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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25094 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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I present my sketch of Cat Woman, an entirely fictional story:

Kirsten Rubenyan is a lonely, struggling MFA student. At some point she has a fling with a perfectly ordinary and fine enough guy she thinks is a lesser-than (after all, she's working on her MFA and he doesn't even have a car) and eventually that goes sour. She is testy about how the relationship went, so she stalks the social media of an ex he mentioned and spins a tale intermingling lots of concrete identifying facts with projections of how she felt about him.

It turns out surprisingly decent with interesting subtleties and ambiguities, but she realizes that her stand-in protagonist is a bit too unsympathetic, so she tacks on a bit at the end where the guy calls her a whore so readers know who the bad guy is. It bursts onto the scene as an internet sensation, and everyone is able to identify the guy and thinks he's an abusive asshole. The guy falls into a neurotic depressive spiral wondering whether he was as bad as she depicts him, constantly rereading his texts with her to figure out what he did to deserve this fate as his life falls apart, until ultimately killing himself.

Kirsten walks away with a movie deal but vacillates between feeling she's the victim of a mean misogynistic society and having nagging doubts that maybe she did something wrong.

Any resemblance to any real person, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

spins a tale intermingling lots of concrete identifying facts with projections of how she felt about him.

I mean this is kind of the issue. I've got a lot of female friends, some of whom are prone to flights of romantic fancy/chronic daters, and every relationship is undoubtedly re-evaluated at the end through the lens of it having failed/that particular emotional state. I've sat through enough abortive non-relationships where one week it was booking a marriage venue, the next week the ick has been triggered and the potential paramour is/was a horrible ogre the whole time in order to be pretty skeptical of this kinda narrative.

Even sticking in the Whore thing, whilst tilting the story in favor of the feminine to most readers, seems pretty weak to anybody who's actually been in the market

I don't mind the unreliable narrator of the story, really, or an unreliable author even. The issue is people who take the unreliability at face value (Humbert is so romantic!), and an author who drops in an identifiable real person as the target of their ire from a position of relative power.

Is that not just a woman’s standard internal monologue?

Low effort, zero value comment. You've been told before not to post like this. Next time will be a ban.

It seems that it was a woman that wrote the article setting the record straight, so probably not.

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