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Notes -
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:
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:
(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:
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.
This is the worst sort of internet drama. Reading Motte-discourse on gender relations already makes me want to contribute to certain male statistics, so I want to take it in an extremely different direction.
Earlier today, I saw the unfamiliar term “ECW” in the TVTropes article for Genre Turning Point. Over the next half-hour, I learned numerous facts about the insanity that is pro wrestling.
Which brings us to Chris Benoit. A wildly successful mid-level performer whose wiki page covers his career in agonizing detail, Benoit accrued numerous rivalries. Most notable is the fake affair with a rival’s wife which turned into a real affair, divorce and marriage. When news broke of his 2007 suicide, his promoter canceled existing events for a three-hour tribute. The aforementioned evil CEO broke character to give a normal CEO announcement.
But oh, boy, was there a twist.
Within a day, his promoter learned that Benoit had MURDERED HIS WIFE AND CHILD before committing suicide. He’d strangled first his wife, then his drugged son, and only hanged himself after two days of shambling around the house. The eulogies came to a screeching halt. All mention of Benoit was excised from future broadcasts.
So, why am I bringing this up? Take a look at that last wiki page, mainly the “Events” section. In the aftermath, people insisted that Benoit killed his son for being too small or for a secret disability. They said he’d feuded with his wife after she suspected him of cheating, and that there was life insurance fraud at play. Maybe it was a professional hit. Maybe he’d researched death by hanging before snapping his own neck with a lat pulldown machine. Maybe it was roid rage, or maybe he’d just been hit in the head too much. Anything and everything to milk more drama from an already surreal tragedy.
People demand a better story than a coroner’s report alone can offer. One can add enough maybe and suspected and no evidence against to spin whatever narrative they want. A woman writing a semi-fictional story is boring. A woman driving her ex to despair via a feminist scissor statement? Now that’s entertainment.
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My model of this situation diverges from yours, primarily on the axis of how much outrage is warranted. While I see the chain of events you lay out, my conclusion is less one of a great ethical transgression and more of a messy, unfortunate situation amplified by the strange dynamics of viral internet fame.
Addressing the most serious charge, that the story contributed to the man's death: My confidence in this causal link is very low. He died three years after the story was published. While I don't deny that seeing a distorted and unflattering version of yourself become a cultural touchstone would be profoundly unpleasant and mentally taxing, a three year gap suggests the presence of more immediate and powerful intervening factors. To attribute a suicide (if that is what it was) to a short story from years prior seems like a stretch. It may have been a weight on the scale, but it seems unlikely to have been the one that tipped it.
Second, I find it difficult to be maximally outraged at the author for her actions. Let's consider her position. She writes a story loosely based on a person she briefly knew, changing most of the key details of the interaction to fit her fictional narrative. When the story unexpectedly goes viral, she is faced with a choice. Option A is to say, "Yes, this is based on a real person, here is his name, let's all go scrutinize his life." Option B is to say, "No, this is a work of fiction that I invented."
(Neither is correct, by itself, the truth lies somewhere in between)
Given that her fictionalized version painted the man in a negative light, Option A would have been disastrous for the poor bastard. It would have directly attached his name and identity to the despised character of "Robert" . By insisting the story was purely fictional, she was, in a strange way, providing him with a shield. It allowed him and anyone who knew him to say, "This isn't me, this is just some character a writer made up." This seems like the correct action from a harm reduction standpoint, even if it involves a public falsehood. The real mistake, as she later admitted, was including enough specific biographical data (the town, the movie theater) to make the connection in the first place. That was a failure of foresight, but it feels more like carelessness than malice.
Third, my own reading of the story is that it is a decent but flawed piece of fiction that perfectly captured a specific cultural moment. Its strength is in the depiction of internal female monologue, the cascade of small anxieties, and the way a person can build up a fantasy of another that inevitably collapses on contact with reality. Or, as the younglings would say these days, how a woman can suddenly catch the "ick". The story's major weakness, and the part that feels like a narrative cheat, is the final text message. Up until that point, Robert is ambiguous. He's awkward, perhaps a bit pushy, maybe a little insecure, but not monstrous. You could read him as a basically decent guy having a bad night. The single word "whore" resolves all that ambiguity. It flattens his character into a simple villain and retroactively validates all of Margot's anxieties. To me, it's the part of the story that feels most like a concession to a pre-existing political narrative rather than a believable character choice.
None of the elements are implausible in isolation, since men can be overweight, socially anxious, overly aggressive during courtship (while missing better opportunities), bad in bed and can, yes, get angry after rejection. Of course, to specifically highlight all these flaws is a choice that demonstrates a certain political framing, but this is a tier above average gender-war slop.
Finally, the practice of authors drawing from real life is not just common; it's damn near universal. Hell, I do that all the time myself, and nobody told me to seek IRB clearance. Writers are observers, and they use the material of their lives and the lives of those around them. The expectation that a writer must get signed consent from every person who serves as a sliver of inspiration for a character seems unworkable. The issue here isn't the act of inspiration itself, but its collision with a moment of intense online polarization and the story's viral reach. Nobody could really have predicted that, especially without the benefit of hindsight. Not even the author.
So, I do not see a villain here. I see a writer who made a careless mistake with sourcing details, who then tried to manage the fallout in a way that minimized harm to the real people involved, and whose story became a cultural symbol far beyond its literary merits. Sure, we can look at it as a cautionary tale about virality and the blurry line between art and life, but I just can't bring myself to see it as a major ethical failure that demands outrage.
I probably end up thinking more like you on this, but to try and steelman BahRamYou's point, you have to take into account what was the likely mindset the story was written with. It's from the #MeToo era, written by a lesbian writer, in The New Yorker, and it depicts a man as a villain, in a way that even seems to go against most of the story itself. What are the chances that Roupenian thought: "that's what men are truly like, they're children who become nasty and wound you when you don't want to have (more) sex with them"? I think it's quite possible. It's also possible she didn't think so and just wrote the story that wanted to write itself using random details of a relationship she heard before, and despite harbouring no ill will towards men in general decided right at the end to turn the guy into a total asshole. Maybe she thought it would help the story get picked up, or maybe she just made a bad writing decision, or maybe I'm wrong and in decades we'll be looking back at this story and decide she made the best literary choice by doing this heel-turn. We'll likely never know because it's not quite as fashionable to admit having this kind of prejudice against men now as it was when the story was written. But it's almost impossible for me to think that it's not the reason The New Yorker picked it up. If prejudice against men was intended, it does make the revelation that it's based on a story where the man wasn't at all like that seem intellectually dishonest. Prejudice can be understood and forgiven if it's driven by experience or ignorance, but it's much harder to explain and forgive if the person did actually know better.
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From the description, she didn't change the key details. The details that identify him were kept. The details that she changed were the ones that now said that he did horrible things.
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In November 2020. When other things were going on.
(Or given the description of "died suddenly", maybe he was in the experimental arm of the mRNA trials)
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While I enjoyed the drama like a car wreck on 95, I never found Nowicki's actions to be believably altruistic. She was either fame-whoring, or she was score settling regarding something off camera. But there is no way that her actions could have done anything to help avoid any of the problems she claimed to have, and would almost certainly make them much worse.
She claimed that her friends recognized her and her bf based on details in the story. Bullshit. There are 34,000 undergrads at UMich Ann Arbor at any given time, you're telling me she's the only freshman to ever fuck a 30-something? The precise details may have been bang on, sure, but call me antisocial but there are like five people I would recognize at the level of detail we're talking about here. Her best friend may have recognized her, maybe a dozen close friends, but not everyone in Ann Arbor or something like that. There just wasn't sufficient detail to connect the fictional story to a real person based on past events!
But of course, once she chose to publicly out herself, it became known to everyone. And everyone who was aware of her relationship to her dead bf, but hadn't guessed the connection, suddenly became aware of this supposedly deeply embarrassing fact about the late man. That is much more disgusting and libelous than the original short story! That's really outing the guy! It's taking something that was maybe a problem you had with a handful of people in your immediate social circle from college, and turning it into a problem that comes up if someone googles you.
The generic-ness of the story is what gives it its power, it feels like something that happens to everyone. One can picture oneself in either role. I actually looked it up to cite a particular scene to someone recently to explain a feeling I was having.
But accepting your premise, that at some level thinly-fictionalizing someone else is wrong, where do you draw the lines?
Are memoirs ever ok? How many details does one need to change before one can write a novel? Is bitching about your wife on TheMotte ok because it's all under pseudonyms? What if she reads what a mottizen said about her and kills herself out of shame? What about twitter under a pseudonym? What about a blog under a real name? If Kulak writes a little tweetstorm about some "feminist bitch" he had to deal with, and she reads it and recognizes that it was her, is he in the wrong? What about the "blankfaces" that scott aaronson decried? Or is it the ideological agenda that makes the crime? What details is one obligated to change to conceal identity, and which are immoral to change because one is no longer telling the real story?
Under rules designed to minimize harm to subjects of stories, is literature possible? Is journalism? Is essay writing? Memoir?
If one likes books, it seems like one has to offer freedom to the author. I've no doubt that many acquaintances of Hemingway or Hunter S Thompson or Bukowski felt some kind of way about some of their characters, there's a cottage industry to identifying the "real" abc in the classics, and we all accept that as the cost of doing business.
The Knausgaard Rule: if you're a great artist they let you do it. Grab 'em by the memoir.
If you're a hack writing discourseslop to go viral, fuck you, learn to have an imagination.
(For reference, Karl Ove Knausgaard wrote a six-volume autobiography, definitely the best book titled "My Struggle" ever written and indisputably one of the very greatest literary works of the century so far. It was extremely candid about his family, with the first volume describing cleaning out the house of his dead alcoholic hoarder father. His uncle hated this and has been very open about that. One of his exes said "it was as if he said: Now I'm going to punch you in the face. I know it's going to hurt, and I will drive you to the hospital afterwards. But I'm going to do it anyway." But Knausgaard gets to do that, because he's a great artist. She doesn't.)
To be fair, being better than the most famous book by this name is pretty easy.
I rather think that was the joke.
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I'm even more lost than before I asked.
To put it seriously, as a writer who deals with this question in my own work: if you're a great artist you can do whatever you want, your work is beyond good and evil. If you're not, write like you took a Hippocratic Oath. If you have to ask the question you're not great.
That may be - though is it? the annals of art history are riddled with self-hating geniuses who had to be physically restrained from burning their own manuscripts - but the more relevant problem seems to be false positives. Many mediocre, as-yet-unpublished artists believe themselves to be great and never question it.
I refer to something similar as "the Kubrick Principle." If your defense of a decision to break the usual rules of filmmaking boils down to "well, Stanley Kubrick got away with it," the only reasonable response is "you're not Stanley Kubrick." If you're not capable of making The Shining, you don't get to treat your actors like that. But if you are, shrug. I'm willing to accept that trade off.
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True, but I suspect geniuses consumed by self-hatred also aren't going to be agonizing too much about whether their work crosses lines in dealing with others. To think of Kafka, he doesn't air his dirty laundry like Knausgaard does, but there's a hell of a lot of his life and the lives of others in his work. But even among the self-haters, I'm sure, there's a counterexample for everything (that's why these questions about art don't have bright-line answers, only ironic heuristics).
Hey, if you can't hate yourself, who can you hate?
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This does not seem like a serious or useful standard, as even assuming there is anything like an objective standard of greatness, we don't really know if a work is great until after it is produced and read.
There is no objective standard of greatness, I know that won't suffice for mottizen autism, but I'm right, and this standard is both more serious and more useful than any attempt to pin down art like a dead beetle.
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How can it be biased? It's a work of fiction; it either speaks to the reader or doesn't, and the characters' level of realism either works or it doesn't. How the author decides to market it is irrelevant.
I read it at the time, and it seemed serviceable, but not amazing. It probably did take off because it was constructed to be in-tune with the times, but I don't see why that matters. The author made every effort for it to not be treated as anything real (and parts, particularly the last couple lines, rang so false that I don't see how anyone thought it could be real).
If the guy did kill himself and did it because of the story... well, hate to be an asshole, but that's on him. His sense of self-worth shouldn't be dependent on whether the New Yorker publishes a story very loosely inspired by an event in his life, when everyone involved knows it didn't go down as portrayed.
The premise of this conversation is that it is strongly based on two real people and their actual relationship and is identifiable as them; but fictionalized to turn him into a bad man.
I sure am glad no one wrote a popular fictional story that gets turned into a movie in which a fictional character who is identifiably me abuses young women.
Being glad that you're not the subject of someone is not the same as impropriety on the part of the person, though.
I'm reminded of Michael Crichton. He wrote a book that was critical of global warming hysteria. An editor of the New Republic stridently criticized it for that. In his next book, Crichton featured a (minor) character with the same name as the editor, with the same education and occupation. And he had that character be a pedophile with an extraordinarily small dick, whose only real characterization is someone who feels an urge to rape his fiance's infant child. Crichton points out that, despite the character's cosmically small dick, he managed to cause severe anal tearing in the infant child. Naturally, the editor sharing the character's name threw a hissy fit.
It's fair to say that this is much less sympathetic than the situation in the OP, maximally so, with clearly no literary value and just a way for Crichton to lash out at a critical review. But did Crichton deserve legal sanction for this? No. The only relevant critique is a literary one: did this help the story? It didn't, but to have good fiction, we need to reserve the space for authors to be petty assholes.
I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that part of the definition for libel is that it has to be believable. Crichton's character wasn't really believable, it just seemed like a weird joke where was lashing out at someone. Not very nice, but not libel. In this case though, lots of people reading the story assumed it was based on real life and asked for more details, and lots of people in the personal life of both the main characters and asked them if it was about them. To me that sounds more like "libel" than "fiction."
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That's like Hustler Magazine v. Falwell. The actions of the character are so extreme that nobody would understand that book to mean that the real person actually did those things.
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That scandal inspired one of the most memorably titled articles in Wikipedia history.
Strangely after reading that, I want to get Michael Crichton, Michael Crowley, and Michael Conklin in a room together to hash it all out.
"Mine's bigger."
"Give me a minute, it's cold in here!"
Don’t forget the ruler and the camera.
...and the banana for scale.
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Also if he wrote a fictionalized version of the author's life in which her lesbian relationship went sour and abusive the reaction would not be great
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I think this is thoughtlessness on the part of the author rather than malice. She borrowed lifelike details from a real person and ascribed them to a villain, not to slander the template, but simply to make her story more realistic - never stopping to weigh the potential impact on the model at all. This is nothing new - Ian Fleming used to give James Bond villains the names of random people he'd gone to school with. (I remember reading that the real-life Blofeld family, which includes a popular children's books writer, remain quite miffed to this day that their name has become synonymous in popular culture with "evil Easter European mastermind stroking a white cat on a swivel chair".)
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Even granting everything in the story as true, I don't really get the outrage from either side.
Was she a rape victim? No, she clearly was into it and egged on his advances without thinking about the consequences, and then she lacked the courage to tell him she wasn't interested so she let the sex happen by lying about her feelings.
Was he treated poorly? No, he had a chance and blew it by being out-of-shape and awkward.
The only part of the story that didn't work for me were the last lines. "Are you? Are you? Whore." just seems unrealistic. That kind of guy would say something more subtle and passive aggressive, "Guess I should've known when you told me you weren't a virgin. Guess I was wrong about you. Enjoy fooling around in college, I guess." or something like that. Less raging misogynist and more seething "nice guy."
Anyway, I'm also not impressed by these new revelations. Nobody would know that this story was about this dude if Alexis hadn't said anything. It seems anonymous enough and the story consists of so much internal dialog that unless you were a close friend if either the guy or girl and had heard this story from them, how could you possibly know it was about them?
And it's a silly piece of fiction that was written years ago. Are we meant to believe that this guy killed himself because of the story?
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.
It's never been easier to move to another town, lose weight, read some PUA books or whatever, and get your shit together. I don't know what was going on in that guy's life, so I'm not trying to speak ill of the dead, maybe he was wrestling with other demons, and if so I might have more sympathy. But I also think the suggestion that this mean article was so awful that he killed himself is, as we used to say long ago in the 90s, really gay. Nobody makes you do anything. Did literally every single woman in the town know about this dumb story? Did literally every single woman care? Would anyone still have cared 5 years from now? Would anyone have cared 5 miles outside Podunkville city limits? I guess this comes across as mean, but external locus of control males just turn my stomach. I mean imagine being rejected by some literally who college girl because she thinks you're a "loser," and then going ahead and proving her right for all eternity be necking yourself. Just fucking embarrassing. The best revenge is a life well lived.
All too often, and increasingly so in recent months, I find myself browsing the Motte and having to ask "is this guy posting from an alternate reality, or just straight-up trolling?"
No, this is just absurd, completely contrary to reality. We live in a world of instantaneous communication, having had high quality cellphones capturing crystal clear recordings for years, easily accessible databases, and tens of millions of netizens who derive no greater joy than when they can "identify" a wrong-thinker, track them down, and have their lives ruined. It has never been easier to locate a "ne'er do well" and track them down, and conversly it has never been harder to lay low and trust that your neighbors will never hear about your supposed "misdeads" a continent away. 50 years ago, people could watch Bill Bixby play a scientist who bombards himself with gamma radiation, turn into a muscle-bound monster, and end every episode hitching a ride to stay one step ahead of Mr. McGhee, confident that the random people he meet will never even have heard of the Hulk, and would certainly never recognize him. Today, the "skip town to avoid consequences" is the most ridiculous part of that premise.
If he was James Damore or something, sure. But how on earth would someone 2 states away be like "hey it's that mid-30s Red Vines guy from that feminist me too short story published several years ago!" Was he actually doxxed? Is his real name online?
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Except that the defamation here relies not on something like a viral video, or a government name, or even obvious identifying information like a tattoo, but on more subtle stuff like knowing where he lived ten years ago and who he was dating and where she worked. Without that information, no new person he met after the story came up could ever connect the dots...unless an article by his ex gf outing him was published on Slate. Then that might make it a bit more public.
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You're right. And also you have no idea. There is an emotional weight to guilt and self-hatred that has exactly nothing to do with the perceptions of people one actually knows.
Would anyone have cared? Probably not. But then no one generally cares about anyone else anyway. But if you see a reflection of the worst version of yourself --and alas, this is the version that is the only one that most of us (it's a well-known trope that to get a famous person to respond to you, you call them out as unsympathetically as possible... whereas if you simply praise them you'll be ignored) live and die by.
Rationally, sure, yes, nothing wrong with your well-made point. Alas.
Sorry, I'm having a hard time understanding your comment, but I'm interested. Are you saying that even if nobody cared about the story, the story's implication that he was actually "Robert" made him feel guilty and self-hating enough to become suicidal?
I don't think he would necessarily have just wholesale accepted that he was the character Robert, no, of course not, any more than a boy watching Marvel films thinks he's really Thor. I'm saying that reading the worst (or at least very bad) version of his behavior fictionalized in this way, then having it become a viral piece where the male (to whom he may feel is being pattern-matched) is nearly universally mocked as icky, would probably not cause him to whistle while he worked.
This could be true regardless of whether his own acquaintances knew he was the inspiration. (Though he may have suspected in a paranoid way that they might have.)
Thanks for elaborating. I can see that angle as well.
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Is "guilt and self-hatred" the expected mechanic here? I thought the story, considered as an account of the real events, was so obviously slanderous that if the guy had killed himself over it, the claim must be that he had killed himself in despair over being wrongfully accused by everyone in his life despite knowing himself to be innocent. The idea that he might take the caricature to heart seems much more bizarre.
It depends. On the guy, on his own self worth. You may be underestimating a certain type of male willingness to buy into the male toxicity rhetoric.
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Bear in mind, this is right in the heart of fentanyl country, and “died suddenly” is also often a press euphemism for overdose death.
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This is an incredibly callous response. Maybe you really are a Tleilaxu Ghola.
People kill themselves for all kinds of reasons, many of them wildly insufficient, and nearly all of them inconsistent. There are virtually no life events that consistently lead to suicide, in the sense that there are more people who have the same experience and don't kill themselves, from even the most traumatic events. Most suicides are for much less.
When we attribute one person's suicide to another, we are engaging in an extreme form of eggshell plaintiff.
What do you think the suicide rate is among the subjects of viral MFA-type short stories?
I say this only half joking but does smoking count? People that smoke aren’t trying to kill themselves unless they’re probably smoking a carton a day, but you know nonetheless you’re slowly killing yourself every time you light up.
I would call smoking a method of suicide rather than a life event within my model. You might as well say "putting a gun to your head and pulling the trigger" is a life event that leads to suicide. Certainly, if we're accepting drug addiction, heroin would be the better example.
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The latest stats on smoking I saw said something on the order of 1/8 chance of getting lung cancer if you smoke a pack a day. Of course, there are many other ways that smoking can kill you, including other cancers and heart disease, but I don't think all of those amount to significantly more than lung cancer, to the extent that the odds are better than not that, if you smoke a pack a day, smoking won't be the thing to kill you. As such, I don't think it's correct to call it a slow form of suicide.
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It's less that I disagree with the premise, more that the way he said it was over the top and cruel about a subject I find distasteful to be so flippant with.
Is your distaste rooted in some actual lived experience with suicide, or is it based on some abstract sympathy for suicides as an abstract, theoretical class of people? If it's not the former, I would recommend thinking twice about casting judgement on how others react to it.
Flippant is defined as "not showing a serious or respectful attitude." I assure you that I was quite serious about what I said. I was not mocking his death, I was saying that it was a pity, a shame, a sad and grave mistake, completely and utterly unnecessary (assuming the article caused it). And I afford suicides the respect they are due, which outside of extreme circumstances, is IMHO not very much, as it is often a quite self-absorbed act.
If you disagree, I'd be interested in hearing why. I don't claim to be the sole authority on the subject, I'm on The Motte to have my opinions challenged after all.
Not Thomas, but I felt your post was callous and flippant, and this is because I regard suicidal impulses as a mental illness, not an action which it is worth criticizing at the level of rational debate. It's a "stop hitting yourself!"-level error - suicidality is an altered state of consciousness, and suicide survivors coming out of it very often testify that they're immediately aghast at what they experienced. ("What was I thinking?") You may as well tell a schizophrenic that hearing voices is irrational, or a junkie that whatever he ingested he should just stop tripping, as a pure exercise of will, because rationally, he knows fnords don't exist.
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Please don't tell anyone.
Why? Does committing suicide mean you are automatically relieved of accountability for all of your actions? I don't think my response is callous at all, on the contratry, it's the the performative sympathy strangers display for the the person who commits suicide that is insincere, Machiavellian, and callous. I feel more sympathy for his parents and siblings (if any) who have live with that gaping hole in their life, wondering if they could have done something, wonder where they went wrong. FWIW, that is an experience I have personally lived and to some degree will live every day for the rest of my life. He could've chosen differently. He could've chosen not to let some dumb story cut his life short (again, assuming it even has anything to do with it -- he could have had other issues we know nothing about, in which case I may have more sympathy, as I stated above).
The "it made him kill himself!" sympathy mongering drives me mad. I don't take a strict view here--I think people can bear moral blame for someone else's suicide. But in this particular case, based on what we know and plausible inferences, his (hypothetical) suicide is all on him. Maybe if the story was published, and all his family and friends and workplace spontaneously disowned him, there'd be moral blame to share around. (Mostly on those people, though, not the story writer.) But that seems unlikely to be the case.
Despite the framing of the comment, where I share Thomas's objection, I don't believe for a moment that this story caused his suicide or meaningfully contributed to it. If it did, someone would bring receipts, if only for the scandal-click value. It really smells like a classic j*urnalist sensationalism-by-implication play.
Agreed
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But this is what writers do. They use everyone and everything in their lives as raw material. It's long been a complaint! Some do it consciously, some do it unconsciously, but if a writer hears a good story or something that strikes them as interesting, it all goes into the little filing cabinet of the imagination to be re-arranged and turned into a story later. They even write about how they do this!
I think the author is honest, as far as it goes, that she didn't write a direct "this is the story of Jack and Jill, only the names have been changed". She took the base story, mixed it with her own experiences, and translated it into a short story. That people then come along later and say "This was based on our true story" is not evidence she is deliberately lying.
Plus, there are always people eager to find out "but what is the real story behind this?" especially when it's this kind of sudden successful tale that is irresistible to imagine must be based on "this is Jack and she is Jill". And people do find parallels between "hey this happened to me and that event is in this story, so it must be about me!" even in cases where this is not so. There have been examples where authors wrote about George Fotheringham and then a real George Fotheringham turns up and says "all my neighbours think this is based on me, please change this". (That helped explain to me why some character names in early 20th century fiction were so unrealistic; you can't just write about Bill Shaw the villain of your murder mystery for fear of a real Bill Shaw popping up to sue you for libel, so he has to be Porteus Manglefig instead).
This is just "Worst Arugment in the World;" that authors pull from their experiences doesn't mean that a wink-nudge "this is a work of fiction, that just happens to defame a clearly identifiable real-world person, totally by coincidence released during a period when social media was alight with "believe all women" and "yes, all men!" Why are you so upset? Hmmm, perhaps truly the guilty flee where none pursue..." is fine. "in Minecraft" isn't a magical talisman that makes sincere threats not so; "allegedly" doesn't automagically prevent any accusation of defamation either.
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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.
Since when do those things make one “damn close” to a rapist?
In the mind of just about every self-identified feminist woman I've interacted with in the past decade and a half.
In the mind of the contributors to the Shitty Media Men list.
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Even more ancient discussion here
Is it sad i do remember that story? I always assumed this was biased CW red meat, because of the way it made me feel personally. The Purpose of a System is What It Does, etc.
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.
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Previous discussion here.
I liked "Cat Person", and though I could understand why it was interpreted in that light, upon first reading I didn't read it as a #MeToo story at all, but rather an incisive examination of the dynamics and awkwardness of modern dating. God knows I've been on my fair share of awkward dates like those described in the story. Neither character struck me as the "villain" (until Robert arguably pulls a face-heel turn at the end): rather, they're both clumsy and inexperienced, and no-strings-attached courtship makes it all too easy for one partner to just ghost the other at the first sign of trouble or inconvenience. The murky circumstances of its inspiration should not detract from how skilfully it's composed and the precision of its observations.
I dunno. If I was in Nowicki's shoes, I'd be furious at Roupenian for recasting (blackwashing?) my ex-boyfriend to whom I harboured no ill will as some kind of fumbling misogynistic creep whose dick doesn't work. In fact, technically speaking I have been in Nowicki's shoes: when I was eighteen, an ex of mine asked me to read a short story she'd written. This "short story" was simply her account of the years preceding and following our relationship: changing the names of the "characters" was the extent of the creative invention and poetic license she'd put into it. On the one hand I was grateful that she didn't invent shitty things I'd done to make me out to be a worse guy than I am; on the other hand I was like, 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. Unlike "Cat Person" it couldn't even claim to have been written well, and I'm enormously grateful it was never (to the best of my knowledge) published anywhere.
Roupenian's collection You Know You Want This is worth checking out:
Weird, I'd forgotten it was discussed here, and I commented then, and said like mostly the same things, but with some details shuffled.
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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:
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.
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Presuming that she's being honest in the quoted email, I'm not sure why you find yourself so outraged? 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. Given that, I don't think she deserves any blame for whatever poor mental state that real guy might have gotten into. If this story made him do so, it was due to his choice to interpret the text in a way that was clearly against the stated and ostensible intention. Unfortunate for the guy, but if this author had used an RNG that, through sheer luck, happened to generate that exact same story, resulting in that guy falsely believing that he was being represented as a creepy asshole, the same thing would have happened.
Which, yeah. That's all it was, and, as someone who also subscribes to the Death of the Author, I believe that's pretty much all it could ever be. Whether or not the story is an accurate account of true things that actually happened or the fever dream of a feminist with a fetish for being oppressed (perhaps I repeat myself?) doesn't matter, it's the text that is presented that matters, because the text is what gets read and interpreted, not the thoughts or intentions of the author.
Actually, the story was widely read and shared - it became a prominent enough topic for discussion that it was even brought up here. There's a very big difference between reading something like that and having a personal reaction, as opposed to having everybody around you talking about a story that paints you as a weird, misogynistic sex fiend who is only prevented from being a rapist by your lack of fitness and nonfunctional penis.
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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.
I have no idea how you can draw that conclusion from reading the essay. Robert is depicted as awkward, occasionally boorish and inconsiderate, bad in bed and other miscellaneous unflattering features, but where on earth are you getting anything remotely rapist or stalker-adjacent? He brought a girl over of her own will, she got cold feet while he was stripping off his clothes, but she didn't say so. At no point did he pressure her, it was pure awkwardness on her part that kept her quiet. Barring the most partisan of gender warriors, nobody would consider that coercive.
He didn't even follow her around for Christ's sake, she ran into him by accident at a bar, where her friends overreacted and hustled her out like a Secret Service escort.
Which means he transgressed by ignoring or not noticing her "cold feet," and thus failed to get affirmative consent. From Wikipedia:
From the University of Sydney, in Australia (so this isn't just an American thing):
…
…
…
[Bold emphasis added]
(And you can read more on the Australian Government's new national consent framework, introduced January 2024, here.)
And from the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN, the US's largest anti-sexual violence organization, operators of the National Sexual Assault Hotline.):
…
…
…
[Bold in original]
Note the "partners should watch for these signs and stop immediately if anything seems off" part. Our male character clearly didn't do that. She did not give unambiguous, enthusiastic, and ongoing consent.
Only if you consider "the most partisan of gender warriors" to include (but not limited to) most universities in the Anglosphere, the Australian government, institutions like RAINN (which have non-trivial sway over the American legal system's approaches to these issues), nearly the entirety of Tumblr (IME), and a growing fraction of Western youth among at least the upper-middle-class, maybe.
Jesus, what is this, the sexual code for robots? I always saw sex as something raw, animalistic, spontaneous. Wrestling and overpowering with even some violence if that's what she's into.
Seriously, though, I'd argue that it's just the inevitable conclusion of the "consent model of sexual ethics" (particularly in combination with the natural human instinct to protect women in particular), and of Western society's attitude on these issues for the last century or so. (People talk a lot about the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s, and forget the possibly bigger one in the 1920s.)
Personally, I hope Blue Tribe liberals keep embracing and promoting these norms as thoroughly and widely as they can.
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It's just a blatant attempt (and a successful one) to criminalize any sex anyone would actually want.
If you view women purely as sex workers/providers, a point on which feminists/progressives and traditionalists already agree, this makes sense, since "only criminalize buying" is the ultimate veto over any action the buyer makes in the future. Get famous after 50 years and think they didn't pay enough? Believe it or not, straight to jail.
What, you thought the Junior Anti-Sex League was fiction?
It's literally the same law we use for AoC violations, just with a fig leaf over the whole "well, technically women can consent, so stop complaining, won't you Think of the Children?". Again, that's also by design.
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While I agree with you that no reasonable person would characterise Robert as a rapist, I'm curious if his actions would qualify as such under that absurd "affirmative consent" framework of a few years ago.
See my reply above. And if this is your definition of "reasonable person," then there are a whole lot of unreasonable people out there.
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Mostly good points, but my friend this is rape according to every sexual assault prevention training I’ve been to since 2012. The most partisan of gender warriors are in the room with us now, and they’re getting paid to tell people that.
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She did no such thing, though. She invented a fictional character who were those things, basing that fictional character and the fictional scenario largely on someone she met IRL. Any inference about actual reality and real humans living within it based on the text that she put down was something voluntarily done entirely by the reader. Especially since she lied in a way that pointed away from the real person she based the character on.
That's a big leap from the 1st sentence to the 2nd. I disagree that leaving in that many real details in a story that's explicitly presented as fiction is "essentially libel" with a "fig leaf." I think that's just an entirely normal, reasonable thing for any fiction writer to do, and any harm that might have come the way of the real person that the fictional character was inspired by is entirely the fault of whoever read the fictional story and jumped to conclusions about reality. Certainly, it's possible that this author was playing some 4D chess to libel this innocent man via plausibly deniable means? It's just not in evidence, and all she appears to be certainly guilty of is fictionalize some IRL story she heard in a salacious/provocative way that was particularly in vogue at the time. Perhaps that deserves condemnation for the worst of all crimes, poor taste. But for harming that guy's life or mental health or theoretically turning his friends against him? She deserves no blame, no responsibility.
Yes, that's something done by the reader, but that doesn't mean she has no responsibility--she wrote things in such a way that how the readers would interpret it was completely predictable.
If she didn't do it on purpose, she was reckless enough that she bears pretty much the same moral responsibility as if she did it on purpose.
To whatever extent someone's predictable reaction is unjust, I place the blame on the person reacting in the unjustified manner. For instance, it's completely predictable that if you go around college campuses trying to use good faith debate to argue for milquetoast mainstream Christian conservative ideals, that others will react in a way that gives you the reputation as a neo-Nazi male chauvinist who wants to enslave all women and murder brown people. I place no blame on someone who does this for gaining such a reputation, because the actual responsibility lies in those who observe the former and unjustly/incorrectly/maliciously interpret it as an expression of the latter.
In this case, I place the full blame on those who read these scribblings on paper - scribblings that the author explicitly (falsely) said she invented based loosely on someone other than that man - and deciding that these made-up scribblings implied things about that real man. That decision was unjust, incorrect, maybe malicious, and I place the entirety of the blame on those who made that decision. If explicitly presenting the story as fictional and explicitly misdirecting the audience towards a false IRL inspiration is being reckless in terms of libeling the true IRL inspiration with the contents of the story, then I think that just renders the term "reckless" meaningless.
That's a fair point,. so I'll change it: if it's predictable that people would react badly towards someone else (and only someone else), particularly when it's someone you're hostile towards, you're responsible. It may be worse the more reasonable the response is, but most cases I can think of don't even need to get that far.
By your reasoning, there's no need to change any details; she could have made it exactly describe the guy and as long as she said it was fiction, it would be the fault of the people reading. By your reasoning, I could say that there's a party on your lawn this weekend and if anyone comes and messes up your lawn, I have no responsibility. In fact, I could make a false police report about you committing an actual crime and as long as I've put some details in that the police could theoretically check before arresting you, it's not my fault if you get arrested. Or if you're Jewish I could report you to the Nazis--I've only given them truthful information, it's the Nazis' fault if they then decide to kill you based on it.
You're right, it should be more nuanced, and this does break down at the edges and extremes. If I wrote a short story about someone named "Jiro" who posts on a forum called "TheMotte" and characterized him as a big stupid doo-doo-head and published somewhere that would have a lot of TheMotte users (or we were in an alternative universe where TheMotte was fairly mainstream - but then that TheMotte wouldn't be recognizably TheMotte anymore, would it?), I couldn't credibly claim that this was a completely fictional story that shouldn't be taken as a malicious smear on you. At some point, the deniability is implausible, and that is beyond that point. Even if I named the character "Gyro" on "TheMoat" website, it wouldn't be plausible.
I don't think the situation here is all that analogous. We note that multiple people who knew the man in question and read the story inferred the story was about him; we don't know how many people who didn't know that specific man and read the story inferred the story was about some other poor sap who had nothing to do with the story. We also don't know how many people knew the man in question and read the story and never connected the two. It's not clear to me that it was predictable, much less completely so, for the author that publishing this story would lead to people believing bad things about the real man.
If I were to explicitly and, in good faith, say that I'm lying when I tell others about this fictional party or file this false police report - as this author did when she said the story was fiction and doubled down on that fictional aspect when asked - then I do think the responsibility falls on the person who believes me (of course, lying on a police report is also itself a crime, but a different crime).
This one's an edge case where it's hard for me to imagine how I could lie to the Nazis, in good faith, that the truthful location of some Jew that I'm telling them is actually a lie. When some group is going around saying "we're going around looking for Xs to murder," telling them something like, "Here's a fictional story about an X living 2 blocks away in the red house with the blue door that we pass by every morning in our IRL commute" doesn't carry credibility as being just a fictional story without any basis in reality. The situation here with the story is somewhat analogous to that, but I do think the analogy breaks down due to the much more diffuse and weaker authoritarianism of the progressive/feminist/woke left during that era compared to the Nazis during the era when they were in charge in Germany.
"What is inferred by people who don't know him" is a bad standard--she could have used his real name and address and people who don't know him still wouldn't know it's about him.
And most of the harm would come from the reactions of the people who do know him, anyway.
I was thinking of the scenario where you voluntarily and directly reported a Jew to the Nazis. Under the standard "it's the fault of the person who reacts, not the fault of the person who provides the information" it wouldn't matter whether you provided the information voluntarily and directly.
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