It was December 2017, and I’d had three WhatsApps on the same day asking the same thing. “Read Cat Person yet?” I responded as I do to most things that take up so much air in the cultural conversation that they begin to feel like homework: expressed a bit of performative disinterest and resentment. But when, finally, I did read Kristen Roupenian’s New Yorker story that had just gone viral, I talked about it with my friends for the rest of the week and thought about it for a lot longer.
Back then, Roupenian’s story had brilliantly, dazzlingly, captured the zeitgeist: just two months earlier, sexual harassment allegations against producer Harvey Weinstein had caused the #MeToo movement to erupt. For the first time, public discourse was not just welcoming but actively encouraging women to speak about their experiences of being violated by men. In ”Cat Person”, the 20-year-old cinema employee Margot strikes up a text courtship with Robert, an older customer, before the pair go on a disastrous date and have awkward, horrible sex. It underlined something that was becoming rapidly clear: that men and women could have entirely different experiences of the same sexual encounter.
