Cat Person: The New Yorker's viral story that explains #MeToo

Getty Images

On Saturday, The New Yorker uploaded a short story to its website. Cat Person was 36-year-old Kristen Roupenian’s first piece for the American magazine and, according to The New Yorker, in three days the newcomer’s story had become the magazine’s most-read piece of fiction this year. Cat Person had gone viral: on Monday morning it was trending on Twitter, choking Facebook newsfeeds, and whizzing through the ether by email. Roupenian had fewer than 200 Twitter followers before it was published; she now has almost 6,000. Analogue communication kept pace: in offices across the capital readers unpicked the story.

Cat Person is — in Roupenian’s words — an “excruciatingly bad date story” about a younger woman and a younger man: a meet cute gone wrong. Margot, a 20-year-old college sophomore works in the local “artsy movie theatre”; 34-year old Robert is a customer. She flirts with him, mainly as distraction and to get tips, but he comes back the next week, demands her number, and the pair start texting.

There is the familiar technological two-step: a back and forth of messaging that sometimes hurtles forward and sometimes crawls. Margot must always reinitiate when it stalls.

Their first “date” is unceremonious: he buys her snacks at a 7-Eleven. But she is smitten, and when she goes home for the holidays, the texting escalates. His two cats become a silly trope of their flirting. When she gets back to campus, they arrange a date to the cinema. But on the night their conversation lacks the fluency of the virtual badinage, and she hates the film, a Holocaust movie that she suspects he has selected to impress her. Indeed, it looks like it will be an abortive evening — until she suggests a drink to round it off. Three drinks later and they kiss, and then they are at his house.

The sex makes you squirm. Margot finds him unattractive, the situation embarrassing and is reluctant to continue what has started. She does it, but after a post-coital film she makes her excuses and returns to campus.

The next day she agonises about how to phrase the let-down text until she lets her exasperated roommate send a rude, definitive message; in response he sends a plaintively manipulative one — and Margot dines out on the story.

This is how it ends. Except it doesn’t — because Robert turns up in the student bar she’s in one evening and sends her a series of texts, aggression rising in each one. His last word is unambiguous: “Whore.”

In a post-#MeToo world it is clear why Cat Person resonates. On social media women used recurring words: “familiar”, “relatable”, “recognisable”. There was something in the confessional solidarity that felt #MeToo. The call to arms from woman to woman gave a sense that it was required reading for an ascendant movement. “I enjoyed Cat Person in the way that it made me feel sick because there are so many completely universally accurate moments it touches on,” said a 28-year-old Londoner.

“I anticipated that people would respond to the story, but this level of response has gone beyond what I’ve seen with fiction before,” The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who commissioned the story, said. “Any time that fiction is the most-read piece on our website for days, something unusual is happening.”

Cheer Up Luv Photojournalism Project by Eliza Hatch - In pictures

1/16

The New Yorker did not commission the story unawares. “So much of our national discourse right now involves the lines of consensual and non-consensual sex and where those lines are drawn,” Treisman added. “It’s not a story that involves harassment in the workplace or rape or any of those things, but it’s a story about how those lines can become fuzzy.” It is the “grey area” of the sexual encounter that has most affected female readers.

Fundamentally, Margot’s encounter with Robert is consensual. But, in the moment, she does not want to go through with it. She starts to regret what is unfolding before he has undressed her. “The thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming,” Roupenian writes. “Insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done, 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.”

This is the grey area: a sexual encounter you regret, one that you see through because it would be impolite not to. In Margot’s anxiety you sense her age and vulnerability — perhaps a surer woman would have left as soon as she started to doubt her convictions — but you also feel the pervasiveness of a hierarchy that casts women as the subordinate, the person to whom sex happens.

As Roupenian puts it, “Blunt refusal doesn’t occur to Margot.”

Millennial women recognise this impotence. “It’s great we’re talking about damaging sexual encounters that are in the grey area,” said a friend. Others confessed they had their own tales that, like Margot’s, made them squirm the next day as they sought distraction from discomfiting flashbacks.

In the light of Weinstein and his nefarious peers, there is also an uncomfortable frisson in the age gap between the two. Robert is not Margot’s boss but there is a power imbalance that intimidates her. And as she observes when she is in the car to the cinema, she doesn’t know Robert. Their relationship is based, until this point, on three fleeting meetings and lengthy online exchanges: “It occurred to her that he could take her some place and rape and murder her.”

The story is also interested in the online versus offline relationship: it starts out on text and it is here that it is most successful. The discord between their fluency over text and the real date is familiar to anyone who’s ever had a disappointing Tinder date. It reiterates the reality that how we communicate online, especially in the first flushes of dating, is about projecting a character on to the object of the messaging. When Margot first meets Robert she is not especially attracted to him; it is as a textual being that he interests her.

And then there is Robert: domineering, manipulative, ultimately abusive. But Margot’s relative agency in the situation means this is not a simple victim versus aggressor narrative. Moreover, his character arc is not straightforward: at times he is pathetic and pitiable. But he becomes grotesque: a man who is rejected and who must propel his self-disgust back at Margot. The last word — “whore” — destroys any sympathy you might have.

Many women have also encountered a Tinder version of Robert: the man who ends your correspondence by calling you a “slut” for refusing to sleep with them after an abortive date.

Not everyone got it. By Monday afternoon there was a parody Twitter account, Men React To Cat Person (@mencatperson (almost 7,000 followers and counting), which retweeted those men who had failed to see the nuance in the story.

And perhaps it was in these reactions that the real impact of the story is felt: the idea that some men still can’t see the wrong in Robert’s behaviour is dispiriting. Cat Person might be fiction, but occasionally that deals in reality.

Incidentally, you never meet the cats.

David Sexton: 'This is a game-changer for literature’

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi”, Flaubert is supposed to have said. “#MeToo”, ever more victims of unwanted sexual advances have tweeted this year after Weinstein. Pretty much the same claim? Not quite.

Cat Person has been a phenomenal success, a meme already, a few days after its publication in The New Yorker. It’s a game-changer on a level with the publication of Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx in The New Yorker back in 1997. Although Cat Person is not about abusive power relations or even, strictly, non-consensual sex, it’s clearly the first example of #MeToo Lit.

Its author, Kristen Roupenian, admits it was inspired by “a small but nasty encounter I had with a person I met online”. But she maintains it is “not autobiographical; though many of the details and emotional notes come from life, they were accumulated over decades, not drawn from a single bad date”.

And she is aware of its relevance to the #MeToo world in which men and women have been revealed to misunderstand each other so radically. Now here’s this story, opening up that experience through fictionalising it. (Although it is written in the third person, many readers have taken it as fact.) But they might want to see it that way because autobiography is increasingly seen as the only legitimate form of writing. Anything else — imagination, invention and above all inhabiting the subjectivity of a character — is condemned, as Jonathan Franzen lamented, as “an act of appropriation, even colonialism”.

That this story has been found so “relatable” proves anew that fiction can help us to understand others. That seems a small claim, but it’s the greatest to be made for the art.

Not all those who have responded on social media see it like that. One woman asserted: “I don’t think it’s really possible for men to truly understand the feelings stirred up in this story.” Heigh-ho.

Part of the story’s currency comes from the way the characters form a false relationship through texting that doesn’t stand up in real life. But, as Roupenian says, “the gender dynamics, the uncertainty, the fear — that all predates tech, for sure”.

In truth, the way Margot finds herself in bed with a man she doesn’t know or, she soon realises, fancy, resembles nothing so much as a speeded-up version of the recurrent situation in the great 19th-century novels in which women find themselves subjected to older men they barely know, let alone understand or love.

Effi Briest, in Theodore Fontane’s novel of that name, is 17 when she marries a 38-year-old baron. Anna Karenina is 28; her gristly-eared husband 20 years older (for a creepy insinuation of bad sex, there’s little to beat Tolstoy’s line presenting Karenin exerting his marital rights: “‘It’s time! It’s time!’ said he with a peculiar smile, going into their bedroom.”)

And it is part of Cat Person’s evenhandedness (until that crude last word, when Robert puts himself beyond sympathy) that Margot should be so tricked by her misplaced romanticism — “carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect...”

For Margot is a little bit of an Emma Bovary. And her author has drawn on her imagination to create her as a character as well as Robert —“The heart which I studied was my own,” Flaubert owned.

And that’s why Cat Person amounts to more than an addition to #MeToo testimony, or man-denunciation; it belongs to all its readers, including head-clutching men, as an expression of the permanent truth of human wastage: “the waste even in a fortunate life, the isolation of a life rich in intimacy” (William Empson)

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in