cat person

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

the combo of horror/magical realism + sexual/romantic realism does not work at all imo - these stories are a drag

Weird

so on a “short stories with similar shtick that’s somewhat shocking/out there” how does this writer compare to like, Chuck Palahniuk

xpost That one seems to work. But I haven't read it. I literally feel I live most of my life waiting for a rational and defendable reason to beat the shit out of someone and bite them Rick Grimes-style. Because I am tired of passively getting out of the way of terrible men.

xp besides Stephen King that's the other author I thought of. I mean, whatever collection "Guts" is in is lightyears ahead of this.

xpost That one seems to work. But I haven't read it.

it's not a bad conceit, but the execution is just atrocious

Well at least the cover of the book is nice.

How does the magical realism/sex/horror element of her writing compare with someone like Alissa Nutting?

I’d say that Nutting compares to Rou(penian)

Well at least the cover of the book is nice.

disagree on this too, looks like it was thrown together in five minutes with stock font & design imo

So much of the book screams rush job, which it obviously is. I know you gotta make hay while the sun shines but this really suffered for it.

Oh, I like the deepening angular shades of millennial pink forming a nipple, vulva, asshole. I expect it looks good from distance but I haven't seen it in person.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/26/cat-person-author-kristen-roupenian-dating-ego-power-control

Guys, there are other, better books you can read.

like Anna Kavan

Everything people say about this stuff I think is present in Mary Gaitskill's Bad Behaviour and that's about 30 years old.

It’s fiction for ppl who miss Girls

god, did they stop making Girls?

god, did they stop making Girls?

children of men (2006)

It’s fiction for ppl who miss Girls

it's nothing like girls

This is a pretty good rev of it: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v41/n03/lauren-oyler/pressure-to-please

that review has quite detailed descriptions of the plots of a few of the stories just fyi

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

something about the existence of this cat person book is really depressing to me. i haven't even read it--just the two stories and the synopses of the other ones.

there is something super foucaultian about those two stories. the surface level of social interaction and romance--the moments when people are civil to each other--are in these stories just a facade, and right underneath is just power games/struggles. this is actually not far off from how MRAs see things. i can't live in a mental world where that's what life is though. i don't think it's true, even if there are grains of truth.

it's true for some people. sociopaths mostly.

right. i think a lot of critical theory can lend one to conclusions that people are sociopaths though, if you take it one-dimensionally. like, a lot of that stuff reveals power relations, exploitation, etc, which are fundamental to how society is constructed--it's all true. but also there is like, more to life than just that.

maybe the "horror" element of these stories is that they dramatizing the lurking fear that maybe there isn't more to life than what critical theory describes.

oyler is straight up terrible

sorry lol i'm gonna have to qualify that aren't i, tbh i became aware of her through her terrible lady bird review and her "dan savage: not so problematic after all!!!" piece for the outline was high bullshit

if she's gotten good since then i'm probably not going to find out by reading a cat person review

I’m not familiar with those pieces. The things I read were about social media—I forget what she said but I remember I related to it.

seems fine that you like her! not sure why i have to register my dislike of someone's writing every time i see their name, working on it

i haven't read these stories except for the thread's titular one, but if they're based around dating and interpersonal relationships i have heard so-called "horror stories" from both men and women over the years, but generally speaking only women have told me stories from that realm that veer towards actual horror involving power games and false civility.

loneliness of the middle distance dater

From cat person, the good guy, and the synopses of “the biter” and especially the thigh bone story, it seems her theme is narcissism. The characters relate to other people based on what they want from them—there is no real “connection” happening. Which, i mean, certainly that reflects a reality of human psychology.

But she also ties this to common cultural tropes, like about “nice guys” with the good guy or ambiguous consent like with the cat person, so the collection as a whole sort of appears to be addressing the zeitgeist and saying something about the way we now. Or if not that, then responding to the way people talk about the way we live now. And considered in that light this is a grim book indeed. Which isn’t in itself damning—I don’t need hope and redemption in all my books—but raw misanthropy, i’m not sure. That isn’t appealing.

What’s surprising is how many of these stories are about women abusing men. One story is apparently about a woman who conjures a man from a book of spells and then slowly drains his blood before killing him, but during it she thinks maybe she is in love with him. Is this just an allegory for domestic violence? Is it saying something about it or just reflecting it?

Like, apparently in the biter and the blood-draining one the main character reflects that they could get away with the violence they crave by saying it was self defense bc they are women and their victims are men. Doesn’t this sound like a feverish mra fantasy? Is it satire? I’m just not gettin it and I don’t want to have to read it to find out...

Sry for all the posts.

how is that a mra thing and not a couched fantasy about a woman getting away with what men do in a cliched manner: use women for labor and emotional support and throwing them away when they’re out of blood

like the entire mra ethos is that women should do quote-unquote traditional roles which involves domestic labor, emotional support, childbearing and raising kids

a woman straight-up draining blood from a dude is, having not read the story (caveat), violent but it is literally draining the life from someone in a way that’s understandable as violence — whereas exploitation might not be. that’s the rub, violence against a man is ironically a joke (women can’t hurt men with violence!) but sucking the lifeblood from a woman over years is accepted

like I want to read this story to make sure my take is in the right ballpark but reading “woman attacks man in weird way” as “domestic violence is ok if you’re a woman” is a weird blind take that ignores allegory

and, I mean, I had that ex that was seen in public hitting her new dude in the face in public so I’m not pulling takes out my ass

whoa, i wasn't saying that she was arguing that "domestic violence is ok if you're a woman"

i'm saying the character, in the story, thought she'd get away with it because she could accuse the guy of initiating the violence. it's a plot point.

this seems similar to like, the mra idea that women are the ones who "really do" have the upper hand. like, just superficially.

but yeah, maybe this is an allegory for how men treat women, and so by reversing it we're supposed to see how bad that is, or something

it’s still a facile point, mra fantasies tene to diminish the violent capabilities of women but elevate the idea of violence as a possibility

women are totally capable of violence but making it a weird sort of violence throws it out of the realm of probability

I reserve further comment until reading the actual story instead of doing the New Yorker/nyrb thing where we talk about stories based on what our monthly periodical says

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

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

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

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

no but like ok

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

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

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