See? You can't look away. The shape of his mouth. The prickly growths. It's the same can't look away that's luring you out to see "The Shape of Water"....
Women... and the creepy monsters they feel compelled to have sex with....
"Cat Person" is just a New Yorker short story. I get The New Yorker every week and almost never read the short stories, but I started "Cat Person" (by Kristen Roupenian), and I'm certain the photograph (by Elinor Carucci) made me do it. But I only got 7 paragraphs into it before moving on, intending to come back, but knowing my relationship with these mouth people might never be consummated.
And then I found out the internet was going mad for this story. So now, I've read it, and I'm reading the stories about how and why it when viral. Let's dip into the discussion with "The reaction to 'Cat Person' shows how the internet can even ruin fiction," by Laura Adamczyk at the AV Club:
Response to the story has varied from praise for its relatability to flat dismissal to jokes about how everyone is talking about a—Who’da thunk it?—short story of all things, with much of the conversation focusing on who is the more sympathetic character between Margot and Robert. On Sunday, someone created a “Men React To Cat Person” Twitter account, compiling screenshots of responses to the story, wherein some men express confusion over its merits, others defend Robert as the story’s victim, and one wonders if the story should exist at all, stating that the events depicted don’t just happen to women....I'm not going to read any more of the internet chatter, at least not right now. But I'll just say, based on my own reading of the story, that it makes a good jumping off point for discussing the problem of bad sex. Bad sex is something you need to distinguish from a criminal assault and take responsibility for avoiding. And reading the story is a good vicarious experience that might help women (and men) get better at ending an evening at an appropriately early point. The sex in that story is very graphic — graphic in a completely nontitillating way. In fact, the sex in that story is such that it would make excellent reading for an abstinence-only class.
Debating over who’s the bigger jerk in this [story about a short male-female relationship], or any, work of fiction misses the point.... And yet because so many people came to the story through social media, as opposed to having the print issue delivered to their mail boxes, they clicked through and read without seeing its “fiction” designation. This no doubt encouraged some people to read the story not only as nonfiction but also as something that was up for debate, something they should or should not agree with...
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20 comments:
Creepy? I'm beginning to think those sex-hating 1980s feminist intellectuals had a greater effect on you than you realize.
Creepy? I thought it was pretty damn sexy.
Cat Lady photo stolen from Kubrick
Eyes Wide Shut Poster
NYT predicts Moore at +0.2% victory
The picture, not the story, which I haven’t read...yet. Probably won’t read based on your description.
"Bad sex is something you need to distinguish." You who? It would be nice if progs made the distinction. It would be nice if they were intellectually honest. It would be nice if they would refrain from reframing bad sex as harassment. But they won't. This is not an Althousian world.
The Shape of Water trailer looked dreadfully stupid.
Like they let Marilyn Monroe write the screenplay after complaining about that "poor" Creature From the Black Lagoon" just before the subway blew her dress up.
It sounds like a shorter version of "Gone Girl" which was awful. I read it before going to the move and never went to the movie.
I read it when it blew up yesterday. The story wasn't particularly interesting except to reveal how the usual suspects think.
The attraction is not to the sex but because the female character is responsive to minor changes in tone and mood. The usual suspects think this validates their belief women are made "responsible" for mens' emotions.
The absolute lack of color in the woman's mouth is...disturbing.
Hmmm. If someone took a shot of me kissing my wife it would look like that.
Is male facial hair that unusual?
I subscribe to TNY and read the story earlier this week while working out on a cross-trainer. I thought it was a good story- a stream of consciousness, almost real-time, account of a believable brief affair. I read most of the short stories and find most of them to be quite good. TNY ran a story a few weeks ago by Thomas McGuane which was terrific- I am checking out some of his books.
TNY has recently published accounts of combat in the Middle East which were outstanding. The Kurds love President Trump. Who knew ?
TNY is a great read, despite the rote rant about DJT in their political articles.
Not a bad story. I'm glad I didn't write it.
I wanted things to work out even though it was obvious they would not.
This is an antimatter romance story. It has the opposite of HEA.
It's very postmodern in that no one has learned anything by the end. It's just depressing and ugly.
That scraggly little thing is a piss-poor excuse for a mustache. What I’ve got between my nostrils and upper lip, now THAT’s a mustache.
I have a hard time relating to stories like this (blissfully married for 34 years)... it almost reads like the plot of Lena Dunham's next TV show. Find myself thinking "jeez... is this what modern romance has devolved to? Is this the course it takes?"
Brings back memories. Fairly uncomfortable ones.
The worst thing about being young is that we think other people are there for our entertainment. Maybe not the worst thing. A bad thing, especially when you think back on it.
I read it and was reminded about the one thing about too many American women that makes them so unattractive: their girl friends.
What is more unattractive for any man than knowing that he has become the object of discussion the woman has had with her friends.
The woman in this tale is the female equivalent of an American frat boy: the important people are friends of the same sex.
My advice to younger American men: go for European or Asiatic women. They are less likely to act like the female in this story. They are more likely to be adults.
"It's very postmodern in that no one has learned anything by the end."
Good point Mr. Lynch. This is something that seems to be common to much contemporary chick-lit (in the wider sense, including TV and movies). Women behave foolishly and maybe badly, particularly in relations with men, and then suffer some highly predictable negative consequences. Notable examples of the genre are Sex and the City, Bridget Jones's Diary and Lena Dunham's Girls. On the surface, they can look almost like tales of moral instruction, BUT nobody ever learns anything, neither the characters nor the audience. The bitter results of foolish action result only in a group hug boo-hoo-hoo where women experience emotional catharsis and blame everything on men. Or, if blaming men is just too absurd, they blame "society", "culture" or "America".
I am a 34-year-old man like Robert in the story and sometimes bad sex is all you can get. Also, I was curious about the story as you and Reynolds have posted about it twice. It's a decent story about an awkward one night stand, but the ending is horrible. It seems out of character for Robert and Margot.
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