Q4ALL: What do you think of this New Yorker story? (Cat person)

SmurfESmurferson · 2017-12-11T13:55:43+00:00

There's nothing feminist about the story.

That said, it's relatable as all hell and I'm fairly certain most women who have been single for any length of time has a similar story.

Ultimately, she tried to negotiate her own lack of desire for a man who was good on paper, but who she found deeply unattractive. Hopefully she learned from the experience, and didn't repeat her mistake

says_harsh_things · 2017-12-11T12:32:45+00:00

I'm not sure how I feel. I could empathize with both characters but I also disliked both a little. I do think the reception has been too unkind towards Robert.

squirtingispeeing · 2017-12-11T17:47:28+00:00

This short story was simply honest, and I think people are projecting an agenda onto this that wasn't there. Neither party is completely innocent in this situation, although Robert does lose all sympathy with his text messages at the very end. This was ultimately a story about communication - or lack thereof.

SlimLovin · 2017-12-11T15:28:18+00:00

I read this when it was published last week--I'm a short story junkie and I read the major publications as they come out.

I enjoyed it a great deal, and will likely buy her collection when it comes out. I wouldn't say that there's anything particularly feminist about it. It's a story about expectations vs. reality.

That being said, I can see why women can relate. We've all seen online conversations take a full 180 when someone feels rejected. We've all seen someone reveal who they really are when it becomes apparent they aren't going to get their way.

says_harsh_things · 2017-12-11T15:24:05+00:00

I'm still reading it, but this part stood out to me:

Looking at him like that, so awkwardly bent, his belly thick and soft and covered with hair, Margot recoiled.

Deadbedrooms and fat guys alike, take note.

goatismycopilot · 2017-12-11T13:37:18+00:00

Lol, I wondered when this would show up here.

I didn't think it was a particularly good or well-written story, but I'm surprised at the backlash it's received. I didn't read it as man-bashing or anything, and in fact I spent most of the story feeling sorry for Robert and thinking Margot was crazy. She imagines this whole inner life for Robert and attributes all these thoughts and feelings to him based on nothing. She's very self-absorbed. Robert is a jerk at the end but Margot was a jerk for the entire story leading up to that, and ultimately I think Robert is the more sympathetic character. (Which is interesting, I thought, because he ends up doing the whole "Nice guy" thing at the end but IMO the author did a good job of illustrating why he was frustrated.)

Honestly I was surprised/relieved it didn't end up being a date rape story. I figured with older man/younger woman getting drunk and having sex, that's the direction it was going.

But my main takeaway not from the story itself but from the viral response to it is that people don't understand what fiction is.

ivegotsomequestions0 · 2017-12-11T16:45:38+00:00

Is it really being shared as proof of how hard women have it? If anything, it illustrates what a burden of performance men have. She basically had to show up and look pretty. If she had been a little older, she would have realized that he didn't give a shit whether she was cool or witty.

He had to reel her in by being awesome at every turn. At first he pulled it off, but his insecurity and inability to be good in bed destroyed his chances. I doubt that her insecurities or sexual issues would have driven him away.

However, fair's fair. While it's easy for her to show up and look pretty, she can only get by on that for about ten more years. He gets decades to become better and more desirable. Not an insurmountable task. Such exhausting insecurity and terrible bedroom skills aren't at all the norm.

This is just an excellent illustration of why dates fail, and guys who have routinely found themselves in Robert situation should use it to understand what it is that they did "wrong" and improve for next time.

It's also amusing that he reveals an obsession with n count. As though her being a virgin would have blinded her to his problems or made her enjoy the bad kissing and sex. I think we can see here what causes n count obsessions.

If there's anything for women to take action on here, it's the following: do not commit yourself to a guy you don't like that much (margot didn't, but some do). Find someone who really rocks your socks and lock him down. Don't waste time, or else before you know it you'll be faced with a dating pool that consists more and more of older guys with big problems, and even those will be chasing after the twenty year old concession stand girl.

Menurotica · 2017-12-11T17:04:39+00:00

An entitled tale of a young unattractive woman pining for a Chad and a socially awkward man who can't attract anyone around his own age.

Jaxx_Teller · 2017-12-11T14:48:28+00:00

Lessons learned:

For guys: Be attractive, don't be unattractive. Don't say cringey things, don't be overweight, and read social cues.

For girls: Don't make decisions based on inner fanatical dialogue in your head about the idea of some guy. Make decisions based on the physical guy in front of your eyes.

ThrowawayCactus6012 · 2017-12-11T14:06:44+00:00

It's a short read

It wasn't that short. A rather long-winded, disjointed story about a young college woman going out on a bad date with bad sex, and this is supposed to be "proof of how difficult it is to be a woman in the modern world"?

I look at it more as proof of just how pampered, soft, spoiled, insulated, and frivolous Western women have become. I've talked to women who survived the Siege of Leningrad and endured the Battle of Stalingrad.

I'll concede that the guy was a bit of a turd, a 34-year-old man picking up on a 20-year-old concession stand girl at an artsy movie theater. But it's not the end of the world.

What floors me more than anything is that someone actually wrote this crap and got paid for it. That's the real crime here.

Jackieirish · 2017-12-11T19:24:38+00:00

It's hard for me to separate the current political context from this story to give it what I think would be a fair review -solely because of the very last word. Had the author left that word off, I would have looked at this story as a painfully awkward story of two people who aren't quite as experienced and romantically savvy as we usually see in stories like these. Instead, and only because of where we are culturally and the final word the author chose to end the story, I can't help but wonder if I was tricked: this wasn't the story about two awkward people figuring out how romance works. This was an elaborate set-up to show the world that awkward guys aren't really nice; they're all secretly misogynistic assholes who think they are entitled to whatever they want. Without confirmation of that point, though, that's unfair to the author's work, I would think.

But maybe it isn't.

For one thing, the author should (or at least could) know what's going on here currently. So to put the story out right now -even understanding that the timing of its publication is undoubtedly beyond the author's control, will convey something about the author's intentions for how the story should be interpreted. And, even under the most charitable times, the audience will wonder about that last word and what is meant by it. In the real world, men say those kinds of things all the time and we usually never get a completely accurate explanation for why. But this isn't a memoir. This is fiction. It's not enough to say "well, it's just being true-to-life." This word was used deliberately as the closing statement of the tale to communicate something. So the author's intentions in using it, as much as the character's motivations for using it, are up for dissection.

Maybe after all of that build-up, it was intended to just be a bad joke -the ending to a shaggy-dog story, sort-of. Okay, that's possible.

Or maybe the author was trying to say "Nice guys" don't really exist. They're all secretly assholes.

Or maybe the author was trying to show us how normal guys become "Nice Guys" -through years of loneliness, ineffectiveness, and (even justifiable) rejection.

And before anyone points out that I am choosing to focus on the male character exclusively, let me preemptively respond that the story ends on his last word (which appears to be a complete reversal of his entire character) and does not even bother to describe how the word was received by the female protagonist. Did she say "I knew it"? Did her heart break a little more? Did she regret her mistake and rush back into his arms? Did she blow it off? We don't have any idea. So all we are left with is his action to evaluate. That is also intentional, I think. If we were intended to think about the narrator more than the antagonist, then the author would have, or should have given us something of that character's reaction to and life after that statement. But we aren't given that. So I think it is fair to say, we are meant to wonder about the guy more than the girl, at least, regarding that word.

And there I think lies a weakness in the story and why it comes across as a petty slam against "Nice Guys." The female protagonist builds up this fellow as a potential suitor (all the while shallowly pointing out everything inadequacy she perceives). Through every facet of their relationship she continuously categorizes his flaws and shortcomings until she decides to end the relationship. Of course, anyone who has ever been in a short-term relationship has done this -this is in fact why certain relationships are short-term to begin with. Even in long-term relationships we rate our partners on whatever personal scorecard we keep. Yet that reality, seems particularly cruel in this storyline because the person on the receiving end seems all-too human. Are we meant to think this person doing the scoring is actually the "bad-guy?" It doesn't come across that way to me. So I don't think that is what was meant.

Lastly, I can't help but wonder what the reaction would be to a story about a male college sophomore who dates an older female and finds her to be inadequate would be. If the last line wasn't "Whore," but "Faggot," would I feel as much reflexive sympathy to jilted lover? Or would I be saying "You dodged a bullet, my man. Never stick your dick in crazy"? Or would I feel the same way: questioning the author's intentions and wondering if maybe those intentions were circumspect?

Drippyskippy · 2017-12-12T04:10:03+00:00

A female writes fiction from a very liberal leaning media source. Story was somewhat interesting in certain parts, I think it was more interesting because I listened to it instead of read it. These are my main takeaways the author clearly expresses from the fiction piece. Men who are weird, older and inexperienced in the end are assholes (this is made clear by the whore text). They seem nice, but in the end avoid them. Masculinity is fragile, based upon how she thought things that she was saying were hurting him. The piece demonizes men, you can't be alone with a man or he will rape you or murder you. The woman in the story also does a lot of hamstring, which I thought was one of the most realistic parts of the story. How she is always overthinking things. I also thought that once he shared his true feelings with her, she lost every ounce of attraction towards him, which is TRP theory. when he did this she wanted nothing to do with him. There are truths even in fiction pieces.

Its no surprise that this story became popular. Its a left leaning piece that has feminist undertones. Especially, considering we are in full swing of the Wizard Hunt 2017. I think its interesting that the top rated comment of this thread is a feminist who doesn't believe there is nothing feminist about the story. I guess not everyone has great reading comprehension, or can read between the lines.

Willow-girl · 2017-12-12T14:14:24+00:00

This is not a new situation. Almost a century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald penned, "There used to be two kinds of kisses. First when girls were kissed and deserted; second, when they were engaged. Now there's a third kind, where the man is kissed and deserted."

darla10 · 2017-12-11T13:53:39+00:00

It's a typical young girl mistake. The revulsion she feels, not so much towards him, but towards herself for trying to 'make it work' with this passive agressive loser. I can relate to her disgust.

a_mans_perspective · 2017-12-12T03:44:47+00:00

If this is the kind of literature our generation is producing, then please just let the bombs fall. Something, anything to disrupt this spiral into spoiled selfish overly-entitled delusional narcissistic nonsense.

DarkLord0chinChin · 2017-12-11T15:00:07+00:00

Boring af, didn't read. Provide tldr

[deleted] · 2017-12-11T17:30:29+00:00

Very poor prose

wtknight · 2017-12-11T16:00:49+00:00

I didn't like the story enough to do more than just skim it.

Guys who want lasting relationships from women probably shouldn't go for sex as soon as possible and develop emotional bonds as much as possible before becoming sexual. From my experience, women usually overlook minor physical and sexual faults once they have a strong emotional bond with the man.

Also, the first time a guy has sex with a woman should probably be when they are both sober, or there is a possibility that she will regret the sex, or even worse, he could be accused of rape.

GridReXX · 2017-12-11T20:19:34+00:00

I haven’t read it on Twitter because it’s a rather long read and who has the time. But I saw it was a big thing on Twitter this morning.

His response was my response: https://twitter.com/106th/status/940123566137331712

Another thing I find interesting is how people are consuming it and responding to it. as though it’s an essay or article.

It’s fiction. It’s a short story. Relate to it as such.

yoshimasa · 2017-12-12T11:33:27+00:00

What seems to have been missed in the jumping on the bandwagon screaming "I can relate!" is that what is really missing in this story is communication on both sides but especially with how Margot handled the situation near the end. Sure he was jerk to write "whore" but he had poured out his feelings then he got that brush off message a few days later which he thought was from her. He wanted to hurt her like she hurt him after leading him on from initiating the conversation at the beginning to initiating sex before she dropped him without a word of explanation.

Jackieirish · 2017-12-14T15:43:46+00:00

Been thinking about this story and the surrounding controversy some more and I realized something that I didn't before:

When the girl finally "breaks up" with the guy she does so by sending him a text that is completely tonally different from all of the other texts she had sent previously. The reason for this is because, obviously, she didn't write or send that text; her friend did.

Notice, then, that the very last text the man sends to her is also completely tonally different from all of the other texts he had previously sent to her. Is it possible that a friend (even possibly a female friend) of the man did the exact same thing? Tired of seeing this man being "strung along" (or at least not getting it that the relationship is over), this friend grabbed the man's phone and sent a text that would surely end all communication between the two.

[deleted] · 2017-12-11T12:51:41+00:00

it just shows that women are insane. I must admit, I liked the story though.

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Willow-girl · 2017-12-11T13:14:55+00:00

Well, if that isn't a cautionary tale!

Electra_Cute · 2017-12-11T12:16:07+00:00

lots of trendy young women are sharing it as proof of how difficult it is to be a woman in the modern world

Yes, in addition to that I am certain that people are linking it for the same reason you are, giving the page more hits, as was intended.

Title	Q4ALL: What do you think of this New Yorker story? (Cat person)
Author	Jinzub
Upvotes	8
Comments	190
Date	December 11, 2017 12:10 PM UTC (8 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/PurplePillDebate
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/PurplePillDebate/comments/7j1sxy/q4all_what_do_you_think_of_this_new_yorker_story/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/PurplePillDebate/q4all-what-do-you-think-of-this-new-yorker-story.264524 https://theredarchive.com/post/264524

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