What To Read About 'Cat Person'
Over the weekend, a short story about a doomed romance between a 20-year-old woman and a 34-year-old man went unexpectedly viral.
Kristen Roupenian's "Cat Person," published in the New Yorker, inspired countless tweets and nearly as many think pieces about modern dating, consent, feminism and the role of fiction in American culture, among other things. At this point there are literally dozens of blog posts and articles about "Cat Person" — seriously, Google it if you don't believe us — but you probably don't have an unlimited amount of time to spend reading about "Cat Person."
We've rounded up six of the best interviews and essays that shed light on "Cat Person" so you can keep up with the conversation without devoting your entire week to reading about "Cat Person." (You should probably start by reading "Cat Person" itself, but it might be a trip to see how well you can get by conversing about "Cat Person" without ever having read the source material.)
Kristen Roupenian On The Self-Deceptions Of Dating
This conversation between "Cat Person" author Kristen Roupenian and New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman serves as a reader's guide to the story and gives Roupenian a chance to reveal how thoughtful she is about the gender dynamics that "Cat Person" so uncomfortably explores.
In the bar, Margot thinks of Robert as "a large, skittish animal, like a horse or a bear," that she is taming, coaxing to eat from her hand. But what would happen if she stopped trying to coax and pet and charm him — if she said, bluntly, that she doesn't want him, that she's not attracted to him, that she's changed her mind?
That option, of blunt refusal, doesn't even consciously occur to her — she assumes that if she wants to say no she has to do so in a conciliatory, gentle, tactful way, in a way that would take "an amount of effort that was impossible to summon." And I think that assumption is bigger than Margot and Robert's specific interaction; it 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 Uproar Over The New Yorker Short Story 'Cat Person,' Explained
You might reflexively resist the idea of a Voxsplainer on a short work of fiction, but Constance Grady gets into a few under-explored aspects of the popular acclaim and backlash for "Cat Person," including whether the story promotes fat-shaming and the literary world's mixed feelings about a short story going viral.
[T]he idea that few of the people lauding "Cat Story" were all that familiar with short stories stung particularly badly given the current literary moment. Over the past few months, short story fans have been critiquing the role of the short story in the literary world. Short stories are treated like the redheaded stepchildren of publishing, they argue, as though they're worthy of a reader's attention only because the stories are so short that they require very little of it.
"There seems to be an idea that people, with those shortened attention spans of theirs, want quick and easy reads!" wrote Brandon Taylor on LitHub. "If short stories are going to compete with Netflix, then we better make sure that people know that short stories can be read quickly!"
[Vox]
'Bad Sex,' Or The Sex We Don't Want But Have Anyway
Though this essay by Ella Dawson doesn't explicitly discuss "Cat Person," Dawson mentions in a note that it was inspired by "Cat Person," and it's not hard to see the connection. Dawson offers a sharp feminist analysis of the common phenomenon of women having sex they neither want nor enjoy with men.
Young women say yes to sex they don't actually want to have all of the time. Why? Because we condition young women to feel guilty if they change their mind. After all, you've already made it back to his place, or you're already on the bed, or you've already taken off your clothes, or you've already said yes. Do you really want to have an awkward conversation about why you want to stop? What if it hurts his feelings? What if it ruins the relationship? What if you seem like a bitch?
(Not to mention the mental calculus women have to do every time we reject a man: What if he becomes violent? But if you're genuinely afraid for your safety if you don't comply, bad sex can cross a line into assault.)
Why 'Cat Person,' A New Yorker Short Story, Is Essential Reading For This #MeToo Moment
Your guess why "Cat Person" went viral is as good as mine, but one popular theory is that the themes of Roupenian's story feel especially timely at a moment when powerful men are getting outed as sex criminals left and right. The Washington Post's Lisa Bonos makes a compelling case that the type of unpleasant but not violent encounter described in "Cat Person" stems from the same power imbalances and toxic masculinity that allow sexual harassment and assault to flourish.
A woman enduring bad sex in her personal life is linked to her not being able to escape it in other settings. Sara McClelland, an assistant professor of psychology and women's studies who studies the concept of "intimate justice," or how inequality shows up in sex, notes that "how people make demands at the intimate level is absolutely connected to how they make demands at the social and political level." In women's stories of sexual assault and harassment, McClelland sees women starting to make demands to be safe. "What people have said very smartly is: I didn't have power to change this situation. If you don't have economic power, you're not able to make what we might think of as sort of intimate power exchanges with someone who's being abusive."
'Cat Person' And The Impulse To Undermine Women's Fiction
Many critics noticed that some of the people who shared "Cat Person" on social media referred to it as an "essay" or an "article" rather than a short story, but no one dissected that strange factual error as intelligently as the Atlantic's Megan Garber in this essay.
So many of American culture's creaky misogynies have a way of leaking into fiction. There's the wearying, and longstanding, mandate for writers to create female characters who are likable. (Claire Messud: "If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble.") And the common tendency to dismiss the literary products of women writing about women's lives as "chick lit." But there's also the fact that women writers' characters are often simply assumed to be autobiographical, as if their authors are not possessed of enough moral imagination to create characters who are fully fictionalized. While male authors tend to be given the luxury of fiction — Jonathan Franzen will say what he wants in a New York Times op-ed, and his work will still be evaluated on its own terms in that paper's Book Review — women are often not afforded that basic professional courtesy. Wallace Stegner, in a 1990 interview with The Paris Review, noted that "the kind of roman à clef reading determining biographical facts in fiction is not a good way to read. Read the fiction." Jami Attenberg put the matter more personally, and more bluntly, in The New York Times earlier this year: "Stop Reading My Fiction as the Story of My Life."
9 Men On Seeing Themselves In 'Cat Person'
Enough men hated "Cat Person" to inspire a short-lived Twitter account called Men React to Cat Person. But men's responses to the story aren't monolithic, so The Cut's Anna Silman asked nine men for their uncensored thoughts on the story, which shed a lot of light on how much men and women's experiences of sex, dating and fiction differ.
"Cat Person" shook me. It made me uncomfortable. It angered me and it made me sad. I saw Robert as a pathetic oaf from the get-go. Why was he by himself at the movies in the first place? He reeked of self-loathing and insecurity. I've been told, though I don't agree, that there always seems to be someone with the "power" in any relationship. I think society has made me believe that the younger, more beautiful counterpart, who can easily go and find someone else, would be the individual with the power, and therefore, the control in a relationship. Especially when the counterpart is so clearly insecure and jealous. "Cat Person" made me realize this is not the case. That there is another power dynamic that exists, which is much less tangible, but drastically more powerful. There was this moment of absolute sickness when I felt how Margot had essentially withdrawn her consent to move forward in her mind, but went ahead anyways, because of this pressure she felt from Robert and the concern for what he would think if she stopped short. It was illuminating and absolutely sickening to me. I hate Robert and deeply hope that I'm not him, but I think we — men — all are.
[The Cut]
