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Why You Should Never Take Kate Carraway to IKEA

By David Topping

200911asifyoudidntknow.gif
Because she will try to give you a hand job! At least! Or something! It’s not really altogether clear what the graph above, from this Eye Weekly article about sex’s worth, means. (It’s not a graph so much as a collection of shapes with tenuously related words and numbers near them.) Nor are we sure that we should even be writing about it or its author, anyway: there’s probably nothing that makes Kate Carraway—self-described “alpha-exhibitionist”—happier than seeing a sentence like this that she’s in the middle of, and besides, what’s one article in Eye worth getting all worked up about? Heck, who are we to begrudge someone the opportunity to overshare, all the time, on a platform of someone else’s making? (Remarkably, Carraway’s latest article about sex for Eye is actually not all about her—a rare exception to the rule, since she can usually turn even a massacre of a dozen journalists into an opportunity to tell you about her cold, or no news at all into a happy birthday wish to her “super-hot and successful” sister.)
But maybe the better question is: why, Eye? For some time now, the weekly paper has been becoming less and less about Toronto and more and more about the people who write for it—way more I than Eye. Which, again: fine. But as the endless “me”s and “I”s and unchecked sexual self-aggrandizement increase, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see what subject Eye aims to hold a mirror up to other than itself. Maybe a graph would help clarify that.

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Comments

  • antiboy

    i never read her stuff to begin with. now clicking on one of her links, i’ve had the distinct displeasure of being exposed to her egotistical (and not to mention shitty) writing. i had to close the window a quarter way down her article about being ‘recognised’. ugh.

  • http://undefined Peter K

    At least include your picture. How else do we know if the handjob is even worth it?

  • http://undefined antiboy

    ps. who the fuck uses condoms for a blowjob anyway?

  • http://paul.kishimoto.name Paul Kishimoto

    This.

  • http://undefined ccharters

    It seems she’s trying to live the dream of many single 20-something women in a post- Sex and the City world: to become Carrie Bradshaw. The problem as I see it is that she’s trying to find originality in a shock factor that is mostly just irrelevant and, in this case, entirely confusing.

  • Karen Whaley

    Remember dental dams?

  • http://undefined antiboy

    if her face also looks like a giant foot, then, and only then, will i recognise her as the successor to carrie bradshaw.

  • http://undefined Biff

    Thanks for posting this, I’m glad other people in the city are finding her column as annoying as I do. My girlfriend and I read it just to make our blood boil sometimes. And yes, me writing this comment is exactly the kind of attention she is trying to get, but oh well..

  • http://undefined dowlingm

    Let’s remember – they got rid of Sasha and put her on the back page. Nice move brain trust.

  • http://undefined Roman

    There are activities that demand regular sessions with a therapist: training for a psychotherapy-related field, studying the occult, and then there’s Kate…

  • http://undefined Actor Network

    The last paragraph is bang on. How has a city paper devolved into a Myspace-in-print? Are all the windows boarded up at Eye’s office so that they can’t see a city outside? Aren’t there any interesting stories to tell of its millions of inhabitants who happen not to work at Eye? Would love to see something like the NY Times’ ‘one in 8 million’ feature done here…

  • http://undefined Kate Carraway

    The graph makes little sense without reading the article it ran with. You can see it all here:
    http://www.eyeweekly.com/blog/post/77932–should-i-stay-or-should-i-blow
    And: I appreciate the attention to my work at EYE, but this piece isn’t about me.

  • http://undefined Svend

    I’d go to IKEA with her.
    Eye has gone a bit downhill over the year but definitely not due to Kate. I like her take on life which probably reflects those of many young urban women. I’m glad she doesn’t go for shock value and isn’t bent on being a little shopaholic, she seems more down-to-earth than other newspaper diarists.

  • http://www.guesswork.ca Patrick Metzger

    I don’t read Eye or Kate Carraway but I thought the piece was a cute idea and well written. And the graph makes sense in context.

  • http://undefined fantasygoat

    Way to not get the point, Kate.

  • http://undefined MattC

    I don’t understand this sarcastic piece by David Topping. It’s too easy to attack: a lot of pieces on Torontoist are incredibly boring, but even so, it’s nice to have Torontoist writing its short pieces about the city — a few of the pieces and the resulting discussions are great and insightful, and many are useful service pieces.
    But what is this piece? Carraway’s Required Reading, for example, is a fantastic daily column. Here’s someone else who agrees with me: http://scrawledinwax.com/2009/09/11/mondoville-and-required-reading-torontos-gawker-and-fimoculous/
    If you don’t like columnists who write short memoir-styled, observational pieces, that is an issue with genre, not with Carraway. And if you have a problem with Carraway specifically, this piece does a poor job explaining why. I don’t agree with everything she writes, but I would argue that her pieces are consistently interesting, engaging, and make use of a self-awareness that is rare but crucial. This critique seems awkward and conservative, and I wonder what the point of it is.

  • http://undefined phs84

    Donna Lypchuk and Bill Burrill used a lot of “I” and “Me” in their eye columns. But unlike Kate, they were reliably funny and entertaining, so one could overlook their excessive use of the first person singular.
    It’s sad to witness the deterioration of a once fine publication since its zenith in the early-mid 1990s. It truly has become “eye weakly” as noted in an earlier Torontoist piece.
    ETA: whatever became of Bill Burrill? After leaving eye around ten years ago he briefly resurfaced as an entertainment reporter for the Star before apparently disappearing off the face of the earth.

  • http://undefined joeclark

    Actually, she’s unwittingly recapitulating Julie Burchill, whom she is too young to remember.

  • http://undefined Amber

    Except she’s 100, not twenty-something.

  • http://www.newmindspace.com Kevin Bracken

    This reminds me a lot of Emily Gould and her Gawker saga. After a while, she realized she would get many more pageviews if she wrote about herself, and became a rabid oversharer, even writing about her sex life on a huge blog.
    Eventually she kinda lost it and left Gawker. You can read about it in her NYT Mag piece “exposed.”

  • http://undefined rek

    The point of charts is to visually condense information, putting it all there in a way that’s easy to understand. This one doesn’t make sense out of context, so it is a Fail Chart.

  • http://www.flickriver.com/photos/doitintheroad/ dcooper

    I don’t know, this all seems so familiar…

  • http://undefined WindowpaneMG

    Glad she gave you enough material for a story.

  • http://www.guesswork.ca Patrick Metzger

    This is actually a matrix desiged to aid in decision making, and hence more complex than a simple chart.

  • http://undefined Nathan

    I would argue the opposite about Eye going downhill. I’ve been consistently impressed with their balanced and interesting cover stories lately, and unlike NOW, they don’t push that aged radical 30-something hippie tone.