Recent months make it seem like humanity has lost the instruction manual for its “procreate” function and has had to relearn it all from scratch. After scores of prominent men have been fired on sexual-assault allegations, confusion reigns about signals, how to read them, and how not to read into them. Some men are wondering if hugging women is still okay. Some male managers are inviting third parties into performance reviews in order to avoid being alone with women. One San Francisco design-firm director recently said holiday parties should be canceled, as The New York Times reported, “until it has been figured out how men and women should interact.”
Into this steps “Cat Person,” a New Yorker fiction story by Kristen Roupenian that explores …show more content…
Or, perhaps, in this #MeToo moment, it went expectedly viral, by revealing the lengths women go to in order to manage men’s feelings, and the shaming they often suffer nonetheless. A New Yorker spokeswoman said via email that of all the fiction the magazine published this year, “Cat Person” was the most read online, and it’s also one of the most-read pieces overall in 2017.
Treisman said that while she was not looking for a story that touched on topical issues of sexual agency specifically, when this piece came in, she did hope to get it into the magazine “sooner rather than later.”
The piece—which you can read here if you haven’t already and save yourself both spoilers and holiday-party alienation—follows a 20-year-old college student named Margot as she goes on a date with an older man, Robert, then breaks things off with him. And while it’s fiction, for many women, it felt a little too …show more content…
It’s not quite regret, because you haven’t done anything yet. It’s not quite disinterest, because, well, you’re at his house, aren’t you? Is it guilt? More importantly, if she feels so uneasy, why is she going ahead with it? Is she just afraid to be rude? Is it out of self-protection? What are we to make of a sexual encounter that is technically consensual, but which Margot still considers to be “the worst life decision” she’s ever made?
In the recent powerful-man purge, and in the rape-on-campus crisis before that, there’s been a reckoning over the true meaning of consent. Some have questioned whether women who get drunk, go to men’s dorms, and even initiate intercourse could later have a genuine claim of sexual assault. Margot was at his house, wasn’t she? To some women, this passage in the story underscored the importance of the “enthusiastic” part of the new “enthusiastic consent” standard.
tl;dr: We need sex education that focuses on pleasure, not just on risk. We need to create a culture of enthusiastic consent. And we need to talk about all of the nuances of consent in order to fix our broken culture.
— ella dawson (ft. olivia newton-john) (@brosandprose) December 9, 2017
Treisman said she hopes the piece might make people, “stop and consider what’s driving them in any given encounter of a romantic kind ... I think the fact that it’s generated this conversation has been a healthy
Into this steps “Cat Person,” a New Yorker fiction story by Kristen Roupenian that explores …show more content…
Or, perhaps, in this #MeToo moment, it went expectedly viral, by revealing the lengths women go to in order to manage men’s feelings, and the shaming they often suffer nonetheless. A New Yorker spokeswoman said via email that of all the fiction the magazine published this year, “Cat Person” was the most read online, and it’s also one of the most-read pieces overall in 2017.
Treisman said that while she was not looking for a story that touched on topical issues of sexual agency specifically, when this piece came in, she did hope to get it into the magazine “sooner rather than later.”
The piece—which you can read here if you haven’t already and save yourself both spoilers and holiday-party alienation—follows a 20-year-old college student named Margot as she goes on a date with an older man, Robert, then breaks things off with him. And while it’s fiction, for many women, it felt a little too …show more content…
It’s not quite regret, because you haven’t done anything yet. It’s not quite disinterest, because, well, you’re at his house, aren’t you? Is it guilt? More importantly, if she feels so uneasy, why is she going ahead with it? Is she just afraid to be rude? Is it out of self-protection? What are we to make of a sexual encounter that is technically consensual, but which Margot still considers to be “the worst life decision” she’s ever made?
In the recent powerful-man purge, and in the rape-on-campus crisis before that, there’s been a reckoning over the true meaning of consent. Some have questioned whether women who get drunk, go to men’s dorms, and even initiate intercourse could later have a genuine claim of sexual assault. Margot was at his house, wasn’t she? To some women, this passage in the story underscored the importance of the “enthusiastic” part of the new “enthusiastic consent” standard.
tl;dr: We need sex education that focuses on pleasure, not just on risk. We need to create a culture of enthusiastic consent. And we need to talk about all of the nuances of consent in order to fix our broken culture.
— ella dawson (ft. olivia newton-john) (@brosandprose) December 9, 2017
Treisman said she hopes the piece might make people, “stop and consider what’s driving them in any given encounter of a romantic kind ... I think the fact that it’s generated this conversation has been a healthy