Cat Person, or ‘how big girls deal with bad sex’
A short story in ‘The New Yorker’ shows real-life dating mostly comes a distant second to fantasy, writes Donal Lynch
IT would give you some hope that last week the biggest story on social media wasn’t about which famous man had been a sex pest or Conor McGregor’s shameless shenanigans. Eclipsing both of those was the fevered discussion of Cat Person, a short story by Kristen Roupenian, which appeared in The New Yorker and for a brief, shining moment the piece turned the screaming echo chamber of Twitter into a sort of literary salon. Suddenly, everyone had an opinion on Margot and Robert and their horribly awkward sexual encounter.
She is a 20-year-old college student, he is a 34-year-old man and they meet first at the arthouse cinema where she works and he goes to movies alone. They exchange numbers and, over a text conversation, flirt and joke, mainly about his cats — hence the title (it later turns out he may not have cats after all). When they go on a date it all becomes a slowly unfolding modern tragedy, with her constantly inwardly wincing at his lack of wit and insensitivity, while hoping the day will be saved by a roll in the hay. They end up back at his place and she has several changes of heart. Eventually she “bludgeons” her last bit of resistance with some whiskey and finally in “one last rabbity burst” it is all over. Later, when she rejects him by text, he is firstly polite and then fires one last wounded scud at her, calling her a “whore” by text.
That last word was what excised people the most. It turned out the Twitterati was only pretending to have gone all high-minded and literary, actually. Really, it was into Cat Person because the story seemed to be a document of the ongoing gender wars. Some people referred to it as an essay, as though it weren’t fiction at all.
For many women Robert’s horrible parting shot seemed emblematic of the way men can ‘turn’ when things don’t work out and how, when they do ‘turn’, it seems to reveal the undercurrent of disrespect that was there all along. For men the story was about female self-obsession and the memory of being on the other end of mixed messages; one man even wrote an essay for the BBC telling the whole story of the date from Robert’s point of view, explaining why he really made up the story about having cats (he’d heard women like cats), and how he painfully humours her as she fishes for compliments and cries (after she gets asked for ID in a bar), how he felt deceived and foolish after they had sex and she lay there “emanating a black, hateful aura”, and how, later, smarting with rejection, the horrible satisfaction of calling her a “whore” was too difficult to resist.
Maybe the real, cross-party appeal of Cat Person, however, was that it charted the perennial confusion that exists between men and women and showed so well how much easier it is to manage the admin of dating than the dating itself. The Tinder swiping, the texting, the emotions — we are able for all of that, but we struggle with the awkwardness of live conversation and real people who do not correspond to our romantic and sexual fantasies.
Margot and Robbie arrive to their date, having long ago fine-tuned their constructs of each other. They’ve already spent hours texting and “when they landed two or three good jokes in a row there was a kind of exhilaration to it, as if they were dancing”, she recalls. Then she spends the actual date itself fantasising about a future boyfriend whom she could laugh about this idiot with. Meanwhile, he programmatically rides her in every position while she feels like nothing more than a prop for the porn movie that is playing in his head. In the end neither of them did the other one the courtesy of fully leaving their internal world.
Cat Person’s viral reach also came from its meticulous descriptions of what it feels like internally when a date is going wrong. Not wrong enough to bail on it, because you could still use the ego boost of sex, but wrong enough that you wish you could appeal to an imaginary jury of friends to roll their eyes at you. At the beginning of the story Margot wonders if Robert might murder her when they get back to his apartment. By the time they’ve had sex she half hopes he will. Most of us will have gone on some version of this horrible journey.
The story also touched a nerve because after all of 2017’s hysteria about sex pests, Roupenian gives a much more meticulous and nuanced account of the ebb and flow of consent and desire than could currently be had outside of the safety of fiction.
First Margot wants to sleep with Robert, then she gets scared of him, then she feels “a wave of revulsion” but gets on with it because stopping would “require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon”. There is a strong sense that, depending on her level of self-loathing, Margot, with her “pinned stasis” during the shag itself, could very much have said ‘Me Too’ or something like it.
She might have said she was raped or coerced or, at the very least, pressured. But instead she owns the fact that she was responsible for her own awful decision.
In the context of the continuing flow of sex pest allegations this felt almost provocative. On the day the story was published the filmmaker Morgan Spurlock wrote a long tweet detailing an encounter not dissimilar from the one described in the story, which, he says, later resulted in a private rape accusation against him (he has confessed to being “part of the problem”, and to also having paid a settlement to a woman who accused him of sexual harrassment, yet said he remembered the encounter he tweeted about quite differently, and denies rape).
Margot never wonders about whether she consented or not. She knows she did so, but explains that “her revulsion turned to self-disgust and a humiliation that was a kind of perverse cousin to arousal”. She laughs internally about Robert’s inability to get it up properly.
She goes back to her student dorm afterwards, stuffs herself with food, and chalks it all up to experience, eventually even calmly rationalising that Robert hadn’t committed any worse sin than just being bad in bed.
In the current climate, where all women are victims of unfortunate sexual encounters until proven otherwise, Margot’s dogged agency and responsibility made the story even more subversive.
Perhaps the real lesson of Cat Person is more contained in the reaction to it, which showed that good literature is bigger than mere lessons. Vehement think pieces about the rights and wrongs of the gender wars are a dime a dozen but the cool reflection of a short story works precisely because it is not so literal.
There are nuances of meaning which reward re-reading and equally a sense that parsing the arse out a story rather commits the sin of projecting too much meaning onto something too slight. And that, as Robert — the Cat Person himself — could probably attest, is always a mistake.
‘Margot never wonders about whether she consented or not’