Amateur predictions of the sizes of heated online conversations

[brainwane]

Author Isabel Kaplan just wrote a piece in The Guardian about a bad relationship she was in and conflict with her ex about his worry that she would write about him.

I have fairly uninteresting opinions on Kaplan's piece itself. But I've already seen people talking about it online a bit. Here's what I just commented in the MetaFilter thread:

It has been 14 months since our 683-comment thread about the conflict between Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson (a.k.a. "Bad Art Friend" a.k.a. the kidney donor story).

Comparing and contrasting, as I consider whether the already-burgeoning online debate over Kaplan's piece will be as big as that one was:

- (no obvious race-related element)
+ (class element)
+ (sexism)
+ (bad het relationships)
? (the Larson-Dorland conflict was between 2 women, and this conflict is between a man and a woman where the man comes off worse; here on MetaFilter I think that means far fewer people will take his side but I don't know about the larger Internet)
- (no fraught "how we use social media today" element)
- (has not (yet?) stirred friends of the different sides in the conflict to publicly announce their allegiances)
- (does not bring new light re: workshops, magazines, or similar institutions in writing and publishing)
+ (connects to people's opinions of a beloved/well-regarded feminist author)
+ (many of us are writers of memoir-y nonfiction and/or have been written about by such writers)
- (no one here is doing an extraordinarily good altruistic deed that makes some other people uncomfortable to learn about)
+ (controversy over Kaplan's choice to not name her ex in the piece, given that she and her editors could/should have predicted that Internet sleuths would find him quickly)
? (fragmentation of conversation about this controversy into Hive, Post, Mastodon, and other venues instead of? being as concentrated on Twitter)

Comments

[naomikritzer]

I liked this, from the MeFi thread: "I'm watching a very talented and successful friend of mine struggle with her husband's complete inability to respect or support her EXTREMELY non-artistic career. He, like the author's boyfriend, wanted an impressive, educated, ambitious partner...who would abandon all of her ambitions to raise their kids and support him as a wife. She was supposed to be impressive enough to be better than the other wives and make him look good but never so impressive that she had to miss a kid's recital or make him pick up the dog at the groomer's."

[watersword]

If I had a dime for every mediocre dude about whom I've seen or heard this EXACT THING, I'd have ...well, not enough to retire on, but more than I'd like to think about.

[altamira16]

I thought that was the new billionaire flex.

Instead of having the deeply attractive wife which any of the billionaires could do, they were competing over who could get their wives to do their M.D. and Ph.D.s and then leave all that for them.

Mark Zuckerberg's wife has an M.D.
Larry Page's wife has a Ph.D. in bio-informatics.
Sergei Brin's wife is a patent attorney.

I can't tell if that is enough for a pattern or if these women had careers and left them, but I think I read something about that at some point but can't find whatever it was that I read.

[naomikritzer]

Regarding your analysis, I think you're probably right that it won't blow up as much as Kidneygate, but I'll add one note you didn't -- they're both Jewish, which means this COULD turn into intracommunity infighting (there aren't a ton of Jews but our ability to produce hot air from yelling at each other may be unrivaled.)

But overall: when I first encountered the kidneygate story I immediately wanted to discuss my take on it with a friend. I read Kaplan's piece yesterday and didn't think about it for more than about three minutes. So I do not think it'll blow up, but who knows, if the dude weighs in and it turns into a back-and-forth, it could.

[tylik]

I chuckled a bit, but... I mean, this is like every whiny controlling manchild, right? Water is also wet.

[oursin]

I could not help thinking of all the male writers who not only used things that happened involving the women they were in relationships with, they used their partner's actual writing (Scott Fitzgerald using Zelda's diaries and letters, Robert Lowell using Elizabeth Hardwick's letters and telephone conversations during their fraught separation/divorce in a sonnet sequence...). Projection much, I was going.