“Cat Person” and Me
slate.com
slate.com
I made plans to rent an apartment with some girls from my econ class the following year, but they told me they’d changed their minds when they found out about my older boyfriend.
I'm a woman and I blog. I have made a stab at writing fiction, often loosely based on my life. People tend to assume it is 100 percent true.
When I was getting divorced, if I mentioned my future ex was blond, men who were blond would act like I had just announced "You are in like Flynn!" Brunets who were interested in me acted like kicked puppies, as if I had just announced "I am never, ever dating you -- yes, you -- in specific!!!!"
I learned to scrub such details from my comments and signal as little as possible about my past relationships so as to have some hope of breaking whatever negative patterns were a part of my life. I didn't want men self selecting or self rejecting to pattern match to a past relationship when I was trying to sort out what actually worked.
I dislike the general trend of vilifying men who are involved with younger women, often with no nuance at all. Often age difference alone is sufficient to assume the absolute worst.
Although I absolutely support things like #MeToo -- support the idea that women should not be silenced about the bad things that have actually happened to them -- I am disturbed and concerned by the general trend that the world seems to think all heterosexual relationships are inherently abusive or something. We hear a great deal about the bad, the things gone wrong, the dark side and sometimes it seems like there are no good examples out there, no discourse on "This is what a good relationship look like."
Being able to identify bad actors and protect oneself is a good thing. Being unable to identify something positive or pursue it because everyone around you assumes the worst and feels entitled to butt in is not a good thing.
I wish we could take steps towards something more positive. That sometimes seems impossible in the current climate.
Societal pressure to vilify relations between older men and young women comes mostly from women. Studies (please google it) show that man of all ages 18 to 60 are looking for women 18 to 24. It has a perfectly clear biologic explanation: health and fertility, key factors for healthy children and the viability of the species. But that puts women, especially over 30, at a huge disadvantage if they don't have already children and husbands, so they punish the young women in these relations for obvious reasons.
The difference in maturity means it's harder to relate. I personally wouldn't want a young girlfriend, despite finding them sexually attractive, because I could not imagine trying to share my life with them - our interests would be too divergent. I think there's a real risk, when one party in a relationship is much less mature, the other party may have an unbalanced or unhealthy set of interests - interests that may end up hurting or harming the less mature party.
And the 2nd part also needs a citation especially the villify part. While I am aware of the studies that you are referencing, they usually focus on sexual attraction. But relationships are not only based on sexual attraction.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/online-d... - see the chart by age
https://metro.co.uk/2019/02/22/men-regardless-age-will-alway...
There are dozens of articles and several studies that confirm strong ageism in men preferences for relations. Few mention that single career women over 35 are the most unhappy people and a quarter are on antidepressants. From here to taking action against the relations of their age group men with younger women is a tiny logical step.
No idea what are the "certain circles around the web", but the overused word "toxic" gives me an idea: it it men in general? I saw the Gillette commercial.
Long time I hadn't that much of a laugh browsing HN.
Doing that with a woman his age is almost impossible, fertility and children health when the mother is over 30 is declining rapidly.
In any case, that made me think about life a bit different. In the same situation I would do the same.
Well said. There seems to be some larger theme going on, not just about relationships but also about society in general - we do spend a huge amount of energy shining light on the darkness, and that is certainly valuable, but very little time imagining how things -should- be - a much harder task.
I'm also disturbed by the idea that all of society, all accomplishment, achievement, and maybe even all relationships are the result of power dynamics. It's a simple and juicy, easy to digest, view of the world. The real "Charles" sounds like a thoughtful and troubled person. Society at large is similar - as the author writes "alone with [the] memories of what really happened".
Is it possible the "steps towards something positive" is more conversations about sadness - or least, about ambiguity? "We are all unreliable narrators". Excellent essay.
Male here.
I think OP is referring to "romantic" relationships; I don't think it's true that they necessarily result from power dynamics. But I do think that all relationships, including friendships, work relations, and family relationships, have power dynamics swirling around them. I dispute that relationships are generally, or always, "the result" of power dynamics. I have a tendency to pedantry, so I may be in full agreement with OP.
That relationships involve power dynamics is unavoidable, I think. One of the ways we learn about the person we are relating with, is to push here, poke there, and observe the response. At the same time, we learn more about ourselves.
But attempts at domination are pathological, especially in romantic situations, and I think unusual.
I haven't read the short story, just the linked Slate article, and this one from the Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/the-cat-person...
The girls did not even implied abusiveness in the story. Nor that they would be fine if it was lesbian relationship.
You can thank the dominance of Foucault in the academy for that.
While I think I agree with the thrust of your post, this "idea" sounds right to me. It has a similar feel to statements like "all humans are biased" or "you are a product of your culture"—a commonality which underlies life. Acknowledging these forces makes it easier to discover the ideal relationship/life/etc.
Exactly .... Since a majority of the relationships are heterosexual, relatively most problematic relationships are also heterosexual, that would kind of feed into the "all heterosexual relationships are inherently abusive" mindset
In the real world it is more nuanced (and nobody really cares)
It's definitely no problem to me that people do not want to flat-share with a couple where one partner is 33 y/o and the other in, or shortly after, their "senior year of high school", which if a web search is to be believed usually means 17 year old turning 18. I'm not talking about the law re:that relationship which depending on the jurisdiction might be 100% legal, but these housemates are absolutely in their right to not want to have anything to do with that. Personally, if i was a 18-19 year old looking for a flat to share, I probably also would like to avoid regularly meeting the type of 30-year old that dates a teen, despite the fact that in the author's specific case it was apparently fine and also still fine on retrospect.
As 42 year old your comment sounds to me like the one that people not wanting to rent a flat with someone that has a black partner is perfectly fine because they might not want to meet that kind of people.
Some older men are interested in younger women. And some younger women are interested in older man. Assuming that this automatically means they have character flaws worthy of ostracism is very prejudicial.
No, because a relationship between a teenager and someone in their 30s is seen as 'more likely than not to be exploitative'.
I've only known two people who fit that bill, and as a third-party observer, both of them seemed incredibly sleazy and manipulative. I'm sure that there are exceptions, but most people would correctly see that kind of age gap as a huge red flag.
Unless by more likely that not you mean a bit more likely than average relationship between a doctor and a waitress.
EDIT:
I'm sorry. While rephrasing the claim I changed its meaning. Please disregard my comment.
The usual guidance to “mind your own business” doesn’t really work here because who I live with and where is entirely my business.
Age gaps are not an immutable characteristic. Nor are they culturally common in the USA. So they are fair game for discrimination just like any other exercise of free association.
And yet discrimination against people that display those voluntary behaviors would also be strongly frowned upon.
I don't think it's due to some innate nature of gender gaps. It's pure prejudice. "We don't like people like that because we believe people like that are less moral than us."
Maybe the time will come where ageism will raise to the same status as transphobia, but currently as you notice it's far from it.
I'd like to see some research to back that claim that over 50% relationships with significant age gap are exploitative.
These two statements are not identical.
Or are you referring to the difference "significant age gap" vs "30 year old and teenager"?
If so I conceed. Those kinds of relationships are so incredibly rare among all relationships that I have no idea about the statistics there.
I'm not claiming that, I'm claiming that it's a common belief about them.
What about a 70yo male and a 33yo female? Still exploitative?
That's not what was going on. She was making separate living arrangements from him and had already moved out of her parental home and was living in a dorm and going to college.
Their choice could have helped push her into living with him as the easy answer in the face of prejudice making other choices harder for her. This could have helped make her into a victim instead of someone who once dated an older man and broke up with him and apparently had a better-than-average early relationship according to the description she has given.
What I see around me is a lot of social stratification by age.
Get to know some people older and younger than you, and by "get to know" I mean spend a lot of time together. The "youngsters" get to see that it's not all roses and happily ever after, the "oldsters" get to see optimism and alternative points of view.
At a get-together one of the older couples announced they were celebrating their 44th anniversary; one described it as, "24 wonderful years, and 20... of the other kind." The other nodded in agreement. Staying together (A) takes work and (B) is totally worth it (both points from our "mere" 37 years of marriage).
Thanks for writing this. We need more women saying this.
There's a disturbing conversation I've seen numerous times (mostly on Reddit) that progresses something like this:
1. Someone (usually a woman) says, "It's a problem when men do <X harmful behavior>".
2. Someone (usually a man) says, "Not all men do <X harmful behavior>".
3. Someone (usually the original person) says some combination of "That's a derailing argument", "That's such a minor issue compared to the issues women deal with", and/or "We need to deal with the women's issue first".
What people need to realize here, is that this is validating the incel narrative that women just hate men. That is literally saying to men, "Eh, whether or not all men are rapists/abusers/etc. isn't important enough to talk about." There's nuance here, I understand it's not those peoples intention to accuse all men of these things. But by refusing to correct themselves when they make this overly-broad generalization, people who do this are making an accusation against all men, intentional or not. If people are going to put a "All men do X" narrative into the world, some men are going to react with "All women do X". That doesn't mean it's okay for those men to do that--it's men's responsibility to gain a nuanced understanding of the world as well. But we should also recognize that this IS going to be the natural result of making statements about an entire gender.
I'm in my 30s and I'm in some communities that put me in contact with men of a wide variety of ages, including men in their early 20s. It's absolutely heartbreaking to me to see how men who have come into age in recent years feel about themselves and about women. We can't continue to tell young men that they're inherently sexist. We can't continue to be surprised when telling young men that they're inherently sexist results in them giving up on treating women well. No one benefits from this.
And to be clear here, it's not just women (and not all women!) propagating these harmful narratives. This is something all of us can work on. I hope for my part that I've helped the men in my life to come to a healthy view of both themselves and women.
Like, dont bring up #meetoo if you want diascuss non abusive relationship. Dont bring non abusive relationships when someone talks about own abuse.
This entire thread is about a lady who did just that. (After all, at the very least, the short story's anti-hero is being verbally abusive in his last-mentioned text message to the protagonist.)
And if you mean the other article, that is about good relationship.
And to be clear: I think it's vitally important that women need to be able to speak freely and openly about abuse they've received from men. All I would like is for that to happen without accusing all men of being abusive.
I feel often like the public discourse about relationships has really shifted, from one focused on two people and their interactions, to one where it's increasingly about evaluating the male and even more so, the degree of problems they are causing or not. There's little recognition of the role that the woman (or non-male) in the relationship might play in causing relationship difficulties, or for the possibility that a pair of individuals might just be a bad match for each other. It's as if the female is this neutral party, removed from involvement, passively receiving whatever treatment, good or bad, that they receive. I'm not saying that "women sometimes deserve" anything; I'm not saying anything about anyone deserving or not deserving anything. What I'm saying is that increasingly it seems the relationship is evaluated as if its quality is equated with what the male does, and even some judgment about the male as good or bad globally, decontextualized, as a person.
I say all of this not in a form of whataboutism, or to deny the problems that women have faced, and face, in relationships and society. I guess I'm just concerned about the way these public discussions seem to be occurring, and their consequences for cultural norms and assumptions, and for individual experiences in relationships. If the goodness or badness of a relationship is so dependent on whether or not the male is "good" or "bad", where does it take things? Does that implicitly accede power to the male? What about the opportunity for development of a relationship (or self), as something that both people work on? Are we encouraging a new form of male chauvinism?
There's many layers that the linked essay could be approached: the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the rights to personal experience, and the reputation of the boyfriend (and whether that's even needed if it's fictional). The author is also writing about her experience, and rightfully so. But the real tragedy in my mind is that this is all occurring in the public sphere as if it's some judgment on Charles, who is now dead, did not and cannot have any voice.
The grandparent comment is extremely valuable. However, consider again the framing: "we hear a great deal about the bad, the things gone wrong, the dark side and sometimes it seems like there are no good examples out there, no discourse on 'This is what a good relationship look like.'" Again, is this implicitly referring to "what a good male looks like?" What is a "good relationship?" Is it one where the woman is free from negative experiences? Is it one without difficulties? Do good relationships always seem like good relationships? Might it be the case that sometimes what seems bad might actually be good, or that sometimes good relationships have difficult periods?
I worry that the way relationships are framed in public discussions are becoming seriously distorted, around unrealistic ideas one way or another.
This situation is a perfect microcosm of how the media / contemporary culture at large will take a very human situation with complex personalities and shape it to fit the ideological narrative. The actual story (this link) is nuanced and filled with insights on modern dating culture, while the semifictional New Yorker piece is pretty one-dimensional.
As far as I’m concerned, the only villain here is the author of Cat Person. She apparently got a million dollar book deal out of it, while Charles had his reputation ruined and “died suddenly” which sounds like code for suicide to me. The author of this Slate article even seems to be gaslighting herself into thinking the fictional piece was more true than her real experience.
People internalize that children left alone will reanact Lord of the flies and people reading this will internalize that every relation with significant age difference is an abusive relation filled with negative emotions and dynamics.
Cat Person is great illustration of this, where it borrows endearing details from true healthy relationship but then serves the reader the image of exploitative and abusive, repulsive older partner. Furthering prejudices some readers already had and pushing them further away from accurate description of reality which is really varied as the relationship that was basis of this story shows.
Sometimes even though there's no repulsion, exploitation or abuse and older man just gets abandoned as the young girl finds new friends and there's just mature moving on without any abuse or retibution.
Then eschew popular works of fiction. Talk to a reader or a book club, and get some suggestions, maybe? All books have this problem, but some less so than others. If you're aware of this issue, then reading a wider variety of voices can only help your understanding of the world.
If I wanted to read books that try to reflect reality as good as possible I'd stick to manuals and textbooks.
The problem is a general one that people are being tricked that purely entertainment pieces give them some insights into nature of reality and people. Fictional literature is held as a source of insight of human condition but the parts that make it interesting are pure fantasy of one skewed mind.
But what do you think is the ideological narrative Cat Person aims to fit?
As they say, if you gotta ask what jazz is, you ain't never gonna know.
This story isn't really "inspired by real life events." It's a real story of a real person, sloppily modified to fit the zeitgeist's value system.
That's a pretty big assumption.
You have no idea why or how Charles died. The only thing you know is it was sudden. There are plenty of non-suicide reasons that young(ish) people die suddenly such as being in some kind of accident or, as happened to an old school friend of mine when we were in our 30s, one day his heart simply stopped beating. There are many others.
The respectful thing to do here is not to speculate on how or why Charles died: we don't know because the author has chosen not to tell us. Perhaps she doesn't know either. Not all families want to share this kind of information.
A person who was described as being very sensitive died quite soon after his reputation was (falsely) ruined among his social circle. I think it's pretty relevant to the situation.
I liked the “Cat Person” story when it came out, but I would much rather see this essay be made into a movie
Don’t get me wrong, turning that into a story with a few too many true-to-life details would absolutely weird me out too. But I’m not sure she’s a stalking villain.
Most of them don't wildly profit from what their partners might possibly consider to be at least a slightly unsavoury activity though.
It isn’t the story of this woman’s relationship, she herself attests to that. It’s a story inspired by the evidence of her relationship. If asked I bet a lot of authors would say they base their stories on some kind of real world experience, does that mean they all owe royalties?
IMO one of the really interesting parts of this essay is the ambiguity. She’s upset, and upset at the author, but isn’t entirely sure if what happened was actually wrong, or what any of it means. I find that a lot more powerful than trying to cast people as unambiguous heroes or villains.
Cat Person was a work of fiction. There wasn't much ambiguity about that.
> “Cat Person,” and the cultural reception to it, feels connected to the broader literary debate over “autofiction”—writing that, in its raw and confessional style, seems to blur the boundaries between the real and the invented.
The reality is, you don't; you never once thought about how Updike used his own relationships and those of his family and acquaintances as fodder. You care about this particular story for reasons other than principles. That's fine, but we should start by being honest about it.
As a relatively famous silicon valley person, it might actually happen to you some day, and although it would probably never happen to me I can imagine empathizing with you if you ever ended up as the bad guy in a short story.
I would certainly be bothered if a close friend or family member did that to me in a manner that could ever lead strangers back to me. Nor would I ever publish such a piece about one of my acquaintances without their permission.
I find the notion that such behavior could be socially acceptable quite strange.
William Randolph Hearst certainly wasn't one!
In fact, libelous material is by definition fictional - imputing someone's character by making stuff up.
Now I think that this is fiction, but it is definitely skirting the line and the author should probably have changed a few more details.
This is a bizarre demand to make of a work of fiction. How many fictional stories mention they are fiction in the body of the work?
Not trying to imply that you are one of course, but that’s about as much detail she changed from the real life story—just the names. And now it was so successful that there’s going to be made about it starring Cousin Greg from HBO’s Succession. People love to gossip and will eventually put two and two together.
It's mostly fictional but apparently it comes across as true to many people on first glance. There is also a real world person which apparently many readers see an obvious link to. Regardless of how it all looks to you, surely you can appreciate how such a situation could give rise to a negative viewpoint?
It's not fiction. It's taking the personal relationship of two people and editorialising it to turn it into something it wasn't - for personal gain and political status - while causing the people in it genuine pain and grief.
It's a form of appropriation. If it was mostly fictional it could have started from a different premise and used different characters.
The character space that authors can work in is unimaginably vast, and there was no need at all to use personal experiences to "borrow" detail when some imagined experiences would have done the job just as well.
In reality the the impact of the story comes from the people it's based on - not from the creative imagination of the author, who took their private lives and feelings and distorted them into a saleable feminist parable.
She didn't take two fictionalised people and give them someone's perfectly normal, boring sex life.
Instead she took two real people including detailed descriptions of them accurate enough that they could later be correctly identified.
She then twisted their relationship to make one a victim and the other, her former romantic parter, a cartoon misogynist.
Those that recognise the people involved may well still think "well there's no smoke without fire" regardless of her claim that it's all "fictional".
"Judge Robert D. Sack of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, author of the defamation treatise, Sack on Defamation: Libel, Slander and Related Problems, describes when a libel suit might result from a work of fiction:
“Where the defendant invents defamatory dialogue or other defamatory details in what purports to be nonfiction, uses actual people as fictional characters, or bases fictional characters on living persons but fails sufficiently to disguise the characters, so that the fictional characters are understood to be ‘of and concerning’ their living models, liability for libel may result.”" (emphasis added)
https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/first-amendment-center...
For example, "Bibulous bishop". That could be any bishop, except that the space for the solution, and the other intersecting answers, narrow the field considerably, to the point that the solver is forced to conclude that Bishop XYZ is the solution.
If you follow the Assange case, then you might see a strong similarity with the idea of "jigsaw identification".
I think this is one of those threads where we're all trying to reason axiomatically about what fiction is, and it's taking us to some very weird nerd-alternate-reality places. We can just approach the problem empirically; in the 20th century alone, there are dozens of fiction writers who are famous for doing what the author of Cat Person did.
Flaubert famously quipped, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi!". In the same vein, the ugly side of Cat Person's male character may not have derived merely from defamatory stereotypes, as many readers could have been forgiven for assuming, rather it may, too, have been drawn from life.
Very good article. Moving, and oddly redemptive.
What are you trying to say? This comment made me the most upset×angry I've ever been on HN. Feels like an abuse of language.
Perhaps the only crime here, if crime there be, is an artistic one: the story is just a bit shallow.
I think the essay is more subtle than that. She ends by describing "what's difficult about having your relationship rewritten and memorialized", rather than any sharp criticism. She describes herself as angry and frustrated earlier, but having appreciated that Roupenian was sorry.
It's quite nuanced. A lot of the essay also focuses more on other peoples (real world) interpretation of her relationship, rather than on the fictional story ("My relationship with Charles was full of shame brought on by people who assumed the worst—a predatory man asserting his power over an innocent girl").
Part of the essay focuses on how the story "blurs the boundaries between the real and the invented" but also how that affected both Charles and her in that it made him question whether he had acted like the fictional character, and "sometimes, to my own disappointment, I find myself inclined to trust Roupenian over myself" about her relationship.
The essay is just as much about how we tend to assume a lot of fiction is truer than it is when it includes even some details from reality - to the point where Nowicki finds herself trusting a total strangers interpretation of her own relationship - a relationship said stranger had never observed directly.
A key line to me is "I’ve wondered a lot about the line between fiction and nonfiction, and what license is actually bestowed by the act of labeling something as fiction." This seems to get at the core of what this essay is, with Roupenian being more of a prop to discuss this subject grounded in a real situation than a villain per se. Almost every negative about Roupenian is accompanied by a counterpoint, that while not entirely negating what is often critical does soften it.
E.g "At times I’ve convinced myself that she wanted us to know it was about us" - something that if true would certainly tip Roupenian into villain territory - is followed by "But then I remind myself that when she wrote “Cat Person,” she was still in her MFA program. No one knew her name. Submitting a story to the New Yorker was a long shot, and a piece of literary short fiction had never gone viral in this way."
It also goes towards making the argument that Roupenian was likely more toughtless than malicious, and that her thoughtlessness was somewhat understandable and would have meant very little if not for accidents of circumstance.
Does it put Roupenian in a somewhat negative light? Sure. It was stupid and thoughtless of her not to change details. But villain? I don't think she's important enough even to this essay, to be the villain of it. She plays a perfunctory part of a much more interesting story about Alexis and Charles, their relationship, and how seeing it reflected in the fictional story affected them.
It does make you wonder how much you can trust supposedly slice-of-life fiction, if a friend of one of the "characters" finds the story a poor representation of the person they knew. I suspect some of the darkness in Roupenian's stories comes from a twist in her own perspective, not necessarily from the awfulness of men she's dated.
And a deeper subtext of "Remember, sister, I am not the villain here; the patriarchy is."
It's a #MeToo era-story which is used to narrate supposedly 'real world threats'.
The reason that some might be upset, is because you have a real world story of a 'nice guy' - who was used as the basis to narrative a story about how 'men are bad' aka a warning about 'toxic masculinity' etc..
Here is 'The Atlantic's headline of the original 2017 publication:
"The depiction of uncomfortable romance in "Cat Person" seems to resonate with countless women." [1]
Here is NPR's headline:
"'Cat Person' Author's New Book Evokes #MeToo Themes" [2]
WaPo:
"Opinion: ‘Cat Person’ is a next step in the #MeToo movement" [3]
So that's literally the first three pieces that came up in the Google search - and those three publications are 'major, respected, institutions'. All three are using the 'creative fiction' to promote a narrative about men's supposed actions etc..
It's obviously not just about 'some random bit of fiction that happened to be about real people and those real people are upset'.
If this was Stephen King, who used his 'Real Life Doctor' as the inspiration for some diabolical character - that would be the story. But there wouldn't be any elevation of the story into some kind of narrative in that case ... so it'd just be about a possibly upset Doctor.
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/12/a-vir...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2019/01/13/684894872/cat-person-author-s...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2017/1...
Edit:
Here's a gem [4] it's literally an academic publication using the original story as basis for describing narcissism in the role of the oppression of women.
"I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today—well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance."
This is pseudo-intellectual hyperbole (published!) over a story that amounts to a giant lie.
It's intellectual bigotry.
[4] https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...
You both seem the be making the same fundamental error, neglecting the thrust of this article, and the original piece: things are ambiguous, and in that ambiguity, we can contemplate, and people find that contemplation fascinating
This is literally a case study in 'narrative creation'.
That's exactly what that is.
They are even including the same hashtag in their pieces so that you can 'hashtag along' with the narrative!
This is almost every major publication you can think of, latching onto the same 'creative work of fiction' to project a social ideal.
This is how 'movements' move.
It's in a similar vein to how the narrative that 'The 2020 Election Was Stolen' was created - though half truths, misrepresentations, the story about that 'one guy who cheated on his mail in vote' (as though it was evidence of anything) etc..
Stories are used to help demonstrate (i.e. form a visceral connection) the issue that critical masses of people with influence want to project.
Of course they can often serve a good purpose ... just not in this case.
It's like realizing the cancer is actually at stage 3.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2017/12/12/16762062/cat-person-e...
Quoting from that article, also:
“Cat Person” does not bear any of the signifiers of a personal essay: It is told in the third person, not the first, and it appears in the New Yorker’s fiction section, with FICTION splashed at the top of the page. Nonetheless, the default response from many seemed to be to treat it as an essay rather than as a short story.
A lot of the criticism I'm seeing in the comments here seem to tacitly be assuming that this essay in Slate is relaying facts about "Cat Person" that were known at, or shortly after, the time of publication. They were not. If anything, the assumption was that the story was somewhat autobiographical -- and from what I can see, it really was somewhat autobiographical. The character of Margot is, again, fictional, but she clearly owes more to her author's experiences than to the essayist's.
Roupenian shouldn't have taken autobiographical bits and bobs from a stranger's life, no. But do keep in mind that she had absolutely no idea that the story was going to go viral this way; it's not like Twitter is regularly aflame with buzzy conversation about the latest short fiction piece in the New Yorker. This was an extraordinary event, and like all too much on Twitter in the last few years, chiefly driven by people who decided the story was something people needed to get outraged by. And, again, their outrage was not over Roupenian's mild appropriation.
So, yes, true -- although it's arguably also something of a time-honored tradition for the real person(s) involved to be less than pleased if they feel too-personal parts of their lives were used in fiction without permission. At the extreme this has gotten authors sued, sometimes even successfully. But cases like, well, this one are probably more common: Alexis Nowicki isn't suing Kristen Roupenian, but she's upset, feels unfairly used, and likely knows this essay could catapult "Kristen Roupenian is a bad person" (back) into the media narrative.
The issue is that these stories are latched onto as 'narrative basis' for some kind of populist ideal, which may frankly just be bigotry.
The story was not picked up upon because it was just 'great writing' - it created buzz because it engendered a kind of bigoted fantasy among those that wanted to buy into the potential truthiness of it all.
Like the 'Man Next Door Who Raped The White Girl' (i.e. Black man) from the 'Reader's Digest', 1952 etc.
It's an issue because people can do whatever they want under the guise of creative fiction, and then try to use it as some kind of scare mongering re: 'This could happen! This is happening!'
I'm Canadian, we had to read the Handmaid's Tale in school. Margaret Atwood is famous for saying 'all these things happened somewhere in history' - essentially she cherry picked the absolute worst bits of history and rolled them into a hyper-fascist theocracy. Which is 100% legitimate and interesting from a creative perspective ... but the TV series became a ridiculous point of reference for the fantastical ignorance of some populists who loved think of this as the interpretation of their political enemies. As a TV series it's great fun. But when it's used beyond that (or more poignantly, used by the studios to play into people's bigotry) then it's not good.
Edit: please see my above comment for reference as to how most of the media picked up on this piece as the basis for a narrative. It's not some corner case conspiracy - it was used by NPR, RollingStone, Wapo, Medium, The Guardian etc. etc..
Heck, even actual Biography (non fiction) isn't even judged that way.
Cat Person succeeds because it captures a deeper truth. And boy does that story touch a nerve - a mirror that is hard to look at because of its truth.
Of course, it's pretty clear the story wants to serve as some kind of stylized and boiled-down version of some of the disturbing stuff that women experience dating. But this kind of prompts you to stop and think about the real people on the other side, as well.
It's popular because it triggers existing prejudices about your so called "semi-neckbeardy creepy men". Even that phrase links appearance to bad behaviour.
(I mean in general terms here and not specifically anything about your post, I should point out).
However it's pure fantasy. The original story takes two people's perfectly ordinary relationship and twists it into a series of misandrist and ageist stereotypes.
This is pretty normalised in current modern media.
Attacking the currently unpopular out-group always sells well because the audience actively wants to believe the worst about people they already don't like. Truth be damned.
Really though, we should see this for what it is. The original author of Cat Person was at one time romantically involved with this man. She wrote an unpleasant fictionalised story about him which is now clearly shown to be untrue.
Many authors, male and female, do this all the time. e.g. Ian Flemming did it all the time in his Bond books.
Her story is just a passive aggressive form of revenge for some imagined slight.
I think it was popular because it rang true to a lot of peoples' real-life experiences. It seems strange to dismiss this and assume it's all about baseless predjudices.
> She wrote an unpleasant fictionalised story about him which is now clearly shown to be untrue.
The story isn't about him though, is it? It's fiction (albeit with some details carelessly lifted from real peoples' lives). The story's merit does not lie in how well it reflects Charles and his relationship.
Even "nice" guys are secretly mean and will treat you horrible, if you don't listen to them.
This article:
Women will make up horrible things about guys online, even when it's not true, to get clicks. And not even properly apologize.
Foremost, original text was a story, a work of fiction (not an "article") -- of course it was made up! The fictional character of Robert is not the real life person Charles.
It is strange then, to claim that "Women will make up horrible things about guys online". Is the creation of any unpleasant fictional character a bigoted swipe at large sections of the populace? (There's an additional irony of you generalising this to _women_ and not the author.)
I read Cat Person... Right around the breakup, though I think it was before then and I saw myself in it. Scared the heck out of me. I don't think I was ever as creepy as the Robert of the story was. I spent a lot of time reexamining my actions and hers and trying to figure out how much I was looking in a mirror.
I'm terrified that she'll write a "cat person", fictionalized or not. She was scared for good reasons of a ton of behaviors that I did not exhibit but her "friends" tried to accuse me of, the way a cheater always accuses first.
On the other hand, I know that I'm accusing her of a whole host of behaviors that aren't true or maybe only have a grain of truth to them. They say hindsight is 20/20, but I think nothing could be further from the truth. They say you look on the bast with rose colored glasses, and that's not quite it either. You see patterns, and you try to make patterns, and sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. Getting it wrong can be dangerous. Getting it right can be dangerous, too, particularly when the pattern is one you've been manipulated to see.
I don't think I have any special insight or conclusions to draw here. I'm trying, like the author of both stories - the fictional account and the real one - to contextualize and understand and in many ways to "get past" whatever that was. All I can say is that there's dozens of "Cat Person" stories, and an awful lot of them actually do have a clear villain, one side or the other, but probably more have a set of shared mistakes and bitterness - That for ever Robert texting "Whore", there's a Margot in hysterics, and a set of bitter people who regret everything, but didn't do anything worth regretting.
In this very specific case, passing no judgement on the OP here, there's a somewhat notable difference often between 20+27 and 22+29 even because of life stages. Do both people have full time jobs, their own place? Is one still in school? Can one not drink at bars in the US? These cultural markers often have far more important ties to power and relationship dynamics, as well as healthy relationships even beyond romantic and sexual connections.
I'm not claiming to have a clear view of these lines, but I think OP was right to examine their actions, even if it was all "okay" in the end. It strikes me as a genuine and reflective post from someone who cares, and I would hate to see others use "you are both legally adults" to avoid doing similar reflection. Nuance is important and can be very important at the individual level. Zooming out, is that not the lesson of this whole greater situation?
However, 7 years is not a significant age gap (even when the younger partner is only 18), that this should even be considered as a concern, even preliminarily. If one speaks of life stages and resources such as jobs and independent housing, that varies as much by socio-economic status as it does by the age range in question. Do we hoist the responsibility for self-reflecting on potential past relationship abuse, a serious charge, on anyone who is of moderately higher wealth and life experience than their partner, even when they are the same age?
It is a dangerous trend in our society of taking tenuous theories about power disparities and using those to put the burden of proof on men that they are not taking advantage of younger women. And, pardon the hyperbole, it won't end with 7 years, and likely not even 5.
I'm going to strongly disagree with that, and not sure how you decided that was objectively true. An 18 year old who's finishing off their senior year of high school and going to college the next year dating a 25 year old adult 3 years out of college is a red flag. As a 25 year old myself, I would probably not even date someone that's still an undergrad.
I would very much question any friend my age dating someone under the age of 21. On paper, that would only be 5 years, but I would have far less concerns over 23+33 both working full time despite the age gap being double. Again, context and life stage matters.
> that varies as much by socio-economic status as it does by the age range in question
You're 100% right, people of different socioeconomic statuses can mature at different rates and get to different life stages at different ages. That doesn't magically up the total life experience from a time perspective, though it does make a great point again for nuance, not hard and fast rules on specific ages.
> Do we hoist the responsibility for self-reflecting on potential past relationship abuse, a serious charge, on anyone who is of moderately higher wealth and life experience than their partner, even when they are the same age?
I don't think this gap gets to a point of being a problem often, if ever, but there's no harm in reflecting. I don't see why we wouldn't all want to reflect on the health of our relationships of all sorts. You speak of abuse in a binary, but it's a spectrum where some of that wouldn't even classify as abuse but as maybe mildly taking advantage of someone. There's no harm in trying to ensure fairness in your own relationships, as it is actually one of the few places in the world that is fully in your control when it comes to fairness.
> It is a dangerous trend in our society of taking tenuous theories about power disparities and using those to put the burden of proof on men that they are not taking advantage of younger women. And, pardon the hyperbole, it won't end with 7 years, and likely not even 5.
There's no gender bias here, the same goes with all genders. You see this type of power issue in same sex relationships too, to say nothing of non-binary people. This is not a burden of proof though, there are no accusations floating around. The only claim here that this asks on society is that if you potentially are in a power imbalanced relationship, just take care and examine the details. I don't see the danger here you speak of.
My argument was to point out a lack of good reason in the first place to have concerns over the age gaps. I agreed life experience can be different, even significantly, I just don't see evidence or reasoning (in any conversation on this topic) it has anything to do with greater potential or likelihood of abuse or any degree of taking advantage of people.
Like, you mentioned your own signals for red flags, where you would draw the line over age gaps, etc. But, to be frank, is there anything more to it than the ick factor? What happens when an undergrad does date someone in their 30s? I'd argue nothing, or nothing should happen, unless one has specific evidence against that relationship itself.
>The only claim here that this asks on society is that if you potentially are in a power imbalanced relationship, just take care and watch the details. I don't see the danger here you speak of.
In the article, the author claims how she was essentially ostracized from here friend group because of her romantic choice. This is the common pattern. I'm just against the casualness of assuming there's any good reason for this concern, because it just leads to non-defensible and damaging gossip for the supposed offender.
I do agree on the point that there isn't anything wrong with self-reflection of this sort, and relationship mistakes can come all sorts of forms and degrees, I just personally don't see the connection to concerns over age gaps.
It seems like this is the core of the disagreement. The factors here are complex, but here are some things I would point to as a starting point:
- You often have large financial differences that can start completely accidental power imbalances in otherwise healthy relationships if not managed closely. This can happen regardless of age, but age/life stage will introduce this risk more often. Is it a hard and fast rule? No. Is it a "greater potential or likelihood"? Absolutely. Apply that test to the later things as well as well.
- Housing. What happens when only one person's place is a viable place to stay the night? Again, this happens outside of age related gaps, but happens more often with them. See dorms and roommate situation mismatches. In that 18 year old high schooler situation above, literally parents.
- Brain development. We don't reach full cognitive decision making maturity until we are 25 IIRC. This can literally shape decisions and their framing within the relationship and create a vector for abuse. To be clear, this does not discount people's cognitive ability under 25 at an individual level but is a subtle statistical risk factor.
- I would not be surprised to find statistically that people who date beyond these "considered widely acceptable" boundaries are more prone to these types of manipulations and abuse, and generally more unhealthy relationships + lack of relationship experience. Anecdotally I've certainly found it to be true, but I'm not trying to claim that as data here beyond a single point. It's something that would need research and likely study.
- Whether you think they are fair or not, the social effects are real in today's world. I've seen this personally act as a "multiplier" on existing issues. (There's a better way to approach this as a society, but it's not to ignore the potential risks here entirely.)
- Even when fairly treated socially, social circles can not mix for reasons around age/life stage gaps without any bad assumptions. The lack of mixing friends and circles IMO is a fair place to assume potential power imbalance issues, again when combined with logistics on housing and finances. It's an easy way to harder shift the balance of life sharing in one direction, often the person farther along in life.
If you're reading all these and saying "I know relationships that have all these issues without an age gap" then great, they/caring friends should probably do a self-check on those as well! But it doesn't mean that we should ignore how these gaps can be a statistical risk factor for bad relationship dynamics.
If you think all of these aren't real, I'm sure others can come up with things that fit the bill. Proving the complete lack of statistical likelihood is a tough case to begin with, and there are just so many factors here that I can't imagine any study confirming your argument here.
> But, to be frank, is there anything more to it than the ick factor?
FWIW, ick factor is not a part of it for me at all, or I would have no issue dating a 21 year old college undergrad myself on that test alone.
Even further though, I would argue many people's "ick" is derived from some less reasoned through logic in the same vein as above. It's a subconscious smell test people should absolutely examine, but shouldn't be written off completely as it does come from somewhere. People just need to examine the source better.
> I'm just against the casualness of assuming there's any good reason for this concern
I can totally agree here, but there's a middle ground. Think of it as checking for prostate cancer when you get older. Should a doctor just assume you have cancer? Absolutely not. Should they check regularly for it, more often than with someone younger? Absolutely they should.
I think what may be happening is you're over-applying my original post. I'm not prescribing any ostracization for these red flags, but rather reflection and awareness of potential issues.
PS: At a personal level, I avoid these flags entirely because I have plentiful options without these flags. Why take the risk? But I don't persecribe that in the same way to others, I just pay closer attention if it is someone I am close enough with to care about and the reflection/analysis/opinion is wanted by my friend.
I'm wondering, are you against dating outside one's social class, too? should millionaires date waitresses? or billionaires date millionaires? Doctors dating house cleaners?
>Brain development
How about dating outside one's education, so to say. Is it ok for a college graduate to date a highschool dropout? How about a well-educated, cultured, person dating a trailer park educated person? How much of an IQ difference is ok? 120 IQ dating a 90 IQ?
We don't need to get silly with millionaires vs billionaires or reductive stereotyping. Every situation is different and nuanced, and literally all I have said is:
1. Large age/life stage gaps create more statistical vectors for abuse
2. It's worth reflecting on how these factors affect relationships in order to make them as healthy as possible.
2. I didn't say anywhere the 18 year old can't decide for themselves. This is not me saying "all 18 year olds dating 25 year olds should break up". I am saying that those relationships are more ripe for abuse and they warrant more reflecting/examining for the health of all involved.
* I think my "I avoid these flags" was taken to mean every one individually when I meant the sum of all when it comes to age and life stage gaps, so sorry for the lack of clarity there.
Nowhere did I say to apply any of this as a rule. Literally all this is for is the potential for power imbalances. Plenty of relationships have a mix of these factors and can be healthy. I tried to make this clear but to say it plainly, none of this is proscriptive or prohibitive.
It's one to thing to introspect because you feel like you need to, it's another thing to introspect out of fear of having another Cat Person written about you.
Now this should be a story.
I don't think anything Roupenian wrote lived up to Cat Person so maybe she just lucked onto someone else's story.