cat person

short stories go viral now

lol - indeed!

read it this morning. good story imo. didn't think the ending was great tho.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

https://twitter.com/MenCatPerson

An interview with the author:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-kristen-roupenian-2017-12-11

I think this is the first time I have ever finished reading a piece of fiction published in The New Yorker #hotTake

thurber?!

nope, never got to one of is cartoons (had to google) - willing to bet his stuff is better than New yorker 'proper' fic.

I have thought about picking up some Mavis Gallant after reading a non-fiction piece of hers in the New Yorker (I linked it in the ILE New Yorker thread)

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DQwmfdkUEAAkBXg.jpg

Stopped reading halfway through because it seemed like it was headed somewhere uncomfortable.

this discussion has somehow reminded me that my CD-ROM* of the entire new yorker ever -- which i got secondhand for not very much a few years back, for researching its music-writing in the 60s and before -- no longer works on my current mac update

*it might be something more modern than a CD-ROM, this is just a funny way to describe it

just call me thurberperson

I have those CDs! Christmas 2K5

the last line is i guess the source of a lot of the virality but i hope this doesn't sound uncharitable to say that it feels a little gimmicky? imo. maybe i'm just jealous of the narrator's awesome and funny and loving support network that hustles her out of bars when she needs it.

treesh do yrs still work?

Yeah but I don’t have an optical drive on my current macbook

I agree the last line is gimmicky but sadly not unrealistic. (Indecided to read the rest of it.) I found the story really bleak all around. There was never a genuine connection between the characters — they seemed really lost, over-aware of how they were being perceived. Even withiut the last third of the story it reminded me of why dating is so painful and brings out the worst in people, at least in the casual no-expectations way we do it now. (Not that things wee better before, probably bad in different ways.)

I wasn’t envious about any part of the narrator’s life.

Sorry for typos- walking through penn station bumping into things

i think it'd be more powerful if he didn't text her to call her a whore. that marks him out as slightly more villainous than if they'd just left him as a potential everyman.

i mean i don't know how many men text women to call them "whore" irl - i'm not speculating as to how common it is, but it made it easier, imo, as a man, to read it and think i'm not like him, which i'm not sure is the intention. better if it was more uncomfortable and if it was left to the reader to hang themselves.

yes that's what i was trying to get at

this story was unengaging bollocks tbh. read some jean rhys

haha

*watches the whole internet be engaged in a piece of fiction for a change*

this was most unengaging read some jean rhys

Def recommend finishing a Donald Barthelme story fwiw

Haven't read this

i've read everything

it was poor

the narrator didn't really feel like a character, just an observer, a receptacle for the narrative. the story's sole purpose appears to be winding up/attacking mras, which is a noble enough cause, but the writing is kind of dull and the whole thing emanates a sort of calculatingly nihilistic dysphoria that brooks neither joy nor horror. nothing is left to chance. and in its obsessive recall of detail it comes off quite superficial

^^^too many adjectives

there are loads of good ny'er stories, obviously.

i do find it p rare that i enjoy the new ones tho. i actually found this more precise and readable than many of them tho.

tho tho tho

i read it -- i haven't read a short story in the NYer in many years (if ever) and I thought it was haunting and true.

that marks him out as slightly more villainous than if they'd just left him as a potential everyman.
as i read it, he had been sitting there stewing in the bar for a while and had been drinking. i thought it was a sign of what lurks in the heart of everyman and only comes out when he is empowered with a way to send a message and effectively have the last word.

when i was her age, there was no texting but i have no doubt that average "normal" dudes had many uncharitable thoughts about me. ugh this story stung.

#noteveryman

I am not exactly worried about its quality as a story (lol like I can tell) but it carries a charge, the story does sting for sure. That's a lot than almost any fiction you'd pick up randomly like this.

maybe - i dunno tho, i feel like texting someone "whore" and that whole last exchange to me feels kind of psychotic or at least mra/alt right.

i'd say a lot of men's sexism is less overt than that - exposing that, which the piece did a lot along the way, i guess, might be more difficult/interesting.

i just feel it's better when it shows the creepiness of the actually quite "normal" things he does, like the paternalistic behaviour etc, if he's this angry full misogynist creep it has less impact.

that just feels way beyond the pale to me - it suggests all his other off behaviour he is because deep down hes' this awful angry creep, rather than in fact the normal behaviour of an average man.

xpost i think if the story is trying to say "yes all men" then it'd be more powerful if it didn't end the way it does.

xpost to ll

LG otm there I think

The whole thing lacks any ambiguity really though

the narrator didn't really feel like a character, just an observer, a receptacle for the narrative. the story's sole purpose appears to be winding up/attacking mras, which is a noble enough cause, but the writing is kind of dull and the whole thing emanates a sort of calculatingly nihilistic dysphoria that brooks neither joy nor horror. nothing is left to chance. and in its obsessive recall of detail it comes off quite superficial

― imago, Monday, 11 December 2017 14:04 (fourteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hmmm what else sounds like

#noteveryman was good tho it were right good

the narrator literally announces she has told this story different ways before now, how much ambiguity do you want

(amking my way through the interview now)

re: the last line. Kristen says it was inspired "by a small but nasty encounter I had with a person I met online", later on in the same interview she expresses nervousness in trying to capture a younger person's texts. So maybe all of that explains the crude ending but I liked it -- from where it started to where we got to. All the witticisms and weeks of flirting turning so ugly, to this one word left like that. It didn't stop from the story from hitting a nerve.

Fills enough time before the next time Trump tweets his thing so enjoy it, says I.

decent story, i also don't think the last line is in keeping with the rest but i don't mind an attempt to swing for the fences.

if he's this angry full misogynist creep it has less impact.

he's not -- i think it's supposed to show that if they feel shitty enough, or are drunk enough, or feel rejected enough, even the guy who seems to have it all together could lash out and say something like that. it's not beyond the pale for a drunk lonely pissed off dude to lash out and say something he will likely regret but be unable to retract. in the past, people could just think it. maybe say it to their friends. now they both have to live with him having actually expressed it.

i guess i just don't believe that is the action of anyone but a particularly angry misogynist.

lashing out maybe, or getting angry - people get angry in dating. but calling someone a whore is like getting into territory where the word "violence" doesn't feel a misuse. to think otherwise i'd have to try to justify him calling her a whore.

i don't think you have to justify it to understand that it's possible for a person who is performatively kind to find that his kindness is not rewarded as he thinks it should be, gets angry, lashes out drunkenly in a way that is disproportionate to the way he feels he was wronged. it did not feel ott to me, though it was an abrupt ending to the story.

I think the last line would feel over-the-top if it was in isolation but the string of messages before it makes it more credible, imo. Within the context of getting angry/lashing out there are still plenty of guys out there who have no trouble responding like that, doesn't need to be a MRA.

Also don't think this story is supposed to "wind up" anyone, feels like a very weird way to look at it imo.

only a really warped person imo. like it's p much a hate crime, what he does. anyway i guess we won't agree on this - i can't claim to have a full perspective on this story.

xpost

also she basically initiated the relationship based on his apparent (performative) kindness -- that she eventually chose not to pursue further contact with him after their lackluster encounter is another choice she made, one he felt was uncharitable toward him, so he lashed out in anger. It seemed like a conceivable reaction of a man who felt the control had not just been wrestled away from him, but done so by a younger woman -- which is basically totally realistic. Whether or not your average "decent dude" would hurl that word around casually is not really the point. Although personally I don't think it's a stretch.

LG -- even if you believe that "only a warped person" would say/do this, it's a sign of how warped many people (men) are. More than you think!

seemed totally relatable to me and her perspective seemed valuable. i'm not that guy but i certainly know lots of that guys. it's really weird that people are so uptight about either being that guy or knowing that guy that they have to get all captain-save-a-cat-person on twitter but hey it's 2017 i guess.

lol, quite possibly. i was beginning to say "nobody i know would ever do this" but i can't claim to know. i can only use myself as barometer and i know for a fact i would never, ever do this. i don't say that to morally grandstand either, i have no sense of myself as righteous whatsoever, it just makes me recoil and for me personally it allows me to then dismiss him a bit.

a bit like someone using a racial slur - i label them a racist and that allows me to distance myself and kind of treat all their other behaviour with more suspicion. i feel it'd be a stronger story if he didn't get this angry at the end. but i also feel like it'd be a stronger story if it was exposing the creepy paternalism or patriarchal behaviours in ostensibly "normal, happy" relationships. more subtle maybe but more interesting too.

i've spoken too much itt

xpost i find it v annoying that people are getting lambasted for saying it's a bad story. it's a piece of art, you don't have to like it just because of what it's about.

xpost to ll there, sorry!

apart from the ending the story was v successful at casting a kind of awful vibe where a perceptive, intelligent woman drifts from one impulse to another without feeling able to stand up for her own shifting feelings, or even declare them

thought the ending served well to show the dark side of welcoming objectification: narrator finds his reduction of her to a precious doll initially sweet and attractive but the other shoe drops when precious doll discovers inscrutable older guy is shallow/gross/a shitty lay

i think the final "whore" in there suggests that maybe there _was_ danger in those moments and part of what makes the story compelling is that the decisions she made, that had some grounding in her mind in self-preservation, may ultimately have been more necessary than she or we thought in the moment.

yeah I would think the specifics of the story mitigate a bit against reacting to it as some kind of universal takedown of men/masculinity, though obv aspects of it have larger resonance. idk maybe I am sheltered but 20-yr old college student meets mid-30s sad sack is not something I imagine happens too too often.

if anything the part that didn't ring true for me was her fantasy of seeing herself as young-and-beautiful-with-flawless-skin through his eyes--not impossible I suppose but young people are more insecure than that ime. that said, perhaps I've just hit the limits of being able to imagine myself as the object of the male gaze?

I don't think gendered slurs are anywhere near the level of taboo in current society that racial slurs are. Like they should be but.

xposts

he's not -- i think it's supposed to show that if they feel shitty enough, or are drunk enough, or feel rejected enough, even the guy who seems to have it all together could lash out and say something like that. it's not beyond the pale for a drunk lonely pissed off dude to lash out and say something he will likely regret but be unable to retract. in the past, people could just think it. maybe say it to their friends. now they both have to live with him having actually expressed it.

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, December 11, 2017 7:58 AM (thirty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is extremely true, and your other point about kindness not being rewarded is also true. lots of guys i've known over time, there's this expectation i think that the kindness they show (that no one asked to be shown!) is deserving of some prize or acknowledgement or having someone in your debt.

truth bomb

men who call women they've slept with whores are not ime some negligible subspecies of obvious monster and the story ending on that word highlights what's underneath "everyman" condescension waiting to be brought forth by rejection+frustration (as LL says). that's like why it's a problem.

lotta redundant xposts.

idk maybe I am sheltered but 20-yr old college student meets mid-30s sad sack is not something I imagine happens too too often.
yes, you are sheltered. ime one of the only truly powerful instruments a 20 year old woman wields is her ability to charm easily charmed men*, of which he was one. not a sad sack, but vulnerable. i might say that in some ways she took advantage of him too -- his attentiveness, his worship. she knew this, and it's why she was worried she would come across as a tease iirc.

I don't think gendered slurs are anywhere near the level of taboo in current society that racial slurs are. Like they should be but.
OTM x1000

*needy men

feel like tinder and the like (tho they meet irl in the story) have led to a lot of relationships with big age differences. i see this a lot now.

it has always happened? very much like the way it happened in the story! you flirt with some dude, he seems alright, you hang out, and then things go south faster and faster until whatever was there is definitely over.

ahem i am unfamiliar with this dynamic (pulls at collar)

i also think ^^^ is part of the point of the story

in some ways it seems to me a comment on the dark side of assuming sexual agency for all people when we are still playing on a field that is not just uneven, but full of landmines.

men who call women they've slept with whores are not ime some negligible subspecies of obvious monster and the story ending on that word highlights what's underneath "everyman" condescension waiting to be brought forth by rejection+frustration (as LL says)

it isn't underneath if he straight out calls her a whore, imo. it's overt. if you're trying to talk about what lies underneath a veneer then you need to show that it lies underneath, which is actually more insidious and interesting. there's a diff between thinking a thing, or having it emerge in your mind, and saying it which would also be p good territory for this story, whatever way it was explored.

xp
good points, thanks LL

it's underneath if it comes out only at the dead end of the relationship, after like a dozen unanswered texts, as the last line of the story.

also i think the fact that it connects, at the last possible second, the nuanced and pathetic image you have in your head and the image of an alt-right shitposter, is pretty deliberate.

ime one of the only truly powerful instruments a 20 year old woman wields is her ability to charm easily charmed men*

this is rly otm and i liked the stuff w her job at the art theatre: the way he blows up its sophistication first in flattery but gradually in anxious bitterness and insecurity was v true to the usual dynamic between older lonely men w what they think of as taste and younger women whose intelligence they praise until the day it stops working.

(the praise, not the intelligence)

it IS underneath!! he is hiding it, even from himself. it only comes out and breaks his veneer of decency when he knows she is no longer interested (again, her decision) he is robbed/"robbed" of his control over the situation and he lashes out (drunkenly) with what is buried beneath the flirting and jokes and attentive question asking and his urbane apartment and everything. anger at having his control taken away by a young woman he slept with, a person with whom he assumed (incorrectly) that he had the upper hand.

he is not an MRA shitposter -- he is a regular guy. otherwise she wouldn't have spent as much time with him as she did.

it's also a fairly difficult technical problem to have this mentality submerged but not overt when the story is first-person from her perspective

"Later, the bartender told me that he'd written 'whore' to me into the text window, but decided to erase it."

i dunno, i just think him saying that stops him being a regular guy. you don't just call someone a "whore". even thinking "she is a fucking whore" or whatever would be p strange. guess we're going round in circles.

if he's texting women calling them whores he is an mra shitposter, de facto.

i guess i just disagree with that

i think it's important to note that i don't think the author is portraying either of the characters as predatory; it's worse than that. this is business as usual.

a few years ago just turned thirty i hooked up with a girl that was i believe 19 maybe 20 at a and this is a creepy detail a 17 year old girl's birthday party that i went to with friends from work NOT KNOWING it was a 17 year old girl's birthday party. driving home the next morning, she asked how old i was and i couldn't even say it and had to shakingly pull out my drivers license wordlessly pass it to her. she said, comfortingly: no, it's cool, my friend is dating a guy who's like 42. i was smitten with her, got her phone number, texted once, got no response and agonized for a few days about sending a follow up but never did. about a week later? she said she was in the mountains skiing and hadn't gotten my message but she wasn't interested, and i never saw her again.

i can relate, folks. tbf this guy does seem like an mra shitposter right off the bat. story was okay.

xp So many details were true to life and experience imo. I want to use the words "gross" and "banal" somehow but both already seem cliched.

he should have used them about the student bar she suggested

he seemed insecure for sure -- would not extrapolate that to "MRA shitposter"

yeah clearly insecure and i definitely understand that part of it. i dunno, the slightly manipulative exchange at the counter starts it off, the way he suggests jokingly that she insulted him, referring to her as "concession-stand girl."

those were the parts that to me are creepy and more strongly so if the ending isn't as overt

i enjoyed this story. guy seems like a dickhead from the get-go but that isn't a flaw in the story to me

seems cool that a piece of fiction went viral. although obviously i had a quick look on twitter and saw some of the worst takes ever. someone who found it fatphobic. chuds arguing that the girl is "the baddy".

The way he withholds recognition and respect, uses small denigrations, pretends to take offense to stay on the offensive, is textbook. Seen it, lived it, dated it. Also struck by, on her part, the multiple times she's aware that she's smarter, abler than him but gets nervous or retreats into imagining the fantasy/image instead of taking control of the situation and being done with him. That she's almost afraid? to expose him, or to find out what could happen if she lets him down.

Her instincts here are probably good, which is what the end is telling us, but even without the literalness of the last lines it's just the water we swim in. Seeing someone be sure that they're better than you and know that they're wrong but keeping that secret for reasons of your own...protection, politeness, or finding a tiny sliver of power in being underestimated. Not realizing that you had so much power at your fingertips all along if you just claimed it instead of settling for the tiny bit that you had to deal with all their shit for.

yeah this story stings both ways

lots of good posts on this thread!

i really liked the story. i think it speaks to a transactional sense of entitlement commonly found among Nice Guys that is rooted in misogyny.

posts on this thread more interesting (to me) than the original story tbh

a good writing exercise would be to write this same story w the male as the narrator

^^ or have the same author alternate woman & male narrators

i feel like i've read this story a thousand times from the man's perspective

La Lech otm throughout this thread.

I saw this story was going viral because of the ending and was expecting some sort of Shirley Jackson/Alan Moore futureshock twist - like, maybe it's called Cat Person because it turns out that he is **literally a half cat half person** - and sou was relieved by the actual ending.

I'm 40 and have been in a relationship for 15 years - and I totally saw this guy as the nightmare alternative me if I'd stayed single. We might not be that guy right now, but everyone has the potential to be that guy.

Aside from that I thought it was a funny and super-relatable piece, OTM about bad one night stands and how crushes can suddenly curdle in an instant. And I'm not sure it's fair to ascribe gimickiness to a piece that never sought its virality.

That said - I thought the last couple Curtis Sittenfeld stories (also about bad one night stands) were better.

Certainly have read this story quite a bit from a man's perspective - not sure texting would be adding (too much) of a new angle on it either.

xpost

even so, comparing/contrasting two voices sheds new light on both. reading the male side of the story from the (female) author's perspective could be unpredictable, revealing. just the kind of imaginative leap that fiction (as opposed to straight autobiography or memoir) not only allows but requires.

talking form not content here

as a single dude with a cat I feel I should weigh in and say ... my cat rules

I don't need to see the guy's side of the story, I've read and seen that countless times before (and not just from make writers)

Wanting to see this from the guy's side seems like a subconscious desire to excuse the guy's behaviour. But it's ok for him to remain an unknowable asshole. Ambiguity is also a thing fiction does.

(Male writers, I mean, sorry)

You don't seem very ambiguous about it

genuinely curious, where are the countless stories like this by a male narrator

m coleman is right i suggested it more as to form, not at all to defend/justify the actions by either party.

how abt if this female writer herself wrote a vers from the male narrators pov, would everyone still be as dismissive / not want to read it?

while i agree that i haven't read countless examples of this scenario from a male perspective the idea that someone's reaction to this story would be "i would like to read this from the man's perspective" seems beyond banal and wrong as a reaction to this story

“When u laguehd when I asked if you were a virgin was it because youd fucked so many guys”
“Are you fucking that guy right now”
“Is someone getting the best"
"the best"
"the best"
"the best"
"of you."

i like it fine on its own terms & think its well-observed and engaging fwiw

i speculated it might be *interesting* to read from multiple points of view. and that's "beyond banal" or "wrong" or jesus subconsciously excusing this creep's behavior?

bidding ILX a fond adieu

imo the male perspective is p much already there. for instance by the end you are as aware of the emotion induced in him by her laugh as you are of the emotion in her that caused it. so is she. having read this version of the story i felt pretty clear on what had happened to both the characters. the reverse however would not be true: he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers. huh.

very good post

Oh that is very neat.

Interesting that her interview suggests she was trying to see things from his side anyway (sorta):

The first draft of the story came fairly easily—I wrote it in a feverish burst—but I did feel self-conscious, afterward, about the verisimilitude of the texts, especially because Margot is younger than I am and there’s nothing more embarrassing than someone older trying to mimic the communication style of a slightly different generation. There are fewer of her texts in the story for that reason. I liked writing Robert’s side of the conversation, on the other hand, in part because I felt like I was his analogue as a writer: both of us were trying to imitate how someone younger would talk, always on the verge of a slip that would give the game away.

i really liked the story. i think it speaks to a transactional sense of entitlement commonly found among Nice Guys that is rooted in misogyny.

don't see this narrator self-identifying as a nice guy tbh. he's not a particularly fleshed out character tho.

genuinely curious, where are the countless stories like this by a male narrator

good question imo. so many people saying "we've all read this story" - don't think so - if it's actually written by this author i don't think we can assume we've already read that story.

he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers

it's possible to show things by absence. one of the things i don't like about this story is that the reader doesn't get to know more than the character.

Are you saying you can't think of any stories or novels written by men about male misogynists?

he's not a particularly fleshed out character tho

That's a fair critique though - one person's archetype is another person's "too unspecific"

nobody said "a man should rewrite this story" tbf - i also think upthread people are misinterpreting m coleman's post. i read as "it'd be interesting to see this author tell this story from the male's perspective" as "this needs to be more fair to the male character by telling his side of the story"

the two things are p different. the first, while obv just some idle musing, might be interesting, right?

sorry meant to say people seem to be interpreting his post as "this needs to be more fair to the male character by telling his side of the story"

I super recommend the interview - she's good at explaining what she was doing (e.g. by making the guy so thinly drawn) without overexplaining it

https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-kristen-roupenian-2017-12-11

I linked it above. Its good, there'll be a lot of pressure on whatever she does next.

In her twitter she also linked this reaction piece: https://elladawson.com/2017/12/09/bad-sex-or-the-sex-we-dont-want-but-have-anyway/

I know that both perspectives are strongly in there but...many of the readings are tied to your biography and history, and so we also test our feelings against the writer of the piece, who happens to be a woman.

I was actually thinking of some names re: the male perspective. Immediately after I finished this story last night I wanted to read Pavese's "The Suicides" (i'll pick it up, think I left it at my parents' bookcase lol) just this highly corrosive story of an affair completely gone wrong. Maybe Moravia's Boredom for an age-gap story. Or Radiguet's Count D'Orgel's Ball from a young male perspective, this time an affair with a married older woman. I think a few of Schnitzler's short stories would count here too.

Also it might usually be to do with those stories re-counting an academic Male to female student r/ship. But I've never engaged with it (just sounds like a total waste of time). I do remember seeing a twitter thread from a woman about a couple of months ago who couldn't quite believe what she is reading.

I also don't really get when men feel the need to "take the man's side" (or whatever) in a piece of fiction, as if it's impossible to identify or find commonalities with a female character

...

the reverse however would not be true: he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers. huh.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, December 11, 2017 2:03 PM (two hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is a great breakdown, dlh!

The author's take on how Margot's constantly shifting in her guesses of Robert's motivations and inner self which rings true to me. Some people have commented that it seems she's projecting, which seems off. I don't know that anyone can take someone else purely on the basis of their actions, and we all bring prior knowledge, hopes, even ideals to the table. It does feel like Robert's projecting throughout the story, but it's almost completely about externalities -- not what Margot would want, or why, but purely judgments on things she does and chooses.

I keep thinking about my college creative nonfiction writing course and how this is very similar in style to the work a lot of my classmates wrote, and not far from some of the themes, but it exceeds anything we came up with in execution. I wish I'd pushed myself harder at the time, but writing in this way is difficult and I felt like the experience really indicted my own sense of introspection and my understanding of others.

In a sense, I recognize both of these people.

<i>the story was v successful at casting a kind of awful vibe where a perceptive, intelligent woman drifts from one impulse to another without feeling able to stand up for her own shifting feelings, or even declare them</i>

this resonated with me--i read this as a particularly gendered and truthful experience of a certain kind of sexual encounter, but maybe a man would also participate in this type of extremely unfullfiling sex without trying to do anything to change the encounter (?)

I think the changes necessary to make it plausible, or at least plausible in a commonplace way, would also make it into a much different situation

I think Robert is supposed to be an MRA/pickup artist type, not an everyman. From the beginning he is always putting the narrator down or else ignoring or belittling her. He never takes a genuine interest in her life, to the point where it seems calculated. In each of their interactions, his first priority is to protect his ego. He’s more pitiable than loathsome, though he is that too. People like that — closed off, cruel people — are not even truly alive. You can’t imagine him loving anyone. The fact that there is a cottage industry training people to be like that is, you know, horrifying.

Any man can become like Robert in the sense that everyone is capable of killing the best parts of themselves, but he is really far gone in my view. There are people like him, and they are legion, but there is nothing ordinary about this pathological sort of existence no matter how common it is.

no, he’s an everyman. we did this shit long before MRA types had these tropes. it was a thing as far as I’ve seen, back in my life

and yeah, it’s bad, but people clue into empathy and become whole humans at different parts in their lives! or they don’t. the pressure to understand others, as a societal good, is perhaps higher now when we roll our eyes at public figures proclaiming they have an understanding of women after having a daughter

Fine but it’s still fucked up behavior, stemming from a place of extraordinary selfishness and suspicion.

like the entire twitter-response male denial of this being an abnormal man, of us needing a story from the male viewpoint, of the ending seeming unrealistic, of the supposed judgmental bits

that all seems more false to me, and this story isn’t an absolute, but I could hear the details of it from a friend and believe it — but the details never come across like that, you end up with more emotional color, especially on the male end

sure treeship, I’d believe that. but how many people, really, have those factors?

the story isn’t an indictment of men, all men, even this fictional man. it’s got some facets to consider and some behaviors we find questionable, some gross, some too optimistic or naive

hm...i just finished reading this. my 2 cents:

robert reminded me of a nerdy (yes, overweight) friend i had when i was a kid. he made the same type of jokes, making these these surreal, imaginary characterizations of people (he did it towards men and women) to cover up for his social awkwardness. i actually always thought of him as a gentle bear and i would say this to him. so here's where i think the story is not believable: so there's this omnipresent narrator thing going on, but then towards the end goes into this post structuralist point of view thing, which is fine, albeit a bit clumsy. but while the narrator is still a separate entity from margot -- in the first half of the story -- the narrator equates robert's seeing more nude women with a fantasy of being with an experienced man, if i'm reading this correctly. i'm going to draw from my own personal experience with the roberts i've met and say no. robert sounds like he totally lacks experience with women. i have met women who have misjudged guys' sexual experience simply because he was way older

so why is robert's lack of sexual experience so important to me. well, as someone who has been around a lot of guys, not having sex can put guys in an existential crisis and it's a crisis that they try to mask (avoid) by getting hobbies like movies and art and whatever other thing they think women would be interested in. but while they're working on these hobbies, they become frustrated because they think they are "doing everything right" but are still not getting what they want. like someone said, as if women were prizes to be won

the guys i've met who think like this were either teenagers or in their twenties but with the mindset of a 15 year old in all aspects of their life. meaning they would not have an apartment or house of their own, because they lack motivation or ambition to do much of anything in their lives. so a robert having a place of his own doesn't ring true to me

anyway. sex with margot was the most important thing in robert's view, imo, which is why everything was reduced to sex when he became so angry at the end. what makes me think this dude is also an amateur is his putting margot on a pedestal by imposing his own conservative beliefs on her and his poor communication skills. and the tongue kissing. he is all the bad things that the author has experienced, which is fair enough, but robert as a single entity is not believable, but it works in getting the message across

also apparently the author based this story off her experience with dating apps. my female friends tell me they get bombarded with messages and have so many men to pick from. why pick a man who you're not attracted to? the story could have been more fleshed out in terms of how women choose who to go out with, because there is a real struggle between finding the right balance between looks and interests and (what you see as) "success." this goes for men and women of course

i felt so bad for margot though and one thing that i did find really interesting is how both failed at communicating. margot because she was confused and didn't want to hurt his feelings and robert because of his what i truly believe is his lack of experience with women and probably bad role models (parents, guardians, friends, etc.)

in general it was an interesting read and it did keep me wanting to know what would happen next

pic.twitter.com/qKkd7fNoAN

— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017

Focusing on the ending feels like missing the point a bit - it's an extreme, but not untrue, depiction of male reaction to rejection ime. The first time I read it, I thought it was pretty hilarious, almost a relief after all the tension that preceded it. (And if you think that kind of thing doesn't happen often or is an outlier, a girlfriend of mine recently told me how a guy she was dating, a mutual friend of ours, said she was being "a jackass" because she told him she wasn't interested in a relationship after three nice-but-not-mindblowing dates. He also said calling her a jackass was supposed to be a compliment? I don't even know... the point is, he was far from an MRA-type, though exhibited some pretty typical Nice Guy behaviour.)

the story was v successful at casting a kind of awful vibe where a perceptive, intelligent woman drifts from one impulse to another without feeling able to stand up for her own shifting feelings, or even declare them

absolutely - this is the bit that resonated most strongly with me and other women I've discussed this with. the oscillation between "I hope he likes me/I hope he doesn't hurt me", handwaving bad behaviour as "maybe he's just having a bad day, maybe I offended him, I need to TRY HARDER". and just *wanting to impress* some guy even when he hasn't done anything to deserve it apart from being kind of cute/well-dressed/good at making jokes is a thing that almost every 20-year-old straight girl, including myself, I know has gone through.

The author has deliberately withheld a lot of information about Robert, but just looking at the overall reactions, it's funny how so many men have a specific idea about who he is - he's an MRA-type, he hasn't had a lot of sexual experience, he's this or he's that. whereas most women see Robert as just pretty much as he's written - a random guy.

i have reservations about how he comes off at the end but ^^^^ he's a random guy

Sorry to state the obvious, but surely the fact that people are debating this is due to the very ambiguity this story was earlier accused of not having - which ambiguity is baked right in, right down to the titular concept of the story? The narrator admits in an aside that she isn't sure whether the dude lied about having cats (which is surely a huge red flag & far from normal male/human behaviour is the kind of psycho stunt that the male lead in a romcom has to admit to in the 3rd act) or whether she just didn't see them. It's clearly designed to be read both ways.

That said, I don't feel that the final texts are that much of an escalation from his earlier extremely douchey behaviour - there's a nasty edge to a lot of it throughout.

It is that he is a random guy, and not some MRA thing (that's a Methodology, right? Nothing felt too calculated)...but it also felt like they were both random people playing at using/being used by one another. The intention at the beginning is to connect, he is a dick but she gives her number too. Everyone is degraded by playing at whatever towards the end.

Like, that's often how life is, but then again I'm he person who watches Salo, goes 'yup, he gets it', then moves on.

Sorry to state the obvious, but surely the fact that people are debating this is due to the very ambiguity this story was earlier accused of not having

that is what people are debating. some say it is ambiguous, others say the ending removes a lot of ambiguity.

moving away from that slightly, i just think this idea of "he's left open, you can interpret him how you wish" is kind of a thing people say that sounds like it's clever on behalf of the writer but isn't necessarily so. also the ending is the bit that, for some at least, seems to stop that being the case. i mean i dunno, ending a story is difficult, i read it again last night and i think the ending was a tempting stick of dynamite that actually is a case of plot riding roughshod over character.

there's a lot of wiggling itt like "if a friend told me this story i'd believe it" - i mean we do have a phrase "truth is stranger than fiction" and obv there are plenty assholes out there, i wouldn't doubt any story of human behaviour not least in this sphere. still dunno if it feels true to this character but he isn't v fleshed out.

as someone who has been around a lot of guys, not having sex can put guys in an existential crisis and it's a crisis that they try to mask (avoid) by getting hobbies like movies and art and whatever other thing they think women would be interested in. but while they're working on these hobbies, they become frustrated because they think they are "doing everything right" but are still not getting what they want. like someone said, as if women were prizes to be won

the guys i've met who think like this were either teenagers or in their twenties but with the mindset of a 15 year old in all aspects of their life. meaning they would not have an apartment or house of their own, because they lack motivation or ambition to do much of anything in their lives. so a robert having a place of his own doesn't ring true to me

some fairly wild stereotypes there imo going in all sorts of directions, maybe if those guys were just boning more they'd have a ferrari.

you, a nerd: have you read about Cat Person?
me, well informed on topical items: uh, he goes by Yusuf Islam now

— Five Bergolden Rings 🎅🎁🎄 (@BergoEsBueno) December 11, 2017

i liked this story a lot. way better than any recent new yorker stories i've read in a long time. really loved how carefully it depicted the weird atmosphere of a date (which, after all, usually happens with somebody you barely know, and often leads to weird situations where you feel kind of trapped, even if they aren't necessarily dangerous situations) and how carefully it depicted the narrator's shifting attitudes toward the guy. the ending was startling (for its abruptness as much as anything else) but after a few seconds it felt like the right way to end the story.

^^ i meant to replace my second use of "how carefully it depicted" w/ a different phrase that meant the same thing, but hey, that's why i'm not in the new yorker

LG and imago coming off like you don't know any women who are dating w/ apps tbh

LL and io OTM itt

i have seen the sort of thing that happens in apps, of course i have. i've heard from friends, read articles about it. i'm under no doubt it's intense and horrible, dick pics etc.

but this story features no apps.

that's an interesting choice tbh - she says it was inspired by a meeting on an app but she chooses to her meet him irl. i have to say, maybe this is sad in a "oh no our phones" way but i haven't heard tell of a friend meeting someone irl like in a shop or whatever, in years, or maybe even ever. meeting irl at a party or through a shared interest, maybe. that does lend a little weight to him as pick-up artist, but i don't really want to open that up again.

chooses to have her*

i liked this story a lot. way better than any recent new yorker stories i've read in a long time

i should add, so did i. said it at the start of thread.

but this story features no apps.

The kind of frustrated text strings that this story ends with are common in general casual / exploratory dating, whether via an app or not. They're just so frequent via apps that you would surely not be surprised by the ending if you talk much to women who are doing a moderate amount of interacting with men in the text-y era.

(talk much about their experiences, I mean; not trying to imply you're an incipient cat person who doesn't interact with women at all!)

gonna stfu though bcz Lechera & Laurel have said everything relevant already, and more usefully

i just don't t think you can accuse people of not knowing about what happens in apps, then when it's pointed out there are no apps in this story, say "well i meant texts, it's all the same". it isn't really the same, when he's basically stalking a person who he met irl and then sending texts to her phone number. there's a hierarchy of communication and how personal it is, just as there's a hierarchy to our relationships with people, those we've never met offline, those we see every day, those we've slept with.

the question of why they meet irl is one i'd love to hear the author answer, just because i think it's an interesting choice in a story which seems to demand they met via tinder. to me that's why you mention apps, cos this story feels of that world even tho there are no apps in it. i think them meeting on tinder or something would have been really interesting and almost an open goal, his photos, their first message etc, so much interesting stuff to explore, but maybe it's zeitgeisty enough already.

How is he stalking her? He did stop texting once she/her friend let him know. Up to the last interaction, which is just nasty, and could be the beginning of something like stalking.

Apps are the ice-breaker so you can begin texting, and this r/ship is built via texts.

I thought this was good, on the whole, but one major sticking point was that she thought he was mid-twenties but he turns out to be mid-thirties and if someone is kinda heavy set and hairy and schlumpy in the way she describes then those two ages aren't really confusable in that way, or very rarely are. Or if they are it's that the guy you thought was in his thirties is actually ten years younger not that other way round.

but i thought this was pretty fresh, on the whole.

maybe schlumpy is pushing it.

Or if they are it's that the guy you thought was in his thirties is actually ten years younger not that other way round.

maybe she thought he was one of those guys who looks like he's in his mid-thirties but is actually ten years younger, and then it turned out he was just in his his mid-thirties?

something can be true and righteous and thought-provoking without being especially gripping or well-written. no doubt this does reflect the experiences of many, and i'm all for the discussion, if not the text itself, which i felt was too cartoonishly on-the-nose with its awkwardness and horror, and lacking in the oxygen of externality

It is good that a socially relevant, well written piece of popular adult fiction is enabling a discussion about anything in 2017. I am glad it exists!

Overall, though, I find the piece more "interesting" than "good." As an entry point into a discussion about sexual experience I am glad to have read it. As the presentation of a perspective I do *not* understand (college girl dating seedy older guy) it was well worth my time. But as a piece of structured fiction it was ... just okay. (nb: I am approaching this as a writing teacher).

In my work I have heard two distinct conversations happening about Cat People. But they are messy, and commingled. The first conversation is about the ubiquity of creepy dudes objectifying women and about the sociology of dating men; the second conversation is about the technique and story itself. Often, I think critiques of the story/technique/representation are actually proxy conversations in which dudes to push back against the first conversation. But I think both conversations are valuable and need to be had.

It's my guess that the virality of the story is due to the first conversation (i.e. so many men are creepy and not-so-secretly misogynistic). I think that fans of the story are reacting to this, its content, and the way in which it handles/represents the experience of a not-quite-a-relationship with a lot of realism. I like the can of worms it has opened. I've enjoyed reading (upthread and elsewhere) the articulate thoughts and opinions about gender/dating/identity, etc.

But the second conversation, about the story itself – which the author is certainly strong enough to bear – is where I feel comfortable putting an oar in the water. As a piece of fiction it is strange, and kind of unique, and I think it merits and supports a rollicking conversation. To belittle discussion/disagreement/reaction to it is paternalistic and snide (that 'men react to cat people' twitter irritates me), because I am certain the author will not curl up meekly.

my mind, in fact, it stumbles over its own intentions

(ignore the last line – that was a quote from a response I read elsewhere)

^^^great post, ty

It's impossible to entirely separate the two discussions tho - like say imago's complaint that the story is "cartoony" ties directly into whether that character feels real to us as representative of a certain masculinity or not.

the narrator equates robert's seeing more nude women with a fantasy of being with an experienced man, if i'm reading this correctly.

I don't think it's a fantasy? It's more that she assumes he has and is puzzled by his behaviour - which I think is meant to highlight how unexperienced she is and how little she knows about men. It's not a turn on for her or anything.

why pick a man who you're not attracted to?

You get to a certain level of desperation where you just end up thinking "why the hell not, could turn out to be good" (meetcute tropes reinforce this).

Oh, I know the discussions aren’t seperable. But quibbles with the expression... of which there are certainly valid ones ... don’t inherently suggest disageeement with the content (although they often are proxies).

What are the characteristics of agreement/disagreement with the content of a short piece of fiction and what moral conclusions are to be drawn answers to the usual address

Lol "lacking in the oxygen of externality", wtf is this bollocks?

There’s nothing wrong with meet/cute tropes. Xp

The fucking apps have ruined everything. People are out there trying to get laid in a context where 1.) there is no accountability, or incentive to put your best face forward, and 2.) it’s really easy to dehumanize the people you are interacting with this because they are words on a screen. They didn’t invent misogyny or anything but they’ve breathes more life in it during an era when trends should have been leading toward more equality. (Imho). They’ve ruined everything.

I think some of the negative male reactions to this have something to do with the category of 'creepiness', which includes stuff that can be considered moral failings or behavior that should be condemned (e.g abusive texts), but also stuff provokes disgust but it's also not really 'fair' to blame someone for (e.g. being fat, bad at kissing etc), but it's not possible to neatly separate the two, or how one might impact a potential lover's assessment of the other?

I don't think this is a failing of the story, and trying to separate the two would not be true to life (like some ppl were saying the story was 'fatphobic' and Robert should only be presented negatively for the actual morally bad things he does), but the framing via which a lot of ppl are encountering this story on social media is not as a piece of fiction which represents the ambiguities of real life, but as a righteous call-out of bad male behaviour, tweets about how all men should read this and reflect about their transgressions etc, I get why in that context men would get defensive about certain aspects of this and complain that they're being condemned for being a physically unattractive loser or whatever

Treezy what experience had you of dating pre apps for dating and I'm asking in a framing way not a shaming way

What are the characteristics of agreement/disagreement with the content of a short piece of fiction and what moral conclusions are to be drawn answers to the usual address

Sorry, I don’t follow this.

xps by focusing so intensely on the already-solipsistic central pair it failed to offer the relief or the mystery of external circumstances - settings, people, whatever - and perhaps by design, too, in order to induce a sort of psychological claustrophobia. i suppose the author succeeded in making it feel unpleasant

anyway yeah carry on treesh

My experience trying to meet people on apps has been mediocre but not terrible — women aren’t weird or mean on there like men are — but it still seems to bizarre for me. It aldo seems bad/frightening/dystopian to have like hundreds of matches lined up in an inbox.

I mosty think the apps are bad because of what I hear from my friends who are women. I think the technology has given a lot of fucked up guys the perfect opportunity to embrace their inner stalker, and maybe prevented them from learning real social skills or empathy.

Maybe my analysis is off the mark but I do think a piece of this conversation that is missing is how technology has affected the way people live. I’m probably unduly reactionary about various forms of social media, but still, I’d welcome more analysis from cooler heads.

fwiw online dating has been a boon to myself (when I was still in the game) and tons of friends of both genders: having a profile where you could advance a few starting points before you get too deep into the conversation was a lot less humiliating, and had less potential for disaster, than trying to pull in a bar. Never gave Tinder much of a go though, these picture + one line of text apps do feel a lot more transactional.

There’s nothing wrong with meet/cute tropes.

Whether there's something wrong with the trope-as-trope is irrelevant to the point I was making: there's tons wrong with using fiction tropes as a guide to how romance works in real life, and yet mostly we all still do it.

the framing via which a lot of ppl are encountering this story on social media is not as a piece of fiction which represents the ambiguities of real life, but as a righteous call-out of bad male behaviour, tweets about how all men should read this and reflect about their transgressions etc, I get why in that context men would get defensive about certain aspects of this and complain that they're being condemned for being a physically unattractive loser or whatever

This is totally correct but tbf at this point I feel like social media corrupts everything it touches.

Even in this story, this guy probably wouldn’t have dared to sejd that message as a letter or phone call. Maybe he would have, but probably not. People aren’t as careless with older media.

Self xp

Phone call probably not, letter probably yes (cf Julian Barne's <i>The Sense Of An Ending</i>, not that I enjoyed it much); the distinction isn't old media/new media, it's between facing a real human being and writing to one imo.

putting out the fire with gassy memes

Hey soda, great post. Interested to know (as a writing teacher) what about it you thought was "just okay" and "interesting" rather than "good"

But the second conversation, about the story itself – which the author is certainly strong enough to bear – is where I feel comfortable putting an oar in the water. As a piece of fiction it is strange, and kind of unique, and I think it merits and supports a rollicking conversation. To belittle discussion/disagreement/reaction to it is paternalistic and snide (that 'men react to cat people' twitter irritates me), because I am certain the author will not curl up meekly.

good post imo. i do think there is v little discussion of the story itself and the technicality of it, which i suppose is to be expected, most people don't care about that.

i also find that it's p common for people to focus on the political necessity of stories rather than the stories themselves. tbh sometimes this isn't that useful to the writer. last week somebody in my masters class wrote a story about a muslim teenager revealing to a friend that she's a lesbian. the discussion became so politically charged, both in favour of and against the story and the language used, that it made it almost impossible for anyone to give her any useful feedback or comment about the technical elements of it as a story.

i personally felt that that ends up as a form of prejudice in itself - she said to me in the pub after that "you can't even say 'islam' without a huge uncontrollable discussion happening".

i guess now the cat person author is in the ny'er feedback is not so important, but it's still interesting how something becomes a political football. l

(In my mind the story's small remit and use of archetypes works to the story's benefit - if you find it claustrophobic and bothersome, that's a sign of the story working. But without seeing more work by the writer, it's hard to say whether those limitations are specific choices for the story or a sign of the writer's own limits.)

i realise it's a major white male privilege to sit here and say "i just want to talk the technicalities of the story" but i also think the literary world is quite patronising towards less privileged groups, even (especially?) when it is praising or lionising them.

xpost

lol that i thought it was first person! in my memory it is. i gather the term of art is "third person limited"

from the first page of google results on that as a search term:

There are a number of reasons why you might decide that third person limited may be right for your next work of fiction. Here are just a few possibilities:

You want the ability to show a situation through the eyes of an interesting or unique character;

You are writing a mystery, and want the reader to experience the clues and outcomes from the point of view of one of your characters;

You are telling a story in which your main character's perspectives evolve or change, and you want to show those changes through their eyes;

You want to maintain a sense of uncertainty about other characters' motivations, emotions, or past.

check, check, check, check

re: something upthread about how he was not a stalker:
there have been abundant stalkers (from those who leave notes/gifts to those who hide behind bushes and wait for you to come home, etc*) long before mobile phones/texting/apps -- the impulse has always been there, just like the impulse to be a creep. both behaviors are motivated by entitlement imo/ime. going to the student bar and waiting for her in a corner by himself is pretty standard stalking. upthread someone suggested it might be the starting point of something that could become stalking. stalking is watching, waiting, monitoring. that's what he was doing.

i think one of the most interesting things about this story is the very true-to-life way she deludes herself into thinking he is someone more interesting/more kind than he really is. in some ways, his witty texts and performative kindness works, just a little. just enough :( even though she is in college, she is probably bored with her options. college boys are just high school boys with one or two more years under their belts and more freedom. this guy was an adult and he had an apartment and was witty with an air of mystery. and he responded to her flirtation. that feels good. and then after the encounter, when she finally realizes that this is not something she wishes to pursue and chooses to cut off her communication with him, it turns out he is not only disappointing, but hostile. tale as old as time.

*both things that have happened to me and my closest friends, just 2 examples of many

The story was inspired by a small but nasty encounter I had with a person I met online. I was shocked by the way this person treated me, and then immediately surprised by my own shock. How had I decided that this was someone I could trust? The incident got me thinking about the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks, whether online or off.

My response above was to the specifics of texting as stalking. In the story it's mostly the usual back-and-forth with gaps in between, standard stuff between two people texting.

My recall is her noticing a swift response but I think there were variable gaps as time went on?

So idk, couldn't see anything, except at the end where he lashes out, where it could escalate to something potentially harmful. But as the story cuts off it ends as as proof of some of her later instincts turning out right

Xp ll

yeah i agree with that -- some of this story seems to be about the lack of accuracy of interpreting nonverbal communicative behavior (length of time between texts, response time, for example) which isn't all that different from waiting for someone to call you back. interpreting the silence.

when i read the end i felt good for her actually -- shame she had to go through the disappointing sexual encounter, but at least she had made the decision to cut him loose. that's something.

That’s an odd reading, if you don’t mind me saying so - ‘contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks’ is pretty much the definition of dating apps. I mean, there’s the context of hey how are you, would you like to take your clothes off with me, but you’re missing every other bit of structure.

xp to mh

not true, you will usually know which albums by bands they enjoy also

My response above was to the specifics of texting as stalking.

you said "How is he stalking her?" about a story in which he shows up at a place where she is, unwanted. i mean you could prob call it stalking when he goes back to her workplace to ask her out too.

xpost

Also not to forget that some of the observational comedy of the piece is very on point, relatable and funny. I definitely lol'd (with bittersweet recognition) at

At last, after a frantic rabbity burst, he shuddered, came, and collapsed on her like a tree falling, and, crushed beneath him, she thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made!

i think the best thing about the piece is how brilliant and hence terrible the sex scene is - there are literally yearly awards for bad writing about sex, it's hard to do and people avoid it so often, she went right into it no holds barred and it is deeply realised and uncomfortable.

also it is now causing me to wonder when the first new yorker story using the word "came" in this sense actually was, and the negative and then positive editorial decisions leading up to it

you, a nerd: have you read about Cat Person?
me, well informed on topical items: uh, he goes by Yusuf Islam now
— Five Bergolden Rings 🎅🎁🎄 (@BergoEsBueno) December 11, 2017

― ||||||||, Tuesday, December 12, 2017 2:50 AM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is an incredibly good tweet

Ok LG I think because your posts centred around texting vs aps, and then you started talking about stalking in the middle of it...apols for any misread.

I don't count him asking for her number as stalking, given their interaction previously and that she said yes.

xp to Andrew

That’s fair. The phrasing reminded me of a story a woman on twitter recently shared. The kind of ad hoc interaction and joking leading up to a meet, and the missing pieces slowly becoming clear.

I do think it’s interesting that we instantly jump to dating apps when talking about meeting online

Tbh I was relieved there were no actual cats in this story, so as not to deepen the stigma against men who own cats.

what's this about a stigma
*shuffles cat under the couch*

the term is pussyboy

"cat person" may go the way of "catfish"
who knows!

a cat a man a plan a napalm catamaran

why pick a man who you're not attracted to?

You get to a certain level of desperation where you just end up thinking "why the hell not, could turn out to be good" (meetcute tropes reinforce this).

― Daniel_Rf, Tuesday, December 12, 2017 12:07 PM (three hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Because there are other ways to find someone attractive besides them being a gorgeous film star type on first glance? Someone you were like "Ehhh he looks...normal?" can become beautiful to you when you know them and there's significance to little expressions, habits. You have to try them out to know, though. Or is this just me? I've dated lots of men I wasn't initially smitten with because what else can you do? Beautiful ppl date each other, and I hope (or did when I was dating--I don't really think about it now) that men will regard "normal" women with the same openness and appreciation. (If not, it's NYC, feel free to chase models or w/e but that's not going to end well for pretty much anyone.) But the thing is that sometimes the expected schedule of "date - date w/ kiss - date w/ kiss again - fancier date - sleep together" happens before you figure them out and then you're in the middle of things wondering how this happened but stopping it would be a big disruption and after all you let things get this far....

i think one of the most interesting things about this story is the very true-to-life way she deludes herself into thinking he is someone more interesting/more kind than he really is. in some ways, his witty texts and performative kindness works, just a little. just enough :( even though she is in college, she is probably bored with her options. college boys are just high school boys with one or two more years under their belts and more freedom. this guy was an adult and he had an apartment and was witty with an air of mystery. and he responded to her flirtation. that feels good. and then after the encounter, when she finally realizes that this is not something she wishes to pursue and chooses to cut off her communication with him, it turns out he is not only disappointing, but hostile. tale as old as time.

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 boom

My experience trying to meet people on apps has been mediocre but not terrible — women aren’t weird or mean on there like men are

....

good post, io

that added weirdness of "well, this guy likes the movies at the theater I work at and so do I, so we've got that in common" that slowly evaporates as she realizes that's not really a commonality and he seems to associate her working there with pretension is o_O

Many many xps

that is what people are debating. some say it is ambiguous, others say the ending removes a lot of ambiguity.

moving away from that slightly, i just think this idea of "he's left open, you can interpret him how you wish" is kind of a thing people say that sounds like it's clever on behalf of the writer but isn't necessarily so.

I'm not saying it's necessarily clever - it's a standard feature of this type of fiction, sometimes to a fault. Anyway, my post was more in response to this idea that ppl who read the guy as being a serious creep or PUA type are reading it wrong, when the story itself strongly hints at this possibility throughout, to the point that the protagonist wonders about it.

(I'm ambivalent about the ending in general but don't agree it tips its hand too strongly in this regard, mainly cause it resonates with a similar experience I've had)

in orbit

you use the word "normal" and i agree with you, but margot/narrator deliberately said the word "revulsion" and the way she describes him in the first half of the story is kinda...gross? he wasn't a normal/avg looking person is what i get from the story

but i agree w u if we're talking about a regular/avg/normal looking person

tbh im surprised ppl are thinking the ending is over the top or too on the nose, seemed totally believable to me and believability is overrated anyway, also not really understanding the hostility towards short stories that have that formal tie things up with a bow ending, imho its s totally legitimate if not the only approach, i like it as a matter of fact even

wld be kinda fun if (so not gonna happen) were entering an age of super punchy topical viral short stories that enrage hardcore fans of the form

I feel guilty now but I pictured the dude in the story as a slightly angrier version of an acquaintance of mine and I could picture him fuming at the bar about this whole ordeal and sending nasty text messages after a couple drinks

haa

o yeah i pictured him as an angrier version of... an acquaintance too

i don't think he's supposed to be particularly repulsive, i think there's something to the notion however that when you meet someone new and you don't find them immediately super, super attractive, as you start to become involved w/them you shift back and forth as the relationship progresses and their personality or mannerisms make them much more or much less attractive. what you'd find sexy in a person whom you admire and respect and love might become a repulsive characteristic in someone who creeps you out or whom you dislike.

also the reason i bring up dating apps is bc i feel like dating apps have had a huge impact on our social interactions

i used to talk to random women at cafes and just make small talk or make a joke and if she followed up i could ask a question or make another comment and things could move forward from there. there was this intrigue to it bc i didnt kno if we had anything in common and it all started from a silly comment or a small observation

on say okc women have essay length profiles, dislikes, interests, protocols as to how one shld approach her, requirements of all sorts, questions answered about life, religion, sex, mundane things, etc

and everyone is free to judge you based on whether or not you read their profile

this goes both ways of course, w guys being straight to the point, getting numbers as quickly as possible and moving things to a real date and sex faster imo

all this complicates our social interactions and i believe they are different from a man meeting a movie theatre attendant at the movies. robert sounds like a very weird, lonely guy that is probably always on the internet/web. i mean a 20 year old not asking for a guy's social media accts or not more web savvy seems...different in our times especially as that is women scope a guy out and see what he is like

and yes all of us make generalizations abt robert bc this is a short story and we know next to nothing abt him. we are inside margot's head more so things on her side are explained more clearly

xp

I pictured him as Oscar from The Affair

I was anticipating/hoping that she would go back to his house and there would be like 160 cats.

https://new2.fjcdn.com/gifs/Allot_7ed177_943139.gif

I would also read that story

When u laguehd when I asked if you were a virgin was it because i had so many cats

she was secretly hoping he was a furry like her, that's the unspoken subtext of this entire story

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3h0ltkxXt1qbrdf3o1_500.gif

i can't be the only one thinking of an anthology called cat people

^^ Yeah.

I'm surprised this story got so much traction. It's good but it's hardly a story with a unique theme. Is it #metoo that pushed it to the fore this much?

xp you certainly are not

virality is a mystery to all

somewhere philip roth is very angry

haha

liver person

believability is overrated anyway

careful you don't accidentally criticise the story.

wld be kinda fun if (so not gonna happen) were entering an age of super punchy topical viral short stories that enrage hardcore fans of the form

would be fun to see how bad a story can get before people stop praising it because it's morally correct.

hehe

writing decent short-form non-genre fiction competently is difficult

I'm also very happy there's a fiction piece in the New Yorker someone's sharing that isn't Borowitz

I'm surprised this story got so much traction. It's good but it's hardly a story with a unique theme. Is it #metoo that pushed it to the fore this much?

― ♫ very clever with maracas.jpg ♫ (Le Bateau Ivre), Tuesday, December 12, 2017 3:06 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I think so?

I read it yesterday and I really don't get why this is getting so much attention at all.

It's a fine story but I wasn't blown away by anything about it thematically or stylistically.

I'm also very happy there's a fiction piece in the New Yorker someone's sharing that isn't Borowitz

― mh, Tuesday, December 12, 2017 1:42 PM (eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fucken amen

yah i dunno i liked the story, i'm not sure there's much behind its gaining traction other than lots of ppl finding it super relatable

checkmark twitter: this is about the unnavigable contours of toxic masculinity and consent

me: https://t.co/gAkoNwLWFF

— Tamara (@_TamaraWinter) December 12, 2017

x-post Wish I could say it wasn't but it is definitely that.

i rarely -- if ever -- enjoy reading fiction that i identify with personally. i enjoy reading fiction in part to gather what it's like to be someone who is NOT me. this story -- i think i enjoyed it going viral because other people were reading about an experience that maybe THEY hadn't had the dubious distinction of having, but i had. so seeing other people read and talk about the story is more enjoyable than having read it myself. i know about cat people; it's interesting to watch other people become acquainted with them. (while i am actuallying and being pretentious, i have seen 5 val lewton movies!)

imo its ok for a story to just be relatable and is an accomplishment in its own right, its not personally what im into as far as fiction but its fine and good i think

i want short stories to become the new listicles, if u think abt it its not too far from the personal essay genre that was big online a minute ago

I guess this just seems like such a common experience to me that I find it hard to believe that there are people who don't know about cat people? Good points though, LL.

a lot of people don't have particularly nuanced views and reading a story about a situation that sits mostly in shades of grey, where you're not quite sure if it's just a really mediocre experience or a bad one, isn't something they seek out

if this was a film one of the characters would be comically bad by the end or someone would have to get murdered in the background to spice it up

This is a "your terrible ideas" post but I kinda want to start a twitter account called "cats react to cat people" that's just like "meow purr so relatable meow"

Oops I mean cat PERSON obv I got confused with all the lewton talk

The two or three things I felt when I re-read this piece today:

- The focus on the minute details (of their texting conversations, of Robert's body) gave this story a kind of confessional quality that made it feel more autobiographical than fictional, so I get why people called it a "piece" or "article" instead of a "short story".

- The crux of the situation that I feel a lot of people are missing is that Margot was 20 (and thus underage in the USA) and the fact that a 34-year old was drinking with her, and subsequently having sex with her, makes this situation at the very least, on paper, predatory. A further detail to support this idea is that toward the end of the story, it's revealed that Margot had told many people about what had happened (she was traumatized), and her friends are protecting her like Secret Service agents (she was traumatized).

- The focus of the 34-year old being a badkisser and a badfucker is important insofar as it suggests that Robert was unable to hold down a relationship with somebody his own age. His focus on Margot's perceived lack-of-experience (and then accusing her of sleeping with Albert at the end) made me think that he had, at least, subconsciously felt the real effects of his badkissing and badfucking and sought (again, subconsciously) to have a relationship with somebody who's lack of sexual/romantic experience would give them less of a basis of comparison to judge his sloppy lovemaking.

I was surprised to see the reaction to it. It was well written and precise (although I didn't particularly like it) but people have always loved overidentifying with fiction tbf.

I didn't find the ending a surprise/shock/etc at all? There are so many indications that this isn't a guy who'll take rejection well. The various little warning signs - cats/not cats, the little comments digging at her because she mocked the film suggestion, her sense that she should be self-deprecating/apologetic - reminded me of people I've known where they're not quite believable and you can never feel easy around them. It was probably the thing I liked most in the story, that feeling of unease where you're unsure but trying to convince yourself otherwise. 100% agree with what in orbit said upthread that Margot's instincts were on the money.

Have to say that my personal favourite in recent years from the NYer was this Lesley Nneka Arimah piece.

apparently the author has an active account over on metafilter and admitted as such via a sock account she made to respond to the post about the story

https://www.metafilter.com/171090/Margot-met-Robert-on-a-Wednesday-night#7258782

I'm not especially active on that site these days, but I know a few people around here are

imo its ok for a story to just be relatable and is an accomplishment in its own right, its not personally what im into as far as fiction but its fine and good i think

― lag∞n, Tuesday, December 12, 2017 4:03 PM (fifty-one minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this kind of makes me wonder what reactions would be like if this had been presented as a "young adult short story" rather than a "new yorker short story"

I judge this short story to be beyond criticism (sees how everyone is impressed, goes one stage further). In fact, I judge ALL short stories to be beyond criticism, and we should never stop praising them.

Fwiw the industry self-definition of YA is for ages 11-17 so even Margot overshoots by at least several years if not a decade.

I love that Arimah story, it's my favorite out of her collection.

xp

My Short Story About Cat Person

I read Cat Person and didn't really like it. xyzzzz__ is a silly boy. The End

the funny thing is the new yorkers short stories are often bad, much worse than cat person, often bad fake deep stories abt young ppl sex with a literate gloss on top and everyone just ignores them

ALL short stories are perfect, including ones by Jean Rhys.

Maybe instead of an ILX poetry competition we should have a short story competition. All entries sent to a pollrunner and posted anonymously kinda thing

uhh that sounds p fun

the funny thing is the new yorkers short stories are often bad, much worse than cat person, often bad fake deep stories abt young ppl sex with a literate gloss on top and everyone just ignores them

i was gonna say this earlier, god some of them are fucking shit. just terrible whimsical post-modern rubbish with a few refs to phones and instagram hammered in now and again.

when i listen to the fiction podcast it kinda boggles the mind some of the absolutely barnstorming incredible stories they've published and how weak and ephemeral some of what they publish now feels in comparison. i like naturalism so i liked this story more than most of the usual stuff but still was only really okay for me.

I really liked Cat Person btw, I had just read an Ottessa Moshfegh NYer story (on an ILB recommendation), and this was more engaging and focused despite being much longer.

something slightly depresso about the typical lifespan of a phone-based relationship pretty exactly matching the scale and scope demanded by the short story format

love too enjoy the discourse
http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/item/d0ef8a0d-82c6-4df7-acb4-8688b514cd32

^a BBC response to cat person from robert's perspective

the mind boggles. what were the BBC thinking publishing that? a horrible piece of writing, in all senses

oh those sweet, sweet clicks. as sweet as orgasm chemicals

i would place money on that article being down by this time tomorrow

ha thats one of those pieces that from the first sentence provokes a wtf is this responce

jesus christ almighty

no doubt, so here's a pastebin
https://pastebin.com/SC8x1yJg

someone should have to put their name at the bottom of that crime

Epic trolling

what of the dog person

ha thats one of those pieces that from the first sentence provokes a wtf is this responce

― lag∞n, Tuesday, December 12, 2017 6:16 PM (thirty-eight minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ive thought abt it and come to the conclusion its fanfic

“Cat Person” shook me. It made me uncomfortable. It angered me and it made me sad. I saw Robert as a pathetic oaf from the get-go. Why was he by himself at the movies in the first place? He reeked of self-loathing and insecurity. I’ve been told, though I don’t agree, that there always seems to be someone with the “power” in any relationship. I think society has made me believe that the younger, more beautiful counterpart, who can easily go and find someone else, would be the individual with the power, and therefore, the control in a relationship. Especially when the counterpart is so clearly insecure and jealous. “Cat Person” made me realize this is not the case. That there is another power dynamic that exists, which is much less tangible, but drastically more powerful. There was this moment of absolute sickness when I felt how Margot had essentially withdrawn her consent to move forward in her mind, but went ahead anyways, because of this pressure she felt from Robert and the concern for what he would think if she stopped short. It was illuminating and absolutely sickening to me. I hate Robert and deeply hope that I’m not him, but I think we — men — all are. — Zachary, 30, product manager

https://www.thecut.com/2017/12/8-men-on-seeing-themselves-in-cat-person.html

people attending a movie at an art house theater alone? so weird

That BBC thing is spectacularly bad

Put on the spot with a queue of pick ’n’ mix-crazed kids behind him,

i feel like i daren't look at the thing now

i mean, the bbc version; i feel embarrassed by it. i still haven't read the original, though i will say the most unrealistic thing about the final line is that he puts a full stop at the end

that post by "product manager" is a bit strange. indeed it is hardly weird to go to a movie alone. people should be fine with being alone and others being alone. now and again the reactions to this story towards the male character occasionally throw up attitudes which seem part of the problem. like calling someone "a pathetic oaf". or upthread we had the whole "sex = power and success" motif.

similarly upthread we also had "him arriving at her workplace to ask her out would only be creepy if she said no" - so the end justifies the means? and it's only wrong to ask her out at her workplace if she says no, therefore the act of doing so has no inherent right or wrongness to it and it's entirely right/wrong based on the reaction of the person asked? that seems a strange form of morality to me. "you asked her out at her workplace?", "it's fine, she said yes".

seems to me it's either bad in all circumstances to go to someone's workplace and ask them out, which i'd lean towards, not heinous, but it's a location where they have to be for a set period of time, where you are a customer and they may not be able to tell you to fuck off, where they can't simply leave and may have maintain some veneer of politeness or professionalism.

when you poke around at it, it doesn't seem like even well-meaning men have a fucking clue about how to behave, towards each other or towards women, and i'm willing to include myself in that.

tho the story has enough elements everyone can unite behind - i'm not sure i've read any deeper analysis, particularly from men, that's actually had anything like the ring of truth or thought to it.

Do you include yourself in that?

perhaps justify your own comments before posting a childish one-liner.

Maybe you should try and see that other ppl have a different moral compass than you first.

Fwiw though it felt like a back and forth which was could be judged as half-shitty, it had bits of wit to it, there was a rapport..

People want to connect, they'll do all sorts of things and they aren't checking and questioning themselves all the time. There are basic standards but enough grey areas so -- as to how this works in the story -- I would say my answer was perfect and good and I will not log off online.

LG - the power i was referring to upthread was not "sex = power and success" -- not like "first you get the money, then you get the women, then you get the power" tony montana style etc. it was about the inevitable power struggle at the beginning of a romantic relationship between people who don't know anything else about each other aside from a mutual attraction (of varying degrees). the balance tips back and forth, over and over. example: one person holding out longer to respond to a text and the other trying not to show that they were anxious about it. robert had adulthood and mystery on his side. margot had youth/beauty and the power to say Y/N to sex. she abdicated that power when she had sex with him even though she wasn't into it, which is sad to watch. robert got pissy and had an immature shit fit when his power was revoked.

i agree that people are very confused about how to interact with one another -- and i am not about to try to solve that problem. in a literary sense, i liked how everyone at the end of the story had lost something. no one escapes without bruises. not even the reader!

There was this moment of absolute sickness when I felt how Margot had essentially withdrawn her consent to move forward in her mind, but went ahead anyways, because of this pressure she felt from Robert and the concern for what he would think if she stopped short. It was illuminating and absolutely sickening to me. I hate Robert and deeply hope that I’m not him, but I think we — men — all are. — Zachary, 30, product manager

I think this section is a simple, reasonable, not too convoluted response to reading the story--a little ott maybe but a good sign for this person if this is what he really felt. It would be hugely beneficial for lots of reasons if more people, esp men who are normally cast as trying to wrest sex from women to varying degrees, understood that consent is always in flux and can be withdrawn. The idea of obliviously going forward after consent is withdrawn should be sickening! Zachary has time to figure out a more complex take on masculinity etc, at least this is a start.

My wife mentioned she'd read this story and I asked her opinion, was this man a predator and an atypical creep, or was he a normal regular guy. She said, "Definitely a regular guy."

agree, otm

It would be hugely beneficial for lots of reasons if more people, esp men who are normally cast as trying to wrest sex from women to varying degrees, understood that consent is always in flux and can be withdrawn.
understatement of the year
it would be nice if more people believed that

if Robert had understood/believed this - would it have made any difference to how things panned out?

i would imagine so? he might have waited until they weren't intoxicated to initiate their first sexual encounter.

To understand/believe that would make him act differently in a lot of situations besides the actual sex I think, it'd be a completley different story imo.

not related to uncool conservative opinions but wrt to paypal I just saw someone who tweeted a short 6-post thread on why the nyer "cat person" is a short story work of fiction and not a "piece" or an "article" after it got a little traction she said "if you are using this thread in your creative writing seminar here is my paypal link"

― marcos, Monday, 11 December 2017 14:09 (six days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

from the reveal your secret conservatism thread -- im actually more aghast at the idea of people somewhere who don't understand the idea of a work of fiction -- is this actually a thing?

She got hired and wrote it up - https://www.villagevoice.com/2017/12/15/our-reaction-to-cat-person-shows-that-we-are-failing-as-readers/

idk, assumed most people saying that don't normally read any fiction in the first place.

Also took it as a sign of how little the fiction published in The New Yorker matters to anyone.

finally got around to reading this, thought it was great, ll and io otm itt

im actually more aghast at the idea of people somewhere who don't understand the idea of a work of fiction -- is this actually a thing?

I worked at bookstores for a couple years, it's definitely a thing! It really eye-opening how many people kept looking for non-fiction in the fiction section and vice versa. Sometimes they were on-the-border books like Celestine Prophecy and Zen&TAOMM, which I guess is understandable, because who the fuck knows what they are. But I had a *lot* of angry customers who couldn't find, e.g. The Tipping Point and I had to be like, "Er, you're looking in the fiction section."

Perhaps it was that they knew the difference between fiction and non-fiction, but just thought the entire store was in alphabetical order.

tangential to the topic, but I sometimes wonder how many people have aphantasia, something that I only read about a few years ago but had been described by friends:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083706-my-minds-eye-is-blind-so-whats-going-on-in-my-brain/

it’s most obvious when someone is a voracious reader but finds it difficult to get into reading fiction, but you also end up with casual readers having trouble not taking a story literally or wanting to give characters advice as if they’re real people — completely missing the point that fictional characters are written that way as a reflection of reality but the framing gives you perspective you may not otherwise have

two things have stuck with me about the very beginning of this story --

Flirting with her customers was a habit she’d picked up back when she worked as a barista, and it helped with tips. She didn’t earn tips at the movie theatre, but the job was boring otherwise, and she did think that Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class

1) flirting was a way to pass the time; it didn't yield her tips anymore. she was just bored. not that i need confirmation of my theory that she was curious and bored and that's why she pursued this guy, she basically said so at the beginning of the story. this also resonates -- you could plant her in a record store, a restaurant, a movie theater, (a video store if they still existed) and it could have been anywhere. I think this adds to the universality of the story.

2) her flirting took the form of merely striking up a conversation with him; is this flirting? is any interacting beyond the most transactional/cursory supposed to be interpreted as flirting? i think this points to one of the most problematic realities of communication between people who may (or may not) be attracted to each other. it becomes even more difficult to distinguish friendliness from flirting, which doesn't work out well for either the sender or the receiver of the message.

that resonates with a conversation I overheard between workers at the local convenience store last night. one of the women was exclaiming that if she caught her man so much as talking to another woman at a party she'd be dragging his ass out of there!

I'm standing there waiting to pay for my drink thinking, damn, you can't even talk to people at a party without raising suspicion?

i am reading a printout of this story on my couch and finding i need to take breaks against the vicarious embarrassment and guilt it induces in me

people reading the male character as a pua are i. clearly out of touch ii. onto something - it's a good story about how those guys make external and explicit a set of conditions most ppl dating have internalised - margot as much as Robert

it's interesting how for pages at a time they're just 'she ' and 'he'

I typed 'the me' character for 'the male character' above, which is so plainly Freudian as to be embarrassing

The Village Voice piece is better than I expected, albeit ends at about where it ought to start. (Also, uh, I imagine most of the people calling it a 'piece' were aware it was fiction. If I refer to a dresser as 'a nice piece' that doesn't mean I believe it an example of a journalistic genre)

mh how do your fiction non readers feel about television ?

As a short story I'd say, hm, the imagined prolepsis w the future boyfriend followed by the actual jump forward doesn't quite work for me, and a better round of edits might have worked wonders w/r/t which scenes need to run long to heighten the mode of uncomfortable realism and which scenes just need trimming

still pretty remarkably good for a millennial short story tho. writes about both texting and sex in a mostly realist mode successfully. still don't get why the last text has a full stop.

wow i did not expect to love this

HEADLINE: CAT PERSON NAILS FLAPPY BIRD

I’ve had enough of this story

People mistook it for an “article” not because they don’t understand fiction, but because it read like a (very well written) version of confessional literature of the type that used to be published on Thought Catalog. The characters were familiar — young girl coming to self awareness, predatory misogynist who hates himself most of all (the “nice guy” archetype, although Robert was a total dick from the beginning). This isn’t really a criticism, but the popularity of the story derives not from the fact that it revealed something new about our times, it just distilled a lot of feelings people had been talking about anyway.

This story will live forever because it will be seen as an emblem of the texting and nu-misogyny age, like Gatsby is an emblem of the Jazz Age. But it’s so bleak.

This story will live until valentine's Day max

Can u not

I don’t get treeship’s gripe at all

Why does this story keep reading itself to me??

treeship sure has a lot of pronouncements to make about this story
it just distilled a lot of feelings people had been talking about anyway.
maybe those feelings needed to be distilled in fiction that (apparently) makes people uncomfortable in order for us to talk about them more honestly

because it read like a (very well written) version of confessional literature of the type that used to be published on Thought Catalog.

The story starts in third person narration!

pfft, mere minor details

i dunno if thought catalog and ‘well-written’ have ever been used in the same sentence

For me it consistently brings to mind Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates.

the stakes aren't quite the same but the sense of creeping awareness and then the facade drops and the ugliness just emerges at the end

version of confessional literature of the type that used to be published on Thought Catalog.

lord this was WAY better than the shit on thought catalog lol

btw i thought it was great, felt very real, robert was too real tbh

xp -- re: JCO - i read where are you going, where have you been in high school english class
we even watched the movie with laura dern -- iirc it was good!

Yes good movie! Laura Dern was so good. My first exposure to Treat Williams!

i was kind of wondering why i hadn't seen any compare/contrast with Looking for Mr Goodbar
one thinkpiece i skimmed mentioned Erica Jong/Fear of Flying which I also thought was an interesting comparison

WAYG, WHYB is a much better story imo. It's genuinely terrifying for a start, and it deals with genuine predation

I guess we can have both though

I think Robert is supposed to be an MRA/pickup artist type, not an everyman. From the beginning he is always putting the narrator down or else ignoring or belittling her. He never takes a genuine interest in her life, to the point where it seems calculated. In each of their interactions, his first priority is to protect his ego. He’s more pitiable than loathsome, though he is that too. People like that — closed off, cruel people — are not even truly alive. You can’t imagine him loving anyone. The fact that there is a cottage industry training people to be like that is, you know, horrifying.

Any man can become like Robert in the sense that everyone is capable of killing the best parts of themselves, but he is really far gone in my view. There are people like him, and they are legion, but there is nothing ordinary about this pathological sort of existence no matter how common it is.

― treeship 2, Monday, December 11, 2017 9:24 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i strongly disagree. robert seemed like a pretty average insecure self-loathing dude w/ a pretty typical misogynist sense of entitlement. maybe ripe for an mra/pua conversion but not much more than any regular dude

I'm not sure Cat Person isn't its own kind of terrifying...

I guess we can have both though

cat person is definitely its own kind of scary. not cautionary life-at-risk scary but "you are in treacherous emotional territory" scary -- it's hard to know what the fallout of their encounter will be for either of them with the abrupt ending, and it seems to invite speculation.

does anyone else know Looking for Mr Goodbar?

Spoiler: protagonist gets brutally murdered after taking a guy home from a bar.

dude treeship2, this is just what a lot of dudes are like, i'm afraid......

we also already went over this
treeship is wrong

i strongly disagree. robert seemed like a pretty average insecure self-loathing dude w/ a pretty typical misogynist sense of entitlement. maybe ripe for an mra/pua conversion but not much more than any regular dude

― marcos, Thursday, 21 December 2017 16:00 (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do you think ilx has an accurate outlook of what a normal dude is like

oh fuck off

you're a big ball of bad faith, dmac

Tsk tsk

i strongly disagree. robert seemed like a pretty average insecure self-loathing dude w/ a pretty typical misogynist sense of entitlement. maybe ripe for an mra/pua conversion but not much more than any regular dude

― marcos, Thursday, 21 December 2017 16:00 (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Do you think ilx has an accurate outlook of what a normal dude is like

― remember the lmao (darraghmac), Thursday, December 21, 2017 11:15 AM (nineteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i can't speak for "ilx" but robert's misogyny seemed pretty garden variety to me idk

hee hee ‘big ball’

also she basically initiated the relationship based on his apparent (performative) kindness -- that she eventually chose not to pursue further contact with him after their lackluster encounter is another choice she made, one he felt was uncharitable toward him, so he lashed out in anger. It seemed like a conceivable reaction of a man who felt the control had not just been wrestled away from him, but done so by a younger woman -- which is basically totally realistic. Whether or not your average "decent dude" would hurl that word around casually is not really the point. Although personally I don't think it's a stretch.

LG -- even if you believe that "only a warped person" would say/do this, it's a sign of how warped many people (men) are. More than you think!

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Monday, December 11, 2017 11:26 AM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is very otm

and LL u are right you all did talk about this already i dont mean to make everyone hash it all out again

dmac starting off my "friday" fresh

was watching the Netflix series Love, in which the Gillian Jacobs character’s ex calls her “whore” on two separate occasions, recently and thought about the discussion here about this story. She takes offense, of course, but she’s not surprised. the character reads as scary-angry, but not in a way that casts him out of polite society at all. gotta say I wouldn’t blink if a dude said that to me after a date. I certainly haven’t when street harassers switch from complimentary intrusive comments to “bitch” or “whore” when I didn’t respond in the way I guess they thought I should.

all of this is a long way of saying La Lechera otm

^^^i think this is similar to WAYG, WHYB. in that story she's a girl who's moving towards adulthood and at the same time is exposed to the danger that comes from the wrong type of man, in this one she's a vv young woman who has perhaps one of her first exposures to the arbitrary nastiness men can show to women when things don't go their way, or when they feel spurned as opposed to being the ones who do the spurning. i guess the primary difference in this one is it's perhaps the first (or the nastiest to date) example for this character of what she'll have to deal with for the rest of her life w/men. one story ends with a knife, another with a deep paper cut, the first of a thousand.

xposts

also tbf i am afraid of men and when I was single i hid in my house most of the time sooooo I might not be a representative sample in terms of my expectation of hearing a gendered slur after a date.

it's totally normal imo and during this thread's initial cycle i repeatedly closed tabs containing gis results for "queen gertrude gif"

(in response to various forms of the "his portrayal went too far" take)

so over this story tho lol, not its fault, or anyone individually else's really

lol Hamlet is the ur-Robert

the funeral red vines will coldly... nah gonna face it i got nothing.

(btw people do buy red vines, all the time; in my art theater experience they might be the most popular concession stand candy. had hoped to feel superior to the workshopped nyer writer over this detail in kind of an elmore leonard beat of the street way but then i remembered flirting isn't something you do because it's true)

saw the author got a SEVEN FIGURE book deal, well deserved imo for writing the first ever short story that went viral

i didn't find robert exceptionally toxic or misogynist. perhaps mra-leaning, but not really. he was sadly familiar and common asshole, his misogyny garden variety as marcos said.

ok i have a question about the reaction to the story when it blew up: saw a lot of people saying "NOO! Don't you see?? BOTH characters are loathsome." --- wtf? the girl is 20. 20!!!!!!!!! idk how you could interpret her words or her decisions as loathsome, she's a fucking college kid. idk what you could question her for, if it's going home with or falling in a crush high with this schmuck dude, ... she's a kid... come on. anyway i should look up these criticisms, which will be difficult, because they were tweets.

yeah the protagonist is maybe a bit naive and just, you know, young. she doesn't read the warning signs that robert is a prick, which imo are there the whole time. but that's hardly something to dislike her for or think she's an asshole

i like the part where her friends hustle her out of the bar and she thinks, am i being a mean girl? but i do feel sick and scared tho. thought that part was working on a much higher level than "they both suck" or even than "they both behave hurtfully"

i think there's something very subtly terrifying (and even moving!) about that seemingly minor moment bc it's both pretty universal in the experiences of women, i think, and it shows how sometimes you have to follow instincts and gtfo of there. terrifying in the sense that women sometimes feel the need to escape men even in seemingly minor social interactions (not just extract themselves from a conversation but leave a building) and moving in how her friends are there to protect her. i'd need to reread it to get more details. i'm also speaking from a male perspective, so i'm not sure how much my take here holds up.

xxp yeah the warning signs are there from the get go. but again, she's 20. she had a crush high. having a crush totally warps and narrows your vision, no matter the age, but especially when you're that young

i like the part where her friends hustle her out of the bar and she thinks, am i being a mean girl? but i do feel sick and scared tho. thought that part was working on a much higher level than "they both suck" or even than "they both behave hurtfully"

Right, that was great, and very real. she's figuring out how to live, how to interact, how to date. everyone knows that shit is often excruciating and confusing and very hard.

i gotta find these criticisms i saw bc wtf... now that i think about it, they might've been criticisms from people that are around the narrator's age

i would not underestimate her decision making capabilities on account of her age. i remember myself at 20. "college kid" is somewhat infantilizing imo.

I didn’t actually see the “they’re both awful!” reactions; was that about the moments, during sex, when she reacted poorly to his body? some corners of the internet seemed not to read that part of the story particularly skillfully.

she does seem narcissistic in moments, and I think she is, on purpose, not partic heroic or Mary Sue-ish. some people really want fictional characters to be “likable,” esp if they’re women.

the creepiest thing this guy did was go to the same bar she hangs out at (uni bar)

also the "signs" were only there bc she ended up not liking the guy

plenty of women and men wierdos that love each others' weirdness out there

he got an underage woman drink in order to fuck her. not entirely uncreepy.

saw the author got a SEVEN FIGURE book deal, well deserved imo for writing the first ever short story that went viral

― flappy bird, Thursday, December 21, 2017 12:41 PM (sixteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

these numbers are always fake tho right, if she sells a million books then theyll give her the a million dollars, a publicity stunt

i'm not sure bc i didn't want to spoil the story- just remember seeing lots of people saying both characters were loathsome.

i would not underestimate her decision making capabilities on account of her age. i remember myself at 20. "college kid" is somewhat infantilizing imo.

college is infantilizing (at least ime- i'm 25). i don't think she's stupid or makes any obviously bad decisions- again, crush high- but at that age you're learning how to be an adult in the 'real world' for lack of a better word. the mistakes she made, not reading this guy's asshole behavior, she's learning how to live. that's what i meant- at 20, people generally have v little life experience, especially in dating/hooking up. it's not a putdown on her, it's a fact of life for many people that age now.

she didnt tell him his and he thought she was older as told by the narrator/protagonist

yr kinda pushing it

she didnt tell him hers*

Last weekend while I was grocery shopping a strange man walked right up to me and started patting and prodding me around the shoulders and being like "Heeeey, what's up?!" like a good friend you haven't seen in a while, and he got into my space so fast I couldn't react right away. After a second I was like, "Sir, I don't know you, stop touching me. Please get away from me." His response was "Fuck you, bitch. You think I want to fuck you? I must want to fuck you, huh?" and yelling variations of that while going down the street.

So no, I don't think Robert is unusual at all.

yeah...did he, though? a lot of what he does can be read as neutral, but it did not strike me that way. I didn’t like the story enough to reread it tbh.

xp to be clear that I’m not doubting io’s story. I’m sorry that happened, io.

at 20, people generally have v little life experience, especially in dating/hooking up. it's not a putdown on her, it's a fact of life for many people that age now.

― flappy bird, Thursday, December 21, 2017 1:04 PM (thirty-six seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

id agree with that i noticed recently in conversation with someone around that age that she hadnt really developed the ability to detect extremely obvious scumbags yet, tho i wldve expected her to just based on her personality/intelligence, then i was all oh its just experience, tho obv this ability doesnt strictly correlate with age, also i wld lilke to state for the record im not the scumbag in this story

also the "signs" were only there bc she ended up not liking the guy

plenty of women and men wierdos that love each others' weirdness out there

― infinity (∞), Thursday, December 21, 2017 5:58 PM (eleven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"Women like being harassed as long as the guy is hot."

Also, NO, you've got that backwards, she ended up "not liking" him because all his kindness and interest in her was fake and he was an unpleasant person who didn't treat her with respect--a user, at the very least.

she didnt tell him his and he thought she was older as told by the narrator/protagonist

yr kinda pushing it

― infinity (∞), Thursday, December 21, 2017 10:07 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

she didnt tell him hers*

― infinity (∞), Thursday, December 21, 2017 10:07 AM (four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i mean as the story plays out, he finds out she's twenty and then takes her to another bar that doesn't check IDs and keeps buying her beers.

I constantly need to be reminded that some people develop that skill (scumbag detection) earlier than others
it's a good point
and yet i still think that she is not especially blind to his faults but kind of idly tolerant of them until they start to accumulate and take on the shape of a cat person

sorry that happened to you io -- that sucks. i know the shock and the "please do not touch me" speech and the fuck you bitch routine :( it's like being sprayed with mace-laced axe body spray and lingers the same way

xxxp lol

yea everyone's different, some are more precocious than others, but the narrator character felt very familiar to me, her experience with the dude was very familiar as well. lots of my friends went thru much worse.

Thanks, hs and ll! Actually I was remarkably unfazed about it after the fact, but that might have been because I was tired enough to drive off a bridge. I feel like it was a turning point for me in my lack of embarrassment at being harassed! I yelled back at him!

I feel like the character notices a lot and her feelings about Robert change with what she notices (what had seemed appealing about his body becomes repugnant, for example) but she doesn’t explicitly make the connection. or feel entitled to blame him, exactly.

she deceived him by not telling him her age so it was not important for her, it fed into her older man fantasy which she talks about in the sex scene

she obv was interested at that point in the story

also someone, albeit very few, like the dom/sub thing, so ya. in the end she was way more normal/avg than him

im not really saying i dont think he is an asshole, im saying there are women who wldnt mind his assholeness

xp I love yelling back! Of course it is risky but it feels amazing.

One time some dudes catcalling near my apt called me a bitch, and I yelled, “THAT’S GODDAMN RIGHT, AND YOU PICKED THE WRONG BITCH TO FUCK WITH!” I am not often that version of myself but I remember her fondly.

lol

lol <3 <3

she deceived him by not telling him her age so it was not important for her, it fed into her older man fantasy which she talks about in the sex scene

she obv was interested at that point in the story

also someone, albeit very few, like the dom/sub thing, so ya. in the end she was way more normal/avg than him

im not really saying i dont think he is an asshole, im saying there are women who wldnt mind his assholeness

I was really close to my door when I yelled it. I credit Ice Cube and how fucking tired I was at the time.

:)

shut up, infinity.

Also, NO, you've got that backwards, she ended up "not liking" him because all his kindness and interest in her was fake and he was an unpleasant person who didn't treat her with respect--a user, at the very least.

I feel like the character notices a lot and her feelings about Robert change with what she notices

this isn't how it read to me at all? she seemed was never particularly interested in or attracted to Robert at any point but enjoyed being desired by someone, and maybe the power of being desired by someone who you don't desire and you feel superior to, she's playing with him to an extent, but then she decides/realizes that she doesn't want to sleep with him but that stage she feels unable to back out and how she thought of the power dynamic shifts, she runs up against the limits placed on her power? I didn't get the impression that there was a point when she realised he was a bad guy and then her feelings about him changed or anything? 'idly tolerant' of his faults seems accurate

she deceived him by not telling him her age so it was not important for her, it fed into her older man fantasy which she talks about in the sex scene

she obv was interested at that point in the story

also someone, albeit very few, like the dom/sub thing, so ya. in the end she was way more normal/avg than him

im not really saying i dont think he is an asshole, im saying there are women who wldnt mind his assholeness

― infinity (∞), Thursday, December 21, 2017 1:21 PM (thirty seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i know what you mean but isn't "deceived" a little strong? she has a very familiar deer-in-the-headlights reaction at many points in the story. again, inexperienced nervous young person going thru new life experiences.

i don't know if you could argue the guy's loathsome behavior is mostly subjective until the final scene. like horseshoe said, his asshole behavior is not close to a BDSM mindset at all. it's very pathetic and nerdy, very mra, very entitled to a woman's affection, attention, and praise.

you dont need to be into bdsm for this

also the story involves a naive woman who ends up finding something about herself and realizes she is not interested in someone she once fantasized being with, in this situation, of course his treatment of her is wrong

it still does not disprove that there are women who are interested in dom/sub lifestyles and its variants, which i never said this was about, so i dont get why you think its so bizarre

no I agree exactly with what your reading. she notices behavior and reacts to it ( after having created a narcissistic fantasy based on nothing but his attraction to her) but doesn’t think of it as bad or good. part of why she loses any physical attraction to him, it seemed to me, is he showed evidence of being an unresponsive lover, though she was also uncommunicative.

she seemed was never particularly interested in or attracted to Robert at any point but enjoyed being desired by someone,

not really true, at various points there is some (very nicely written) language about her feeling a crush!

xxp to soref

(which dissipated when she realized he was kind of a small, petty person) xp

I think the fact that she notes his weight as appealing early on, and then experiences it as revolting while having sex she doesn’t want to have with him later is evidence of the kind of thing I’m talking about

btw i keep thinking of him saying "hey, concession-stand girl" even after learning her name and it makes me cringe

Again, the grouping term for that last clause is ‘male’.

infinity I have no idea what you are talking about; don’t get how dominant submissive relationships entered the conversation really

Er many xps to flappy bird.

flappy

i guess deceive cld be a strong word. what wld u call it? withholding info?

sure, again i chalk it up to being in a new situation and not necessarily knowing what to do. & i was responding to the dom/sub observation re: robert's prickish putdown attitude toward her from the very beginning, which idk his particular brand of negging didn't remind me of a dom/sub thing at all. but that was just my take

sure

makes it hard to talk abt robert tho i guess bc not much is revealed abt him

other than his love for red vines

will never look at red vines consumers ever again tbh

ha *the same, but that works too

not much is revealed of him aside from his easily recognized behavioral patterns that match those of people with bad sexual politics (is there another way to put that?)

easily for some, less easily for others

yeah, i feel like plenty is revealed

these numbers are always fake tho right, if she sells a million books then theyll give her the a million dollars, a publicity stunt

not sure what you mean by this, if the advance is $1m, she'll probably get $400k now, $300k when she turns in the manuscript, $300k on publication, the money is hers whether she sells a single copy or not, so long as she actually turns in a book

will never look at red vines consumers ever again tbh

sort of surprised "red vines" has not already been "reclaimed" as a performative candy choice by rotten people

i never even heard of red vines before the story! are they the same thing as twizzlers?

really??

I think the fact that she notes his weight as appealing early on, and then experiences it as revolting while having sex she doesn’t want to have with him later is evidence of the kind of thing I’m talking about

I didn't see this so much as evidence that his weight only became repulsive to her as she notices his personality flaws or that he's an unresponsive lover, more that she felt some degree of repulsion from the beginning, which was appealing in a way when it could be used as part of an ego boosting fantasy but unpleasant when she actually sleeps with him and feels dragged down to his level? like, the fantasy is based on the idea that she can remain 'above' him, enjoy being desired without being begrimed or without any change to her position/status, but t doesn't play out like that in practise

I think the story says that the moment she realises she wasn't going to get anything positive out of the encounter is when he asks her if she's a virgin, and she laughs b/c she remembers how carefully she chose when and how and who with she lost her virginity, and the idea that her first time would be with this loser in this awkward/tawdry situation is ridiculous to her - but she it's driven home to her that Robert sees this encounter in a different way to her and she feels obliged to apologise and tacitly accept his framing on their sex act, which is one where it does 'count' and is part of her life story or whatever, rather than one where she remains uncontaminated - it seems like this is when the power dynamic shifts and she's lost control of the narrative

are red vines a regional thing? i've only ever lived in the northeast & mid-atlantic and all we have are twizzlers

lol holy shit marcos i didn't see your post

yeah, i feel like plenty is revealed

― horseshoe, Thursday, December 21, 2017 1:53 PM (nine minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otm! there was a good post earlier itt (difficult listening hour i think?) about why we don't need to hear this story from robert's perspective because we already know it

lol xp

here is the post i was talking about, otm imo

imo the male perspective is p much already there. for instance by the end you are as aware of the emotion induced in him by her laugh as you are of the emotion in her that caused it. so is she. having read this version of the story i felt pretty clear on what had happened to both the characters. the reverse however would not be true: he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers. huh.

― difficult listening hour, Monday, December 11, 2017 3:03 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

maybe they really are regional. i can't recall if red vines are sold in IL or NY, but they're everywhere in California. they are a Cali company.

i'd heard of them before and tbh thought they were one of tarantino's fake brand names i.e. candy apple cigarettes

you kidding, we smoked Candy Apples all the time back in the day

ohh nvm i'm thinking of Red Apple Cigarettes

You know was an asshole? That roommate who obnoxiously sent the fuckoff text.

to soref, she does muse on how his weight is cute or something early on. I don’t think she’s repulsed by him at the beginning. Perhaps not v deeply interested in him either, except as a prop to her self-image, but that is how dating can be when you don’t know someone yet.

the idea that her first time would be with this loser in this awkward/tawdry situation is ridiculous to her -

not how I read this. I read her laughter as more at his (telling) image of her as virginal and “pure,” whereas she’s sexually experienced. I don’t think she thinks of him in such clearly derisive terms as “loser” though I agree she enjoys feeling the “power” of being perhaps cooler and possibly more sexually experienced than he is. (I think by this point she’s been kissed, poorly, by him.)

Yes, a very nasty moment - I really liked it. xp to quincie

I mean Robert may have handled the rejection better were it not done in such a dick move.

I think dudes getting aggravated that a woman might consider a guy fat, or base her attraction on something tenuous like her perception of his interest, is telling. Navigating whether you’re attracted to someone, and why, is something you have to take on when you’re dating, and figuring out the other person’s motivations can flip your own feelings on the matter. Once it became clear in this story that the man’s reasons for finding her attractive weren’t intellectual and he stopped showing interest in her interests, and even started tearing down what he perceived were her interests, she started seeing him more in the same terms he was using

otm

I mean Robert may have handled the rejection better were it not done in such a dick move.

laughing was a dick move? idk. wasn't an inappropriate or gross question to ask if she was a virgin but if your ego is so fragile that you take nervous laughter as rejection i have no sympathy, like mh said navigating this stuff thru rocky terrain assures that your ego will take some hits, comes with the territory, get over yourself etc.

i think quincie meant the abrupt breakup text the roommate sent Robert. but I still think he would have had his vituperative episode either way.

Ohh right on, and yeah i agree

i read the r u a virgin q as the narrator suggesting how completely inexperienced and unaware this guy is

i also think this dude is a massive loser btw

I think he’s completely average, he just missed the point where his peers coupled up and had kids so he seems more dire as a mid-30s man acting in this way

his peer group is definitely the “I didn’t really respect women until I had a wife/daughter” type

she started seeing him more in the same terms he was using
there's a point at the end of each of my erased explanations of this whole thing where it always turns into "and he became a cat person"

the story is called cat person
i think the way he evolves in her eyes is a big part of the story's purpose/point/main idea/short answer question

I feel like calling the character a loser kind of reinscribes his worldview? the truth is men who view themselves as vulnerable on the dating market are totes capable of winding up with a woman they might view as prettier or better than them in whatever way they categorize these things. the question of whether they’re going to actually respond to that woman as a person is a separate one.

the very idea that he would ask someone he had just gotten drunk and taken home RIGHT BEFORE they do it whether or not she is a virgin is one of the more disgusting things he does

he is so gross
mh otm about his friends

horseshoe - where was that article about men being bad at losing?

in nplusone. Hang on; I’ll find it.

https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/the-intellectual-situation/in-the-maze/

ohh wait i forgot that they went to the bar before they had sex, i should read it again.

i like the discussion itt, haven't talked about it with anyone else yet, again it's amazing and cool that a short story went viral and spread so quickly, and is still generating so much talk 10 days after it was published

omg also this is so otm
the question of whether they’re going to actually respond to that woman as a person is a separate one.

his peer group might strike me also as the types of social scenes i am least comfortable with, where men kind of segregate themselves into a men's group or men's corner or whatever, to talk their dude talk. i don't necessarily mean a few male friends going out together, but the types of men who are not friends with women.

i have a friend who refuses to be friends with women, because he feels as though it's impossible, that there's some kind of sexual tension he can't handle. i talk about my female friends and he acts like i'm being unfaithful to my wife (p.s. this man seeks out escorts, i've recently discovered through another friend.)

the truth is men who view themselves as vulnerable on the dating market are totes capable of winding up with a woman they might view as prettier or better than them in whatever way they categorize these things.

not all of them surely? some men are genuinely irremediable

talking about this story is reminding me of a moment a male acquaintance was complaining that a girl he’d been seeing told him they needed to work on making out better. He was all spluttery, “ I mean, I’ve never gotten any complaints before!” I remember trying to tell him no one’s good at these things in some abstract sense; you’re good with another person; this person likes you and wants to make out with you a whole lot more; enjoy it! he did not see things that way iirc.

/the truth is men who view themselves as vulnerable on the dating market are totes capable of winding up with a woman they might view as prettier or better than them in whatever way they categorize these things./

not all of them surely? some men are genuinely irremediable

also, selfishly, I feel like I have to get by in a world where a lot of men feel this type of insecurity, and I wish they didn’t because they’d be nicer to me and other women in their lives.

she has sold her debut collection for major moolah

his peer group might strike me also as the types of social scenes i am least comfortable with, where men kind of segregate themselves into a men's group or men's corner or whatever, to talk their dude talk. i don't necessarily mean a few male friends going out together, but the types of men who are not friends with women.

i have a friend who refuses to be friends with women, because he feels as though it's impossible, that there's some kind of sexual tension he can't handle. i talk about my female friends and he acts like i'm being unfaithful to my wife (p.s. this man seeks out escorts, i've recently discovered through another friend.)

― omar little, Thursday, December 21, 2017 2:40 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah i've had the same experiences, some of my friends and former friends were very much "hanging with the boys" types- i.e. daydrinking and playing xbox and fucking off like children. there was a separation there, as if female friendship was impossible. it was very strange to me. i didn't hear that "i can't be friends with women" sentiment expressed outright but def felt it

i have a friend who refuses to be friends with women, because he feels as though it's impossible, that there's some kind of sexual tension he can't handle. i talk about my female friends and he acts like i'm being unfaithful to my wife (p.s. this man seeks out escorts, i've recently discovered through another friend.)

― omar little, Thursday, December 21, 2017 2:40 PM (seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

By no means do I mean to judge, but how can a person like this be your friend still? How is that not entirely twisted?!

The Cat Person story and subsequent discussion - mostly here - has been very interesting. I've mostly listened and read. It also has me thinking that I prob come from a place of huge privilege, call it a bubble, but men acting like complete pigs are barely present in my personal life? By which I don't mean it's not happening (it is, way more than I realized, and I can't imagine how completely awful dating must be for women in 2017. I wouldn't wish a man on any woman tbh), but rather how could you stay friends with someone Omar mentioned? How do you not turn your back on those people? You do. You can't validate that behaviour by sticking by someone because you like the same sports team or went to high school together. This aspect baffles me.

You, as a male, have a male friend. He is a pig and/or asshole. How is that not the end of the friendship?

(again Omar, and also Flappy, not meant as a dig on you or your friends, but I don't get how you can (still) be around guys like that. Is it the hope you can change this guy around?)

Because people aren't just pigs and assholes, and if you are kind and say things like "that's not my experience" or "I don't think I'd say that, why do you?" not everyone will respond rudely or argue with you. Change is gradual, and sometimes these attitudes aren't something people are consciously pushing, they're just things that they haven't put any thought into. But yeah, being around people who voice some really backward ideas on occasion can be wearying and you want to take a break or kind of taper off contact for a while.

I think the idea that someone voicing misogynist ideas or mistreating others is something that has to come from men's rights or pick-up artist types is ahistorical. The truth is that a lot of the men writing those articles and selling their idiotic books are in their 30s - 40s and their main complaint is that when they were in their early 20s, fifteen or twenty years ago, they could act like dicks and get dates and now assume that society is wrong, that they don't need to change.

The truth is that most people that were their peers back then did change, or at least changed enough to have families and friends now, and they're not dating -- many of them are married! This particular story, if I were to read some context in, is about a guy who never changed, and probably isn't even self-aware enough to realize it. You don't need someone telling you to act like a dick, you just need to lack the awareness of what you're doing.

It's also part of a reason why a man that age would think going on some dates with a 20 year old would be a good idea -- generally people gain experience as they age and the dating pool of women interested in a man belittling them and showing the wrong kind of interest is much smaller the older you get.

tbf i haven't really seen this fella in a very long time. the "i can't be friends with women" stuff felt like weirdly misguided puritanism, inna pre-Mike Pence stylee. he cast himself as a very moral dude! i mean the reason i haven't seen him for awhile was partially i think because he went through a public and kind of embarrassing divorce and went underground for a bit, then re-emerged acting a bit stranger. i think since last Dec I've seen him once.

and it was subsequent to my last seeing him that i heard about the escort stuff and it completely weirded me out. so when i say "friend" it feels very past tense. i never like to say "ex-friend" at least when there's been no single incident where there was an official break.

sounds like he can't manage his boner

sorry to be crass

that's probably the most accurate explanation tbh

he has these unabashed dirtbag pals and i think he's extremely impressionable. but that doesn't give enough credit to his own ability to perhaps not be a dirtbag himself. cocaine and Backpage are really easy to avoid if you want.

xp maybe!

a lot of men don't have a good framework for how to socially relate to women outside of a relationship. like marriage or a long-term partner gives you the ability to see other women as triangulated in some "not my wife" space and it removes the anxiety, and outside of that framework it's all wonky

I have a friend who has always been kind of off in this way, and his parents definitely gave him a weirdly skewed outlook on the world, but he's changed over time. But he still doesn't have a good understanding of how to define boundaries well -- any woman who's single, even friends, alway live in some "should I be pursuing her" space

regarding this:

It also has me thinking that I prob come from a place of huge privilege, call it a bubble, but men acting like complete pigs are barely present in my personal life?

yeah i don't doubt that your friends are decent but obv lots of men indulge in their worst instincts with some people and front like Mike Pence with others. i know that when I would hang out with him, he never seemed to be anything but a gentleman to the point that my wife considered him like the little brother she never had. she started to get odd vibes around the time i did, i guess.

Late to it, but he struck me as something of a truth claim for a new kind of detached, affectless bloke - wrecked by isolation and the internet, unable to approach relationships at any kind of real level. I was convinced, when he went to his laptop, that he was going to hook up some tasteful porn. I'm wary of using it as a metaphor, but there was an implication of something like an autistic inability to recognise the existence of another mind: she was a body with an unfortunate attached sentience.

xp maybe!

a lot of men don't have a good framework for how to socially relate to women outside of a relationship. like marriage or a long-term partner gives you the ability to see other women as triangulated in some "not my wife" space and it removes the anxiety, and outside of that framework it's all wonky

I have a friend who has always been kind of off in this way, and his parents definitely gave him a weirdly skewed outlook on the world, but he's changed over time. But he still doesn't have a good understanding of how to define boundaries well -- any woman who's single, even friends, alway live in some "should I be pursuing her" space

not sure what you mean by this, if the advance is $1m, she'll probably get $400k now, $300k when she turns in the manuscript, $300k on publication, the money is hers whether she sells a single copy or not, so long as she actually turns in a book

this is correct btw. the only time the advance doesn't get paid in full is if something goes wrong during that three-part process. if the books sees publication she's good for seven figures minus her agent's fee & taxes.

I think a lot of it has to do with the ways you assign value and trust to others, and yourself. Definitely dehumanizing.

This story has stuck with me. As said a millions times, felt unusually real and familiar.

Maybe some significant projection here, but enough elements of Robert are relatable to me, though at a younger age. Mid 20’s, post college, depressed, drinking too much, out of shape, basically given up on finding someone, spent my free time shut up in my house with booze and ~films~. Know the feeling of having someone unexpectedly show interest in you and, almost begrudgingly (because you’re stuck in this fatalistic mentality), deciding to see where it goes. Things progress, you drop your guard (for the first time in years), you start to really like and get excited about this person. Intimacy occurs, both physically and emotionally, you’re OPEN finally. And then... you’re promptly, coldly rejected.

Obv. talking about one specific instance in my life, and it seems so small condensed like that, but it was absolutely devastating and just reaffirmed all of my neurotic self doubts. I didn’t lash out in anger, but if I had gotten a kinda shitty text (sent by the friend in the story) I probably would’ve.

That one little couple-of-weeks relationship was emotionally traumatic enough that it made me re-evaluate my entire lifestyle and way of thinking. I got my shit together, worked on becoming more socialized and self-aware, finally started having normal romantic relationships. Managed to shed that paralyzing fear of rejection. Grew confidence at some point along the way. Came with experience.

Anyway I don’t know where I’m going with this other than to say I have severe embarrassment (and maybe?) empathy for Robert. I don’t excuse all of his behavior, but I know that guy and I don’t see him as a total piece-of-shit sleaze. I see more of a sad, fragile, inexperienced, uhhh... well, loser. I’m about Robert’s age now and I just thank God I had my moment of clarity earlier on.

good post

yea!

going to get a nice big 'from the woman who brought you cat person...' sticker on the cover of this

imo the male perspective is p much already there. for instance by the end you are as aware of the emotion induced in him by her laugh as you are of the emotion in her that caused it. so is she. having read this version of the story i felt pretty clear on what had happened to both the characters. the reverse however would not be true: he does not know even at the end what she is feeling and a story from his pov would not incorporate hers. huh.
― difficult listening hour, Monday, December 11, 2017 3:03 PM (one week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

this is such a great post

^^^yes excellent post

part of what frustrates me about the conversation surrounding cat people is that people both itt and outside of it have said that this guy is not an aberration; he is and historically has been a very commonly encountered person. not to excuse his behavior, but to mark it as mainstream rather than aberrant. and it doesn't matter how many times you say it, someone still has come along to try to question this assessment. the phrase "believe me" has no weight to it anymore and still in this circumstance, i urge people to believe me. it was, as io put it both "gross" and "banal"

Well said and I agree.

dunno if anyone's made this comment (and it may be a self evident point) but can i presume the signifier of "cat person" is that he's not the average guy's guy - likes cats, into art movies, ostensibly outspoken about your needs and consent, emotionally hypersensitive - and yet still culpable of all the bad patriarchal bullshit the instant things don't go his way

like "cat person" is a sorta less nerdy "m'lady"

i thought it was an association w/ "cat lady," he's kinda holed up, life passing him by, internally focused, socially awkward etc.

holed up, watching art movies, socially awkward, has cats, navel-gazing

please stop negging me

thanks all i read a lot of henry james this year

not sure what you mean by this, if the advance is $1m, she'll probably get $400k now, $300k when she turns in the manuscript, $300k on publication, the money is hers whether she sells a single copy or not, so long as she actually turns in a book

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, December 21, 2017 2:00 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

according to the press release?

Just this week I've gotten press releases from publishers boasting they acquired the rights for her first book for the whole of Scandinavia, Netherlands and France. She's def going placed because of this. (and an advance is an advance, indeed)

an advance is an advance, a press release is a press release

otm

theres a huge incentive to massage these numbers as ppl are extremely titillated by them u get free media coverage and no one in the history of the world has ever actually checked if the $500k she gets when she turns in the manuscript is contingent on like the book having been optioned for tv or some shit, i mean im no expert on the publishing industry obvs but i know they do this in sports and the incentive is obvious AND theres ridiculous nonsensical book deal in the media all the time

i mean maybe they just straight up wrote her a check for a cool mili idk if no publicist has ever fudged book deal numbers for coverage before i have a suggestion for u

actually, j, my name is jim random house and you are dead wrong about how the biz works, bozo

damned owned again

cat ppl got racks on racks on racks

lol xp

actually, j,

ayyyyyy

re: the title and how it functions in the story- describing someone as a "cat person" is as vague as "people person." it means nothing. it has nothing to do with old "crazy cat lady" idea, i think it's playing off of internet age cat abundance. cats are everywhere. describing himself as a "cat person" in the context of a date reinforces the idea that he's just a boring and very average schmuck. he has nothing to say. he's not quirky or weird and he doesn't even know how to fake it.

I kinda wish there were more specifics about their pre-date conversations. I felt like it was definitely easier from a writer's perspective to just describe the feelings/nature of those conversations, rather than attempt to write the actual witty banter, invented stories, etc. It probably made it read more as universal. But I feel like that would have been a good way to develop the characters. I'm not saying they were total sketches, there was some characterization -- such that it seems weird that people are saying that she is obviously smarter than he is -- but I feel like the sketchiness of the characters makes it easier for us to see them as stereotypes or thinkpiece tropes. Idk maybe that makes the story useful? Maybe thinkpiece tropes prompt more discussion or draw us in more than characters that are more fully-drawn?

Personally, I wasn't the kind of 20 year old college student that had any interest in dating dudes in their 30s, because I couldn't see how I could possibly be seen by them as an equal, and why would I go there with someone who didn't. Not saying that I'm superior, but I don't see that as a point in her favor. I think they are normal, delusional, pathetic people attempting to have a relationship, which tends to make delusional pathetic people of most.

but I don't see that as a point in her favor. I think they are normal, delusional, pathetic people attempting to have a relationship

yup

attn localgarda, this URL is made for you

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/you-ve-read-cat-person-now-read-this-irish-bad-sex-short-story-1.3363992

almost a year since cat person
where's the "this is where we are a year after cat person" thinkpiece?

it has felt like a very long year

I’m excited for her book

https://medium.com/s/story/the-good-guy-a-story-from-the-author-of-cat-person-59e5bfe9322f

*dutifully forwards author many articles about how to write better*

Wow mine really is the most miserable generation

yeah, on a quick but full reading, i didn't care much for that.

Ted needs to take a break from dating and go to a therapist. There is something broken in him. You’re not supposed to go out dating to fulfill a half-conscious desire for revenge borne of self loathing. If he is supposed to be a “normal man” like the guy in cat person, rather than an extreme case, then we really are fucked and they need to close tinder and new york.

I’m glad this story and cat person exists. It definitely hita some kind of cultural nerve. I don’t know how accurately it represents how people live in “reality”—i hope not well.

La Lechera and in orbit OTM throughout all of this thread.

I just now read the Ted piece. Only in terms of comparison to Cat Person (that I haven't re-read since it came out), it's too on the nose/not a fresh.

not *as* fresh

It’s a very different kind of read because the main character here is inflicting pain on people. His relationships are vehicles to prop up his ego.

Like the other one though it was vividly rendered. I will remember having read this, I suspect.

It could have done without the glass-throwing and concussion.

It was a plot device though. He gets dragged to the hospital and imagines he is on trial.

It seemed over the top for that character to do that, based on the few things we knew about her. Yet people do over the top things all the time.

with yerac and jmm; a good editor might be able to turn this into something stronger though. "flames licking at my feet" is a little eye-rolly.

Yet people do over the top things all the time.

― Trϵϵship, Sunday, January 6, 2019 1:29 PM (fifty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

do they

Yes. It’s my penetrating insight of the day.

i feel like ppl are more likely to sublimate and repress but ymmv

this is horribly written btw, not even a rhythm to get caught up in like "cat person"

More likely for sure. I’ve nevet had an outburst like that honestly

i read a little bit of this story and aborted mission -- maybe i will go back to it later but I'm not sure I need to read it tbh.
i was into "cat person" on account of the sheer mundanity of it; this one seems to be out to shock from the first sentences. it's not hard to dredge up horrible dating stories, not sure this is very interesting or insightful? but i haven't read the whole thing. i only made it to the entrance of Angela. i guess i will report back if i read the rest.

initially v hard to get past

Like all the women he’d dated over the past several years, Angela was, by any objective measure, way out of his league.

but the whole "man my cold dick hurts worse than my bleeding head" part rivaled it

xp same here, really liked Cat Person, but the first few paragraphs of this made me lose interest. I felt like the characters in Cat Person were very true to life, but this man seems very poorly drawn. Does it get better, anyone?

I really wondered if anyone had edited it the entire way through and then at the end seeing it's from the upcoming? book. If someone doesn't want to waste time, it's not great. If one is curious, it's like a jezebel.com throwaway.

the painful cold dick thing is maybe a metaphor? either that or written from the perspective of someone who doesn't have a dick and wasn't interested enough to ask someone with a dick what that feels like. or maybe the piece is a metaphor for that set of circumstances.

This author is extremely talented imo, she hits on some 'internal monologue' stuff that reminds me of Carver at his best. The very concept that Ted cannot conceive of penetrative sex as being something un-rooted in violence, that his receptive partners are faking it, that he himself is manipulating them into sex, this is stuff that cut deep for me? Ted's outburst toward his present-day lover about how "it's all her fault" was... very much an unspoken truth in many of my own breakups?

The intense judge-y tone of the whole piece scuttles it entirely, like does Ted literally GO TO HELL? or go INTO THE INCINERATOR? idk but this author's capacity for delineating the thought process is really wonderful and I hope she writes some comedies or love stories in the future, bc right now her stories read like Pink Floyd's "The Wall"

Maaaaaaybe? Brad otm about the writing, “god imagine reading a whole book of these” is where I’m at with this writer now

The writing in this one mostly fell flat for me. For instance, this kind of thing:

Well, what if she did, Ted? What. If. She. Did. Couldn’t he have just shrugged his shoulders and said, “Whelp, sucks for your cousin, I changed my mind”? No. He could not do that, because that was something that only an asshole would do, and he, Ted, was not an asshole. He was… a nice guy.

Yes, okay, everyone agreed that nice guys were the worst, but this was different. To feel incapable of interrupting Rachel in the middle of a meal and dumping her without warning — that wasn’t Nice Guy Syndrome, that was just being humane.

I don't think she should have explicitly used the phrase 'nice guy' at any point. It just shows up too clearly how steeped in recent discourse the story is, and turns the character into a punching bag.

I totally was imagining Ted Mosby as the main character.

I’m still reading this but this isn’t good. Like the cousin thing, and then his fixation on Anna...feel like he’s going to flip and murder someone by the end. Should have taken Yerac’s advice but feel obliged to finish it.

Also in the original thread above I see people (one person?) saying Cat Person should be written from the perspective of the guy. Is this a common thing now in modern writing? The only published thing I could think of was when they did that with Twilight/50 Shades. It seems like a random thing to even want.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP33_uFlzTM

This was a thing on twitter as well, and on there it was loads of people angry at the story insisting the (fictional!) man should get a chance to air his views for his (fictional!) acts.

somebody actually did that, as a kind of sincere revenge of the fedora dude exercise iirc

tbh tho this new thing feels a bit like she’s trolling everyone who mocked ppl who failed to realise cat person was a short story and not a blog post, by writing something that reads more like a garden variety medium post than something by a serious fiction writer

Yeah, that is why I was saying it twas too obvious/on the nose. Like, we all the know the men in Cat Person and Nice Guy/Ted but Cat Person felt more startling in the recognition.

I read the whole thing, and I agree with fgti that there are flashes of something compelling, she has a talent for identifying some very specific mentalities when it comes to dating/gender. But there's also so much that drags it down, and that ending, ugh. It feels like both the writing and editing were rushed to capitalize on Cat Person hype.

I think people on Twitter might be getting defensive about these stories because they seem like an indictment against "male behaviour" as a whole, casting benign stuff as being toxic and gross. In the case of "Cat Person" the dude was clearly shitty, but in the case of "The Nice Guy" Ted's behaviour doesn't actually even seem to be all that bad? The comment that spurs on the tumbler-throwing sounds more like a man being real about his boundaries and desires and being punished for it with violence.

Perceiving these stories as indictments isn't off-the-mark-- with "The Nice Guy" in particular, Roupenian seems to wish to re-cast even reasonably justifiable male psychology and response as being worthy of hellfire punishment. But I see a lot, a lot of commonality between Roupenian's male characters and Raymond Carver's-- in particular, Earl in "They're Not Your Husband" (that's the story where a husband, noticing that his waitress wife has put on some weight, bullies her into losing some, and she does, and then the author specifically asks for a slice of pie so that she'll show off her ass at work, and the husband subsequently makes leering comments about his own wife to a patron in the restaurant-- god what a fucked up story). Carver's position is observational and leaves the reader to form their own judgements, whereas Roupenian acts as judge for her characters-- she herself is effectively a character in her own stories, as commentator. And that scuttles the story for me. I read "The Nice Guy" and felt like I wanted to defend Ted-- why is he being punished by the author for having his own desires, his own boundaries?

But yeah I haven't had as much of a "wow have you been reading my diary?" response to an author's delineation of internal monologue and motivations since like... idk the first time I read Chris Ware's "Jimmy Corrigan"

It's funny that some recent LA Times article about the new women in congress referenced Cat Person.

Because contrary to Ted’s puzzlement that women all seem to react the same way to him, it is actually possible to tell how someone feels about you without them saying so and the story does at least do that much in pointing out several occurrences like that. That it’s a mystery to him is not the same as it being a mystery to the reader.

Bad as these stories are, I’m not sure the author is to blame for overly fragile twitter people taking a fictional character as a depiction of all of masculinity. That people have reacted to it so strongly is really more about them than the stories themselves and there are literally millions more out there to read.

being punished for it with violence

This struck me as an odd decision. The guy's just been physically assaulted and put in the hospital, and this is the moment when we're being invited to pass judgment on his whole life?

this story reminded me a lot of "you can drive a person crazy" (and bobby in general) tho i think sondheim is a better observer of character and gives a more plausible explanation for this kind of dynamic (tho he also ascribes it to immaturity) than the author of this piece who sounds like someone trying to score points against old boyfriends more than explore whatever psychology is actually relevant here.

The guy's just been physically assaulted and put in the hospital, and this is the moment when we're being invited to pass judgment on his whole life?

that part made sense to me insofar as it's coming at a moment when the indictment of "bad men" may prompt a kneejerk reaction to feel sorry for them rather than hold them accountable for their actions, cf Al Franken. but the execution is hamhanded.

Yeah there's a weird dissonance between this extremely detailed depiction of his history and motivations, vs the heavy-handed interjections that are like 'don't forget though, men who think of themselves as nice guys are actually unredeemable assholes!'

xp

I was posting last year about an idea that Roupenian writes about here-- that some individuals whose sexual preference is purely penetrative (i.e. men) cannot conceive of the fact that their sexual partners would actually desire to be penetrated, as the men (i.e.) themselves do not have that desire, and so they tend to have unhealthy approaches to approaching sexual relationships with their partners, relying upon coercion and/or persuasion and/or cajoling in order to achieve that end. In Ted's case, he actually views his potential sexual partners with suspicion-- 'she must be faking this desire for me'-- and has to imagine that his dick is a knife in order to achieve an erection-- 'the only way I can engage in penetrative sex is by imagining it as an act of violence'.

i'm not sure she's drawing that connection here (or so explicitly at least). it's less about his inability to imagine penetration as pleasurable and more about his anger and resentment towards partners who he believes are "settling" for him, or don't truly love him, etc, so he has to view penetration as violence to achieve erection bc he needs to punish his partners to feel equal in the relationship. this shows up in an array of what he describes as "mean" sexual behaviors, not just the penetrative act.

yeh i think i am going to skip this one
i don't want to get anywhere near the inside of ted's head

opinions!

I thought the author did a good job with the two premises that

1) people want to be desired sexually by people with sexual status greater than their own
2) people want to know that they are loved desired sexually

(I originally wrote "men" rather than "people" for both of those, but the author doesn't seem to suppose the gendered versions so I'll leave them open instead.)

I don't think these premises are grounded on the protagonist's self-loathing, since the self-loathing emerges after 1) is confounded by real life in childhood. So I see this story as digging a little deeper than just "self-loathing men are shitty to women".

I think people should date people they like. Ted’s approach is a nightmare.

It was surprising that she leaned so hard into the archetype of “the nice guy” — as people noted that made it seem less like a short story and more like a morality play, a kind of woke Pilgrim’s Progress.

However, in the end I do feel the writer is talented. And it’s not like she’s drawing on nothing—so many people have pointed out the dynamics she dramatizes in these stories.

Reviewing the book, will return when I get thru it. Haven't read the new story yet.

ok i have read a little more
there is a lot of truth in the discussion of ted's unsolicited attention to his crushes
it doesn't seem to occur to him that the disgust he (legitimately) senses from the objects of his affection might rest in the unsolicited/unwanted attention he pays them and/or the way he is objectifying them rather than a reflection of himself
then he starts pretending friendship when it's not friendship he wants -- this is so common and so harmful :( and mostly unrecognized

um, I wouldn't say it's mostly unrecognised. It's one of the most dominant cultural tropes of our time

unrecognized as being harmful i mean! people seem to think it's cute?
it's not

see: posterboard guy in Love Actually, who maybe is Ted?

Maybe. I think the "friend zone" concept is increasingly recognised as a toxic one these days

these days like in the last few years, maybe
but there are many unaccounted-for years in there where it was not recognized as such
and damage was done during those years -- this seems in part to be about some of that damage?

Yeah he’s a sneaky dude who, as a college student, basically emotionally tortured Rachel and Anna. The woman he threw the glass at him seemed a different casw though—as fgti pointed out, all he did with her was decide to break up with her, unless there is something else Imm forgetting.

*woman who threw

but there are many unaccounted-for years in there where it was not recognized as such

Probably a good move to set this story (the teenage years at least) in the '90s

Originally I thought the idea of a “friend zone” is when two people actually are friends, and have a real foundation of friendship, but one is just secretly in love with the other ne. Now it seems that it’s someone with a secret agenda misrepresenting themselves—which maybe is how it *actually* was playing out most of the time all along

The bigger issue with ted is he never once seems to consider these women’s feelings independent of how they reflect on him. He cares whether he is a “good guy” but he doesn’t really care about the fact that they are feeling hurt.

holy shit though i can't keep track of all of ted's developing feelings because this story is too detailed and boring about anna and rachel and the parties and the moms
it just didn't seem to go anywhere. we are left with idiot jerk ted and that's it

not as good as cat person for sure -- although i do appreciate the girls not being left off the hook. it's not like he's the only bad guy in the story

xp -- which maybe is how it *actually* was playing out most of the time all along no maybe, this is otm -- you can't be secretly in love with someone and pretend to be their friend. you can pretend to yourself that this is what you are doing, but that doesn't make it true. the person who pretends friendship while secretly pining is a person who doesn't care much about the other person's feelings because theirs come first.

“it doesn't seem to occur to him that the disgust he (legitimately) senses from the objects of his affection might rest in the unsolicited/unwanted attention he pays them and/or the way he is objectifying them rather than a reflection of himself”

it might, in part, and it might rest in part on his not being otherwise appealing. Both can be true.

He wants to be Marco who without having to do anything attracts Anna. Without doing anything he “only” attracts Rachel. Desire, our desirability, is partly a function of what we control, and partly not. Ted is learning how to (ab)use the part he can control.

Probably a good move to set this story (the teenage years at least) in the '90s
otm

I just read something where the author said this piece was in response to all the (weirdo) requests to write Cat Person from the man's point of view.

it would have to be the same story then right? i mean, ted is different from [guy in cat person whose name i forget]; they are not the same person? or are they supposed to be the same person?

Oh, i think maybe more a companion piece.

i guess that leads me to my other question after finishing this story -- who is ted then? what is his context? we don't really get much of a clear idea aside from his perspective (from the very beginning) about his sexual performance. i mean, that's a helluva defining characteristic i guess but i don't feel like ted is as real as the people in cat person. idk. maybe some people feel differently if they are/ have been closer to more teds.

Oh wait, I think I read this too fast and I can't find where this came from originally.

The Good Guy https://t.co/4Ysz5MD8fv
From @KRoupenian, the author of the short story Cat Person. pic.twitter.com/HMmXSLDY8D

— AlanPF (@alanpf) January 3, 2019

Ugh, don't know why that is showing up black. Ted and the other guy are kind of the same to me, but Good Guy was just too much of a tedious read right now. otm about reading a whole book of short stories like this but I am not really a short story person. They all have this sense of doom which probably comes from knowing the story is going to end too soon.

like we are plunged into ted's neurosis from the very beginning
in cat people, there was some mystery and the intimate revelations only came up once they went out, etc
ted here is just like pow i think my dick is a sword from the opening paragraph
maybe that was intentional but the difference seems worth noting if this is indeed a "companion piece", like an answer song or whatever.

i can only handle this shit in small blorps -- i don't think i would sit down to read a book of stories about cat people

If you click on that tweet that is blacked out, I misread it and she was writing The Good Guy when Cat Person went viral. She says she sends it to people who ask for Cat Person from the man's point of view.

...unless i or someone i know wrote them and they were true
then maybe i would!

ahhhh that is a very different thing (sending it to people who request "man's pov")
i knew there was more to this!

Yeah, i read it too fast when I was just looking to see if there was any response to the story.

the real story is kind of lol!
and the lack of context/pow with the neurosis makes more sense now!
ted is the guy who wrote the email!

or one of them
i don't really believe we can classify people this broadly tbh

This is making me think there is an audience for Portnoy's Complaint from the piece of liver's viewpoint.

This interview made me more interested in the book: https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/surprising-things-can-happen-an-interview-with-kristen-roupenian/

It sounds like a lot of it is more horror/magical-realist, not just Cat People studies.

lol at yerac

haven't read this yet:

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-it-felt-like-when-cat-person-went-viral

nyt pan of the book seemed to tell me everything i wanted to know https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/books/review-you-know-you-want-this-cat-person-kristen-roupenian.html

There’s none of the simmer of “Cat Person” or its attention to language in the rest of these stories. Roupenian will work a metaphor until it screams. On a walk in the woods: “The vaginal lips of a pink lady’s slipper peep out from behind some bushes; a rubber shred of burst balloon, studded by a plump red navel knot, dangles from a tree branch, and the corpse of a crushed mushroom gleams sad and cold and pale.”

Yeah, the woods are gross.

So the book is about the destructive outer reaches of human sexuality, not the crushing banality and habituated cruelty of the status quo, it seems.

That New Yorker piece, now I am worried my dog had a UTI at one point in his life and I didn't know.

After “Cat Person” went viral, I sold my first book, a story collection. It’s coming out this month. I’m hoping that the number of monsters and murderers in its pages will put at least some of the autobiographical questions to rest. But, more than that, I want people to read it. I hope they like it. And, at the same time, I don’t want to know what they think about it. I’m sure that sometime, late at night, I’ll go on Twitter and search for my name and try to figure out what people are saying—or not saying—about me and my book.

Her next piece will be how no one is saying a thing about her book and #feelings etc.

the folksy primness of the NYT review was annoying enough to make me want to read the book

Nothing wrong with being folksy or prim

especially when you're an nyt reviewer

Was that a pan? The review read more confused.

I think there were expected something that spoke to the zeitgeist/common experience but found a book that was much more disturbing and less relatable

The man you’re in love with might turn out to be an old thigh bone tied to a mirror (an actual plot point).

We've all been there, amirite?

Actually that plus the wildly reductive summary of the new one ("Ted in “The Good Guy” needs to fantasize about stabbing women to sexually perform") makes me want to read it.

The author says she likes /is inspired by Stephen King types of things so this makes sense.

She's also sold a script for a slasher movie

For sure but her breakout story wasn’t like that

xp

People think her breakout story was from her dear diary so whatevs.

Her breakout story was basically a horror story, no?

I think one of CP's strengths was its proximity to a horror story. Obvs not a Stephen King story but still

xp!

I think there were expected something that spoke to the zeitgeist/common experience but found a book that was much more disturbing and less relatable
lol what's weird is that i can totally relate to the desire to create absurd realities in order to escape the "common experience" which generally sucks

”Ellie in “Biter” bites. Ted in “The Good Guy” needs to fantasize about stabbing women to sexually perform. Laura in “The Matchbox Sign” imagines that her body is crawling with parasites — and her boyfriend participates in the fantasy. These characters remain their pathologies; the curtain falls on them before we can ever ask: Now what?”

is it her job to tell us "now what"?

Not sure. The critic seemed to think her portrayal of these characters was one dimensional—they were just their obsessions

that's kinda how i felt about ted tbh

I haven’t read the book. I know i sort of felt like that about “the good guy.” “Ted’s” self absorption and indifference to the women in his life was nauseating—which was the point, obviously—but in the end I wasn’t sure what to think except “ted sucks.”

Xp sorry didn’t see you posted again. But ya. Probably won’t read this so i’ll never know for sure what the book is like

read the first three stories last night. Damn... this is pretty bad

This seemed to me like a more trustworthy slam than the NYT review:

https://slate.com/culture/2019/01/kristen-roupenian-book-cat-person-review.html

I've read all but the last two stories. Really, really rough - clearly rushed and poorly written & edited throughout. The subtlety, detail, pacing, and banal horror of "Cat Person" - a completely brilliant story not at all diminished by the stuff it's sandwiched between in here - are missing. Just caught up on the thread, and yeah, I was thinking Stephen King the whole time, also Chuck Palahniuk. Lots of body horror, gore, magical realist/fantasy stuff. "The Good Guy" isn't even worth discussing. I thought "Bad Boy" was good but felt incomplete. As others have said itt, the pacing and uncertainty of "Cat Person" are so much of what make it great, and she gets to have a "shock" ending that is actually sadly pretty predictable and common and familiar. Other than Girls, there aren't many other works of fiction that have so vividly captured dating in the 2010's. But the horror and pulpiness of the writing obscure the social critique, which for the most part is pretty pedestrian and uninteresting. Pretty disappointed - I'm not a horror fan (do love SK though), but she's sort of a lousy writer, and needed more time to work on this stuff. A one hit wonder for now.

Rip

its sad she was a cat person :(

reading "the good guy" shocked me; i didn't know new yorker editors still work so hard.

there aren't many other works of fiction that have so vividly captured dating in the 2010's

dating has always been like this, nothing 2010s about it imo

it is often much more exciting and less grim than this, surely? not that this scenario isn't common

yeah it's exciting, high risk/high reward

LL you're right, I misremembered there being some Tinder element in the story (despite having read it for the second time only a few days ago). besides the texting, could've easily taken place in the 90s

I am now going through all my remembering all my horrible dating stories. UGH. I really wish there had been more online interaction about it during my peak years, I would never have put up with some of that shit.

i think dating is a whole different ball game for women. i don't like the alienated aspect of online dating and pray i'll never feel the need to go back to it, but i've honestly never been treated cruelly or disrespectfully by someone who i just happened to be dating. worst experience was the night someone just made it clear that she found me extremely boring.

this is one of my more obvious observations but still.

I've only online dated twice (like 2 dates/people) but it doesn't matter, it happens outside of that. For women it is a continual calculus of what you portray, how nice you are, how funny, how much you aren't a total cunt, what was the final tabulation of services paid for by each other, you went on a date and realized...meh... but still try to salvage something because you might just not know "THE REAL THEM". And then since you put all that energy in anyway and your/his apartment is so far away and you have been taught to never make anyone uncomfortable or sad... how dangerous do they seem, do they know where you work and who your friends are that they might sabotage your life later or show up somewhere and threaten harm. It's exhausting.

yeah exactly. so much anxiety seems built into it for women. i don't really ever worry about that stuff. i hate disappointing people, so saying "it's not gonna work" can be hard, but like, not because i fear a bad reaction. different worlds.

it's funny that in the one story the guy doesn't hold back what he's thinking in the beginning (and you could read this as confidence from feeling invulnerable / privilege of not fearing violence from women if u were so inclined) and it leads to a violent reaction that appears to kill him

true. maybe i should watch out more.

ok I finished it. "Death Wish" is sort of like "Bad Boy," a dating/sex nightmare that veers into magical realism. those ones are both OK but man... the last one, "Biter," ends with the most EYEROLL worthy #MeToo era stinger. the whole story is a setup for that last sentence, which might as well be accompanied by a rimshot.

plz share

are there any stories where people are in emotionally supportive relationships based on mutual affection? maybe something else bad could happen to them after, but to start.

No

hm, i guess that makes sense based on her whole style. but ime most relationships are like that. not perfect, sometimes they don't work out, but people tend to care about their partners, even if they also resent them in some ways. what was alienating about "the good guy" is he only saw the women in his life through the prism of himself--how they reflected back on how he saw himself (powerful, a "good guy," whatever).

xxp Mordy - the setup for the punchline would take too long to explain & its groanworthiness might be lost. it has to be read to be believed. I'll try later

xp well yeah, she's not the ambassador of dating and relationships, she has a niche and mines it.

for sure, and i'm not saying she "should" do her thing differently. the thing that is surprising, reading about this, is that she isn't really going for realism anyway, even though cat person suggested that was her bag. these are horror stories.

she should have leaned into the punchline gimmick and ended every single story with "Whore."

whore or stories

But my favorite is the final story in the collection, “Biter,” which is about a girl who discovers a love of biting in preschool. Later, as an adult, she must find a socially acceptable way to get away with assuaging her craving for flesh; when she accidentally stumbles on a predatory man, she discovers that she can bite with impunity. It made me say “ew” out loud while I was reading it, but I didn’t feel like that “ew” moment was used (as with the white worm) for no reason. This story’s ending, which I won’t spoil, lands. Its moral seems to be: Take advantage of the flaws in the system, as long as they’re not going anywhere. Good for the biter, I guess.

Is the punchline something about biting off more than she could chew?

how hard does she want to bite? a little biting is ok

being single and dating is at once the most debased and pathetic state one can find themselves in, and the most fascinating, because you can tell your friends tittilating and gruesome tales of bad dates. i look forward to finding a long-term partner, yetcst the same time know that once i do, ill be forever more boring to everyone i meet

Oh man, I loved to bite as a child, teen, uh early dater. I really had to hone that in. Maybe I should read that story.

i feel like biting is extremely normal. if you're biting enough to break skin that's pretty different though.

so the woman makes up a game called "Opportunity" to figure out a way to clandestinely bite her new boss: where he's most often alone, where she could satisfy her urge to bite him and plausibly get away with it. the boss is portrayed as a total heartthrob, innocent and hot, all the women in the office love him. the woman is really playing Opportunity a lot and trying to figure out how to bite him. one day, he goes in for an unsolicited kiss and grabs her butt. she bites a huge chunk of his cheek off, extremely satisfied. the final two lines:

Because, as Ellie quickly learned, there was one in every office: the man everyone whispered about. All she had to do was listen, and wait, and give him an Opportunity, and soon enough, he would find her.

COME ON

Yeah, I was a bad biter. I think it was aggro/frustration issues already seeing/feeling it in my mind/jaw. I probably would relate to this story.

wait, how was it an unsolicited kiss if she was playing "opportunity"?

also she would definitely not get away with that.

"Biter" is written from the POV of a female "predator," someone who learned early in life that her sexual desire to bite people isn't socially acceptable, and suddenly finds herself employed by a man so attractive her urge to bite him overcomes logic and self-control. she's enamored with him and we see him as a flawless, inevitable victim. when he makes a move far more aggressive than she anticipated, she's able to plausibly retaliate and not only not get in trouble, but gain the respect of her coworkers, who actually have been menaced by this "elf" all along. Fuck