"TV is all made up anyway. Why not join the fun? "

October 4, 2016 2:12 PM

Rachel Brewson, Dating Editor, has written for xoJane and Thought Catalog, loves craft beer, the beach, and warm LA nights, and does not exist. The team of men behind Rachel Brewson, the fake woman whose breakup went viral.
posted by Artw (19 comments total)

Hey there, Balloon Girl.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:19 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

...marketing consultant Kenny Hyder...still prides himself on what a great job his team did

:thinking face:
posted by Annika Cicada at 2:22 PM on October 4, 2016 [9 favorites]

FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE
posted by corb at 2:26 PM on October 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

I have always thought that xoJane and Thought Catalog were fake-ass journalism, and this doesn't surprise me at all.
posted by chinese_fashion at 2:33 PM on October 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

What we need is a B Ark.
posted by Faint of Butt at 2:53 PM on October 4, 2016 [17 favorites]

I have always thought that xoJane and Thought Catalog were fake-ass journalism, and this doesn't surprise me at all.

Thank God for Jezebel, right?
posted by Going To Maine at 2:55 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

I am a real centipede loving woman who wrote a real thing for xojane, but later I regretted it because I realized their clickbait wasn't just "gross" things like bugs or pimples (which is OK and even funny to me) but morally gross people.
posted by melissam at 2:58 PM on October 4, 2016 [12 favorites]

"What is happening!"

You and me both dude.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 3:00 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

is there nothing an all male marketing team can't ruin
posted by poffin boffin at 3:08 PM on October 4, 2016 [40 favorites]

UNPOPULAR OPINION: I Love House Centipedes

!!!!!!!!!
posted by Artw at 4:00 PM on October 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Hijacking this thread to talk about house centipedes would give those men just the attention they deserve.
posted by chairface at 4:12 PM on October 4, 2016 [2 favorites]

Rachel Brewson, who "...loves craft beer, the beach, and warm LA nights." Uh huh.

Review Weekly, he explained, was “a content site that we did to run affiliate programs through.” The concept is called arbitrage: “You pay for traffic and then monetize it and try to turn a profit. But because of my background in SEO, it was natural to start some content and try to get some free traffic as well.”

and

Katz appears to have gotten his start in moving companies: he owns one called Budget Van Lines, based in Nevada and California. In 2011, the company was one of several who were the subject of a Senate Committee’s investigation. Senator John D. Rockefeller of West Virginia wrote a letter to Katz questioning him about the company’s alleged practice of holding household goods “hostage,” hanging onto customers’ stuff until they agreed to pay “exorbitant fees,” as Rockefeller put it, that weren’t part of the original agreement.

So a bunch of dude leeches decided to try and leech off that sweet, sweet ad money by getting a bunch of clickthroughs to their fake-ass company. Well, at least they're screwing the ad companies by presenting fiction as fact, rather than holding peoples' stuff hostage.

Ctrl-F "bustle" = no results. Interesting.
posted by Existential Dread at 4:16 PM on October 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

The whole office, they wanted to be treated differently because they were like creative writers.

That's right. I need single-origin coffee and a neck pillow before I can pretend to be a person on the internet.
posted by betweenthebars at 4:45 PM on October 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

Whoa... I think I remember this. I read it once (I check out XO Jane now and then) and figured it didn't sound healthy but was her business and filed it in "not my circus, not my monkeys" (I rarely read the XO Jane comments, so I had no idea it attracted the response it did).

Gods, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.
posted by Deoridhe at 5:14 PM on October 4, 2016 [16 favorites]

is there nothing an all male marketing team can't ruin

Pre-ruined things, like Trump and the comics of Frank Miller?
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:45 PM on October 4, 2016 [5 favorites]

He said it was unlikely that anyone would ever find the male character, who he planned to keep alive indefinitely. “I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’m going to keep doing it. It works.”

I'm imagining a 21st-century morality fable where misfortune causes this guy's own life to wither, while the character's becomes more fleshed out and real but is known publicly through the face of an actor he hired or something, and he finds himself trapped in a torture of Tantalus^{^} where he lives vicariously through the character and yearns to have all of the things the character has, but never can.
posted by XMLicious at 1:14 AM on October 5, 2016 [6 favorites]

What we need is a B Ark.

I've made this joke dozens of times in the last ten years and one person got it.

It's becoming increasingly clear that we're on the B Ark.
posted by Sphinx at 3:14 AM on October 5, 2016 [14 favorites]

I really liked Jane when it was a dead tree magazine. Shame it's gone downhill in the online version since Jane had her health issues.
posted by the uncomplicated soups of my childhood at 5:52 AM on October 5, 2016

Dwelling on this later, two sections stood out to me:

"“I didn’t like what was going on there,” he said in his pleasant Israeli accent. “The whole office, they wanted to be treated differently because they were like creative writers. So I got turned off with all this and I just cut it. I had to stop what was going on and fired everybody.”"

"“Yeah,” [Hyder] said. “But these aren’t real people who matter. It’s some women’s site that has a bunch of content on it. It’s not a real political discussion or a religious debate. I’m not doing anything malicious. I’m not trying to control the world. I’m just trying to get activity.” "

I think this ties into the Capitalism's Crisis of Care thread from earlier - there is a devaluing of the humanity of others which seems to be part and parcel with a capitalistic ideology. The comments about people wanting to be treated like they were doing creative writing because they were doing creative writing, or the implication that a woman's site is neither real nor important is fundamentally about devaluing vast swathes of other people and dismissing their importance. The idea of assigning cost to things people usually do for free doesn't actually counter this issue, it just comodifies it.

The dismissal itself often falls along axes of discrimination - women, the poor, black people, Latin@s, disable people - but it's the ease of the dismissal and how blatant and yet unremarked it is which is haunting me. I can't help but feel as if picking apart and figuring out how to counter this dismissal, how to value without comodifying, is central to moving forward - in terms of social justice and equity at least.
posted by Deoridhe at 4:48 PM on October 5, 2016 [6 favorites]