BahRamYou
5hr ago
I'd argue there are degrees to which that's normal and appropriate, and this goes too far. It's one thing to base a story or fictional character on a real person. Usually if it's not a public figure they'll change some details so it's not recognizable though, and try not to drag someone through the mud. In this case, she left all the trivial details identical so that all of their real-life acquaintances easily recognized them, but then also changed his character to be unrecognizable. She's basically giving everyone who knows this guy in real life that he's a rapist, or something damn close (creepy, awkward, and bad at sex), when he was nothing like that in real life. There's simply no reason to use a real person for that character- why not invent an actual fictional person if you're going to make up the story anyway? At this point it's pretty much libel.
BahRamYou
5hr ago
It's certainly a story that stirred up a lot of emotions and got people talking. I remember a lot of people talking about it when it first came out, but this is the first time I got to hear the story from one of the real people involved, or even find out that it was based* on a true* story.
BahRamYou
5hr ago
Her lying about it in print is bad, but the lie was that it was purely fictional, which is a way of making the real guy appear more distant from the creepy asshole that is depicted in the fiction
No, the lie is that she made him out to be something damn close to a rapist and stalker when he really wasn't at all. There are plenty of real life cases that might have been fit that kind of legally-nebulous situation, but this one seems to be completely innocent. If it was purely a fictional story it would be fine, but she left in enough real details that all of his real-life friends and family isntantly recognized him and started asking him if the story was about him. She essentially libeled him by calling him a rapist, and got away with "it's just fiction bro" as a legal fig leaf. This probably resultd in a lot of his friends and family turning against him.
BahRamYou
5hr ago
Ah, thanks for linking that. I missed that earlier discussion about the slate piece. But yeah, I realize all this is several years old at this point, I don't claim to have any late-breaking news here, it's just that this is my first time reading the slate piece and seeing the true story. I guess the only difference now is the movie has been released, but I haven't seen it. It sounds like the movie is a lot more ham-handed in making the guy a pure villain.
But basically I agree with you on this:
when your current boyfriend urged you to draw inspiration from your personal experiences, I presume he meant to use them as a jumping-off point for a fictional story, not to simply transcribe them as-is
Even an amateur writer should understand that, and I'm really surprised that someone with an MFA and a literary agent could get away with it in a professional magazine.
Actually, it's about ethics in literary journalism
Do you remember a short story called "Cat Person," which was published in 2017? It went viral and caused quite a stir at the time. It's a story that involves dating, sex, questionable consent, and an awkward age gap, so it's practically the perfect storm for inciting controversy at that time. But it's also just a well written and engaging story- I'd recommend reading it and forming your own thoughts if you haven't already.
The story is written in close third person, which gives the impression that we have a perfectly reliable narrative of what the main person is thinking and feeling, while the other characters don't matter so much. It invites us to feel sympathy and understanding for the main character as something adjacent to a rape victim. The male character starts off seeming normal but behaves worse and worse as the story goes on, leading to the ending where he sends her a string of angry text messages that end in the single word: "whore."
It's an intensely personal story, and told in a realistic style, so one can't help but wonder if it's about the author's own life. If so, is that really what happened, or is she perhaps twisting some details to make herself look better and her ex-boyfriend look worse?
The author, Kristen Roupenian, strongly denies this. They published this interview just a couple days after the story (did they already know it would blow up?) where she said among other things:
The story was inspired by a small but nasty encounter I had with a person I met online. I was shocked by the way this person treated me, and then immediately surprised by my own shock. How had I decided that this was someone I could trust? The incident got me thinking about the strange and flimsy evidence we use to judge the contextless people we meet outside our existing social networks, whether online or off.
So no, it's not a true story, or at least not anyone she met in real life. It's mostly her venting at some online troll. She goes on to say that she actually felt more comfortable writing Robert's texts in the story because she's his age- she doesn't really know what it's like to be a 20 yr old college girl these days and has trouble imitating their texting style. But it's clearly meant to be a feminist story where we mostly have sympathy for the woman and very little for the man, evaporating to nothing at the end as he turns into a monster.
A year later, she published this follow-up: What It Felt Like When “Cat Person” Went Viral
This essay is auto-biographical. She explains that just getting her story published in the New Yorker was a huge break for her as a writer, and she was thoroughly unprepared for the amount of publicity it got. There was a huge response to the story, initially from feminists praising it, and then from (mostly) men criticizing it or defending the man in the story. It was taken as sort of a microcosm for all bad relationships between men and women in the modern era, particularly for short term sexual relationships. Everyone wanted to know more details about her own life and the "real" story, so that they could know more about how to judge it.
Except that, as she said... it's not real. She made it up. She's actually a 36-year-old lesbian woman with very little hetero dating experience. She spent her twenties doing the Peace Corp in Kenya, followed by a long graduate program studying African literature. Her own life is pretty much the polar opposite of the main character in the story.
I'm sympathetic to this perspective. As a writer, I would want my story to just stand on its own, without people trying to investigate and psychoanalyze every detail of my life. I strongly believe in 'Death of the Author," so it really shouldn't matter what the author did or thought when they were writing the story. It's a short story with many details missing, so you're free to imagine into it whatever you want. If you want to imagine it as a banner for why women need feminism to assert themselves more strongly, and why enthusiastic consent (not just nominal consent) is important, you can read it that way. Or you can read it the exact opposite way, for how a guy did absolutely nothing wrong except being slightly awkward and insufficiently attractive, so he then gets his feelings hurt and his reputation destroyed by the whims of a young woman who can't even say what he did wrong. All she has to do is cry, and she's got her entire friend group leaping to her defense, plus a huge outpouring of #metoo from everyone reading this story online.
So what I'd like to say is that it's just a good work of fiction, and you can leave the author out of it unless you want to buy her book.
Except... apparently it isn't a work of fiction after all
This came piece came out in 2021, 2 years after the follow-up reaction piece and almost 4 years after the original story. In this essay, a woman named Alexis Nowicki claims that "Cat Person" was actually inspired by something that happened to her. And not just "inspired" by, but with enough specific details matching that she had dozens of acquaintances contacting her to ask if she had written the story herself under a pen name.
Apparently she had been an 18-year-old in a relationship with a 33 year-old-man, living in the same town as the story and having their first date at the same movie theater, with a very similar communication style. Other than the age gap, it seems like they had a pretty typical relationship- awkward at first, dragging out over several months, then happy for a few months, then gradually breaking up. She was perfectly happy with their sex life, she was just happier living in a different city. They still kept in touch occasionally, and were amicable but not close.
She contacted him about the story, and he agreed it was very odd, an uncanny match to some of their own experiences. It also him a lot of angst and self-doubt, to see himself as the bad guy in the story. But they took it to be just some weird coincidence.
Three years later, she found out that he had suddenly died. It does not say how, just that it was "sudden." It doesn't exactly say suicide, but it also doesn't say it wasn't suicide, so I have strong suspicions.
After his death, this woman Alexis did some more investigation. She contacted a mutual acquaintenance (though apparently he wasn't close enough to know that this man had died). She asked him about the story, and he said that yes, it was true- this story was about her. Her ex-boyfriend and talked to the author of the story, and she based it on their relationship.
Some time later, this woman contacts the author of the story, and gets a response. The email says:
When I was living in Ann Arbor, I had an encounter with a man. I later learned, from social media, that this man previously had a much younger girlfriend. I also learned a handful of facts about her: that she worked in a movie theater, that she was from a town adjacent to Ann Arbor, and that she was an undergrad at the same school I attended as a grad student. Using those facts as a jumping-off point, I then wrote a story that was primarily a work of the imagination, but which also drew on my own personal experiences, both past and present. In retrospect, I was wrong not to go back and remove those biographical details, especially the name of the town. Not doing so was careless.
I can absolutely see why the inclusion of those details in the story would cause you significant pain and confusion, and I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. I hope it goes without saying that was never my intention, and I will do what I can to rectify any harm it caused. I was not prepared for the amount of attention the story received, and I have not always known how to handle the consequences of it, both for myself and other people. … It has always been important for my own well-being to draw a bright line, in public, between my personal life and my fiction. This is a matter not only of privacy but of personal safety. When “Cat Person” came out, I was the target of an immense amount of anger on the part of male readers who felt that the character of Robert had been treated unfairly. I have always felt that my insistence that the story was entirely fiction, and that I was not accusing any real-life individual of behaving badly, was all that stood between me and an outpouring of not only rage but potentially violence.
(apparently they also later had a phone conversation which she kept private)
When I read that, I felt outraged. I'm trying hard to be fair to the original story and author, to not give into angry-internet-male feelings of the eternal online gender war. But now by the author's own admission she:
- knowingly based her story off of one specific person's life
- did not bother to ask that person for permission, or even to tell her that she was going to publish it in a very popular magazine and even license it for a movie
- repeatedly lied in print, saying it was purely fictional, when it wasn't
- twisted essential details to make the man seem like a creepy asshole, when the actual man was a kind and gentle person who thoroughly respected his girlfriend's boundaries
- caused enough angst to this guy to put him in a bad mental state, which may have contributed to his sudden death
The piece ends with some hand-wringing by the author about how "we are all unreliable narrators." So uh... maybe her own memories are all wrong, and the guy was actually was as bad as the fictional version of him? Maybe she was just too young and naive to notice that this guy she thought she liked was actually bad? Maybe some distant lesbian woman twice her age knows more about her own lived experience than she does? Despite all of her own memories, and evidence, and the testimonies of other people who all said what a genuinely good guy this man was... maybe the fictional version was more true because that's what resonated with other feminist readers' reactions?
No, screw that. I'm going back to my original gut reaction from when I first read it- this story is biased as hell, it's a feminist hit piece to smear all men, and it's just pure culture-war fodder. She started off with a true story for inspiration, but then deliberately changed all important details for maximum outrage. Sometimes things are just that simple.
BahRamYou
2d ago
"the last ware that used them in bulk" is the one currently going on, where both sides have been chonrically short on shells for years now.
But I'd argue it was always an issue during the cold war too, where both sides were very much preparing for war, but the Soviet side prepared with far, far more shells than the NATO side did. It's a good thing we never had to fight them a conventional war. Good thing we've got most of the old Warsaw-pact countries on our side now.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Are there any movies or T.V. shows that focus on depicting what it was like to just walk, walk, walk through slowly changing landscape on the way to a future battle?
Lord of the rings is kinda an allegory for that... the "war" for Frodo and Sam is mostly just them walking a lot, being very tired and very hungry and very scared for some hypothetical future battle.
BahRamYou
2d ago
But this is my point: I don't think there's anything feminist about housing male rapists in women's prisons. I think gender ideology is a profoundly misogynistic worldview, in practice if not necessarily in theory. I likewise don't think there's anything feminist about the Palestinian resistance, and at best they have nothing to do with each other.
Ah, you might think so, and I think so too. But in practice those are both positions split along gender linees, with women being far more likely to support Palestinian resistance, light prison sentences, and putting trans women into women's prisons even if they committed rape. The feminist position isn't "what's good for women," it's simply "what do feminists support," which cn sometimes be very different. One could even argue that it's good for feminist leaders when bad things happen to women, because that strengthens the political support for feminism. But it's not up to you and I to figure it out, all we can do is signal which team we're on, and you're trying to signal the anti-feminist team which they're obviously not going to like.
And in any case, our company's HR department is made up of two men and one woman, the latter of whom has been on sick leave for well over a month
Yeah and what are the political opininons of those two men in HR? Are either of them even slightly conservative? Probably not.
Besides it's not just about the HR department. It's all of corporate culture, generally, becoming a feminist safe space. Eveny manager with any sort of political savvy will instinctively know this.
BahRamYou
2d ago
I don't know. I'm frustrated. I'd have no problem with a "don't talk about politics in work" rule, provided it was applied consistently.
I think this ties into the argument from that Helen Andrews essay about how American society is becoming more feminized. And the office/workplace culture is maybe the biggest shift. All of the political views that are allowed to be expressed are the feminist positions, all the ones banned are the anti-feminist ones.
To be fair, you'd have a very different experience in other places. If you put up those posters in, like, an army barracks, or a gaming discord, or uh... here... most people would make fun of them and maybe attack you personally. You'd have a lot more slack to put up the opposite views.
Bottom line: people are political animals, we're not neutral, everyone just favors their own side.
BahRamYou
2d ago
Are cheap, effective, good enough weapons only something despotic alcoholic nations can make ?
Maybe yes? Or more specifically a middle-income thing- you need a workforce with some amount of training, tools, and quality control so that they can make the things work, but not too much or they'll expect better jobs. Working in a munitions factory seems like a terrible job- all the brutal, physical pain of working in a factory, plus the chance that it might blow up. 1st world nations can sort of solve that by using elaborate mechanization and safety controls, but that skyrockets the price.
Something that always shocks me is reading about artillery shell production in WW1. Britain was producing something like 100,000 a month at the start of the war, and that was insufficient, leading to the Shell crisis of 1915. They were able to masively ramp up production by recuiting a million women to work in munitions plants and crank out shells like crazy- more than 1 million a month by the end of 1915. France and Germany did similar things.
So today, after a century of technological advance and 4 years of the war in Ukraine, you'd expec their shell output to be even higher right? Well... not so much. It's like 500,000 for the UK and 1 million from Germany per year. People in 1st world countries really don't want to go to work mass-manufacturing explosives.
BahRamYou
3d ago
I played that game just a bit. It was super comfy. I understand why people didn't like it, because the actual gameplay was pretty much "like World of Warcraft but not as good." But it was really fun to just hang out in Middle-Earth, especially the Shire. You could grow pipeweed and smoke it. I think I'd get really addicted if they made a game that made it more like Animal Crossing and less like WoW.
BahRamYou
3d ago
technological breakthrough in metals refining allowing the spanish to exploit more marginal mines in the new world
Which one is that? I haven't heard that one.
BahRamYou
4d ago
Joe Rogan has what, 40 times Nick's viewership? Sixty? Nick struggles to break half a million, Joe regularly puts up 20 times that, and has done 100+ times that.
True, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. Joe Rogan is 58 years and has been doing podcast for over 15 years now, and he was already a big celebrity before that. He was one of the OG podcast bros, and at this point basically everyone has heard of him. He's not growing particularly fast anymore. He might have hit the limits of what he can get. Most of his opinions are very bland, centrist stuff, and he's mostly known for just bringing on a wide range of guests and letting them talk about whatever they want.
Meanwhile, Nick fuentes is 27. He went from some random college student, to being completely deplatformed, and until recently most normal people had never heard of him. He was not only deplatformed from any liberal organization, but even most of the conservative organizations tried to kick him out. He's completely banned from youtube and most other mainstream sites. His podcast is on rumble.com, which is a site I'd never heard of until I went to look it up just now. So I think, despite his overall small numbers, it's a sign that are some very passionate supporters out there boosting him and overcoming all mainstream efforts to shut him down.
BahRamYou
5d ago
me too. I was impressed by his ability to basically take 4chan /pol/ or twitter style shitposting and... "sane-wash" it into a coherent argument. I don't know if he personally will become a big influence, but that sort of alt-right, moderate racist, moderate sexist, moderate anti-semite faction of internet reactionaries is definitely becoming a force in American politics.
Amazing interview. This is probably an unpopular opinion here but.... I love the New Yorker. There really aren't a lot of other publications that are liberal-friendly enough to get this kind of access, but also smart enough to hold them accountable to their bullshit, and subtle enough to jiust let it speak for itself intead of trying to hammer the point into the readers' heads.
Her answers seem like actual double-think straight out of 1984. She's forccing herself to hold two contradictory opinions at the same time (that Biden was an amazing president who did nothing wrong, but Harris was also an amazing candidate who did nothing wrong even though she lost badly). Her loyalty is being proven by how strongly she's able to endorse contradictory postitions with no shame.
BahRamYou
10d ago
Just to to Mexico man. Its digital nomad easy mode for americans. You can even use your us phone plan there.
BahRamYou
10d ago
The only thing that matters is your appearance on social media. Irl appearance no longer matters.
BahRamYou
11d ago
Very interesting article! Thanks for sharing.
I think his conclusion at the end of the article is pretty reasonable- people who get obsessed with porn are not that different from people who get obsessed with any other sort of internet content. If you spend 6 hours watching tik tok or K-dramas or twitch streams, you'll also end up feeling physically drained and kind of gross.
But then it sounds like the people he talked to are not just passively consuming the content, they're actually producing it, by putting a lot of effort into editing and curating it. And they're a community, actively talking to each other, encouraging (?) each other, or competing for status. Pushing each other to new extremes. This might be the only community these peop have, since most people are disgusted by this stuff, and their lifestyle doesn't lead to making friends easily.
It often seems that any kind of hetero mens' sexuality is taboo in polite society. LGBT people can have their pride displays, women can "own their sexuality" as a form of feminism, and everyone encourages. But when men talk about theirs, it's considered gross or threatening.
And like... it is. I get it. i really don't want to hear other guys talk about their sex fantasies, even if it's the same as mine.
But maybe that's something we can all get used to. Spend enough time on places like 4chan or certain discords and you do get used to it, even in its most extreme forms. Maybe there's room in polite society to allow men to express their sexuality a bit more, but still restrained. A middle ground, so that we can express ourselves without resorting to these unlimited anything-goes online spaces of depravity.
BahRamYou
12d ago
It seems like it would be trivially easy to either edit your ID pic to change "F" to "M", or borrow a friend's ID for that pic.
BahRamYou
12d ago
So i've never quite understood how this app works. how do they verify that the users are women? And how do they stop people from just spamming bad reviews all over the place? Putting aside all the ethical and legal issues, i can't believe it ever worked at all.
BahRamYou
12d ago
The thing about language learning, especially a non-European language like Japanese, is that it's a never-ending process. It's not like you hit some threshold and suddenly understand everything effortlesslly. It's a continuous grind to learn new words, new grammer, and improve on the basics. You can get by in any country with English, hand gestures, and phone translation, but it's not very comfortable. It's one thing to be able to do simple things like order food in a restaurant or follow transit directions. It's a whole other level to do the things that I want to do when I'm actually living somewhere- take a class, read a book, or keep up with people's jokes. Hardest thing of all is being in a group conversation and trying to understand what multiple people are saying, while also thinking of stuff to say myself. Even if I'm fast enough for the conversation, I might just not know the thing they're talking about, like if they're referencing some random local celebrity.
On the plus side, being an obvious foreigner who speaks English does have some advantages. You'll naturally meet more curious, intellectual type people who want to practice English and learn about other countries, as well as other foreigners travelling. And if you're like me and you tend to over-intellectualize everything, speaking in a foreign language can force you to just be blunt and spit it out in plain, simple words- because that's all I have!
BahRamYou
13d ago
Only up to a point. Some regulations represent a dire risk to their industry. Coincidentally, Matt Ygelesias wrote [this[(https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-forgotten-politics-of-big-tobacco) today about the history of tobacco regulation, and what a political struggle it was to rain them in. It succeeded eventually mostly because people just got annoyed by second-hand smoke, rather than any sort of principles health message. But Clinton and his coalition were never in danger of being unseated in primary challenges by big tobacco. His vice president Al Gore even came from an old tobacco growing family and was a senator from Tenessee where they still grow lots of tobacco, but he could still openly campaign against the tobacco industry.
BahRamYou
14d ago
Yes, they can do it. But none of them did except AIPAC. And now it's this one fringe lobby group for crypto, mostly funded just by Marc Andresson. Meanwhile Big Oil, Big Tobacco, and Big Pharma get regulated to death despite their massive lobbying efforts, because apparently their lobbyists just... all suck at their jobs? How else are we supposed to explain this?
BahRamYou
14d ago
I don't have any clear answers on whether I recommend it, I'm still deciding on that for myself. But I'll give you my thoughts.
The obvious best is getting a way cheaper cost of living. With my middle class American salary, I feel rich in a lot of foreign countries. Like 1/2, 1/4, or even less than what it would be in the US, depending on what you're willing to tolerate. I also really enjoy being able to get away from some of the stuff that's always bugged me about the US- suburban sprawl, health insurance, red-blue politics, enshittified apps for everything, and lack of good nightlife. Those are just my own preferences, but nice thing about digital nomading is you can kind of pick and choose what lifestyle and culture you want. Of course, every place has its downsides, and you start to see those more once your there.
Worst thing is that I can never stay for as long as I want, because of visa issues. Plus being an obvious foreigner with no permanent ties to the community, it makes you feel like weird and adds a lot of hastle to even simple things, like getting mail delivered. It's hard to stick to a regular diet or exercise plan or join clubs. I'm hoping to figure out a way to stay more permanently, but a lot of countries don't have good visa options for that, or only for older people.
Country-wise it depends a lot on which city and neighborhood you're in, but I really enjoyed my time in Mexico, Taiwan, and Japan. All 3 managed to hit the sweet spot for me of feeling comfortable enough to relax, significantly cheaper than the US, and interesting enough to find fun things to do as a random foreign single guy. It also helped a lot being able to speak some Spanish and Japanese. I did not enjoy my time in Southeast Asia where I couldn't understand anything at all, and I thought Western Europe just felt too similar to America to be worth the hassle.
From what she wrote, it sounded like everyone who knew them knew that it was about them. It's a small town and there were lots of identical details. Bad enough for her, to have her private life suddenly exposed to the world. Probably much worse for this guy who is now being portrayed as something damn close to a rapist to anyone who knows him in real life. It seems to me to meet the legal definition of libel. I don't know enough to say he killed himself because of the backlash but... it sure sounds like it played a part.
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