It’s rare for a literary short story to go viral across social media, but it happened this week with the publication of Kristen Roupenian’s ‘Cat Person’ in The New Yorker magazine. It’s Roupenian’s first published work and the fall-out of #MeToo issues that lie scattered round about is a bit like the gruesome confusion of debris deposited after a tornado. The piece itself is well-written and thoughtfully constructed, but the main reason for all the hoo-ha is its subject matter: a ‘romantic’ liaison in the digital age, with all the potential pitfalls of contextless encounters, instant trust and express intimacy.
The story - written in the third person - centres on a single date between Margot, a 20-year old university student, and a 34 year-old man called Robert (profession unknown but he claims to own two cats, thus the title). The narrative zooms in on the interior dialogue looping around in Margot’s head as she fills in the gaps that emerge as a result of her texting relationship with Robert.
As she crafts and sets him up for their first and only date, we see that she is mentally and emotionally agile and imaginative. She is white, bright and privileged. Robert’s characterisation is deliberately sketchy, but on the slippery spectrum of Margot’s imagination, he oscillates somewhere between a cuddly, lumberjack bear and a serial killer. She joins up dots that are not there and shapes him in to something he really isn’t. Robert, despite the 14 years he has on her, appears less worldly than Margot. He is podgy of mind and body and his prospects don’t seem nearly as good as those of Margot. She sees herself as a young woman in control but it doesn’t quite work out that way. Essentially, she finds herself in bed with someone she doesn’t fancy, doesn’t know, doesn’t trust and whom she fears might even murder her in his apartment. In order not to hurt his feelings, she has disturbingly grim sex with him anyway. Above all, she wants to be nice and not create a fuss by acting on what she is really feeling and thinking. For Margot, there is no enthusiastic consent but does this amount to some form of emotional rape?
In the current climate of public outing, shaming and firing of sexual predators, ‘Cat Person’ offers a deeply nuanced take on the psychology of sex and coercion from a predominantly female perspective. It also exposes the underbelly of relationships in an online age where increasing levels of loneliness and social isolation intensify the need and longing for intimacy with a real human being. Because the closeness engendered in online worlds can only ever really exist in our imagination – and over which we have full editorial control where we are free to join the dots in whatever way we choose - we can, and often do, end up being angry and disappointed by the ‘real thing'. This applies to all online commodities, from a pair of shoes to finding ‘the one’ on a dating website. Despite the cornucopia of fun and romance offered by websites such as Tinder and OkCupid, the hopes of many are quickly dashed as they deflate into nothing more than casual sex, alienation and rejection. No matter how super-fast our broadband may be or how instant our messaging is, building real trust and developing true intimacy takes just as much time as it always did. It’s a slow business with many unpredictable turns and dips in the road. The more you hurry it, the quicker it trickles through your fingers to the point where you are left with nothing but your own cynicism and disillusion. For Margot, all she was left with was a single-word text from Robert calling her a ‘whore’ (all because she decided against a second date).
Roupenian’s short story has opened up a very necessary debate about the role and perspective we take up in relation to other people’s feelings – particularly the way in which women often assume responsibility for the feelings of others, whether it’s someone close to them or someone they barely know at all. The clever thing about Cat Person is that there are no heroes or villains. Both are victims of social conditioning and the narrow roles they are destined to play. If the #MeToo movement shakes up this game set in stone, it will be worth the transient pain it causes and benefit all of us.
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