. The Caribbean vacation in 2006. The two-story apartment in Rockefeller Center that Raffaello rented for visiting members of the clergy. The notable absence in said apartment of any visiting members of the clergy!

A wise woman once said: "A woman especially if she has the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can." Wait, does that ring a bell?? Yeah, genius it was the tagline for Becoming Jane. The thing is, it doesn't apply to women who have no actual knowledge to conceal. And I'm not trying to get you to pull an Ophelia here but did the Feds even bother trying to question you? Did you ever get deposed? Let me tell you Anne, I would love love looooove to live in a world that allowed me to believe you waited until last week to dump him because you were recording his phone conversations, "backing up" his hard drives, strategically digging through his wastebaskets and mastering his rhetorical tics in preparation for your directorial debut, an epic black comedy on the striking guilelessness of powerful, influential, successful, and thoroughly rotten people when they believe themselves to be possibly in the presence of Christ Himself. At turns subtle and madcap, stark and decadent, it could serve as a scathing cinematic indictment of …well shit, you name it: organized religion, the human condition, Money, Power, the Vatican, vanity, "Love," your idiot self, even your ex-boyfriend.

But I somehow doubt it! Which is why right now, I hate to break it to you, he may be the one going to prison, but he is also kind of "winning."

Rafaello Follieri: The Indictment [WSJ]
Earlier: Vaticonned! How Anne Hathaway's Boyfriend Got Clinton To Underwrite Their Fabulous Romance

3. Kissing can communicate messages that language cannot: A couple who had known each other since the eighth grade found themselves friends as college seniors — until, one night, he kissed her. A month later, he proposed; they have been married for 18 years. Swoon! Too sweet to snark. 4. You may know that women are "in heat" when they're ovulating — but instead of promiscuity, this fertile phase of the cycle just makes them super picky. Dudes better come with their "A" games. 5. Well this one is kind of a "no shit" study, but apparently the feelings a woman has for her sexual partner are tied to how good her orgasms are. In other words, sex is better when you're in love. 6. This is a titi monkey. These South American primates form strong relationships with their partners, and single (unpaired) male titis have different brain activity than monogamous males. Some dudes just aren't hard-wired to settle down? You don't say! 7. If you're not attached, fed up with love and just wish you could do everything your own damn self, good news! In labs around the world, scientists are working on turning male cells into eggs and female cells into sperm. Sure, lesbian and gay couples eventually may be able to have children who are genetically their own... But maybe you just have one of those really good friends, who makes you think to yourself, if you were a dude, I'd have your baby? Science wants to make that happen!

Affairs of the Lips: Why We Kiss, Kiss and Tell , C'mere, Big Boy, Sex is Better for Women in Love, 'Til Death Do Us Part [Scientific American]
Are Male Eggs And Female Sperm On The Horizon? [New Scientist]
Death Of The Father: British Scientists Discover How To Turn Women's Bone Marrow Into Sperm [This Is London]

A friend just forwarded the american apparel story link and said: "dude, you're efamous...kind of". I was totally amazed and happy that such a debate was sparked by my humble offering.
First off, i'm not a graf writer. Honestly, I was just reacting to the constantly degrading images of women that AA creates. That ad in particular - headless, bent over, composed so that the focus was irrefutable... I went home, grabbed some spraypaint, took the train back and waited until 4am to climb the scaffolding.
Now that i've read all of the comments and reactions posted on jezebel, i feel regret at having chosen the word "get". The people who mentioned "are" as a better choice of wording were right. I struggled with the thought of leaving such an open-to-interpretation message, but eventually just decided to go with my gut-reaction and get the hell down from there.
It was horrifying to read that some people interpreted it as "women deserve to be raped" or that i was probably some uneducated/ignorant/misogynistic graf writer promoting my justification....(geez, talk about a stereotype!) I also took offense to the comments that suggested i need to re-evaluate my concept of feminism... duh! of course i agree that women should be able to dress as they please and not have to worry about others interpretation. That said, i couldn't let this advert slide by without a protest. This wasn't a run of the mill ad by some faceless corporation. This was Dov Charney's "art" and ideology.
I'll be the first to admit that i have a lot to learn. I'm not much of an academic, and have only recently started reading books which address gender, feminist theories, body image... i have my own (imperfect) ideas and reactions to the world around me and accept that i am going to make mistakes, and grow as i learn more...
As an act of civil disobedience/direct action, i believe that this form of protest was effective(if only momentarily) in that it caused AA economic damage(well over $10,000.), inspired an open discussion on many levels and was a learning experience for all.
I don't mean to ramble on and on, so i'll just end this by saying thank you for bringing this topic/discussion onto your website. In the future, i will take greater precautions to be more clear in my meaning...