On "Cat Person," As A Real-Life 20-Year-Old Girl

Disclaimer: this post will discuss heterosexual romantic relationships between young cis women and older cis men, because a) that's the relationship described in the story, and b) those are the only relationships I have personal experience with. If you are trans or identify outside the binary, or your sexual orientation is not heterosexual, and you have thoughts about how other genders and sexualities interact on age differences, please reach out to me and tell me your stories. I'm always trying to learn more!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person

^ Please go read it if you haven't.

The Internet was taken by storm this past weekend by "Cat Person," a short story by Kristen Roupenian that was published in The New Yorker. Because I am liberal scum, I am a paid subscriber to the publication, but I didn't know about the story until Sunday evening, when Kumail Nanjiani tweeted about it and I had to have a look for myself.

I was absolutely mesmerized. I am a reader, but I'm much more partial to physical books than digital ones. I can sit for hours with a paper book and be totally immersed (provided, you know, that the writing is good). But even a brilliant piece read from a screen can lose my attention, regardless of length, purely because of how easily distracted I am by my glowing box of diversions--other articles or stories, YouTube videos, Spotify, or the four to five Word documents I've got open at any given time, full of my own fledging novels or poems. With "Cat Person," I started reading and didn't stop until I was finished. I will admit that I took brief pauses after certain moments, moments that articulated thoughts I've had so vividly I had to take a break just to let them sink in. It was dizzying.

Despite the visceral discomfort we all feel when reading this story, nothing criminal happens. That's what's so crazy about it. It's just...gross. It's a little bit off. It's the uncanny valley of a sexual encounter. She's 20, he's 34--legal but creepy. She consents because she doesn't want to summon what she believes is the requisite amount of politeness and tact to say no--legal but upsetting. Their sex is at once almost an empowering one-night stand but also almost a case of sexual assault. It walks the line so finely and so articulately, most female readers can immediately drum up an occasion of their own that eerily reflects this one, whether they want to or not.

Being 20 is by far the most confusing age I've experienced yet. Really, I'd say from 18-25 or so, being a woman is complex in a way that being a girl never was. When you're under 18, you are a minor, protected by the law (ostensibly) and only engaging in romantic and sexual relationships with people who are also minors (except under awful circumstances). While the question of assault still looms large, and far too many young girls are plagued by predatory behavior that permanently traumatizes them, society has purportedly made strict rules about who young people are meant to date--each other. Over the age of 25 (this is just me projecting, as I haven't gotten there yet), many women have started living on their own, supporting themselves financially in some capacity, and thinking about marriage and kids as a possibility, even if it's not an immediate one.

It's that hazy area in between, where, in the words of professional adult adolescent Britney Spears, "I'm not a girl, / Not yet a woman." If we're still in school, we're college or grad students; otherwise, we've just recently entered the workforce. Many of us have never been in real relationships (cue Adele singing Hello, it's me). For those of us under 21, we can't even go into bars. And yet! There are men in their 30s, 40s, 50s (need I go on?) who are pursuing us romantically. I made the rookie mistake of setting up an OkCupid profile during my freshman year of college, mainly just to see if it was any better than the tragic hookup wasteland of Tinder, and I was propositioned by multiple men over the age of 30. One 58-year-old man messaged me asking me out, making him older than both of my parents. I shut down the profile pretty quickly after that.

Most girls are told from a young age that we mature faster than boys. Science backs it up (I think, but you can Google it). Therefore, at 20, when we are, by the legal definition, ready to date fully grown men, there's some appeal. Theoretically, the maturity gap is rendered moot by the age difference. These guys--these men--have money, jobs, stability. They don't share a house with seven roommates. They don't wear flip flops to dinner. They don't hook up with your friends, because they don't know your friends, because they're 30. I've never been on a date with a 30-year-old (and I hope I won't for at least a few more years), but this is the kind of bare minimum paradise I imagine awaits me on the other side of 25.

Despite all these clear perks, there are drawbacks. A 30-year-old man is gonna know exactly what he wants from a relationship, physically and emotionally, whereas a 20-year-old girl has no idea. Sex and love mean very different things to those two people. And the power is going to lie with the man, 99% of the time. His gender and his age position him above that woman, no matter how smart or sexually experienced or physically strong she may be. Of COURSE there are exceptions. But the danger comes when we as young women assume we are the exception, when of course, categorically speaking, we almost certainly are not.

I have friends who have gone out with older men. In most cases, they were not scarred for life, physically or psychologically. They just didn't work out, because one or both parties realized that they were just too far apart in experience to have a lasting relationship. I have wound up in conversations with men at social events where neither of us realized the age gap. Twice I found myself flirting/chatting with men in their late 20s as an 18 and 19-year-old, respectively, and both times when they found out my age, they politely ducked out of the conversation. I was hurt--I'm legal (sort of), what's the problem--but in hindsight, these were just good dudes. They weren't trying to tangle themselves up in the type of gray-area sexual encounter described in "Cat Person," and they definitely weren't looking for a relationship with a girl who still had the word "teen" in her age. My total lack of life experience was prohibitive. I am so glad that these men found my age disqualifying instead of titillating.

There's one other fascinating aspect of "Cat Person" that has been touched on decidedly less than I'd like in the thinkpieces I've read so far. I'm talking about Margot's perception of herself. While she and Robert have sex, she becomes most aroused when thinking of herself through his eyes, as a young, thin, beautiful girl that he was grateful to have in his bed. It's the kind of thinking that has attacked my psyche in the past. In practice, I am horrified every time an older man makes a pass at me in public or yells something lewd at me from a car. I feel violated and scared. But in theory, when I think about what I represent to them, this beautiful object that they will never have...I feel...powerful? As insane as that sounds? While I've established that older men will always have greater agency in sexual encounters with younger women, there is a weird sort of synthetic power that comes with being a young woman in a society that teaches women their greatest assets are their beauty and their youth. I have struggled with self-esteem about my looks my entire life, but even at my lowest moments, I am still a 20-year-old girl, and that alone makes me appealing to a disturbing subset of older men. Some dark corner of my mind derives pleasure from that. It's a thing that I've never admitted and that I've never heard any of my female friends admit. But seeing it in "Cat Person" has me wondering if anyone else in my demographic experiences the same thing. If so, what does it mean? What do we do with it? Do we try to rewire our thinking to avoid these infrequent but very real thought patterns? Or do we accept that we are not saints, that our more insidious feelings are just a part of being human?

I don't have answers to these questions, and I don't have a surefire way to avoid unsatisfying or unsettling sexual experiences in the future (if you do, WTF and also who are you?!). What I do know is that "Cat Person" represents the type of fiction I'm always dying to read. It exposes us, it challenges us, it forces us to confront what we think we know about people, forces us to admit that we might be wrong, not just about others, but about ourselves.

I Am Scared And Nauseous: An Incomplete List

1. literally everything about the president, everything he says and does and stands for. but he's gonna reappear on this list many times more specifically

2. the fires currently eating my hometown/current place of residence

3. maybe we're on the brink of nuclear war with North Korea?!

4. hurricane-damaged areas of the US still reeling

5. Nazis are back?!

6. pretty stoked about all the powerful predatory men being taken down by brave survivors but also I'm genuinely terrified about the possibility of backlash because as far as I can tell when men are publicly humiliated they tend not to take it well

7. we've had about eighty gazillion mass shootings this year and no one will do anything about gun control

8a. the tax bill that just passed raises taxes on literally everyone except for people with private jets. like even regular rich people are paying more taxes you have to literally be a sultan who drives a car made of gold to benefit from this tax bill

8b. they snuck in a bunch of CRAZY CRAP like anti-abortion stuff and other seriously problematic cuts to healthcare

9. A KNOWN PEDOPHILE/SEXUAL ASSAILANT MAY BECOME AN ACTUAL SENATOR IN AN ACTUAL US STATE

10. I have a lot of finals tomorrow

11. boys????? still sending me mixed signals???? in this economy???

12. oH RIGHT NET NEUTRALITY. WE MIGHT LOSE THAT

13. there's a real chance that the president and/or his closest associates colluded with a hostile foreign power to sway the 2016 election, taking it from a competent/experienced politician who literally would have sawed off her limbs for the job and giving it to a bigoted hot-tempered manchild who among other things has: mocked a disabled reporter, not known what clean coal is, said all mexicans are murderers and rapists, said the central park 5 were guilty even though they were exonerated by DNA evidence

14. I have submitted about eight hundred million poems to lit mags and most of them are taking forever to answer but of the ones who have responded I have gotten one acceptance and six rejections

15. sometimes the frat/srat people in my buildings have very loud parties a) on week nights thus disrupting my sleep/study schedule b) and then they don't even invite me ok thanks for the flashbacks to high school

16. I only have like a year and a half until I graduate college with a degree in popular music (what was I thinking) and like I'm probably gonna go to graduate school but the program I'm looking at is only a year and a half and then what???? I am not a pop star yet!!! I am not even pop star adjacent!!!! WHAT AM I GOING TO DO

17. MUSLIM BAN??? yeah that got passed. bet you didn't even notice. but they added north korea (duh) and venezuela (?!?!?) to the list so now the supreme court is like "oh I guess it's not racist/xenophobic/Islamophobic anymore so it's fine!!!!!!"

18. THE LIFE EXPECTANCY OF A BLACK TRANS WOMAN IS 35 YEARS OLD HOW INSANE IS THAT. how are people literally murdered just for existing. black trans women have spearheaded so many of the most important milestones in LGBTQ+ history. and no one is doing anything about this

if you have anything else you'd like to vent about please leave a comment I'm gonna go KEEP STUDYING FOR FINALS WHILE LYING IN THE FETAL POSITION ON THE FLOOR