Oh, no! "Cat Person" is back. Now, it's a movie. And the man we're supposed to be creeped out by is... Cousin Greg!!

Well, Nicholas Braun was a master of awkwardness as Greg on "Succession," but do I want to seen him dragged through this monstrosity? Or do you think there's any chance this movie could be good... at least good enough to get us back to talking about "Cat Person" like we did in 2017/2018?

They made a movie out of that New Yorker story "Cat Person" — you know, the story everyone was talking about...

... the last time everyone was talking about a short story.

Remember? It was December 2017, and my first post on the subject was: "I was drawn in by the creepy close-up and started reading before 'Cat Person' became an internet phenomenon." Ha ha. I didn't want you to think I'd just follow a trend. I said:

"What’s difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialised in the most viral short story of all time is the sensation that millions of people now know that relationship as described by a stranger."

"Meanwhile, I’m alone with my memories of what really happened – just like any death leaves you burdened with the responsibility of holding on to the parts of a person that only you knew."

Writes Alexis Nowicki, the real-life person upon whom the story "Cat Person" was based, quoted in "The Cat Person debate shows how fiction writers use real life does matter/Kristen Roupenian’s viral 2017 short story is again being debated, now over her alleged use of details drawn from life. The questions this raises do not have neat answers" (The Guardian). 

[Nowicki] alleges that biographical details in the story were taken from her life and relationship with an older man, whom she calls Charles. Nowicki had never met Roupenian, but came from the same small home town, lived in the same college dorms, and worked at the same theatre as Margot....

As it turns out, Roupenian did know Charles and told Nowicki that she had gleaned details of her previous relationship with Charles through social media. It’s a sad story, especially as Charles died suddenly last year and Nowicki clearly desires to set the record straight about a man she felt was kind and decent, unlike [the character in the story] Robert....

Of course, writers always use people like this... or maybe not quite like this. Change some of the details at least! And yet, it's Nowicki drawing attention to herself and to Charles. She seems to have felt Charles was wronged. Roupenian turned him into a symbol of misogyny, and Nowicki wants to clear his name... which requires an additional sullying of his name.

The author of the Guardian piece — the delightfully named Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett — says the "the most interesting question" here is: "how do you go about reconciling the necessary use of real human experience as a way of exploring human psychology while doing right by people?"

It was Graham Greene who wrote that every writer has a splinter of ice in their heart. I think he was right: you have to have it, otherwise you would spend all your time worrying about the impact of your work on others and you would never write at all.

"All I remember from the rest of that afternoon was sitting under an oak tree in a University of Michigan quad... thinking, This is it. This is the happiest I will ever be...."

"On Monday, December 4th, my story 'Cat Person' came out in the magazine and online.... Three days later, I was sitting in a coffee shop with my girlfriend, Callie, trying to write, when she looked up from her computer and said, 'There’s something going on with your story.'... 'It’s just Twitter,' I said... Then I went home, fired up Twitter, and saw that I had a bunch of notifications from strangers. I was reading through them when my mom called about something unrelated. I tried to explain to her what was happening, and then she went online herself and, at some point, she said, 'Oh, my God, Kristen, someone Barack Obama follows just retweeted your story.' Then she burst into tears."

From "What It Felt Like When 'Cat Person' Went Viral" by Kristen Roupenian in The New Yorker.

"Nearly every story in You Know You Want This has someone getting stabbed, strangled, slashed, gouged, degloved, immolated, bludgeoned, bled out, brain-injured, or asswhupped."

"I suspect Roupenian knew 'Cat Person' would jaundice readers’ expectations one way or another, and she exploited this by opening the collection with 'Bad Boy,' a title that might suggest another misogynist miscreant. The couple who narrate the story torment their friend, a sad-sack guy fresh off a breakup who’s crashing on their couch. They tease him by having noisy sex in the next room; when they realize that degrading him turns them on, they coerce him into a ménage à trois full of 'pain and bruises, chains and toys,' escalating to a frenzy of deadly transgression... [The stories] all play off the same Nietzschean character archetypes: the weak dominated by the strong, victim versus victor. The victims are sensitive, passive introverts, forever in their own heads, wavering between reluctance and compliance. The victors, meanwhile, look just like you and me: Their innocent, kind, or seductive facades conceal a poisonous nature, like the appetizing rainbow slick of petroleum coating a dead ocean. The victim compounds their own suffering by over-empathizing with their tormentor, who is only emboldened by shows of vulnerability...."

From "Kristen Roupenian’s Power Dynamics/In her new book, the author of 'Cat Person' tells stories of sadism, narcissism, and gore" (The New Republic).

(I'm assuming you remember all the interest in the story "Cat Person." If you don't click on the tag.)

"Men, Tell Us About Your High School Experience."

Fill out this form, just in case you want to tell on yourself before anybody else does.

The NYT wants you to trust it with your information:

We want to hear from men about their high school experiences. A Times editor may contact you with follow-up questions. No information you provide will be published without your permission.

But Christine Blasely Ford didn't want her name to come out, and yet it did. Is the Times more trustworthy than Dianne Feinstein?

Given the stakes these days and the low standard of what counts as sexual abuse — like Cory Booker's reaching for a breast a second time — why would anyone volunteer anything? I understand the value of having an open and honest conversation about these things, but hasn't that route been closed off by the shocking dire consequences to Brett Kavanaugh (and Al Franken and Louis CK, etc.)?

But the NYT has a form it would like you to fill out. The first question is:

Did you ever, as a teenager or younger man, behave toward women in ways you may now regret? If so, how? And how has that experience stayed with you over the years?

Won't this drag in a thousand "Cat Person" and Cory Booker stories? If you've got anything in the Kavanaugh-as-told-by-Blasey category, you'd have to be irrational to put it in writing. Or maybe just old or dying and not looking for another step of professional or social advancement.

"There is a whole literary subgenre now that trades in this sort of deferred pleasure – books with subtitles like 'My year of reading' or 'Unpacking my library' or..."

"... 'One hundred books I read in the bathtub during my sabbatical in the south of France.' When you read about someone working their way through their intended-to-impress reading list, it helps you to imagine that you too are capable of accomplishing such a feat. Often, these books involve either a man reading the Greek and Roman classics or a woman tackling the thick Victorian novels – canons both familiar and fusty enough to keep me from losing my mind with envy. Not so in the case of Sharp. Dear God, what a sexy reading list Michelle Dean has put together. Never have I seen so clearly that my dream version of myself – the person I always assumed I would grow up to be – is a drily witty, slightly abrasive woman in a black turtleneck whose end table is stacked high with yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt."

From "Smart for our own good" by Kristen Roupenian. You remember Kristen Roupenian, she of "Cat Person."* The book under review is "Sharp: The women who made an art of having an opinion."

Roupenian's "dream version" of herself — what she pictured as she was growing up — had a particular mode of conversation ("drily witty, slightly abrasive"), a specified item of clothing ("a black turtleneck"), and a visualizable pile of books ("yellowed paperback copies of lesser-known works by Susan Sontag, Joan Didion and Hannah Arendt").

So what was your dream version of yourself? Even if you weren't, in your real youth, thinking in terms of a particular mode of conversation, a specified item or items of clothing and a visualizable pile of books, please play my little game. It's like Clue — Colonel Mustard in The Conservatory with the lead pipe.

Also, chez Meadhouse, we just had a long conversation about this:

Perhaps the finest moment in Sharp... is Dorothy Parker’s parodic takedown of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Rosalind rested her nineteen year-old elbows on her nineteen-year-old knees. All that you could see of her, above the polished sides of the nineteen-year-old bathtub, was her bobbed, curly hair and her disturbing gray eyes. A cigarette drooped lazily from the spoiled curves of her nineteen-year-old mouth.

Yes, Parker anticipated the recent, scathing Twitter thread “Describe yourself like a male author would” by almost a hundred years.

That's a great Twitter game. Maybe you won't play my "Dream Version" game because "Describe yourself like a male author would"** is too deliciously tempting. But my game is easier. Can't go wrong. How well do you think Dorothy Parker did at her parody? I thought the repetition of "nineteen year-old" was hilarious, but the really puzzling part is the point of view: "All that you could see of her" has a "you" standing somewhere, eyeing and judging the young woman, and "your" view was obscured by the side of the bathtub so that you could only see as far down her face as her eyes, and then in the next sentence, "you" could see her mouth. Is that Dorothy's lapse or is she skewering a foible of F. Scott's?

And here's Nora Ephron's parody of Ayn Rand:

Twenty-five years ago, Howard Roark laughed. Standing naked at the edge of a cliff, his face painted, his hair the colour of a bright orange rind, his body a composition of straight, clean lines and angles, each curve breaking into smooth, clean planes, Howard Roark laughed.

Hey: Describe yourself like a female author would. Another game.

Roupenian knocks "Sharp" as "essentially, of a series of positive reviews of well-respected writers":

[I]f everyone in your audience already agrees with what you’re saying in your essay, then writing it is a waste of time. In the case of Sharp, readers would have been pleasurably surprised to encounter the name of a writer whose inclusion felt even a little bit risky, even disagreeable: the aforementioned Ayn Rand, say, or Camille Paglia, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Roupenian uses words like "well-respected," "risky," and "agrees"/"disagreeable" to stand in for any mention of politics or ideology. Was that active sanitation or really the way Roupenian thinks (that is, like an artist***? The latter, I hope.

In this sense, Sharp is a book that hasn’t learnt the lesson it tries to impart. It is disconcerting to read a book that focuses on so many women who pushed intellectual boundaries, yet which stays so squarely within the confines of conventional wisdom when it comes to the writers it chooses to assess.

____________________

* Looking for a link about "Cat Person," I found, from last May, "Kristen Roupenian, author of Cat Person, is dating a woman." We got so excited about the story of a woman going through with having sex with a man when she didn't really want it. Roupenian said it was "strange to suddenly be the spokesperson for terrible straight sex."

** For a description of the origin of this meme, read "‘Describe Yourself Like a Male Author Would’ Is the Most Savage Twitter Thread in Ages/The challenge is a fierce indictment of what happens when you try to write a character you don’t respect or understand."

A male author is insisting that he is living proof that it's possible for a male author to write an authentic female protagonist.

Here's a quote from his first page. pic.twitter.com/f6d5bN2EHq

— Gwen C. Katz (@gwenckatz) March 30, 2018

*** I always quote Oscar Wilde for this proposition: "Views are held by those who are not artists." It gives loft to my own aversion to politics.

Reading the Comey interview transcript, I get a "Cat Person" vibe.

From the transcript, here's Comey describing his conflicted, confusing feelings about that encounter on the evening of January 27, 2017:

JAMES COMEY: ... and so I said, "Sir, whatever you-- whatever you like." And he said, "Well, why don't we make it 6:30?" And I said, "Sure." And then I called Patrice, broke our date, and-- as luck had it, I had-- an encounter with Clapper, who had left the government but we were giving him a recognition as honorary F.B.I. agent. And I told him about this invitation and he told-- comforted me by saying, "Yeah, I've heard lots of other people are getting calls to come for dinner." 

He comforted me...

And so then in my head I was-- "Okay, so it's a group thing. He must be having a group thing tonight, a group thing tomorrow night. That's fine." And so I went over there expecting-- a crowd of people.

And so then in my head I was... I feel as though I'm reading a #MeToo story told by a young woman. Why didn't he say "I thought..." like a plain-spoken adult? It's like the inside of his head is an environment with moods and wisps of cognition. He's invited into a private space, he has his trepidations, but other people will be there, and he's hoping he won't be alone with the man.

The question Anderson Cooper failed to ask Stormy Daniels.

This is so obvious to me that it's weird to point out. From the transcript, here's a key interchange after which Cooper moves on to another topic:

Anderson Cooper: And you had sex with him.

Stormy Daniels: Yes.

Anderson Cooper: You were 27, he was 60. Were you physically attracted to him?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Not at all?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Did you want to have sex with him?

Stormy Daniels: No. But I didn't-- I didn't say no. I'm not a victim, I'm not--

Anderson Cooper: It was entirely consensual.

Stormy Daniels: Oh, yes, yes.

The obvious next question is: If you weren't attracted to him and you didn't want to have sex with him and it was entirely consensual, why did you have sex with him?

Don't tell me the answer is so obvious that the question shouldn't have been asked. She should have been required to state explicitly why she had sex with him if she didn't want to have sex with him. Personally I believe that sex should be an even exchange — sex for sex. If one party to the sex needs an extra sweetener to close the deal, that's not good sex, and neither party should want it. You should give sexual access to your body because you want sex, not because someone who wants sexual access to your body has something else you want. And you shouldn't want to gain sexual access to the body of a person who doesn't want sexual access to your body but is only putting up with your body because you've got something else they want.

I think it's bad behavior to give or accept sex under the conditions described by Stormy Daniels and it should have been part of the interview. It's awful to hear a woman scoff at the idea that she could have wanted to have sex with a 60-year-old man as if of course it's utterly gross, what do you think?!! Why is she on TV just laughing at an older man having sexual interests? Flesh out the whole story! If she didn't want him for sex, what was her motivation? Was it straightforward prostitution or something somewhere on the prostitution spectrum — some kind of Harvey Weinstein dangling of career opportunity having to do with "Celebrity Apprentice"?

ADDED: If I go a little further back in the colloquy above, we can get to some material that suggests Daniels was a "Cat Person" sort of individual who went from one thing to the next and found it harder to extract herself than to just go through the motions. She'd been in Trump's hotel room, having dinner, and she excused herself to go to the bathroom, and when she emerged, he was sitting on the edge of the bed. Prompted by Anderson Cooper to describe her thoughts...

Stormy Daniels: I realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into. And I was like, "Ugh, here we go." (LAUGH) And I just felt like maybe-- (LAUGH) it was sort of-- I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, "well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this."

Where sex is not an even sex-for-sex exchange, it's either on the prostitution spectrum or the rape spectrum. This passage makes it sound like the rape spectrum, and I don't mean rape in the criminal sense, but something that can be called self-rape. But Daniels strenuously distances herself from that idea as the interview continues.

"If you need to watch a movie more than once to understand it, then you've lost me. That's the definition of a bad movie, in fact."

Writes MadisonMan in the comments to the post about the 20th anniversary of the movie "The Big Lebowski" and the critics who panned it. He agrees with the original reviews, but has only "watched it once, and I'm not rewatching. It's unwatchable to me...."

The subject of rewatching (and rereading) is a big one, I realized as I started to respond to MadisonMan in the thread. I got this far:

I always had to rewatch an episode of "The Sopranos" to understand it. There was too much going on to get it the first time and too much artful ellipsis.

But I'd also have to watch last night's episode of "Survivor" again to understand it, and I know that isn't worth doing.

And then I decided this needed to be on the front page. When do you say, I am not rewatching/rereading that — they had one chance to reach me and I'm not putting my time into unraveling what they failed to make clear? And when do you say, I'm going back in to open up the mysteries that passed me by the first time?

One reason I'm glad not to be a law professor anymore (and glad to be able to follow the precepts of a fine religion) is that I was forced and had to force others to read Supreme Court opinions, and we were required to understand them, and that meant a lot of rereading of aesthetically displeasing and intellectually unrewarding verbiage.

I was bound by the power of the Court to spend twice as much time (at least) trying to read something that they could have spent more time making readably clear. I suspected that the Court deliberately inflated its own power by imposing burdensome reading. Heh, that will keep them busy, and they'll never get to the point where they can criticize us in writing that anyone else will have the endurance to read to the point of understanding.

But I was the Court's taskmaster, insisting to students — over and over — that no matter how incomprehensible you think this is, you can understand if you reread. Read it a second time, and if you still don't understand, read it a third time and a fourth. Empower yourself by discovering the meaning that only rereading will reveal.

I don't do that anymore.

I want to read and watch things that are rereadable/rewatchable. I truly believe that the best movies and writing are better the second time (or third or fourth time). But you can't get to the second time without going through the first, and when do you say, after the first, there will be no second time? Maybe the secret is to walk out of movies and throw aside books when you realize you're just trying to get through this and would never want to see/read it again?

Maybe, with all your first times, if you're not thinking this is going to be better the second time around, you should bail out of the first time. Is this a one-night-stand? If yes, then don't "Cat Person" it, get out.

The NYT would love to hear your most intimate sex stories. Please describe in graphic detail.

Does this seem creepy?

We’ve seen it play out on a public stage, from the Aziz Ansari incident to The New Yorker’s “Cat Person” story. So-called “gray-zone sex” has prompted impassioned conversations about — and personal reflection on — what constitutes consent and how we signal our desire or apprehension in the moment.... We want to hear how you handle consent for sexual intimacy in relationships and encounters. Do you have a particular experience you find yourself thinking back to? What was said, texted or hinted at, through words or physical cues, that moved the encounter forward — or stopped it? How did it make you feel at the time, and how do you think about it now?...

• We are seeking accounts from college undergraduates worldwide in 500 words or less.

• Visuals that illustrate your story (text message conversations, social media screenshots or similar images) are welcome....

I note that the solicitation is written in a gender-neutral way. Other than the reference to the Ansari incident and the Kristen Roupenian short story, there is no indication that they are only seeking stories from women who've had encounters with men. I'd like the Times to reveal in the end what proportion of the submissions (double meaning intended) are from women encountering men. 99%? Would a man who grudgingly provided sex to a woman and regretted it — or extracted himself after inspiring expectations — write up the graphic details for the New York Times? With screenshots!

Isn't it a question of who feels righteous about invading another person's privacy?

Fiction and nonfiction: "Cat Person" and Aziz Ansari.

Lately, I've been thinking about fiction and nonfiction. I've said a few times that I love the nonfiction essays of David Foster Wallace but I can't force myself into the fiction. Just last month, I got some insight from his interview with David Lipsky:

I can tell by the Lipsky interview that Wallace put much less effort into those essays than he put into his fictions, but the fiction doesn't work on me the way it's supposed to, which is — Wallace says this in the long interview — that it's supposed to be great fun....

Lipsky emailed me and challenged my resistance to reading Wallace's fiction. I've tried to get into "Infinite Jest," and I can see how much fun it's supposed to be, but it's just not fun for me.

I'm working my way to saying something about Aziz Ansari, so let me preview the nonfiction sex story about him that's in the news today. He's quoted as saying, during the incident, "Oh, of course, it’s only fun if we’re both having fun," and afterwards texting, "It was fun meeting you last night," to which the woman responded, "Last night might’ve been fun for you, but it wasn’t for me."

Anyway, Lipsky recommended 2 short stories that might awaken me to the joys of reading fiction from David Foster Wallace: "Good Old Neon" and "The Suffering Channel" (both in  the collection "Oblivion"). I've read them and I've been mulling over what to say to Lipsky, something about the difference between fiction and nonfiction. I was thinking the answer is something like: In Wallace's nonfiction, we see, through his eyes, people and situations that are really out there in the world. In his fiction, his mind has created a world, and everything in it he made for reasons that came out of his head, and that's just too intense, too nightmarish, too sad. In his nonfiction, he goes on a cruise ship or to a state fair or a lobster festival or to the porno film awards ceremony. He comes up with perceptions and ideas about those real things that other people created, that are not figments of his imagination. He didn't invent things for the purpose of making us feel awful about them (or good about laughing at them). That stuff really exists, and he's our fascinating companion, looking at it with us. We're not alone.

The work of fiction that's got so much attention these last 2 months is "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian, in The New Yorker. Many people who were talking about it didn't really seem to fully register that it was a work of fiction. As Laura Adamczyk wrote (in AV Club):

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....

And now we have the turnaround, a nonfiction account of a date with the charming young comedian Aziz Ansari that people are reading and comparing to "Cat Person." But Aziz Ansari is a real person, and the story told by the pseudonymous "Grace" is exposing him to devastating contempt. He's not a fictional character, like "Robert," the "cat person" Roupenian created for us to loathe. Grace's story is presented as true, which of course doesn't make it true, and for all we know, "Cat Person" squares up more accurately to something that happened in real life, but "Cat Person" is called fiction.

Here, I'm having the reverse feeling that I have with David Foster Wallace. I prefer the fiction. I prefer "Cat Person" to Grace's story, because "Cat Person" excludes the question of what should we do to this man who pushed his way through a sexual encounter without noticing how not-into-it the woman was. We can observe and analyze the details contemplatively because there are no real people, just stand-ins for people who might exist, and there's no issue of whether the author is being fair to anyone or whether "Robert" should be arrested or otherwise ruined. We watch and judge and learn. We — all of us — have the woman's vicarious experience. But the decision to tell the stark details of a bad sexual encounter with Aziz Ansari feels so dismal and sad. I'm not able to think about the story itself. I'm completely distracted by the exposure of the frailty of a particular individual, a real person.

A problem I've had with fiction is the sadism: The author creates characters who will be amusing to torment. But Grace's story entails finding a real person, someone we already like (or love), and telling a story about him that demands that we hate him.

Feel the truth: "Read the book. See if you don't feel like you are with me on that couch in the White House. And see if you don't feel alarmed..."

So said Michael Wolff on "Meet the Press" today, after Chuck Todd confronted him about "a lot of little errors" — "One page had three in one. Some of them may be copy edits, small, factual errors. But it adds up. Why shouldn't a reader be concerned about some of these mistakes?"

Wolff's answer was just "I think a reader should read the book. The book speaks for itself" and that quote I put in the post title, which I thought was a very weird answer. Wolff wouldn't defend the book and the method and care he used. He just insisted that people read the book. Questions about whether the book is true should be determined by readers simply feeling whether it's true.

That reminded me of the way Stephen Colbert presented himself years ago on the first episode of "The Colbert Report": "Now I know some of you may not trust your gut...yet. But with my help you will. The 'truthiness' is, anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news... at you."

It felt like a complete concession that the book was fiction. Because that is how fiction works. It isn't reporting, but a different way of getting to the truth. If it feels true, it is true, for the purposes of the mental life of the reader. What's out there in the real world is... oh, what is it? Is that "real world" you speak of anything at all? I'm here in my own head, where whatever is felt is.

Here's Mark Leibovich, chief national correspondent for The New York Times Magazine, also in the above-linked "Meet the Press" transcript:

Where I am is first of all, is it possible to go any higher than number one on Amazon if you're going to write a book? I mean, this is just, it's incredible. 

No, it's not incredible. People love a hot pile of salaciousness. They love it even more than whatever hot pile they're cooking up in the pressure cooker they got for Christmas (judging from the Amazon best-seller list, which has Instant Pot recipe books at ##3 & 4).

Back to Leibovich:

I do think... there are very significant journalistic critiques that you can throw at this book. But I also think the "it rings true" truth about this is absolutely valid. 

Ah ha ha ha ha. He's buying the feel-the-truth-at-you/fiction-is-truth theory that sounded like bullshit when Wolff said it.

And part of it is what Michael Wolff has said and will say again I'm sure is that this is exactly how people around him, or many people around him at the White House, certainly Republicans on the Hill speak privately. Now, if you were to ask, probably I would say 80% of elected Republicans on the Hill, "What do you think of the president's fitness for office?" The first thing you will hear, I guarantee you, is, "Can we go off the record?"

So he's using the fiction method. Just making up something. Even putting a number on it. 80%! He hasn't asked this question of all the congressional Republicans. He just feels that if he did 80% of them would say let's go off the record. And he's feeling that at you.

ADDED: In the comments, some are puzzling over the phrase "See if you don't feel like you are with me on that couch in the White House" (in the quote in the post title). But it relates to something earlier in the transcript. Chuck Todd asks Wolff how he managed to become — as he claims — "a fly on the wall in the West Wing." Wolff answers:

You know, I literally kind of knocked on the door and said, “Can I come in?” and they said “Okay.” And I came in. I sat on the couch and that’s the point of view that I’ve written this book from. I mean, in the real intention of this book, is to have readers sit with me on the couch and watch what’s going on in the West Wing. I went into this with absolutely no agenda whatsoever. I have no particular politics when it comes to Donald Trump. This is really all about human nature.

Notice how much Wolff sounds like a novelist. Nothing wrong with being a novelist. But there is something wrong with reading a novel and not realizing it's a novel. Remember, recently, the internet went wild talking about the New Yorker short story "Cat Person," and it seemed rather obvious that a lot of people were just talking about it as if it were a blow-by-blow account of a real relationship? Come on, people! That's incompetent reading. Fiction is different.

AND: "Fire and Fury" takes on the burden of being "fake news." Then mainstream news media can report on the book, pass the material along, and claim not to be doing "fake news." Remember the Allcott/Gentzkow definition of fake news I've been talking about (beginning here). The definition (by 2 economists and adopted by at least some political scientists) excludes "rumors that do not originate from a particular news article." I don't accept the definition myself, but I'm seeing the gears turning in the minds of the mainstream media people who want to say things but still worry about their journalistic professionalism.

Instapundit rewrites "Cat Person" from the man's point of view.

Part of it anyway, with some good sideways snark at Anderson Cooper.

"I went through a situation very similar to Margot and Robert [the characters in 'Cat Person,'] where I was in his position."

"I traveled from New York to Virginia for a friend’s wedding and ended up spending the night with one of the other guests, who was actually moving to Brooklyn in a couple weeks. As I left, she handed me a card in a little gold envelope with my name on it, with a note saying she had a good time and her number. It was enough to leave the impression that she wanted to connect in some way when she made it to Brooklyn. I followed up with her, got no response, and left a voicemail referencing how we made out at the wedding and asking if she’d like to make out again. She left me a voice-mail after that saying that my message scared her, and not to contact her again. I called her back right away (I know this was disregarding her request) and apologized, because it was upsetting, and we had mutual friends who encouraged me to contact her. Then I never contacted her again and never asked our mutual friends anything about her. It was a shitty feeling all around, and I was sickened by the thought of making her scared. Simultaneously, I felt manipulated, like that was the worst thing she could say to me to make me leave her alone. I never said that to her or anyone else before this."

Writes "Chris, 38, artist and father of two," quoted in "9 Men on Seeing Themselves in ‘Cat Person'" (New York Magazine).

Should Netflix be shaming/mocking/stalking its own customers like this?

To the 53 people who've watched A Christmas Prince every day for the past 18 days: Who hurt you?

— Netflix US (@netflix) December 11, 2017

I wouldn't assume Netflix is using actual information about its customers. It's just a jaunty reminder that you can get Christmas movies on Netflix, using the trope that Netflix — like Santa Claus — sees what you're doing and judges you.

And it worked really well. Look at all the re-tweets. And it got the Washington Post to write an article, "What to know about ‘A Christmas Prince,’ the Netflix movie that sparked a controversy."

The response [to the tweet] was massive (retweeted about 110,000 times so far) and alternated between amused and scornful: Wow, Netflix, way to shame your own viewers for watching a movie that you commissioned and featured and promoted on your streaming service. Also, it’s a creepy reminder that this company has access to loads of personal data about all of your viewing habits, and probably has drawn some other intriguing conclusions. And it might tweet about them.

Anyway, the “creepy tweet” kerfuffle has been in the news this week, so for those of you who are confused about this thing called “A Christmas Prince” that sparked such a controversy, here’s everything you need to know about the movie. Spoilers abound.

I don't need to know anything about "A Christmas Prince," so I go back to the thing that pointed me to this "kerfuffle" in the first place, a humor riff — linked at Instapundit — "The Sad People Who Watched ‘A Christmas Prince’ 18 Days In A Row Craft A Statement/We've done nothing wrong. But we do need to lay down a marker that watching a good, clean holiday romance every single day of the Christmas season is just good, clean fun" by Mary Kathrine Ham. Sample:

Lindsay: What’s the implication, here, that we’re all lonely cat ladies just because we want to watch a spunky reporter investigate a playboy prince and get herself entangled in some truly royal trouble a couple dozen times??

Martin: I am not a girl or a lady, cat or otherwise. I know I’m outnumbered, here, but really....

Angelica: We do have a lot of cats, to be honest....

Oh! Cats again. Time to reread "Cat Person" for the 3rd going on 18th day in a row:

She learned that Robert had two cats, named Mu and Yan, and together they invented a complicated scenario in which her childhood cat, Pita, would send flirtatious texts to Yan, but whenever Pita talked to Mu she was formal and cold, because she was jealous of Mu’s relationship with Yan....

Before he got out of the car, he said, darkly, like a warning, “Just so you know, I have cats.”

“I know,” she said. “We texted about them, remember?”

Cats take on so much of the blame for what's wrong with us humans. That is, we project our shame onto cats. The cats don't care.

More importantly, what would cats watch on Netflix 18 days in a row?

When has this happened in the last 50 years? Everyone's talking about the same short story!

This is the second post on the topic of "Cat Person" by Kristen Roupenian, so start here if you don't know what I'm talking about already. This post just collects some of the fascinating tweeting under #CatPerson:

"When I was reading the #CatPerson short story, my first reaction was to be annoyed with the protagonist, but then I realized that I was annoyed because I myself have felt powerless to stop situations that felt bad to me in the past because I didn't want to hurt the other person." — Mina Salome.

"#CatPerson was such an odd thing to be published. Girl meets socially inept loser, aggressively pursues him despite lack of attraction so she can use his reaction to feel like a goddess, then dumps him and no one is surprised when he sends a mean text." — keanu steves.

"Margot can be shallow, rude, naive and still be the victim of patriarchy. Robert can be a bad kisser and a creep and still be sweet, considerate and deserving of sympathy. Good literature will resist simplistic moral interpretations. Call me ‘bout it." — Claire Ní Carol-aigh.

"One great thing about #CatPerson is I’ve never seen so many men suddenly collectively decide fatphobia is a real thing." — BridgetCallahan. (In the story, the young woman is grossed out by the man's slight tubbiness.)

"#CatPerson male opinion: He knew she was uncomfortable and ignored it. He knowingly took advantage of her unwillingness to say no. He was aware of her characterisation of him and intentionally groomed her by playing into it. We aren't stupid, we're predators. Story is spot on." — difgefs uktyuk.

"A girl meets an older guy with old fashioned tastes & he gives her a Pepe lighter & some food when she's hungry. Later, after she coerced him into fucking her, she finds him repulsive. And fat. #CatPerson." — Problematic Lola.

"What I like about #CatPerson: it destroys the 'loveable awkward oaf' excuse that assholes lean on when they behave manipulatively/poorly. Being a socially awkward nerd doesn't excuse you from treating people like shit." — Grace Lau.

"Can we please talk about how sis was in the car going to God knows where thinking 'I hope he doesn’t murder me' and then homeboy said 'don’t worry I’m not going to murder you' and then sis says 'It’s OK, you can murder me' GIRL WHAT?! #CatPerson." — The Honorable Chemist.

I made CAT PERSON BINGO! Reflect on past mistakes or print one out and keep it in your purse so you can stay wary of dating red flags. You're welcome xxx #catperson pic.twitter.com/sfaGNezSEv

— Emma Hope Allwood (@emmahopeall) December 11, 2017

Starting a new project where I ask tinder guys about #CatPerson and so far it is going better than I ever could have hoped. pic.twitter.com/aQFI1vrP2V

— Michele O'Brien (@michele_ob) December 11, 2017

I was drawn in by the creepy close-up and started reading before "Cat Person" became an internet phenomenon.

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....

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...

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.