cat person

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......