The Sex Scribe
BIRKNER, GABRIELLE
OLAM The Jewish World The Sex Scribe GABRIELLE BIRKNER IS THAT HER? Is that her?" I one gawking Yale freshman asked another at a campus party on a Saturday night last fall. "Yes, shhh,...
...Tm not necessarily writing about love," says Krinsky, whose voice has no trace of an Israeli accent, despite Hebrew being her first language...
...According to Rovzar, "Sex and the (Elm) City" has sparked dialogue on campus about everything from sex to journalistic ethics to freedom of speech...
...They move from relationship to relationship, never quite being wholly happy or satisfied...
...Krinsky asked in a recent column), is exactly what Rabbi Shmuley Boteach scoffed at in the popular book Kosher Sex...
...The family moved to New York when Natalie was in high school...
...But almost everyone has something to say about this Israeli-cum-Canadian-cum-all- American-girl...
...Well, she had...
...The column explores topics like: How to decipher what a post-"hookup" call really means ("There's the Maybe-If-I-Call-Right-Now- You'll-Come-Over-And-Get- N a k e d - W i t h - M e - A g a i n call—MIICRNYCOAGNWMA for short") and how to discern whether your number of sexual partners is too high ("We went around the table, four, seven, one, nine, 18, one a month, one a week, not since the new millennium...
...As Krinsky's columns have evolved, their focus has changed...
...But some think that instead she promotes this mentality...
...If I were her, I'd be embarrassed...
...People at Yale are afraid of making themselves vulnerable in relationships, she says, so they tend to avoid them altogether...
...This, she says, has allowed her to continue writing, in the face of some harsh criticism...
...There, she was raised in a Hebrew-speaking household, and traveled often to Israel to visit her grandparents, who still live in Tel Aviv...
...The tide of Krinsky's column is, of course, derived from Candace Bushnell's "Sex and the City" column, which ran for years in Manhattan's spicy New York Observer and was later adapted into an even more popular television series of the same name...
...And as for all the interest in her and her column (ABC News recently asked to follow her around for a night as she garners story ideas), Krinsky says most of it is very gratifying...
...Even amidst the terrible, terrible things going on in people's lives, we're still human and have emotions...
...Yes, shhh, she's right there," the other answered...
...She also plans to compile her columns into a book...
...But in writing about sex, I am writing about what people go through—for better or worse—while looking for love, about all the crazy things people do on the path to finding someone you want to end up with, and I don't think that's frivolous...
...Some of Krinsky's peers have even called her "The Jewish Carrie Bradshaw," comparing her to the TV show's protagonist...
...What she does is chronicle—with an eye for the absurd and plenty of tongue-incheek humor—what it's like to be young and single at Yale...
...Bushnell, in chronicling what she called "The Age of Un-innocence" (in which "No one has breakfast at Tiffany's or affairs to remember.instead we have breakfast at 7 a.m...
...Mention her name at Yale and some will coo...
...Her early pieces published last fall dealt primarily with sex acts...
...I ridicule this mentality a lot in my column," she says...
...Some people love it...
...1: "Thou shall not refer to someone with whom thou has hooked up with [only] twice as a 'boyfriend...
...In her column, Krinsky doesn't tackle the tough issues of the day, and for the most part, doesn't dispense advice...
...I honestly believe that even during the Holocaust, there were still 19-year-old girls, likely my grandmother among them, who wanted to fall in love...
...OLAM The Jewish World The Sex Scribe GABRIELLE BIRKNER IS THAT HER...
...At the time of publication: still no boyfriend...
...People shouldn't stop publishing books or writing plays, or making music just because there is something far more grave going on in the world," she says...
...I couldn't wait for college because everyone told me I would meet the man I was going to marry...
...Not to ignore the dating scene-Scripture connection, another Krinsky column discussed "The Top 10 Rules of Hookups, Bible Style...
...I was going to fall in love," Krinsky confessed in a recent column...
...But these days she's used to the attention...
...That definitely fascinates people...
...I just love your column...
...Krinsky— maybe because she's half BushnelPs age—sees a light at the end of the tunnel and says she wants both...
...It's been two years, and I'm still waiting...
...Hundreds of thousands across the country have logged on to the Yale Daily News Web site to read her "Sex and the (Elm) City" columns...
...Our generation is suffering a crisis of intimacy, which manifests itself above all else in our not feeling unique...
...The following day it was 4,000," Krinsky says, "and the number kept growing— exponentially...
...To be sure, Krinsky, wasn't prepared for the fame—or depending on whom you ask, the notoriety—that the weekly sex column she writes for the Yale Daily News has brought her on campus, and across the country...
...Over coffee, on a rainy Sunday at Yale, the pretty and petite redhead bears little resemblance to her brash, blase, in-your-face alter ego that thousands meet when they read her column each Friday morning...
...Some people hate the column," he says...
...It's the exterior shell that I'm willing to show the world, and inside, I think I'm a lot more sensitive than I come across in my column...
...Another letter chided, "It's not something that people need to be so open and talkative about...
...Natalie, hi, I, uh, wanted to introduce myself to you," said one of the freshmen, approaching her...
...I face the same insecurities that every girl my age faces...
...She does, however, take issue with her critics who say her column is frivolous, particularly in light of the current state of war in two of the countries she calls home, the United States and Israel...
...Rule No...
...Do the three rabbis in the bar only have sex...
...Krinsky says because she is 19 (she turns 20 this month) and writes a sex column, people make a lot of false assumptions about her...
...Others will cringe...
...Krinsky spun around to see what all the commotion was about and was surprised to see the two male students who had been talking so surreptitiously, were looking in her direction...
...Krinsky, who calls herself a "secular Zionist," is the daughter of two Tel Aviv natives, and three of her grandparents are Holocaust survivors...
...But no matter how people feel about it, they read it anyway...
...So who had arrived...
...The Elm City...
...In another column, she outlined her plan to find a boyfriend, because in what she calls "the vast gaping black hole of dating," finding a boyfriend takes "devotion, enthusiasm, and impenetrable strategy...
...Krinsky remembers when Christopher Rovzar, her editor at the Yale paper, phoned to tell her that one of her racier columns— which like the rest of the newspaper is published online—was read by 2,000 people...
...Overhearing the conversation, Natalie Krinsky, then a sophomore, figured that Barbara Bush, the president's daughter, or the actress Jordana Brewster, both Yale students, had just arrived at the fete...
...Her paternal grandmother was on the Exodus, the famed ship that left France in 1947 bound for what is now Israel, and was intercepted and turned back by the British who then controlled Palestine...
...A celebrity at Yale, Krinsky, is also a cult figure among many college-age students...
...Mention her name at Yale and some will coo...
...Others will cringe...
...Is love just too close to home...
...her more recent columns have ventured into the arena of love...
...Only one side of me.the bubbly and outgoing side...
...The picture she paints is of single life on campus, full of random hookups and loveless sex ("When was the last time you hooked up with someone who respected you, much less loved you...
...and affairs we try to forget as quickly as possible"), wrote about love and commitment as if they were virtually unattainable...
...After putting themselves through Tel Aviv University, ????.?????§^ parents immigrated to Toronto just before she was born...
...In her final piece before her summer hiatus, Krinsky pondered "What makes sex funny and love not...
...It wasn't long before the number topped 200,000...
...Krinksy admits that this "vast impersonal universe" could very well be Yale...
...A recent letter to the Yale Daily News complained her column was "offensive and reflective of modern-day society's immorality...
...But what's the girl in the center of the hoopla really like...
...It's Yale's hometown of New Haven...
...Sure, she's clever and sarcastic, as one would surmise from her column, but she's also highly sensitive, winsome, and (surprise, surprise) romantic...
...comes through in my column," Krinsky says...
...Do they never fall in love...
...Krinsky says she hopes to continue writing her column when school starts again in September, and the editors at the Yale Daily News say they'll welcome it...
...She concluded the piece by urging Yalies not to think of sex and love as totally separate entities, and expressed her desire to fall in love this summer, while she interns in New York...
...Have we indeed done the unthinkable and separated sex and love in our minds so that one is almost completely distinct from the other...
...Sex and the Ivy League...
...There's a market for this," she says...
...I take a lot of things to heart, but I've learned to separate myself from my column...
...People today] feel themselves to be trapped in a vast, impersonal universe, that is unfeeling and indifferent to them," writes Boteach...
Vol. 27 • August 2002 • No. 4
