By Sharanya Gopinathan
This weekend, a story in The New Yorker hit that perfect sweet spot between being a wholly satisfying piece of work that tapping perfectly into the global zeitgeist. Cat Person is about what Margot, a 20-year-old college student, thinks, does and feels as she texts, meets and sleeps with Robert, a 34-year-old man.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
It follows all the back-and-forth that goes on in Margot’s mind as she meets him, notices the things he says and the way he reacts to her. We see how she notices his changing moods and signals. She mentions at one point, how it felt “as if the dynamic had shifted out of her favour”, the discomfort of making small talk on their date, how he softens towards her when he sees her crying and the ineptness of his kiss.
When they finally make it back to his house, she wishes she could leave but “insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.” You get to know exactly how Margot felt about having sex she didn’t want to have after she felt it was too late to “to stop what she had set in motion”, complete with descriptions that make your uterus curl (it’s a thing, you’ve never felt it?).
Super problematic comedian Amy Schumer once joked that all women have walked away from a sexual encounter at some point thinking, “Gee was I just raped? I think I kinda was…”. The joke was funny the way hysteria can be, because it was just so painfully true.
Cat Person seemed to strike that chord with women everywhere, who hailed it as the “next step” to the #MeToo moment, everything they needed right now, and as the articulation of so many complex feelings and daily processes that women were so acutely, intimately and immediately familiar with.
Oooh, and then there were the men!
As Cat Person lit a strange kind of fire in women over the weekend, so it did in all the men who crossed its path. Many men found it impossible to begin to understand why it resonated so deeply with every woman who read it. They were also unable to absorb any of the ideas encapsulated in the piece – that the power differences between men and women play a huge role in intimate relationships, that men are often terrible at sex, that consent is complex and can be revoked at any point, and that the sexual violence isn’t actually rigidly defined the way it is under law.
A Twitter account called Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) has collated some of the pained responses from men. Here are some of the craziest.
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
— Men React to Cat Person (@MenCatPerson) December 11, 2017
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