“Carried Away by a Fantasy of Such Pure Ego”: “Cat Person” and Consent

My college students collectively agreed on the following statements during a class session devoted to discussing Kristen Roupenian’s short story “Cat Person,” which was featured in the December 11, 2017 issue of The New Yorker: “She should have just left.” “She was drunk.” “She implied consent when she got in the car.” “She was weak.”

The momentum of the #MeToo movement, combined with the popularity of dating apps and the current discourse surrounding sexual agency, put Roupenian’s story at the forefront of social media sharing. The piece features Margot, a 20-year-old college student, and Robert, age 34, as they communicate via text messages before going on a date that ends with unpleasant sex. The blurred lines of consent manifest in “Cat Person” pushed me to include Roupenian’s story on the syllabus of my course called “Sex Research and Subjectivity” at Shippensburg University where I am an Associate Professor of English who uses psychoanalysis as a critical lens.

“Cat Person” appeared in our “Technology Unit,” which investigated electronic communication, gendered romantic assumptions, dating apps, and Internet pornography. On this day, my class

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also prepared “‘Cat Person’: What Robert (Probably) Thought,” a satirical take on Robert’s point of view that paints him as an oblivious dolt, not a calculated player; “Kristen Roupenian on the Self-Deceptions of Dating,” an interview by Deborah Treisman with the author on the real-life inspiration of her piece; and “Tinder and the Dawn of the ‘Dating Apocalypse,’” social commentary by Nancy Jo Sales on how dating apps are eroding the qualities that used to define relationships.

I was initially curious to see how my students would respond to the ambiguity painted by Roupenian in “Cat Person.” Robert doesn’t do anything that is blatantly wrong, but he holds some power over Margot by virtue of his age and ability to provide her alcohol, while Margot submits to unwanted sex to avoid the discomfort her “no” would produce were she to voice it. I anticipated that my students would resurrect Margot’s stifled voice. They would argue that the collective voice of male sexual privilege, as embodied by Robert, snuffed out her own. I even envisioned them giving voice to her silenced one, adding her name to the list of women finding their own voices in the midst of pervasive misconduct and even abuse, buoyed by the recent admissions and apologies in the media. I expected that they would hear what Margot could not say: that consent is black or white, not gray.

Though I had a few female students who adamantly chanted, “Not saying ‘no,’ is not the same thing as saying ‘yes’” or “She feared the aggression her refusal would spark,” the majority of my college-aged students—in the same age demographic as Margot herself—spoke the words with which I began this article. She had a voice and did not use it, they argued; they would speak if they ever found themselves in this situation, they fought; Margot was the one to blame, not Robert. So the voice of sexual violation that I found was not Margot’s rearticulated in the words of my students, but, rather, critique of her own failure to narrativize her displeasure. While no one in the room ever said, “Margot was asking for it,” most agreed that she “didn’t want it” and “should have said so.”

Class that day kept reverting back to the question of how to find female voice. If technology is affecting the location and expression of female voice and the result of these manipulations is muddying the waters of consent through failures of narrativization, then it seems like we need to initiate new dialogue surrounding the intersection of sexual agency, language, and fantasy that extends beyond the current conversation about enthusiastic consent. In fact,

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as evidenced by the discussion that day, it appears that conversation about the current dating climate has shifted emphasis from explicit rape to the meaning of consent and the purpose of sexual intimacy. To get at the gray area surrounding these matters, I asked students to compose written responses to this general prompt: What happened in “Cat Person” and why?

Though there were some exceptions, of course, a shocking number of us had come to the same general conclusion and repeated words such as “both Margot and Robert,” “failed fantasy,” and “due to technology.” For example, my post from that day reads:

Both Margot and Robert are complicit in the failed execution of a mutually consensual, pleasurable, and meaningful sexual encounter. This is due to technological communication and how it creates a false intimacy and a projected fantasy that leads to implied expectations and unavoidable reality when we leave our phones for real life.

In the interview Treisman conducts with Roupenian, the author admits to writing these features into her story, saying:

…[R]eally these are reassuring self-deceptions. Our initial impression of a person is pretty much entirely a mirage of guesswork and projection. When I started writing this story, I had the idea of a person who had adopted all of these familiar signifiers as a kind of camouflage, but was something else—or nothing at all underneath” (Treisman, “Kristen Roupenian on the Self-Deceptions of Dating,” The New Yorker [December 4, 2017], 2).

Communicating entirely through text messages after their first meeting, Margot and Robert swiftly and easily trade in these signifiers as each projects what he or she expects the other wants and likewise reads these signals through the lens of what he or she most wants to see.

Similar to letter writing and its idealized projection of self and other, text messages update this historical phenomenon through their immediacy and constancy. As in those earlier missives, Margot and Robert have initiated a pleasurable fantasy that is defined through the same psychoanalytic features of the transference: an interaction with a constructed projection of what each desires to find there. Their text-based relationship is indirect but that obscurity allows for a potent satisfaction because each gets exactly what he

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or she wants: the temporary fulfillment of a lack that is rarely filled in reality. “She still didn’t know much about him, because they never talked about anything personal,” thinks Margot, “but when they landed two or three good jokes in a row there was a kind of exhilaration to it, as if they were dancing” (“Cat Person,” 4). The absence of defining personal information and face-to-face encounters, plus the presence of nearly constant contact and deliberate banter, produces and intensifies projected desires, giving both Margot and Robert the illusion of intimacy.

When their texts are on point, their dynamic is in sync, a self-contained discourse that feels sensual and right, despite its delusions and distortions. Present in the moment but only through words and emojis onscreen, Margot and Robert find their rhythm. As the reference to dancing suggests, the pleasure located in this text-based fantasy is sexual in its own right and often leads to physical sex as it does with them. During this section of our discussion, students argued that the pleasures of this fantasy illusion are the same as sexting. While neither Margot nor Robert sent revealing photos or talked dirty in their texts, the fantasy basis of their relationship and its embodiment in language certainly fits a mild definition of sexting as the exchange of flirtatious messages intending to arouse.

Earlier in the class we read a short piece published on Salon.com by Sand Avidar-Walzer titled “A Freudian Analysis of Sexting” (August 1, 2013), and his argument about sexting proved valuable in our discussion of “Cat Person” since our conversation kept returning to the “false fantasy” constructed by Margot and Robert. Mind-changing to many in the class including myself, Avidar-Walzer’s argument dismantles the negative connotations associated with sexting to assert that “sexting isn’t a failure to find genuine sexual satisfaction; it’s sexual satisfaction of an entirely different kind” (4). While we went into this article expecting to find our negative attitude toward this practice reaffirmed with labels that demeaned these virtual experiences as “unreal,” “anonymous,” “impersonal,” and “autoerotic,” what we found urged us to shift our view to the perspective argued by Avidar-Walzer suggesting that sexting is not an inauthentic sexual experience, but rather a different one altogether. According to him, sexting offers a productive experience of fantasy, desire, and pleasure that is validated through the same terms we used to criticize it.

Sexting allows the expression of a desire that is pleasurable

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primarily because it exceeds the bounds of reality and permits an experience with the self routed through another person behind the screen. Both of these psychoanalytic ideas pushed me—as well as others in the room—to accept this alternative view of the controversial practice. If what we’re really after in fantasy is an experience of ourselves, of our own temporary access to what we’re thinking will make us whole, then sexting provides that temporary pleasure. Margot and Robert do not exchange naked pictures or explicit language, but their “dance” does seem to fit the virtual fantasy that Avidar-Walzer wants to differentiate from physical sex. “It’s an opportunity to get feedback on your desire,” he writes, and the couple in “Cat Person” give and get that feedback through their messages (“A Freudian Analysis,” 3).

Though Robert exists behind the screen, Margot is essentially having an autoerotic experience with herself; her projected desires are pleasurably affirmed and reciprocated; her texting voice says what it should to get what she wants. The same goes for Robert, of course. The problem seems to arise, however, when this virtual fantasy bleeds into reality. As is often the case with fantasy, when there is a transferal into reality, the fantasy shatters because “the pleasure of fantasy, its psychic value, is its promise of a space in which desire is unconstrained by reality” (“A Freudian Analysis,” 3). At odds with the idealized fantasy of perfection, reality reveals that it cannot support the pleasures of projective desires. Plunged from virtual anonymous words on the screen to the imperfect particular human typing them, fantasy evaporates and instead is replaced by the “red flags” my students kept pointing to when we came to Margot and her in-person reaction to Robert.

“It’s obvious she’s not into him, but she keeps going along with it anyway,” argues my student chorus. When Margot and Robert finally put their phones down to get together for a movie date, their physical presence has a lot of catching up to do. Onscreen they’re smooth and flirty, but in real life they’re flat and awkward. Margot is in her head the whole time, anticipating Robert’s reactions to her verbal responses and arranging multiple interpretations to the scenarios that might possibly play out. Her internal thoughts pass through her mind like the gray typing bubbles on the left of her phone screen, though she is actually in the presence of a live person, and not his avatar. During this part of the date, it’s clear that Margot is not physically attracted to Robert, their conversation is stilted and stalled, and her emotional status is described as

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“wildly uncomfortable,” yet she continues (“Cat Person,” 6).

Her persistence appears to stem from her attempt to reconcile reality and fantasy, to keep giving him another chance “because she’d had such high expectations for him” and knew if she stopped the date that “they wouldn’t talk again” (“Cat Person,” 7). In the face of reality, Margot chooses fantasy. As if she’s still texting and not on an unpleasant date with an unappealing man, Margot shines a favorable light on their shared reality and projects back what she wishes to see rather than what is. Making jokes about his potential to “rape and murder her,” she seems aware of Robert’s potential for violation and harm, yet she agrees to the purchase of alcohol though she is underage and even asks if she can come over before he does (6). Margot’s denial of her own negative feelings and her implantation of positive ones point to a failure of her reality testing, yet another casualty to technology’s false intimacy. Margot concedes to the overthrow of reality by instead adhering to the fantasy version of herself and Robert.

From here, the physicality intensifies from a “terrible kiss, shockingly bad” (“Cat Person,” 9) in Robert’s car to going back to his house where it was “a little frightening, to be so completely on someone else’s turf” (13) to eventually “bludgeoning her resistance into submission” (14) for the undesired intercourse that follows. At each point, Margot neither initiates the physical contact nor rejects it; in fact, she complies with it by engaging with the same fantasy construction that fuels their text-based dance. She admits to seeing herself and her beauty through Robert’s gaze; she imagines his exaggerated desire for her perfect physical appearance, and “the more she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got, and soon they were rocking against each other, getting into a rhythm” (16). Negative emotions akin to revolt and embarrassment are close to the surface, and even laughter escapes when he questions her sexual experience, but Margot remains in the role she plays in this fantasy and betrays no overt unease. She likewise avoids the discomfort she fears she would create if she stopped now. Her inner voice is screaming, but her fantasy discourse yells louder.

Instead, she makes reality out of their sexting fantasy even in the moment of undesired physical contact, and they have sex with the fantasy versions of themselves. Margot’s “fantasy of such pure ego” overpowers the reality testing of her psyche and permits her the narcissistic satisfaction of sexting in real life (“Cat Person,” 15). “Cat Person” does not end here, but rather crescendos with

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Margot’s self-loathing, followed by her attempted ghosting of Robert, and finally with an assaultive slur against Margot when Robert is shielded from accountability behind his phone once more. Even before his fingers type “Whore,” this final section is memorable because Robert’s text messages reveal errors and typos that had been corrected or avoided heretofore: “wrog” for “wrong,” for example, or “laguehd” for “laughed” (25). The language breakdown here shatters the foregoing fantasy of perfect language and clearly illustrates the lack of clear understanding between two individuals separated by technology’s screen. The reality of texting is shown forth through the errors of unintended meaning, but the fantasy of texting allows for the satisfying filling of empty signifiers that often extends into delicate interpersonal moments turned intrapersonal instead.

The female voice my class would like to reclaim here is still Margot’s because she stands as a scary symbol for all women who abide by a fantasy construction of themselves, rather than accept an inferior reality and cause uncomfortable disruptions for themselves and their “dates.” It seems, though, that this recuperation needs to happen, not against men in general or even individual men, but rather against technology and the illusion of intimacy and desirability it manufactures. Virtual self-oriented pleasure is distinct from the joint pleasure of real bodies. Texting leads to ambiguous assumptions about closeness and arousal that cloud the issues of consent, discomfort, and language we have fought hard to privilege. Women need to confront discomfort and use the voices of their real selves, not flee into their fantasy constructions, when faced with any sexual encounter: those that are potentially violating, of course, but those that are potentially pleasurable too.

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