cat person

i mean, i've read two of these stories and the other ones we got the synopsis from the review. i feel like i have some sense of the ideas she's working with i just don't know what she is saying.

also i think lying about male violence to evade culpability is a TOTAL mra fantasy so that's why it's interesting that it comes up twice in her stories, given the fact that they're super plugged into contemporary gender discourse. it's not the part about the women committing violence--it's the way they get away with it that seems to be a nod to this kind of "gone girl" idea.

but anyway, i'm not saying she is a misogynist, obviously, i just think these other stories are more difficult to interpret than cat person

she’s not every person and the fantasy of creating false male violence narratives does not invalidate real male violence in the public eye. there are a zillion harlequin/vampire fanfic things with spurious violence that blur things in more questionable ways, they’re just not reviewed in the literature journals

no but like ok

cat person and the good guy -- the two stores she put out to promote this book -- deliberately appeal to #metoo and other elements of contemporary gender discourse, like the idea of the "nice guy." that's how the book was marketed. so examining how she plays with different tropes about gender and to what end is something that book invites.

the fantasy of creating false male violence narratives does not invalidate real male violence in the public eye.

i never said it would do this and i'm not accusing the book of having a "bad impact." i'm trying to understand what, if anything, she is saying with these stories. i'm just on that level of analysis.

i mean, i've read two of these stories and the other ones we got the synopsis from the review. i feel like i have some sense of the ideas she's working with i just don't know what she is saying.

― Trϵϵship, Wednesday, January 30, 2019 9:00 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cat person and the good guy -- the two stores she put out to promote this book -- deliberately appeal to #metoo and other elements of contemporary gender discourse, like the idea of the "nice guy." that's how the book was marketed. so examining how she plays with different tropes about gender and to what end is something that book invites.

― Trϵϵship, Wednesday, January 30, 2019 9:14 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one would hope so, but as I said upthread, every other story in the book is horror/fantasy/magical realism. I think you're otm about her main theme being narcissism.

that writer, lauren oyler, is good. i've enjoyed her pieces for the baffler.

There is a very good crew of female reviewers at the moment. I end up feeling the reviews they write are often richer than the books they review.

cat person and the good guy -- the two stores she put out to promote this book

the book did not exist in any form when "cat person" was published. she was signed off of it. a short story collection is rarely a single mission statement, but is frequently a number of short stories, collected.

Jesus christ you’re tedious

She got the book deal on the strength of cat person. The book includes cat person. The story she released online as a promotional teaser was the good guy. The entire marketing around the book was related to how cat person struck a chord with readers and connected with metoo

Often there is some kind of thematic cohesiveness with story collections. Doesn’t have to be, true, but it seems odd to have a bunch of magical realist and horror stories, many related to sexuality, not connected to the ideas of the more popular two stories about sex, which were in a realist style and more zeitgeisty

yeah it is odd, it's why the book sucks

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/

looks terrible but i can't know for sure bc it's behind a paywall. pastebin?

immediate takeaway is i'm glad i don't have narrow shoulders

i also hit a paywall after three paragraphs.

a cool twist will be if, in the end, he comes into his own and doesn't define himself by his sexual frustration. he can wear the label "feminist" proudly because it's rooted in sincere convictions about human equality.

very treeship post

I feel seen in a couple moments here but overall: wtf?

i'm dumb because i posted this without realizing it has a paywall. i read the print or i'd share.

he doesn't come into his own :/

imgur

spoiler: it turns out he’s one of those old incels and...

oh yeah, and we don't like those. sounds like a great story.

ok, the paywall somehow vanished. i read it.

this seemed actually like a parody of "wokeness" and the "incel" worldview, suggesting that there is a dialectical relationship between these two worldviews. so "nuance" i guess. i still did not enjoy it because the protagonist was a message board poster come to life. his interior life is completely dominated by cultural tropes—there is no life in him. if anything, this might be why women aren't attracted to him.

other characters are similarly social media voices come to life. however, his "woke" friend makes some good points in this scene--but does it cruelly, at a picnic in front of a ton of other friends.

He presses his lips shut while his brain feels like a swirling case of lottery balls, as his friend, pausing to hit a spliff, continues: “I mean, what the fuck do you want? Somehow you got a shit deal. Nobody knows why. Maybe it’s like you never really grappled with this shit because you thought you were exempt. But you refuse to change and are shocked when nothing changes. It’s not like you enjoy it, but you do enjoy pushing other people’s faces in it, that’s your main consolation. Weird how you’re always right about rejection, since nobody’s ever had it worse, nobody’s as pure and as wronged as you. Yo everyone! Check out the Woman Respecter! Last principled man right here! And that’s why you need it, because you get to convince yourself you’re being rejected for your virtue, not cause you’re a bummer. You’ve turned your loneliness into this, like, fetish necklace of martyrdom. And all of us,” they gesture around to other picnickers, “have to sit here and rubber-stamp your feminism. If we don’t indulge your wallowing, we’re being callous and, like, complicit with some diabolical global conspiracy that’s keeping you from getting laid. But if we do, then we’re ‘disingenuous’ because none of us will fuck you ourselves. Right? Am I right, everyone? Hands up, who agrees?”

Three women’s hands shoot up, followed more slowly by the rest.

i don't really understand the ending. is he going into that restaurant to shoot people?

what do u think of this story bamcquern?

yes, he is putting on his mask and opening a backpack with some sort of weapon in it

imo the whole venture does a decent job of capturing the way someone could fail to relate to others while fixating on all the wrong things and I think the writer has read a lot of material -- likely message boards -- to sketch this character. I understand it's a long-running montage of that fixation on an inability to launch and, stripped away of other life details, it becomes something insidious.

at the same time, there's not much in there about a job, other interests, or what social sphere is allowing him to maintain a group of diverse friends while never getting checked

He does get “checked” though—his diverse and left leaning social sphere are not very sympathetic to him. But also not helpful. He basically learns takes from them that he should feel bad about feeling bad—there is no meaningful advice about how to adjust his outlook and priorities to be able to focus on something outside his own shortcomings.

To the point in the maleness thread about a hypothetical person who maybe could benefit from some other straight male friendships, this guy might be an example of that. Normal, adjusted male friends who he could try to emulate, i mean—instead he goes into the internet to find people obsessed with the same issues he’s obsessed with.

Solipsism is a kind of hell, and this story tries to capture that. However I do think its too caught up in contemporary discourse to really be effective. The characters seem like types.

The story seems to suggest that his allydom is directly linked to his misery like maybe he’d have better luck if he were more of a sexist (or at least be more of a real human that others might be attracted to instead of this just woke empty cipher) that could then be remediated by feminism. Too evolved.

The source of the story.

that's pretty fucked up. if the movie is really going to happen she ought to get a hefty fuckin check.

the.......movie

Probably fair to say that Kristen Roupenian wasn't expecting the story to get the attention it did by some margin.

I guess. Still, I would feel violated if this happened to me.

Not only the.... movie but the....

movie starring Nicholas Braun, who plays Cousin Greg on Succession

lazy ass not changing the details writer google a different college or something

Twitter discourse on this today is horrible

This really doesn't seem like a big deal to me. What is actually the same as her life?

- An age disparity in the relationship (very common)
- The description of the man (not her issue, not about her but about him)
- Type of workplace, university and first date location, all of which are far in the past (should have changed at least some of this imo but it's still quite general, e.g. "an artsy cinema" is not that specific and a multiplex is a common place for dates)

It's not actually telling the story of her relationship at all, and it's not trying to. It's the original author going "I know this dude who had a relationship with a much younger woman, that's an interesting jumping off point for a story". And while I don't rate the story very highly, it's relatable for a lot of people because those experiences have been had by a lot of people. It could be anyone.

It could be interesting to explore how real-life people who have been the inspiration for stories feel, but this article seems more like it's geared to create some sort of "shock-horror, how invasive" reaction that I just don't think is warranted.

i only skimmed the piece but at the beginning it talks about including some of her actual clothes but then i think never mentions it again, anyway there was enough detail in there that people were asking her about it, which considering that the relationship in the story is depicted as worse than the real one was at the very least did lead to some discomfort for the real people

The ethics are pretty unclear to me. Only a handful of people could have linked her to the story before she published this piece, but maybe that's enough. Like treeship, I would probably feel shitty about this if it happened to me, but I'm not sure that means it was an ethical breach. Probably obvious to note, but I assume if Charles hadn't died, she wouldn't have written this? I'm not sure how to make sense of her publicly linking him to something as infamous as "Cat Person" after his death tbh

One small quibble: I believe mentioning "an artsy cinema" that happens to be in Ann Arbor could only refer to one place, the Michigan Theatre, though I never lived there and might be unaware of another candidate

ethical breech is a big term its pretty easy to call it inconsiderate tho

Feel bad for Charles, who apparently was nothing like the awful guy in the story and seems to have suffered a great deal from it, she should have known he would read the story and should have reached out to him when it got huge.

That is what I felt as well. It seems like Roupenian knew him though—she said she had an “encounter” with him—and it seems possible that, to her, he may have acted badly. So from Roupenian’s perspective the depiction wasn’t unfair, even though the model for the young girl in Cat Person didn’t see him that way.

it would have been so easy to change the details and indefensible that they didn't, or at least didn't reach out, imo. the "i didn't expect this to be popular" excuse is just that, an excuse.

Like this part of her letter:

It has always been important for my own well-being to draw a bright line, in public, between my personal life and my fiction. This is a matter not only of privacy but of personal safety. When “Cat Person” came out, I was the target of an immense amount of anger on the part of male readers who felt that the character of Robert had been treated unfairly. I have always felt that my insistence that the story was entirely fiction, and that I was not accusing any real-life individual of behaving badly, was all that stood between me and an outpouring of not only rage but potentially violence.

So she is saying that she insisted that there was no real life model for Robert out of self-protection. But bringing it up like this implies that maybe it wasn’t true. Maybe Charles was the model for the character.

The one thing she doesn’t do in the letter is say she feels bad for Charles.

tbf doesnt seem like we got the whole letter

lag∞n is right about the new cat person discourse

and she says they had a second, off-the-record conversation. kinda imagine that Roupenian filled her in on the real-life inspiration for the details that didn't match her story

Are we to assume or infer from the cagey language in the article that "Charles" committed suicide? Is this the assumption being made elsewhere? Because that was my assumption from the writing and the "off the record" conversation that is pointedly mentioned.

tbc I can understand being cagey about that if that's the case

Ooooh didn’t think about that