Advertisement

The universal truths every woman felt after reading Cat Person

The Cat Person short story on the New Yorker wente viral - © Jonathan Knowles 2015
The Cat Person short story on the New Yorker wente viral - © Jonathan Knowles 2015

On the surface, it is an excruciating bad date story. An account of two people who probably aren't that well suited to each other exchanging stilted texts for weeks before eventually going for an awkward drink, and later finding themselves having bad, depressing sex. But for the hundreds of thousands of women who have read the New Yorker short story Cat Person over the past few days, the tale strikes a rather different chord. 

Because even though it is just that: a tale, a piece of fiction - for women, the story brilliantly articulates the minefield which is dating in 2017

In the story - written by Kristen Roupenian - 20-year-old Margot meets and strikes up a text relationship with 34-year-old Robert after flirting with him at the independent cinema where she works. He is witty, clever and charming over text but seems hard to read and unnervingly awkward in real life.

After a confusing few weeks of texting - in which Margot dreams up innumerable interpretations of Robert, of what kind of man he is, what he sees in her, what he wants from her - she agrees to go on a date with him.

During the date he is irritable and distant. Dejected, she suspects, because she gently mocked him for choosing a terrible movie. Margot alters her behaviour in order to change the direction of the date, making herself seem more innocent and vulnerable in Robert's eyes to boost his ego.

She feels Robert is like “a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear” that she is “skillfully coaxing to eat from her hand”. As he brightens up she worries she may have misjudged him and so, even after a fairly rubbish evening and terrible kiss, she pushes to take things further.

'The thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon' - Credit: Alamy
'The thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon' Credit: Alamy

But when she gets to his house she is gripped by the fear that his shy, awkward guy act has been just that. What if, she muses "the other rooms in the house were empty, or full of horrors: corpses or kidnap victims or chains". She watches him getting undressed and the sight makes her physically recoil, but she proceeds with sex because “the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon”. 

There is so much in Margot's story which thousands of women online are saying they related to, but this is at the centre of it all - that niggling anxiety about what might happen if at any given minute she were to shut it down. 

Most of us have had experienced that feeling. And that is the genius of Cat Person - its ability to articulate these universal truths. 

Exchanging online messages is a minefield

Dating in 2017 tends to go a little like this: see an attractive, normal-enough looking person on a dating app, swipe right, match, start talking. Mindless chatter starts to become increasingly less mindless as you find out more about each other's jobs, hobbies, lives. Someone suggests a drink. You pitch up at a bar four days later to meet a person you know relatively little about but by now have subconsciously created an entire life story around. 

Roupenian says that in those early stages of dating, there is so much interpretation and inference happening that "each interaction serves as a kind of Rorscach test for us". 

"We decide that it means something that a person likes cats instead of dogs, or has a certain kind of artsy tattoo, or can land a good joke in a text, but, really, these are reassuring self-deceptions," she told the New Yorker. "Our initial impression of a person is pretty much entirely a mirage of guesswork and projection."

It's this added level of "mirage" which makes modern dating such a minefield, both for men and women. We have such flimsy evidence to go on to reassure us that the relative stranger we are choosing to date is trustworthy. And the endless texting means that by the time we actually meet someone for a drink, we've created what we perceive to be such a clear narrative about who they are in our heads, they can only fail to meet our expectations. 

Bad Tinder date? This bar promises to help any woman being made to feel uncomfortable
Bad Tinder date? This bar promises to help any woman being made to feel uncomfortable

Women will always be a little bit scared of men

That Margaret Atwood line, "Men are afraid women will laugh at them, women are afraid men will kill them" has never been more apt.  

In the story, Robert becomes sullen and withdrawn when he thinks Margot might be laughing at him. Margot, on the other hand, spends the entire night trying to quash the voice in her head telling her she has misjudged him entirely and he could in fact be a threat. 

These are the thoughts which flash across Margot's mind when she is with Robert, and afterwards she questions why she didn't listen to them. She didn't listen to them because she had no real evidence he might become violent, and to assume so felt wrong and stupid.

As she implies, to extricate herself on the grounds that she no longer felt comfortable and simply didn't want to have sex with him, didn't seem reason enough for her to try to leave and have to deal with his reaction.

Every woman has had a sexual encounter she felt too awkward to stop

The sex is pretty heartbreaking to read. It's that all-too familiar grey area sex. The kind you don't really want but feel you should have. Yes, the sex Margot has with Robert is technically consensual, but she goes ahead with it because to put a stop to it seems like such a monumental effort, and she can't be sure how he might react.

The sight of him repulses her, and she immediately feels uncomfortable as soon as they arrive at his house. And yet she feels she would be better off playing along and having sex which is so terrible it leaves her with "a skin-crawling loathing" the next day.

She has no evidence that he will turn violent, no real reason to be afraid, but it isn't just fear which makes her go along with it, it's her in-built aversion to making people unhappy.

Roupenian has said this speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world.  

"Not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy.

"It’s reflexive and self-protective, and it’s also exhausting, and if you do it long enough you stop consciously noticing all the individual moments when you’re making that choice."

The sad truth is that young women say yes to sex they don't want to have all the time. Why? Because they are conditioned to feel guilty if they change their mind too late.

Ghosting is a necessary evil

Roupenian writes in such a way that you can never feel totally comfortable in hating Robert until the very last word. After Margot ghosts him, Robert essentially stalks her by turning up at her college bar and then texting her a stream of messages asking her what went wrong between them. By his 17th and last message, he simply signs texts: "Whore."

You can believe up to a point (if you're feeling particularly charitable) that both characters have simply created a narrative around their exchange which just happens to have been entirely misguided. No one's fault, just two people who should never really have dated in the first place. But the truth is that only one of them winds up calling the other a whore. 

On Twitter, an account called Men React to Cat Person does what it says on the tin. "This happens to me all the time," writes one. "Women just use me and then cast me aside. Now I'm almost 40 and wasted all my life on girls who use and abuse men." 

So how else, then, should Margot have ended things with Robert? She is left feeling repulsed by their night together, and knows she never wants to see him again, but despite all that has happened between them, she doesn't want to be cruel towards him. She owes him nothing, and yet she is plagued by guilt which stops her from ending it outright. 

Three days later, after Robert has sent her a string of messages to which she has not been able to reply, her roommate tells her to end it. 

“Just tell him you’re not interested!” she says. “I have to say more than that," Margot replies. "We had sex."

Her friend grabs her phone and ends it for her, leaving her feeling sick and worried. And then, days later, he turns up in her college bar in a classic intimidation move. 

Yes, ghosting is awful. We're all guilty of the odd ghost, even if we hate it when we're on the receiving end. But turning up unannounced in someone else's space, watching them with their friends and then messaging them afterwards is far, far worse. Take note, creeps of the world - we don't owe you anything. And, like Margot, we've usually got enough friends to create a human motorcade and escort us far far away from you.