Lena-not-Dunham UPDATED

Caity Weaver of Gawker has written a hilarious but essentially mistaken take-down of a NYT real-estate-section profile of some parents buying a one-bedroom apartment "for" (and I'll get to why the quotes are necessary) their 26-year-old daughter who's a college graduate with a job and everything. The young woman's crime - compounded by the fact that she shares a first name with a certain Ms. Dunham - is being a brat. In Weaver's reading, that is.

I didn't see a link to the piece itself in the Gawker post, but highly advanced research skills brought me to it. A key detail jumped out at me: "Her parents take over the bedroom when they visit." This is not this Lena's home, but her parents'. Not just in some abstract sense, in which money is power, and if they've paid for it, it's theirs. In a very literal one, namely that if she wants to have an overnight visitor, heck, if she wants to sleep in her own bed, that may not be an option. This is something above and beyond parents visiting. And as jealous as we all might be of OMG-one-bedroom-apartment-in-the-West-Village (not that one-bedroom barrack-apartments in New Jersey don't have their charms - and anyway, my dream is a townhouse in the West Village, thank you very much), this is a price of sorts. So there's this and whichever anti-motivational impact this sort of thing may - doesn't always, but may - have on a person.

The time may have come to stop looking at the phenomenon of parents "helping" their ever-older offspring as a wonderful thing for them to do if they can afford it. It's like I keep saying re: unpaid internships - rather than looking at it as, how unfortunate that not everyone has the option of working for free, we should see it as unfortunate that even many college-educated adults with previous office experience are now expected to do so. Reactions to tales like these aren't so much "class warfare," as the Gawker commentariat puts it, as a sense of pride on the part of those who made their own way, whose parents maybe couldn't but also maybe could have afforded to do something like this.

My point, then, is not that the rich are paradoxically less advantaged - if anything, the era of eternal parental assistance, in which the alternatives are rare cases of self-made swimming and a whole lot of sinking, makes having rich-and-"helpful" parents more important than ever. It's that we need a new way of thinking about a culture in which dependence (generally discreet, generally not profiled in the Times) goes on for as long as it now does. This culture is bad for the "kids" not getting help and for the ones getting it. And lord knows it hasn't done wonders for NYC real estate.

UPDATE

So, via the Gawker comments, there's yet another angle here, one that's been in the back of my own mind about this topic for ages, but that I was reluctant to bring up, because it seemed maybe gratuitously provincial. But no, so here goes: anti-Semitic misogyny. There's one comment that's just kind of bafflingly anti-Jewish (although I think I can unpack it - Brooklyn is haute-hipster-Americana created by rich white kids not from the NYC area, whereas Manhattan necessitates local connections, local roots, or something?), and another that calls out Chelsea of all neighborhoods as having "sprouted into a Jewish American Princess haven," thereby missing the demographic that the area's boutiques are aiming for. And this with a Lena we have no reason to think is Jewish! A full analysis of the relationship between YPIS and JAP-o-phobia must wait, and may never come, but is stirring in my head, at least.