Comment by bitwize
5 years ago
Roupenian kind of gave a sorry-not-sorry apology. There's a subtext of "I'm sorry I used your friend's personal details, but you're missing the point which is that the story is fake but accurate -- male anger escalates into threats and violence and by calling me out you're adding fuel to the incel fire I'm facing right now because I'm a woman who writes about the bad things men do."
And a deeper subtext of "Remember, sister, I am not the villain here; the patriarchy is."
Maybe Roupenian actually, literally faces threats from men who didn't like her story. It... wouldn't be the first time people harassed a writer for a creative work they took to be offensive.
Nothing justifies threats. But in this case, the reasons that this would offend people -- that it makes untrue and unfair accusations about a real-world case-- are true. Or even worse than one would assume, even, in that it's not autobiographical and does the same about identifiable third parties.
Sorry, but Roupenian didn't get threats over this story because people thought it was making "untrue and unfair accusations about a real-world case"; she got threats because she wrote a story that painted a fictional man in a bad light and the GamerGate types came out in full force. It also painted a fictional woman in a bad light It's worth reading reporting about this story from the time it was published, e.g.,
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/12/16762062/cat-person-e...
Quoting from that article, also:
“Cat Person” does not bear any of the signifiers of a personal essay: It is told in the third person, not the first, and it appears in the New Yorker’s fiction section, with FICTION splashed at the top of the page. Nonetheless, the default response from many seemed to be to treat it as an essay rather than as a short story.
A lot of the criticism I'm seeing in the comments here seem to tacitly be assuming that this essay in Slate is relaying facts about "Cat Person" that were known at, or shortly after, the time of publication. They were not. If anything, the assumption was that the story was somewhat autobiographical -- and from what I can see, it really was somewhat autobiographical. The character of Margot is, again, fictional, but she clearly owes more to her author's experiences than to the essayist's.
Roupenian shouldn't have taken autobiographical bits and bobs from a stranger's life, no. But do keep in mind that she had absolutely no idea that the story was going to go viral this way; it's not like Twitter is regularly aflame with buzzy conversation about the latest short fiction piece in the New Yorker. This was an extraordinary event, and like all too much on Twitter in the last few years, chiefly driven by people who decided the story was something people needed to get outraged by. And, again, their outrage was not over Roupenian's mild appropriation.
3 replies →
It does not in fact make untrue and unfair accusations about a real world case. It is a work of fiction. Until this Slate article came out, there were, like, 4 people in the world that know about the story's inspiration.
4 replies →