Cat Person

How does that make her a whore? She's doing what she has to within the boundaries of the law to increase her capital. Smart.

So do whores

Worse than the short story

Jesus, that was terrible. You don't mean you identified with the male character, do you?

>boundary of the law
Pay attention, Timmy.

Whores are legal here you fat faggot

What the fuck are you on about. This is a skin of a working man; white men aren't supposed to be as pale as the woman on the left unless they spend 90% of their time in their mothers' basements. Retard.

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Don’t like?
End capitalism

You're becoming more incoherent and more of a self parody by the day. Take your meds.

Waifupills
>Asuka
Bluepilled
>Misato
Redpilled
>Rei
Blackpilled

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>The way he looked at her then was like an exaggerated version of the expression she’d seen on the faces of all the guys she’d been naked with, not that there were that many—six in total

I'm not sure I understood this, did the author mean within the last four weeks or six months??

Delete this faggot picture please.

Genuinely don't understand what you're confused about

>Hikari
Bloomer pilled

Unironically based

>only 20
>fucked six guys
>not many
Christ it really is over

neil gaiman does a pretty good cat story

can I get the tl;dr about this

stinky

Roasty gets toasty

Habbedin

daily reminder that the author obtained a 1 million book deal for this

Then you should have enough first hand experience to be able to tell the difference between a whore and a barista, you dumb yuronigger

No, I’m not incoherent, you’re just too dense to understand where the problems are coming from

Literal zero substantive difference, you tubby mutt you

Why does Yea Forums criticize the lifestyle rather than the prose?

you're the problem though

unintentionally a fairly accurate portrayal of a certain kind of narcissism in women

>whores are whores
>baristas are whores
>you're a whore
>the real whore was within me all along

The prose is quite evidently awful. Nobody who praised the story praised the prose, rather they were praising its political and social implications.

The narcissism is everywhere this was hailed as an unparalleled insight into female millennial psyche by female millennials. This is, according to the horse's mouth, them in a good light

>the woman is the problem
>not the incel, the disgusting manchild, the mewling thirty year-old brat

women are disenfranchised as much as men, stop thinking your average female heavy twitter/instagram user is indicative of the general female population, and men can easily escape the harsh realities that women cannot so easily

this speaks to them because they are cat ladies wishing they had sex partners every other week

Yes the woman is the problem

A fellow man of taste

So the piece is candid? Not accusatory, not just mocking men, but also self-aware in its representation of a certain childishness in how young women conduct sexual relationships?

It goes without saying that the prose is awful, as it was written by a woman.

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>t. sends women several texts in a row, the final one being 'whore'

The author herself and many female (and male) commentators have talked about how much they admire and relate to the main character. She's not supposed to be a critique or unlikeable in any way.

The wretched scorned incel has no other recourse to avenge his honour which was robbed of him by said whore

>source: just trust me bro lmao

>wretched scorned incel
he literally had sex with her

While she was struggling not to laugh in his face or vomit at his naked body.

This. Cuckbrains get out.

Jesus Christ, user.
>be told no
>immediately shit yourself, drop to the ground, and roll around in your own filth while bawling your eyes out
>for honour

lmao
sex is sex, pity or not, brush up on your incel definition

Read interviews with her at time. Read twitter/reddit/whatever responses at the time. If you're really interested www.google.com is a good website that you can use to search things up. Come back if you're struggling.

This, . Inceldom is a state of mind, it isn't simply virginity. You may be born with halitosis and ugly as sin, but you make yourself an incel.

>sex is sex,
Incorrect. Read up.

Being a thief or a murderer can be considered smart by those bounds too

are you trying to prove you're an incel or some shit? you're acting like a freak rn and it's painting a very ugly picture of you irl

>immediately shit yourself, drop to the ground, and roll around in your own filth while bawling your eyes out
Hyperbole.

it's not really about him besides serving as a heel and, for the main character, kindling for a narcissistic savoring of herself

Read cat wings by Ursula instead

It must be pretty stressful to know that the organ which society prizes the most in your body gets worse at its job by the day after you turn 30 until it's literally useless.

Anyway it’s just a lie she told, probably to feel like she has some semblance of control and skill in her life as all easy mode women do. In truth they can’t flirt for bigger tips, the dumbasses who tip women 20$ will come in several times a day and they will tell themselves they are a mean bitch and not just every other girl floating along as life just happens for them.

holy BASED

>are you trying to prove you're an incel or some shit?
No but with this non sequitur question you have proven that you are, as I have always suspected, a massive retard.

Even reddit was talking about how she fat-shamed him and her own failings in the relationship. All I see is men saying they kind of identify with Robert's (Richard?) portrayal and how easy it is to fall into the 'play it cool' attitude the story highlights. r/books is rolling its collective eyes at the book deal the author got out of this.
I'm not going to go to twitter, but I haven't seen all the YAAS QUEEN SLAYY you thought you remembered

okay, i dunno what happened to you in your childhood or your formative years, but it wasn't good, and this world has done you wrong, but flexing your inferiority complex on Yea Forums isn't healthy self-medication, you're only worsening your condition, this behavior isn't isolated, it will bleed into your real life

you were wrong, that's okay, you jumped the gun, it's only human... how you deal with the aftermath says volumes about yourself and for that i'm not mad at you, i'm sad

>boundary
>of
>law

Society doesn't prize cocks that much. Maybe architecturally

>law
spook

>projection, conjecture and concern trolling
I love you for taking the time to type this all out though, some thought and resentment was clearly put in.

I meant wombs.

Do I really have to go onto google and search for it myself? Are you really that inept you can't do a basic internet search?

there's no projection in my post, i've talked to you enough to form a good enough picture, you should know that how you act says a lot about your history or at the very least, you as a person

i type ~117wpm when i'm not phased by punctuation or grammar, and it's always nice to get to know people like you

anyway i'm good dude, you seem like you need a real friend though, i'm honestly rooting for you

>says a lot about your history or at the very least, you as a person
Ooh go on, I need a laugh. Make it detailed please.

well see at this point you know my opinion of you is negative, what you want is more bad attention, this is what you've learned

people like attention, it seems the only attention you've learned to get is negative, which is a large part of why you act the way you do, you've already written yourself off, it doesn't have to be this way; your self-hatred isn't going to be further validated by me

git gud

The first comment in r/askwomen is about how the story is crappy albeit relatable in how the sex is described as a third-person view, man-pleasing affair. Is that what you meant? That comment also empathizes with Robert and his awkwardness. Second highest comment misses the point completely, I feel, but even then only expresses admiration for the arc of the relationship, not any of the characters.
By all means, show me your collage, I'm curious.

If you change your diet (cut red meat) you might still get avoid a floppy dick for a year or three. Good luck!

Literally everything you said is wrong bab

>how the story is crappy albeit relatable in how the sex is described as a third-person view, man-pleasing affair
No it isn't

nobody would expect you to admit this, and you probably don't even want to admit it to yourself because you're hardened in your ways otherwise you would have disengaged this conversation long ago

you're stubborn, that's okay. just do better

I want you to see me user. The real me, not the self image you've projected onto me. Broaden your mind.

nah i'm good m8, take care

xxx

Argue with the poster, user, not me.

No thats not the first post of the thread

blond or red facial hair is disgusting

>get your shit together
>manage to get a date
>develop a rapport
>have sex
>feel like you've really made a connection
>turns out she just did it all out of pity and narcissism
Fucking sucks

>That third-party view of sex -- being aware of how you look/feel to your partner instead of actually being connected to your body's own sensations -- was also familiar.
?

Where is the suggestion that the story is crappy?

Sorry, that was a wild, Yea Forums-style reinterpretation of
>I can't say I enjoyed it

Different post and
>...I certainly found it relatable.

It's the same post. There's no contradiction in relating to an otherwise bad story. "I sat on my laptop for three hours replying to anonymous posts and then went to sleep" is, I'm sure, relatable for a few, but it's not a good story.

>end the concentration of power into semi-voluntary hierarchies
>put it all in universalist entirely inescapable ones
There's no virgin forests anymore, butterfly. Anarcho-bullshit won't save you.

The point is to
>remove
hierarchies

The relatability for women was the point of this discussion.

It's just a boring banal diatribe by a woman who thought she liked a guy but didn't is this seriously enough to constitute a blackpill? If so let me tell you, there's far far FAR worse out there. These are just the lazy stories of the bored middle-class for whom sex is a banality.

It's more the fact that even when she seems interested, she probably secretly isn't and is only doing it our of awkwardness, pity and self aggrandizement and if you are unable to pick this up then you are at fault.
>If so let me tell you, there's far far FAR worse out there.
Go on then

Ohhh BASED

thank god i know how to kiss.

whats the secret

Not him, but all of Houellebecq, most of Schopenhauer, all of Cioran and Mainlander, arguably Michaelstadter..

The woman in the short story is not a self-insert of the author, she even said as much in an interview. In fact the guy in the story is supposed to be seen in ambivalent light right until the very last few lines.

Amazing that such a simple and unremarkable story short-circuit Yea Forums's braincells to the point people forget the elementary distinction between author, narrator and character.

Your own mind is a hierarchy. How do you propose to unify disparate wills? Unification is required in places where those wills encounter each other (e.g current population of Earth).

i read how the protagonist of stranger in a strange land kissed when i was a kid and i was imprinted with the technique.

But she is a whore

I too base my morality entirely on what Daddy Government says.

How? asking for a friend

What led you to believe that it was worth your time to spend even a quarter of an hour reading and thinking about that trash

>supposed to be seen in ambivalent light right until the very last few lines.
That's the point, they had him go off the rails just so the readers can be against him

>The viral short story Cat Person by Kristian Roupenian and the subsequent reaction to it by women was the biggest blackpill of my life.
you phrased that like a buzzfeed headline

That tears it. From this time forth I will never placate the female. I shall never pursue or flatter or crave her attention, body or love. The female will be to me as a stone or a tree or or lampost is - another object in a world of objects. She will not inform my thoughts or feelings and I will give no time to considering hers. I swear by mighty God I am now a VOLCEL until the time comes when a purehearted maiden enters my life, if the Lord allows it. Until that time, femoids BEGONE.

well it was described as a kiss that he put his entire being into. the guy himself was a bit of a mary sue, could control all of his body systems, was telekinetic and all that, but basically he was a selfless kisser, i think that was the idea.
anyway, in reality, my experience with kissing is this. play with her tongue a little, and instead of pushing yours into hers, try to communicate through your tongue with hers, maybe guide it into your own mouth, the more intimate the better. also don't drool, if you feel a lot of saliva building, pull away. just pay attention to what they want. there's certain times when a good tongue lance into the uvula is integral for a successful smooch, but overall selflessness is pretty much gotten me a lot of "you're an amazing kisser" compliments. plus my babysitter taught me a long time ago anyway.

You like reading buzzfeed huh?

>plus my babysitter taught me a long time ago anyway.

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not at all, that's why i called him out on it

By ((they)) I suppose you mean the author? Then yes but it's only the last line and it's not something that would come up in normal intercourse. All the rest is believable, if awkward. The point is you don't know well the people you"re dating or even fucking at first, so there is always this kind of ambiguity (and the guy also has visibly ambivalent feelings). You could have the opposite development of an asshole turning out to be misunderstood, it would illustrate the same point (but would be less believable).

You seem to know a lot about their headlines for someone who doesn't like them

No, the point is that beta men are disgusting and women have no strength of character, self awareness or willpower.

it was really awkward, my mother has a best friend with 3 daughters, which i had had my first sexual encounters with in a crazy 4 way 69 orgy as youths, but they had this babysitter come over once when we were all a bit older, and she made out with me for about 6 hours while the other 3 chicks looked at me with more and more annoyance. anyway, don't feel bad, i'm not a sexually successful person, if anything women have infected my life with sexuality that i probably wouldn't have had had they not initiated me in that way. very likely would have been a cloistered artist instead of spending 6 years wasted on a relationship that destroyed me. anyway, this short story, ignoring the prose, is fair enough. it shows how crass and thoughtless men and women are. and how little people actually are able to communicate and how easily bad impressions can be taken. it has been nice since i hit 30, i finally don't have a sexual impulse, and i don't fucking miss it.

that's inevitable if you browse Yea Forums on a regular basis

>how do you
No idea, but I want them to go

They might be good looking but they have worthless low class genes. It only becomes apparent when they hit that wall hard at 25.

So you don't have a plan, but you want to burn down the only system that keeps us all fed, warm, and clothed?

I guess you wouldn't be an anti-capitalist if your plan didn't start with mass graves.

Yeah why would someone read, link, and discuss a relatively well-known recently-published short story when they can respond to /pol/ bait or pretend to read DFW instead?

I've read "Cat Person" and another story she published, "The Good Guy".

Roupenian's portrayal of promiscuous Millennial women is absolutely on point. This is how these women think, this is how they act, this is what their expectations are. Obviously not everybody is like the people in her stories. Having sex with six guys by the age of twenty is, in fact, somewhat unusual.

The main question is how self-aware Roupenian is. Obviously lots of women (correctly ofc) look at the protagonist of Cat Person and see that SHE'S JUST LIKE ME!!! because, well, she is.

The key I think is not to look at Roupenian's female characters, who are presumably partly autobiographical and partly based on her close friends, but at her male characters. If you're "redpilled", you can clearly see the men's "game" at work in her stories (at least the two I've read). Is Roupenian simply providing an accurate but naive portrayal of what it's like to be gamed or does she know what's going on? I don't know. I have a low opinion of women's self-awareness so I lean towards the former.

But look at Cat Person. Look at that fucking last line, man. Does Robert text "plz respond" ... "whore" because he's a bitter loser? No, he does that because *he's a character in a story a.k.a. a puppet, and Roupenian needs him to be a bad person*.

Personally I think Roupenian is very perceptive but ultimately not very self-aware. This is made very clear, I think, by "The Good Guy" in which a thirtysomething career woman literally murders a guy when he breaks up with her. Who then goes to Hell, of course, because he's a Nice Guy (TM). This same story, by the way, opens with the immortal lines

>By the time he was 35, the only way Ted could get hard and remain so for the duration of sexual intercourse was to pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it.

Which is an absolutely stunningly false and bizarre characterization of male desire.

Lmao at ur projection, bro. I don't want to burn anything down, I want to slowly transition to a system that sheds the materialistic/productivistic dialectics and embraces hierarchy-less cooperativism.
This isn't reddit, don't be so defensive lol

Really nice and insightful post. This is why I come to Yea Forums. Thanks for this user.

Based

C'mon, gou only need to spend fifteen minutes in /r/niceguys to know the basics of game. And in those 15 minutes you will have seen many examples of women being called whores by men they slighted.

Apologies, I mistook you for a dangerous radical, not a layabout slacktivist.

Humans are wired for hierarchy. Your only hope for "eliminating" it is by dreaming of universal submission to something powerful enough to keep order but without human drives, like an AI caretaker.

Good post
There does seem to be, among women of this generation, a total fascination yet lack of understanding towards, for want of a better term, beta males. The schlubs, the losers, the awkward nerds, the incels. They seem totally unable to wrap their head round the insecurities of these men, finding their sensitivity morally endearing yet emotionally and sexually repulsive.

I thought it was going to be like one paragraph. I already have trouble finishing books, no way I'm reading all that drivel written by a female.

>le human nature
No such thing, my man. Or none we can't change over the millennia. We'll all get to enjoy the plutocracy until then, at least.

Prove it

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We don't do things we used to do and we do things we'd never done before.

Wrong. I've only ever done what I've done, never what I haven't done.

lmao I thought the opening was introducing a little back story to the author.
I'm gonna give this full read, but honestly, why was it blackpilling? Is it because OP sees this as a sign that to be successful in writing you have to write towards an audience of jaded aging women and relate to their problems caused by their pride?

That and read all of it.

>what are instincts
>what are generally innate desires that are common given a sample population of humans
You dismiss something that is so evident. You must be a brainlet who thinks very highly of himself. Dunning-Kruger effect in action. Please humble yourself and realize that there is objective evidence to suggest there is a general pattern to human behavior and desires, which is uniquely expressed by humans. How we express these natural tendencies is commonly known as human nature.
t. /g/

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Pretty sure we're still stealing, fucking around, and gossiping.

I’m not a capitalist

Getting rid of capitalism removes prostitution. All that was said there.

The aim of anarchism is to challenge all unjustifiable hierarchies.
Unity of the masses brings it. This is why capitalism breaks us up and puts us at each others throats. With that unity we establish direct democracies in various localities, businesses, present public works, tribunals when called for. Involving everyone, growing the community and their responsibilities

Idk what the author was going for but i thought it was very based. Good portrayal of the absolute state of modern men and women
Robert is the archetypical redditor

B A S E D
vocaroo.com/i/s0ox0jGrUEaB

CRINASED

>what the author was going for
Men need to be mind readers

Roupenian studied at my uni (University of Michigan), and, funnily enough, she used actual locations around Ann Arbor for settings in 'Cat Person'. Feels pretty cool to read a fiction piece and have it genuinely inhabit a place you're intimate with. But also pretty shitty because I'd rather have a better story than this one.

All in all, and politics aside, I do have to admit that she did capture a growing kind of mindset, approach, and endpoint of relationships in this specific context. Easy to see why it went viral.

based

Please read more attentively, thanks
>evident
Juicy. What is human nature, user-kun? With examples, please.
Are you saying that stealing, fucking around, and gossiping are are the traits to which collective we call human nature? And that those that abstain from those behaviours have transcended that nature?

>that story
How old were you

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for the orgy, i was like 5-6, for the babysitter, i was 12-13?

Holy shit

>growing kind of mindset, approach, and endpoint of relationships in this specific context.
Terrifying

I take it you support abortion bans

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fuck you i am white

why so glum chum? i don't worry about it. such things are in the past. women don't hurt me anymore.

I'm puzzled to hear it.

reading this story made me really happy im alone

The last line absolutely ruins it by taking away any ambiguity about Robert's character.
Reading leddit reactions, most are what you'd expect but this one was pretty good

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Human nature is statistical as well as individual.

And how much variation would you say is necessary before the statistical nature changes? Is it the same nature now as it was 200 000 years ago?

You seem to know a lot about reddit.

what's with this influx of 'battle of the sexes' posts the past few days on Yea Forums? kudos to the people actually attempting to discuss the text and not turn this into a completely generic chan board

t intrigued me enough that I read her short story collection when it came out early this year.

She has something interesting in her stories that pertains to sexuality in the 21st century. I think it is a grasp of the psychology of desire and the simulacra of sex. I haven’t read any of her interviews but she didn’t seem like a run-of-the-mill feminist from the stories I read. One thing I liked about “Cat Person” was that when the girl has sex with the guy, she finds pleasure not in the physical feeling of sex, not in being with the man, but in imagining the thoughts of the guy desiring and worshipping her as a goddess. She must worship herself through him in order to get off. The self-obsession and self-worship of it made me think she saw sex itself as something to turn a critical eye on. I never felt I was supposed to empathize with the man in the story or the female narrator. It felt misanthropic in general. The man and the woman aee Both despicable.

The story “Boy in the Pool” is also very interesting in relation to how people form sexual fantasies or fixations. A maid-of-honor plans a bachelor party and hires a former teen sex symbol actor (who the bride used to fantasize about with her friends when they were kids, rewatching a specific pool scene over and over) from some straight to video vhs, and they get him to reenact the scene that has been, to them, the height of their teenage fantasies. The most lustful pleasure cannot be purely physical, in fact much of it must take place in the mind.

What's this about?

what prose? lmao

not gay but the guy's mouth and lips look way more aesthetic. the woman just looks boring.

after reading the first line, i've learned its about a girl with a french name (who probably isn't french) in college. so i imagine its absolute trash

okay i read up to the third line and apparently she works at the movie theatre and a guy just bought a box of red vines, which must be some kind of shitty candy because this shocks and appals her like that grown ass man wearing a backpack in that meme.

maybe she's shocked because movie theater candy is expensive and you're supposed to smuggle your own in

okay now we learn that she used to be a barista, and that while working as such, she picked up the habit of milking betas for tip money by flirting with them. i'm picking up the implication that she thinks she's too good to actually flirt with a guy she likes, because why else add this part? she probably expects men to grovel before her.

no, she remarks that such a purchase is unheard of because she has never witnessed the sale of said candy before -or so she thinks.

started reading it but it sounds like thot fiction, whats the appeal?

sounds terrible

my suspicions were correct. she goes on to say that she doesn't even earn tips at the movie theatre job, but of course this won't stop her "boredonm" from driving her onwards to flirt with robert (the guy who bought the candy). also she even addds that she thinks he's cute, but that's just the bonus for her, she's really just doing it for the aforementioned reasons, she's too good to make the first move.

so this is the power of American fiction?? werent you guys like first worlders or something?

okay now we have even more cope, as she goes on to claim that even though she will admit he is kind of cute, he's not cute enough for her to let him fuck her drunkenly at a party. (not in so many words, but the subtext is there)

Sounds disgusting

Look at this highfalutin faggot thinking he's something

he is tall, which she liked. (direct quote) he also has a tattoo, but of what? perhaps we may find out...
he is fat, beared and has internally rotated shoulders. i'm getting the impression that robert is a soiboi. is this story about a used up roastie looking for a poor beta male to finally sink her claws into? based on what we''ve seen up to this point, it would seem so.

Stop this or I'm telling

here is a direct quotation of the next paragraph:
>Robert did not pick up on her flirtation. Or, if he did, he showed it only by stepping back, as though to make her lean toward him, try a little harder. “Well,” he said. “O.K., then.” He pocketed his change.
"try a little harder" doesn't really make sense there. is she narrating or talking to him now? i think its a freudian slip. i imagine that whoever wrote this story thinks that men don't respond to her advances because they are unwilling to "try hard enough." she self-inserted a little too hard when she was writing this line and we get a glimpse of what goes through her head when she's trying to bait some poor, uninterested bastard into her disease-hole. it couldn't possibly be that he's uninterested in me, its that he's nervous or lazy. the hubris is palpable. i'm almost jealous

should be in italics

flash-forward one week: robert is back. this time he makes the first move, which margot obviously enjoys. he says that she's improving her performance on the job. he is happy to acknowledge that she didn't insult his candy choice this time. (why the fuck is this guy going to the movies alone twice in a week?) now there hasn't been much dialogue up to this point, but this is where it starts to break down. exhibit a:
>She shrugged. “I’m up for a promotion, so,” she said.
exhibit b:
>After the movie, he came back to her. “Concession-stand girl, give me your phone number,” he said, and, surprising herself, she did.
i don't know if this is character development and robert is an autist and margot is a stupid thot, or if this is just genuinely bad writing. probably both.

I know a woman who has several children from different fathers, she makes her father (who is a widower) finance them, she routinely threatens him that she’ll run off with her junkie ex whenever he criticises her, she intentionally had the kids so she can constantly stay at home. She doesn’t take care of them but if he ever asks her to get a job she’ll say she can’t because she has kids to take care of but all she does it spend her time browsing tinder. Her father has gone borderline broke at this point caring for these kids whom he loves more than anything and he can’t retire. All the while she is literally completely and entirely unsympathetic to him. There are so many more details behind this story I am not getting in to but it’s been a real black pill watching this brilliant man get reduced to an absolute wretch by his own daughters psychological manipulation and gaslighting. I would personally much rather have a slutty daughter that slept around a few times in college then became a journalist writing shitty short stories about her period than what this man is going through, trust me.

based and truthpilled (aka true)

in the next few weeks (which take up a whopping one whole paragraph) they have a lot of texting happening between them, but no sexting to speak of.

good post user

have you read this review? thoughts on it?
autisticmercury.com/2019/03/09/cuckolded-by-a-savage-armenian-a-review-of-cat-person-and-other-stories-by-kristen-roupenian-by-delicious-tacos/

Capitalism in action folks. Observe.

based seething

This story, and the picture it paints of modern relationships, makes me want to become a monk and spend the rest of my days in a monastery observing a vow of silence.

I bet he is jealous and not sympathetic. Or I don't get sarcasm.

same. every day i grow closer to either doing that or the other thing which you can imagine...

>t. incel who has never gone outside

ah, makes sense, i figured it was one or the other. people don't look at that as suffering as i do, i wish i had never been cursed with that perversion, tainted in my youth, envy flaws the minds of men who would think through their pricks.

me too. Everything is broken.

I have numerous anecdotes from the last year alone that absolutely blow Cat Person out of the water in terms of badly behaving young people. How do you lead a life so sheltered that this story is actually shocking to you?

Go on then story teller lets hear them

Can some user explain to me why the prose is bad here? It seems good to me. I don't read a lot.

It absolutely happens. I question how common it is -- I can spend 15 minutes on r/furfags or whatever and see many examples of men sodomizing each other while dressed as Tony the Tiger, that doesn't make it a typical experience. It was Roupenian's choice to have the story end that way, and it is frankly blatantly obvious that she did so in order to assure the reader that Robert is a Bad Guy.

Yeah I think the main thing she's keyed into is how mass media and digital communication have thoroughly intermediated our ability to form any relationship (though she focuses on sex because sex is important and she's also a woman, but the point stands).

One of the things I liked about Cat Person is the portrayal of a texting-based "relationship". They spend all this time on a fucking glorified teletype machine thinking they're getting to know each other when, of course, they aren't -- or at the very least are deluded about the bandwidth of their channel.

I thought it was pretty funny and it gave quite a bit of insight on the writer (how she laughs autistically during sex, delegates the break-up to her friend)
Also it shows how hook-up culture is so shallow and unfufilling

The median number of sexual partners for an American 15-44 is like 4. This strongly suggests that the median sexual experience is "a couple of boyfriends/girlfriends", maybe a crazy night after their first breakup. It's more common to have one or zero sex partners as it is 12+.

The point of this is that if you're in a social environment where "young people" are constantly "behaving badly" (having promiscuous sex), you're living in a bubble. The group of people who are sleeping with a different person every week is *no larger* and is probably even smaller than literal save-it-for-marriage types.

This is precisely it, I'm glad someone else got it. The male character is completely bland and devoid of personality simply because the POV character is the female one. She is not interested in him, but a version of him in her head, which is really just a projection of herself, so she's really just interested in herself. The man calling her a whore at the end of the story isn't just a thing that happens irl. This man tries to say exactly what she wants to hear, which is her own narcissistic ego whispering in her ear. Him calling her a whore is what she thinks of herself.
I can guarantee that if the story had gone one she would have resolved to change, make sure she had higher standards, and engage in frantic activity to "better herself" until one day she happens upon another Echo and she'll tell herself, This one! Now this one's gonna work out well."

They are not complete stories, they are a never-ending series of incidents I have witnessed by merely socializing with people my own age.
It's fun to think I exist in some special bubble with particularly deviant behavior, but you and I both know that's not actually true. There's nothing remarkable about my city or my friends. In fact my city is actually known for being unbearably boring. The bars close at 1am for heaven's sake.

Not that user but okay, put a few incidents down in the piecemeal form you've got.

fuck you Yea Forums for making me read that trash
also have sex

>have sex
Goddamn you I'm trying

>Ex-girlfriends relentlessly trying to fuck other guys in the friend group to get back at their guys
>Young women (as young as highschool age) performing absolutely debased behavior for cocaine
>Dudes going through elaborate schemes to get their girlfriend out of town so they can cheat on her
>Dudes who occasionally pull off a "perfect week" where they fuck a different girl each night
>A sophomore girl bragging about having fucked exactly 100 dudes since she enrolled
That's off the top of my head from the last six months. Obviously some are re-occurring and some are specific instances.

Bro don’t be like aesops fox and sour grapes you don’t want to live your life a volcel

I’m not some normalfag screeching at you to just have sex but seriously if you do this you’re just gonna realize you wish you had tried one day and it will be irrevocably late because your day to day life will have drifted so far from your peers

>I’m not a capitalist

Oh, sweety.

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>It's fun to think I exist in some special bubble with particularly deviant behavior, but you and I both know that's not actually true
No, I don't know that that's true. You're asserting it without evidence. Pauline Kael didn't know anyone who voted for Nixon either.

that thing is some nerd who hacked off his dick in order to rent-seek off of social deference to the feminine, of course it has a bunch of retarded opinions.

>when Yea Forums larpers want a good book recommendation so they come to Yea Forums
sad

>I'm not a capitalist

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>standing by and letting degeneracy continue
Kill yourself

Shut the fuck up whore. For too long I've wasted my time and energy worrying about the likes of you. Cunt off and leave me in peace away from your shallow dull prattling. You mean nothing to me now. Good day and goodbye.

I’m a heterosexual male unironically

I was in your situation once too, was a virgin until my mid 20s, I’m really trying to give you genuine advice

To paraphrase herman melville, no man ever conceited himself to happiness. That’s what hearth, home, wife and saddle are for.

I'm not listening to cunts.

It’s the necessary counter-reaction to the current APPARENT/respectable forced zeitgeist of “men and women are totally the same and neither should be putting the other down” and the actual, barely hidden zeitgeist of “you go girl!! Down with men!!!” Being able to talk about the battle of the sexes somewhere is refreshing in an increasingly sanitized, dumbed-down, castrated PC world.

Beautiful, you have captured in words what I could only envision in thoughts thus far

Change that to twenty. Woman’s life is hell mascerading as heaven

Lmao there's absolutely nothing wrong with this except the terrible prose you idiots

bruh moment

>Then, one night during reading period, she was complaining about how all the dining halls were closed and there was no food in her room because her roommate had raided her care package, and he offered to buy her some Red Vines to sustain her

This is a story published in the New Yorker. What is literature coming to?

Thanks for the read, OP. Great insight into the mind of the average millenial/zoomer woman.

Well...what do you expect, honestly? What contemporary author would you like to see in the New Yorker?

you guys should really find a waiter job or anything else that forces you to interact with people. also get fit, work on yourself and then have sex

Write a (judgmental) short story collection

The Eternal Armenian strikes again

In the end, on balance, I liked it. It was funny, which helped, and manages to be relevant about modern relations in a way few stories are.

>By the time she got to her room, she already had a text from him: no words, just hearts and faces with heart eyes and, for some reason, a dolphin.

>When Margot announced that Robert was there, everyone erupted in astonishment, and then they surrounded her and hustled her out of the bar as if she were the President and they were the Secret Service.

>By her third beer, she was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Robert. Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.

The story's success comes from its ambiguity: are we supposed to pity Robert or think him a creepy dick? He's arguably more sympathetic than Margot until the last line, which unfortunately comes off more like the writer beating us over the head with the answer to who's wrong. Yet it's hard to say they're not both partly to blame. Margot leads Robert on, initiating sex and a proto-relationship she doesn't actually want. But how's Robert to know? Obviously she shouldn't do that. And then there's the question of sexual inexperience. From Robert's awkward flirting, his inability to take a bra off, the pensive way he questions her virginity, and the bottle of whisky by his bed, Margot has some degree of power over him that she relishes. It's telling that in the moments she thinks of Robert as a creep, she imagines herself laughing at him as she tells the story to her ideal Chad Thundercock boyfriend. How can this be exonerated?

Yet we don't see all of Robert's bad side. From the last line and what is probably him stalking her at the bar, he doesn't seem to be innocent. Yet Margot doesn't actually know that Robert isn't just an awkward mismatch. And Robert doesn't know Margot's vulnerability and dread. The whole thing has been conducted over social media, so nobody really knows anything about each other (Well, Robert has cats - or does he?). We don't even have Robert's texts to judge firsthand, only Margot's word for how they should be interpreted. How could we ever know either of them? We might chalk up Margot's failings to her youth and inexperience. Yet she's clearly psychologically manipulative and more sexually and emotionally mature. Robert's a loser, but then he's also 34 and still hasn't figured the most basic shit out. Do we pity him for this, or is there actually something really unhinged with him, beyond the point where our sympathy runs out? Can we really blame Margot for not wanting to stick around to find out? The story works because there's no easy answer to how they solve their conflicting gut feelings or who's wrong for the fireworks ending of it all.

In the end, on balance, I liked it. It was funny, which helped, and manages to be relevant about modern relations in a way few stories are.

>By the time she got to her room, she already had a text from him: no words, just hearts and faces with heart eyes and, for some reason, a dolphin.

>When Margot announced that Robert was there, everyone erupted in astonishment, and then they surrounded her and hustled her out of the bar as if she were the President and they were the Secret Service.

>By her third beer, she was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Robert. Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.

The story's success comes from its ambiguity: are we supposed to pity Robert or think him a creepy dick? He's arguably more sympathetic than Margot until the last line, which unfortunately comes off more like the writer beating us over the head with the answer to who's wrong. Yet it's hard to say they're not both partly to blame. Margot leads Robert on, initiating sex and a proto-relationship she doesn't actually want. But how's Robert to know? Obviously she shouldn't consent if she doesn't want it. And then there's the question of sexual inexperience. From Robert's awkward flirting, his inability to take a bra off, the pensive way he questions her virginity, and the bottle of whisky by his bed, Margot has some degree of power over him that she relishes. It's telling that in the moments she thinks of Robert as a creep, she imagines herself laughing at him as she tells the story to her ideal Chad Thundercock boyfriend. How can this be exonerated?

Yet we don't see all of Robert's bad side. From the last line and what is probably him stalking her at the bar, he doesn't seem to be innocent. Yet Margot doesn't actually know that Robert isn't just an awkward mismatch. And Robert doesn't know Margot's vulnerability and dread. The whole thing has been conducted over social media, so nobody really knows anything about each other (Well, Robert has cats - or does he?). We don't even have Robert's texts to judge firsthand, only Margot's word for how they should be interpreted. How could we ever know either of them? We might chalk up Margot's failings to her youth and inexperience. Yet she's clearly psychologically manipulative and more sexually and emotionally mature. Robert's a loser, but then he's also 34 and still hasn't figured the most basic shit out. Do we pity him for this, or is there actually something really unhinged with him, beyond the point where our sympathy runs out? Can we really blame Margot for not wanting to stick around to find out? It's not even clear that anyone actually did anything wrong (except for Robert at the end), yet it all ends in fireworks anyway. The story works because there's no easy answer.

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this actually is a great thread desu
it is enjoyable seeing people actually read a short story together and then share their fascinating perspectives and ideas.

wish we all could do this more often. maybe we can have a weekly thread where we read a semi-triggering current-year fiction peace and discuss it?

I tried this with various short, interesting stories by well-known authors. They were intentionally chosen to be short but valuable reads, perfectly accessible. The only reason this topic succeeded is because the story is written in a dead simple brainlet blog post format indulging all the basic sex and romance smut Yea Forums thinks it's above. Thank fuck there is a topic discussing literature on this board, however meagre the story, but I don't think we should read anything promising into this.

All women should be kil

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...

>Inceldom is a state of mind
What does that state of mind consists of?
Having a reasonable view of women? Being angry at shitty their shitty behaviour?

Double trips of truth

Why are women so evil anons?
Not even the devil could be so malicious.

They are his spawn after all and it is the child's fate to outdo the parent.

What would be the reaction of plebid if the genders were reversed?

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The same as before
Men bad
Women good

She means to make her try a little harder:
>as though to make her lean toward him, [(and) make her] try a little harder.

I feel like I have to be a minority using the left with for right wing interests and unaware of it to comprehend what this comic is arguing

using the left for my *

Except orange shirt guy is totally right. The system doesn't care whether you disagree with it or not, nor does it care if you have cogent and devastating arguments against it. These are easily deflected and subsumed. All it cares about is whether you participate.

>Roupenian studied at my uni (University of Michigan), and, funnily enough, she used actual locations around Ann Arbor for settings in 'Cat Person'
Shit, I didn't even realize this, and it came out while I was still there.

Anyways, it seems to me like everyone here dislikes how they think the author intended the story to be read, or they dislike what they think people they hate drew from it.

DESU I think the story does a good job at capturing the mindset of a certain set of people. The conflict mostly is caused by the fact that the guy either doesn't successfully read what the girl is thinking/feeling (a common problem due to a lack of socialization, since everyone is on their phone/computer instead of interacting face-to-face) or he doesn't care and just wants to get his dick wet. The contrived line at the end makes him a villain, but all of this could have easily been avoided had the girl just been honest or forthcomming instead of dillusional. Just as we could blame the guy for failing to pick up that she's not actually that into him, we can also blame her for not communicating that to him in the first place.

Young people constantly struggle to make dates and relationships work because of these poor communication skills, which are exacerbated by a lack of stable social norms around courtship. Since the social narrative is all about consent, and ignores that seduction and non-verbal communication are vital to love, inexperienced young people are constantly heightening their own awkward sexual encounters into "rape". The author doesn't explore this idea or push it any further, but she at least provided a mildly useful example of an outcome of these problems.

If the protagonist is meant to be as equally as reprehensible as Robert then this is an alright short story, but she's not really. In the end she had to be proven justified by Robert. The actual prose is elementary is well. The only reason this was a success or went viral at all was because it captured the zeitgeist of modern day dating, and vilified a man in the end. If it ended after their bad date and "break up", then it would have just been a small slice of life about two equally shitty people only distinguished by the accurate portrayal of dating today.

Basically just a piece of shit.

>doesn't successfully read what the girl is thinking/feeling
I mean, that's made slightly difficult by the plethora of mixed signals she's hurling his way.

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The author is a fucking mong

>a blond guy who spends time outdoors isn't white
cope harder, incel

This must be the worst piece of literature I have read since that one time when I was interested how good two "books" published by some girls in the school newspaper were.

>But look at Cat Person. Look at that fucking last line, man. Does Robert text "plz respond" ... "whore" because he's a bitter loser? No, he does that because *he's a character in a story a.k.a. a puppet, and Roupenian needs him to be a bad person*.
I enjoyed the story enough, but the ending is both sloppy and the bit annoying commentators focus too much on. From how some people describe the story you'd think the last bit at "her bar" was the third act rather than the last paragraph or two. I think for the thing to be more in keeping with the rest of the story she should imagine that he was about to call her something like whore and then leave the question hanging or have it not happen. Also, ime and from what I've heard, "whore" tends to get thrown around more when someone stands their ground a little bit sexually and doesn't follow through, whereas that's not what happened in the story. Also a little more parallelism between the two characters as frankly the 20 yo girl seems to not in any way have her shit together to the level I would expect of someone that age like the 30 something yo guy, plus they're both sending mean texts to each other at the end really.

I don't read in english a lot because it's my 2nd language and I'm afraid I may miss something, but since it was a short story I dove into it, I think it wasn´t that bad. I don't understand why it would become viral tho, the girl is boring and the guy is just a fucking loser, they are not relatable at all.

Stick to reading and writing in your own mutt language

>the ending
I agree but you can't ignore it either. It's the author laying all her cards on the table: maybe both of these people aren't great but she's on Team Woman. This becomes even more clear from reading her other stories.

>I don't understand why it would become viral tho, the girl is boring and the guy is just a fucking loser, they are not relatable at all.
The story is an extremely accurate portrayal of what such a girl is like, many many twentysomething women immediately identify with her.

The girls don't realize that they're boring (how would they, everyone they interact with is mysteriously enraptured with everything they say or do), and they're surrounded by vast numbers of loser men who they don't want to fuck but who, again mysteriously, nevertheless continue to exist in defiance of all common sense.

It's interesting to try and figure out whether the guy is "objectively" a loser. He has his own place and no trouble approaching girls and is tall, on the other hand he appears to have no friends and he loses his frame after they bang.

He's an interesting character, I think. He's not such an obvious loser that Margot is immediately put off, but his post-bang game isn't tight enough to maintain attraction. He's the kind of guy who gets a Title IX complaint filed against him for spoofing women's alpha male detector.

Oh, one other thing, this story a little bit but more another couple of similar stories are treating erectile dysfunction in a very insensitive and superficial way which is a real shame.

>I agree but you can't ignore it either. It's the author laying all her cards on the table: maybe both of these people aren't great but she's on Team Woman.
She a lesbo

Asuka is only a bluepill if you were older than 18 when you first watched eva. When I originally watched it she was my waifu but now I fiend for misato and her scientist friend.

Hey, thank you, that's a good breakdown. I'd say the guy is indisputably a loser tho, he's old as fuck and doesn't know how to kiss, how to fuck, or how to even interact with this girl who should be a piece of pie since, again, he's a mature man. But you are definitely right in that a lot of women identifying with the protagonist fail to realize they are both boring. I think it's a pretty good read for, like, "betas" or whatever you want to call them, since they don't ever see themselves from the women POV.

Great post. Seems like most of the normalfags don’t realize that the female is at fault too; she’s boring, indecisive, and considers herself some supreme neutral arbiter of the universe even though there is nothing enviable about her life besides its archetypical moments

This mindsets dominance is a product of the french revolution. Liberals spread the idea that anyone can be anything and have inherent value. Reality is that few people are capable of running their lives. There is no perfect argument. Either you dominate people with institutions like religion and old pre feudal dynastic arrangements, leading to their inevitable revolt and resentment, or you allow average people to essentially make species level decisions. I believe that the 21st century will continue to advance optics and propaganda to preserve power and decision making in the elite while placating normalfags with the illusion of free love etc

The ideal government is one in which people feel that their Caesar stands for each of them, and that Caesar is also competent himself. There have to be reconciliations between all these different needs. I think that the united states is essentially doing this already but the process needs to be accelerated to give the strongest polities to dominate real decision making like in china while still somehow leading average retards to think that they are enfranchised

I wouldn't say it is bad but it is pretty boring.

other anons are mistaking deliberate word choice and attempts to establish tone as bad prose though it’s nothing special regardless

>This becomes even more clear from reading her other stories.
I'm of the opinion it's an almost accidentally decent story from a mediochre author, which happens a fair amount. It's the first one accepted to the New Yorker out of several submissions apparently.

Wow, that story was really good until that final slew of text messages. It’s like the author herself was working through her own feelings about the Robert character as she developed the protagonist’s feelings, but in the end she was overcome by some instinctual, inexplicit disgust and pigeon-holed him into a reprobate. Not only is it a sour ending, it makes you reevaluate the entire story. Was the protagonist written to feel empathetic only so we’d feel pity for her when she was wrongly called a whore? Pretty unsatisfying

Yes he got nasty in the end, people sometimes do. So that was a dick move of him but that doesn't mean he was evil all this time, or that he won't calm down, or that the others can't do similar acts of rage.. :-\

You got me to finally read it OP. Not bad for jew Yorker. Robert was fag for expecting a college roastie to be his girl. Margot was typical woman. Confused, means well, narcissist. If you want love get a dog, humans will always betray you.

It's fairly turgid

>I'd say the guy is indisputably a loser tho, he's old as fuck and doesn't know how to kiss, how to fuck, or how to even interact with this girl who should be a piece of pie since, again, he's a mature man.
The only way he can get better is through experience which nobody is giving him because he's a loser with no experience.

>misato
based
>scientist friend.
waste

I love Cat Person. It delights me that--the deluge over, the Sexual Revolution having dissolved all sexual boundaries--it is now liberal women who clamor for gentlemen.

We can imagine Robert's character so well: over-sexed on pornography since he hit 12, driven and derided by women as he ages, unable to control himself and unable to marry and live chastely even if found (rare thing!) a chaste woman. And Margot--an active participant in using sex as a plaything (so masculine, these women after the Flood), yet, also, demanding she herself be treated as more than a plaything.

It's almost as if the Sexual Revolution doesn't raise the type of men whom women would actually want to fall in love with.

8.9/10; would read again; let's reinstate Victorianism so we only have to read about these depressing interactions and not experience them.

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Shuddup ponce.

Basically, women only want gigachad, anyone else is compromise and is compromised.

>By the time he was 35, the only way Ted could get hard and remain so for the duration of sexual intercourse was to pretend that his dick was a knife, and the woman he was fucking was stabbing herself with it.

This line is hilarious as fuck. She had another one in cat Person about the man trying to stay hard that was comedy gold.

Peter Sloterdijk, to answer your filename.

>probably him stalking her at the bar
A lot of people interpret it as that looking at reviews, but it doesn't reach the threshold for stalking anywhere that I know. You could maybe argue the texting after but eh.

>The story is an extremely accurate portrayal of what such a girl is like, many many twentysomething women immediately identify with her.

An inexperienced losers too. I was the Robert (in my mid 20s, thank god), and probably still am. Regardless how good or bad the story is, it's crucial for every guy to go through few robert experiences to wise up on what's really going on.

I think this gets to the real reason why the story is both popular but also bad. The author takes some basic philosophical or psychological concept and bases a story around them. Most people don't know about Lacan's gaze so when they read cat person and hear about how a women thinks about a sexual encounter through the man's eyes, how her desire is tied to the way she is desired and seen by the man, it can read like mind-blowing prose because most people (even highly educated people) don't have the self awareness to put that experience into words, but have experienced it themselves. Cat Person is well written at points but it ultimately sabotages the moral ambiguity of the story. Of course, things like that do happen, it's a common experience among women to be insulted after they've rejected someone, but it serves no real story purpose apart from undercutting all the difficult questions it raises about the main character, and giving the story a little moral universe where one person is good and one is bad.

Her other story is worse because it's much more clumsy about its psychosexual concepts, and doesn't seem to understand male desire at all, but chooses to put it front and center. It also has the same problem of taking a morally ambiguous story and driving it towards an ending that removes all that complexity.

Ironically, the worldview suggested in these stories shares a lot in common with the misogynistic subcultures she is criticizing. Her view on sex is not liberating at all, and is overwhelmingly negative. Incels and "nice guys" internalize their own self hatred and project it onto women - her characters do the same but in reverse, they hate themselves and by extension hate men for desiring them. Both are narcissistic in the psychoanalytic sense of the word, they both don't understand their own agency and authority, and subsequently can't respond to the authority and agency of others in the healthy, proper way. This ends with hatred of the other, especially when the other attempts to exercise their agency. The terror that a nice guy has of being rejected is, at root, the same terror Roupenian's women have when men do anything to them (she sees women as acted upon rather than actors). In both cases the terror is that the other has a will of its own, that can act upon us, while being unknowable and beyond our control. Which is the result of a malformed, narcissistic worldview where people fail to develop their own sense of self beyond the validation of others.

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He's sitting drinking at a student bar alone they'd talked about before. It's plausible and (speaking from experience) exactly the kind of serendipitous encounter a Robert-like person would try to engineer. "Stalking" might be too loaded a term, but you get the point that he's trying to artificially "bump" into her.

I really hated reading The Good Guy but this nails my life
>Growing up, Ted was the kind of small, bookish boy female teachers described as “sweet.” And he was sweet, at least where women were concerned. He spent his childhood and early adolescence floating through a series of crushes on older, unattainable girls: a cousin, a babysitter, his big sister’s best friend. These crushes were always sparked by some small gift of attention — a minor compliment, genuine laughter at one of his jokes, remembering his name — and they contained no overt or sublimated aggression at all.
>Never, not even in his wildest imaginings, had young Ted allowed himself to believe that his crushes might be reciprocated. He wasn’t stupid. Whatever else he might be, he’d never been that. All he’d ever wanted was for his love to be tolerated, maybe even appreciated: He yearned to be permitted to linger worshipfully around his crushes, lightly bumping up against them every so often, the way a bee might brush against a flower.
>He struggled in the grip of this conundrum, trying to exert self-control in the form of brutal self-punishment (standing naked in front of the mirror, forcing himself to look at his skinny legs, concave chest, small penis: She hates you, Ted, face it, all girls hate you, you’re ugly, you’re disgusting, you’re gross) and then losing control and finding himself awake at three in the morning, crying with frustration
>the summer before high school, after a particularly humiliating episode with a camp counselor, Ted went for a long solitary walk and considered his future. Fact: He was short and ugly and greasy-haired and no girls would ever like him. Fact: Just knowing that someone as gross as Ted liked them creeped girls out. Conclusion: If he didn’t want to spend his whole life making women miserable, he needed to figure out a way to keep his crushes to himself.
So that was what he did.
His freshman year of high school, Ted crafted a new persona: cheerfully asexual, utterly unthreatening, scrubbed clean of any whiffs of need. This Ted was a 60-year-old comic in a 14-year-old’s body: hilarious, self-deprecating, and much too neurotic to ever have actual sex.
Only difference is I never has any female friends and would never even consider talking to girls I liked

quality post

Magnum and anthem don't rhyme well.

That is the funniest post I've read in a long time. Did you not notice the man's blond facial hair? I'm using this picture as a meme picture, now. I could see how the thumbnail of the picture looks interracial.

I'm not sure Robert comes off as blameworthy even with the last line. He's obviously the inexperienced one, there's no way he should be expected to understand her, she's the one that pushes for sex and never steps back from it due not to social ineptitude, but to social cowardice.
Robert doesn't stalk her, he's desperate to see her and goes somewhere he thinks he might run into her. He sees her avoid him and has a final progression from desperation to fear to anger, likely accompanied by drunkenness, and out of betrayal gives a last insult he'll likely regret.
Authorial intent aside, the story seems to clearly be about the power Margot has and her narcissistic misuse of it that drives a pathetic figure to futile anger, almost a reversal of the college rape situation. It's a clever enough concept (though likely unintentionally, would not be surprised if it's a personal anecdote), shame she's so bad with prose.

that's a lot of books to write

fat beta and roastie go on a date after texting lots of memes
fat beta is bad at kissing and likely virgo
roastie is torn between being disgusting at his flabby hairiness and getting off because she's enjoying the attention
they have shitty sex
roastie gets toastie, pseudo-ghosts him
fat beta texts a bunch, gets no response, then luckily enough sees her and a group of friends at some shitty bar, calls her a whore

shitty story I rate 2/10

Ann Arbor is tiny dude, I get people being a little territorial about bars but in a town of 100k people you're going to bump into your exes every once in a while for all sorts of reasons, especially because there's only so many places to go to if you ever go out. I'm not saying (in the real life version of this fictional story) it isn't the guy trying to bump into her, but just seeing someone at a bar is not the same as someone stalking you, even if they're not reading or on their phone (details that seem to be fairly irrelevant imo).

I have been actual stalked a few times and it is unpleasant.

Iranians have a high number of people with blond hair. Blond doesn’t mean white. White skin means white

I agree, I don't love the Magnum line. I'll change it going forward

EZPZ
2. Dog person
3. Horse person
4. Rabbit person
...
100,000. Fox person
100,001. Zebra person
100,002. Hare person
...
999,998. Spider person
999,999. Bat person
1,000,000. A real hero and a real human person

>blonde
It's looking pretty ginger, and I think that's what he's talking about. I'd call that flushed rather than tan.

WHEN WILL THIS FUCKING THREAD DIE? AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Now call the thread a whore.

>I'm not sure Robert comes off as blameworthy even with the last line. He's obviously the inexperienced one, there's no way he should be expected to understand her, she's the one that pushes for sex and never steps back from it due not to social ineptitude, but to social cowardice.

Can you excuse a 34 for being inexperienced though? At some point your sympathy runs out. That he can't nail basic shit by this age hints at something being seriously wrong with him, hence why Margot feels threatened - but of course we just don't know for certain.

>Robert doesn't stalk her, he's desperate to see her and goes somewhere he thinks he might run into her. He sees her avoid him and has a final progression from desperation to fear to anger, likely accompanied by drunkenness, and out of betrayal gives a last insult he'll likely regret.

This makes his actions understandable but it doesn't exonerate them.

Of course it's possible he wasn't stalking her. But it's also very plausible, given the indicative glimpses we get into Robert's personality, that he is. Of course stalking encompasses a lot of things, and Robert is relatively benign, but quibbles aside the point remains.

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>That he can't nail basic shit by this age hints at something being seriously wrong with him, hence why Margot feels threatened
That makes 0 sense- we should emphasize with her fears because he's a sperg?

He gives off bad vibes and obviously isn't
socialised properly. We don't _know_ if he's a sperg, just odd, or weirdly unstable (at least until the final line, which makes a decent claim for the last one). Neither does Margot, as we're told, which is why she feels vulnerable (along with her physical weakness and how, when they have sex, she is treated as an object to the ends of Robert's desire, like a living pornography, instead of being co-subject).

See, the problem is that you're even considering the last lines at all, when they're so obviously shoehorned and contrary to the tone of the piece itself.

You have to consider what's actually in the story, but I agree, that's why I said in my first post I think the ending weak. See: I'm just saying why the story works.

>Of course it's possible he wasn't stalking her. But it's also very plausible, given the indicative glimpses we get into Robert's personality, that he is. Of course stalking encompasses a lot of things, and Robert is relatively benign, but quibbles aside the point remains.
I was trying to avoid this level of discussion. There's no point arguing about this like it's a real event. The author has left the question open, and I said you cannot rule out stalker-like behaviour, but it probably isn't. The texts afterwards are technically harrassment/stalking though.

Like I say in my first post, the story works because of the ambiguity, not in spite of it: I'm not so much interested in who was right or wrong, because that seems to me to miss the most important dimension of the story.

The ending really does ruin it. It flattens out these ambiguous characters and vindicates Margot's rejection of him too easily. It is perhaps a touch of narcissism that allows ones own actions to be ever seen a morally grey light.

Good post

>He gives off bad vibes
He's probably a PoC, a lot of racists get bad vibes from them.

Cat Person isn't a bad story per se, but you can't help but get the feeling that its strengths were implemented by accident. Most of the discussion centers around its stark depiction of modern dating, the way it is increasingly intermediated by technology, and the feelings of detachment and ambiguity that arise as consequence. Though these themes are present, their importance to the narrative is grossly overstated: they remain underdeveloped throughout its entirety. This critical preoccupation with themes that are, at best, amateurishly executed, may at first appear to be little more than a failure on the part of literary circles to give a controversial story its proper due, until one realizes that this preoccupation is not a mere accident, but a deliberate (if unconcious) deception.

For all the story's flaws, at its center is a white hot core, something that not only probes at the edges of acceptable discourse, but, counterintuitively, miraculously, even, has exploded into the mainstream. Because this core is authentically transgressive, it is unspeakable, and cannot be openly described; at least, not in the pages of a magazine so culturally ossified as the New Yorker. Hence the diversion, the neurotic compulsion to pick around the edges, even as it becomes clear that critic's analysis grows heavy with absence. No, the most intriguing element of 'Cat Person' lies not in its depiction of technology, but in its examinations of the contradictions that arise between contemporary truisms about sex and morality, and the lurid reality of actual sexual attraction.

With the coming of the 21st century, we have seen the emergence of a new discourse around 'ethical masculinity.' That 'masculinity' must be prefaced with 'ethical' reveals the implicit bias: the sentiment, now almost universal amongst the cultural elite, that ordinary masculinity, alone and unqualified by any other modifiers, is intrinsically unethical: boorish, insensitive, violent; not merely associated *with*, but defined *by* exploitation and privilege. In a word: toxic. To remedy masculinity of these faults has become something of a cultural project, spanning decades. Now, informed by the insights of social justice, the notion and image of a 'healthy masculinity' has become increasingly accepted: the modern man is sensitive. He is a pacifist. He is physically nonthreatening. He not only recognizes his privilege, but takes active steps to disassemble his cultural hegemony.

It would be hyperbolic to say that Robert exemplifies this description. However, few would characterize him as traditionally masculine. He is socially awkward, docile, introverted. He is kind (if slightly dull). He is your prototypical "nice guy." Barring a few brief lapses, his behavior lies comfortably within the margins of acceptable masculinity. He adheres to the standards set by feminist convention.

And yet Margot finds him repulsive.

1/3

Robert plays by the rules, and still finds himself losing. In a regime that proclaims the equality of all bodies, Margot is repulsed by his weight. In a regime that abhors chauvinism, Margot is repulsed by his awkwardness. In a regime that conspicuously refuses to judge people for their sexual practices, Margot is repulsed by his sexual inexperience. In a regime that vows to dismantle economic hierarchy, Margot is repulsed by his poverty. Etcetera.

Here is the core, the simple contradiction that motivated millions of Americans to actually read (and discuss!) a short story for the first time in years. Decades of cultural programming has insisted, fervently, deliriously, relentlessly, that No One Is Truly Ugly, And If They Are, There's Absolutely Nothing Wrong With That. But would you have sex with one? As a culture, we love nothing more than locating the most wretched of the Earth, conspicuously tolerating them, before separating entirely, cut to next episode, leaving ample time to administer hearty pats to the back. But tolerance is a low standard to set. (Remember when 'tolerance' had the connotation of enduring something universally unpleasant, like a bad smell?) Sex is a stronger barrier, an exponentially greater sign of commitment. You tolerate trans people. Would you have sex with them? You tolerate the disabled, but would you be willing to have sex with them?

So the the build of the story is the gradual accumulation of cognitive dissonance, experienced as tension: we are Good People with Right Opinions, and we do not discriminate, especially about something so petty and superficial as 'looks.' And yet...the reader is made to feel Margot's revulsion, and her disgust becomes our own. So how is the tension resolved?

Easy.

It turns out Robert was evil all along. Oh.

2/3

This is why I say that 'Cat Person's strengths were probably unintentional. Its author played chicken with her own discomfort and lost. For a moment, the story forced you to examine your own feelings, to confront your own biases. Why do you feel so strongly about a character who is, essentially, innocent? It made you question your own sense of morality, the way you treat other people. A story can't force you into feeling attraction for a character that is ugly. But it can force you to reckon with your prejudices. Perhaps, had the story been better, its moral would have transcended platitudes about the equality of the wretched with the beautiful, and instead asserted their dignity. Good art should challenge you, should wound you, not to hurt you, but to inculcate growth and wisdom.

But Cat Person doesn't do that. As it turns out, your creeping sense of unease about Robert, your revulsion for his behavior and his looks, your disgust for his inexperience and social ineptitude - all are perfectly justified. All along, you didn't hate Robert for superficial reasons, like his weight; no, someone as cultured and intelligent as you (someone who reads the New Yorker) would never make such a simple mistake. In fact, you, and by extension, Margot, (though the two are one in the same) are perceptive to have noticed Robert's latent villainy.

Cat Person doesn't challenge you. Just the opposite, it's there to confirm your worst suspicions: that the ugly really are deserving of the contempt you feel for them.

The story itself is well written, but it fails as a piece of art, because it engenders and legitimatizes our worst impulses while hiding it under a layer of dissimulation. Put simply, Cat Person isn't bad because the author is a bad writer, but because she is a bad person.

Across the world, millions of young women flocked to proclaim their identification with Margot. A single bad writer isn't frightening. A million bad readers is.

>The story itself is well written
I'm not even being an elitist here, but how? The prose is like, barely passable; high school level shit.

Excellent posts, user. Thank you for posting.

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Kudos to you for the effortpost

Eviscerated

This reads exactly like a “Last Psychiatrist” entry.

TLP would be a little bitch that would defend the author and attack men in general for not living up to masculine standards

Yeah, TLP was a bit hit or miss with their analysis. I meant the compact, punchy writing style which I find extremely appealing.

True, his inexperience and awkwardness is largely self made. Was referring more to his actions in the span of the story itself.
No reason to suspect stalking, it's rather contrary to the view we have of the character. What indication is there of anything wrong with him other than crippling awkwardness? It's pretty clear that her feeling threatened is more due to her inability to state her feelings and have to actually recognize her behavior. Going somewhere she might turn up is not stalking, even if it is creepy. Doesn't exonerate his last actions, sure, but it's a desperate insult, not even as bad as his misunderstandings of her intentions earlier. It's only worse because of, depending on the view, its nearness to the truth or its misogyny.

>That he can't nail basic shit by this age hints at something being seriously wrong with him
i am 22 and posts like this make me want to never talk to girls out of spite. i will become 34 and virgin and not have anything seriously wrong with me, that will show you.
or will it? thats the problem. if i do get to that age maybe it IS because i'm fucked

Your youth enables you to think that way. Imagine living another 12 years, under the full burden of adulthood, without any female romantic contact whatsoever (by extension, seeing all your friends get married; losing touch with them, disappointing your parents, etc...).

This is a post par excellence and has made me glad to have dropped by Yea Forums again for the first time in years.

These are very good posts. Feeling your analysis has a slightly blinkered pov, but not bad, nice effort, excellent contribution etc etc

Just be attractive and they will treat you well no matter what you say or do.

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I've read it a few years back. I don't understand why are people freaking up about this, don't tell me you self-insert as Robbie?

nobody does because he's one dimensional and exists only to say awkward things