Victoria Floethe is tired of the moralizing prudes! The younger half of media beef-starter Michael Wolff's recently exposed affair is telling her side of the story: she's a free-living woman beset by Victorian gossiping hordes.

Floethe wrote her piece in the Spectator in the UK, where people wisely don't give a fuck about Michael Wolff and his affairs. This allows her to cast herself as the victim here—which is true, in the sense that anyone on the wrong side of the New York Post is a victim, but conveniently leaves out the fact that Floethe's entire media career plan has been to cast herself as a femme fatale irresistible to older men, which she says is great because hey, her trust fund is down, and everybody knows that "Internet writers need trust funds."

The nut of her self-defense is that the "sleaze bar" has been "dramatically lowered" in New York, probably thanks to populist backlash against the gilded age that just ended, and everybody hates Manhattan and everyone in it:

But something's changed in New York. I've noticed this among my many friends who have moved to Park Slope in family-oriented Brooklyn - they've come to regard Manhattan as the borough of dubious characters. If you can afford to live in Manhattan you must be up to no good. Possibly it's the long descent into recession that has created a new culture of opprobrium - nobody these days should be having much fun.

Park Slope fucks it all up for everyone once again! More important, the internet is full of goody-goodies:

The new sanctimony is, too, the result of internet journalism. Gossip mongering on the internet could be as competitive now as when New York was a city full of aggressive and prying newspapers (cf. Sweet Smell of Success with the evil columnist J.J. Hunsecker - it's always been a favourite of mine). But the internet is probably worse. Its cliquishness makes it more high-school-like than journalism-like. And high school is more hurtful than journalism...
New York, once a big and anonymous place, is - on the internet, and in the Murdoch press - reduced to a horrifyingly captious and moralising small town.

Hmm. So it's good to write stories in Slate about chasing wealthy older men yourself, but it's bad for somebody else to write a story about you chasing a wealthy older man. Gotcha. We take your point on the prudishness thing though, Victoria. You should feel free to live your life as you want. We all should! Just don't be surprised when your plan to get everyone to write about you works out. [Spectator]