Ohh la la! Hot Nannies

Helaine Olen writes a provocative piece in today’s NY Times Style section, about reading her nannie’s blog and finding out what a wild life she was living…while taking care of her kids. quite tittilating reading…

“She hadn’t been with us long when we found out about her online diary. All she’d revealed previously about her private life were the bare-bones details of the occasional date or argument with her landlord and her hopes of attending graduate school in the fall.

Yet within two months of my starting to read her entries our entire relationship unraveled. Not only were there things I didn’t want to know about the person who was watching my children, it turned out her online revelations brought feelings of mine to the surface I’d just as soon not have to face as well. I read the poem, then I scrolled down to the next entry. And the next. Amid the musings on poetry and fanatical analysis of the “Gilmore Girls” was a sweet scene of sex with a new boyfriend, accounts of semi-promiscuous couplings and tales of too much drinking for my comfort.

My husband thought her writing precociously talented but wanted to fire her nonetheless. “This is inappropriate,” he said. “We don’t need to know that Jennifer Ehle makes her hot.”

I defended her – at first. Didn’t she have a right to free expression? It wasn’t as though she was quaffing Scotch or bedding guys, or the occasional girl, while on the job. Besides, weren’t all recent college graduates keeping Web logs?