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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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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!"
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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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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.
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 moves 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?
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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?
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.
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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).
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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