From the Bad Sex article:
Young women say yes to sex they don't actually want to have all of the time. Why? Because we condition young women to feel guilty if they change their mind. After all, you've already made it back to his place, or you're already on the bed, or you've already taken off your clothes, or you've already said yes. Do you really want to have an awkward conversation about why you want to stop? What if it hurts his feelings? What if it ruins the relationship? What if you seem like a bitch?
It says "young women". If you've been married that long and didn't rob the cradle, HRC is middle aged.
It's entirely likely that I'm the most reassuring person on the planet.
It's interesting how we've found ways, as a society, to punish each other for changing our minds; from feeling like a whore/asshole when you just don't want to see or sleep with that guy/girl anymore, to security deposits, to divorce. Changing your mind, about anything at any time, should be less onerous, methinks.
I don't disagree with the Bad Sex article, but it definitely feels like it's written by a college student in being sort of naively irritating. Thinking about it, saying that all sex has to be great sex feels like setting the bar impossibly high in a way that seems liberating but actually ends up being sort of anxiety-producing as yet one more thing to worry about with sex. I feel like it's sort of like food. You should aim to eat lots of great food, but it's also ok to eat meals that are kind of mediocre, or even kind of shitty (as long as they don't poison you). Some nights are going to be cheese and crackers for dinner, and that's fine as long as its not every night. Maintenance sex has a place in a long-term healthy relationship, and it's ok for sex to be about things like maintaining intimacy or physical touch in addition to or even instead of passion or desire.
I do want to start using 'water-polo doofus' as a defined term. Meaning something like casual sex partner who might not have been on the path to true love, but still did everything right: "I didn't see you leave the party last night, Trish. What happened?"
"It was great, I left with this guy who turned out to be a real water-polo doofus."
This seems ever so slightly off to me: "But I wish I had known earlier that it's not rude to say, 'This was fun, but I'm going to go home.'"
Of course it's rude, but it's also ok to be rude in that situation.
What if Mr Water Polo had, at an advanced stage of the evening but before the sex that she desperately wanted, twigged that she thought he was a doofus and said, "This was fun, but I'm going to go home"? I'm guessing from what she wrote that total equanimity would not have been her reaction. So yes, rude. But also something that it's totally ok to be rude about.
That short story isn't at all like the Val Lewton movie.
You should aim to eat lots of great food, but it's also ok to eat meals that are kind of mediocre, or even kind of shitty (as long as they don't poison you). Some nights are going to be cheese and crackers for dinner, and that's fine as long as its not every night.
Buttercup is echoing Pratchett here:
He'd noticed that sex bore some resemblance to cookery: it fascinated people, they sometimes bought books full of complicated recipes and interesting pictures, and sometimes when they were really hungry they created vast banquets in their imagination - but at the end of the day they'd settle quite happily for egg and chips. If it was well done and maybe had a slice of tomato.
God, that story makes me glad I am not young and in fact may never have been. I've had my share of godawful, bad, embarrassing etc sex, but never such a grotesque mismatch between the need for affirmation and plain lust.
Also, building on the cooking analogy, the books that sell best are the ones with full colour pictures.
7: I don't think it is rude. Disappointing to someone, sure, but the exact phrasing is pretty much textbook manners for how to leave something when you want to go. Is there a more polite way to cut a date short? Or should that just not happen?
Thanks for posting this, heebie! I was not about to jump into a FB discussion, but aieeee is this familiar. I spent a year or two in college dating guys ranging from pushy and selfish to seriously offensive (a child molester! Whom I didn't dump for quite a while after he told me!), and the feeling of getting pulled along and not wanting to be "mean" is so familiar, even years and years later.
And she's a jerk. I was, too. But not as awful as the guy.
12, I think, highlights that there are things that are acceptable in a dating context that would be completely unacceptable in any other social context. If you aren't enjoying, say, a formal dinner party, it is not considered polite to say mid-meal "This was fun at first, but now I'm not enjoying myself so I'm going to go home".
Similarly, if you get invited to a non-date social occasion (say, a baptism) which you don't want to attend, it's slightly rude to ignore the invitation, and definitely rude to simply say "I don't want to come because I think baptisms are boring and I just don't like your baby very much". In both examples, you're supposed to either come up with a convincing excuse or just griz it out.
14: I think you are mostly right, but it would be kind of rude in all circumstances to say you aren't enjoying yourself. Big difference between "this was fun, but I'll be going now" and "this was fun but isn't anymore, so I'm leaving." Also, it would be pretty rude to bail on a date (unless it was unsafe or something) mid-dinner or mid-show or mid-movie, same as it would be to leave a formal dinner party. However, I think it's more like taking leave after dinner or from coffee hour after the baptism or whatever, where there isn't a set end time.
Also, "so sorry, I can't make the baptism" is a fine and polite way to refuse. No excuse needed.
First, analogies are banned. And second, both formal dinner parties and baptisms are situations where you don't get the invitation unless you're already in a pretty tight social relationship that imposes relationship-based obligations. The thing that makes dating odd is that it's (at least sometimes) socializing with someone you don't know at all, so you don't have pre-existing obligations to.
And very much what ydnew said about the timing of taking your leave. An invitation to dinner or a baptism is an invitation to a defined event with an end point, and so you've committed to stay through the whole thing unless you get sick or have an emergency or something. A 'date', on the other hand, is open-ended. Unless you're going to think of accepting a dinner invitation as implicitly agreeing to have sex, there has to be some acceptably polite way to bail after dinner -- not exactly because dating is special, but because the event you committed to is over and you aren't required by manners to make a new commitment to a different activity.
'water-polo doofus'
Because they already have a soft-sided helmet and are used to having their head pushed down in pursuit of a goal.
Does anybody invite people to baptisms except the grandparents and the godparents? I've only ever been to three (mine, my son's, my goddaugther's).
My wife's family calls them "christening," so I refused to go to any on her side in case they break a bottle on a baby's head.
Because I always do, I'm going to link to Deb Cameron's blog post about politeness norms and sexual consent. That's probably all I'm going to do because I'd like to have coffee before leaving for my post-surgical checkup, so I hope no one mistakenly thought comments weren't allowed to just end like that.
Thanks. I'm set to start PT Thursday, so things should move quickly and perhaps painfully from here. The surgeon thinks single moms should definitely belong on the athlete track of being willing to work harder and hurt more to be back to full function faster, which works for me because it should mean about 18 months after the initial sprain. But my body is growing scar tissue around the corsetlike internal brace on my ligaments and this ankle will be tight and non-sprainable from here on out.
On topic, I was reminded that a friend had a date that was going so badly that the waitress insisted to the super boring nonstop-talker guy that the restaurant was not serving dessert (all evidence from other tables to the contrary) and he really needed to go. I think he paid and then my friend snuck back in to give an extra tip, and now every time someone from our friend group visits her they have to make a pilgrimage to the cafe to pay homage.
16: it's not an analogy! It is a comparison!
Also, "so sorry, I can't make the baptism" is a fine and polite way to refuse. No excuse needed.
But that is an excuse. Why aren't you coming? Because I can't make it. It's not a very detailed excuse but it's still an excuse.
The thing that makes dating odd is that it's (at least sometimes) socializing with someone you don't know at all
Not at all?? Is this a language thing? Does "dating" in the US mean what we'd call "blind dating"? Because normally you know someone to some extent before you ask them on a date, don't you? You've chatted to them at work or in the crochet class or at the wake or in the Combined Joint Operations Center or wherever it was you met them?
How many of your work colleagues would you invite to a baptism?
Well, go back to the story in the initial post -- it's a woman dating a man she met when he bought candy from her at a movie counter. They've met, but it's not the level of acquaintance that imposes more social obligations than you owe to a complete stranger.
She should have known. Twizzlers are better than Red Vines.
It is never a good idea to go on a date with a complete stranger who gives you candy.
Red licorice at all is a bad idea. Black licorice or GTFO.
MR. PIBBS + RED VINES = CRAZY DELICIOUS
But the post Thorn linked in 21 gets to something really important about manners and sex. Polite refusals require cooperation from the person being refused -- if you say "I'm so sorry I can't make the baptism," and the parent says "What's preventing you? I'm sure we can figure out some way to make it work!" suddenly your polite refusal has turned into an embarrassing conversation where you're either going to be telling elaborate lies, being baldly rude about how you just don't want to go, or you'll end up going to the baptism because you can't face being so rude.
The expectation that some significant number of men are going to be socially uncooperative about taking a polite refusal makes normal politeness break down around sex as soon as anything gets confused at all
"I never thought I would be so poor as to not have Dr Pepper, or so rich as to have Red Vines".
33: It's certainly my opinion that politeness requires not auditing other peoples' reasons for refusal even when they are almost certainly false.
27: They'd been texting for months. The bulk of the story is about the accrual of felt obligations in that period.
24.last: I think in the age of internet dating this is less true. You exchange some messages on an app, the person asks to switch to texting (so you know already you could never love them), you mutually decide it would be nice to meet in person. Either you have sort of a protodate to screen for serial-killer vibes (I recommend gelato because worst-case scenario you eat gelato) or you just go all-in and food or drinks are involved (I recommend ending up at a bar where you can play trivia because if you don't want to keep dating the person you can just insist she keep the trivia winnings and everyone wins, pro tip.) anyway I'm probably pwned because I had to stop partway but I added value because I typed this to distract museld while my stitches were being taken out and holy shit I have an ankle!!
Here's an interview with the author.
I'm no good at literature, and could not work out the role in the story of cats, or of being a cat person.
I recommend ending up at a bar where you can play trivia because if you don't want to keep dating the person you can just insist she keep the trivia winnings and everyone wins
Ah, but what if the reason you don't want to keep dating her is that she's bad at trivia and so hasn't won anything? And surely this is the most common reason for not wanting to keep dating someone.
39: Obviously in this totally hypothetical situation you are good enough on your own to pull a two-person team to second place but not good enough to beat a table of six who know lots of Miami Sound Machine during the stupid musical round.
What's the drink women are supposed to order when they're feeling threatened and need the staff to rescue them? And is that a real thing or just something where someone on the internet said, "Hey this should be a thing!"
How could it be a real thing, that women generally and restaurant-staff generally would know, but men wouldn't? They let men work in food service.
When I worked in food service, I was totally surprised to see a chalk board with '86' as the header. The origin of that expression had not occurred to me.
Maybe they don't tell the men. So the woman orders a McGuffin, and if it's a male waiter he goes "OK, coming right up" and goes back to the bar and keeps asking "hey table 19 wants a McGuffin, does anyone know how to make a McGuffin" and gets lots of shrugs until he asks a woman, and she knows what it means and, I don't know, sets the restaurant on fire or tases the guy or whatever.
41 rings true is a very convincing but obviously totally hypothetical hypothetical.
The waiter usually wouldn't be allowed to make the drink here anyway.
43 is exactly what you'd expect a woman to say who wanted to keep the name of the secret rescue drink a secret.
Has a New Yorker short story ever gone viral before? Is this a great moment for culture?
Also, congrats on getting your ankle back, Thorn!
Or she orders the drink in Laadan.
(Just reading "In the Land of Invented Languages". A bit like a hugely elongated New Yorker article but still quite good.)
I guess if there's a secret Chinese menu there can be a secret women menu.
They both probably involve more offal than I'm used to.
The meme I see running around occasionally identifies the rescue drink as an "angel shot" and includes picture of graphics placed in the woman's bathroom. So I think it's a real thing. I would imagine it changes based on the nature of the establishment, as at a certain point you stop going to places where shots are an appropriate part of a first date (either that or I have become unfun).
As of the start of this year, it was apparently a thing in one restaurant in Florida, and had never actually been ordered, according to Snopes (who are dubious of its effectiveness).
https://www.snopes.com/ordering-angel-shot-potentially-life-saving-women/
I assume that everyone has already seen the Men Reacting to Cat Person twitter feed, but I'm posting anyway in case maybe someone hasn't. (That article is less good than the twitter feed itself, but gives some introduction.)
(Edit: after 3 failed attempts to make the html work, here is the damn link: http://junkee.com/cat-person-new-yorker-men-twitter/138723.)
Fuck. http://junkee.com/cat-person-new-yorker-men-twitter/138723
It'd have to be a pretty dire situation before I ordered a drink off a restroom wall.
The best place to find a DUI lawyer is on the wall above the urinal in bar.
60: It was a little unnerving the first time I saw one hanging out up there.
That's why they switched to just using signs.
61: that is weird, they're supposed to be all swimming around in a tank behind the bar so you can see which one looks most ethical.
61: So much so, that I wound up going outside and peeing in an alley.
In the classy suburban bars, I'm told the ads over the urinals are for divorce lawyers and sports cars.
At which point you needed a public indecency lawyer. They usually set up shop in the dumpsters.
Sorry, Moby, but could you explain the 86 reference? It means nothing to me.
66: Yes, it's hard to be a man with a bashful bladder these days.
From Thorn's link:
Detailed analysis of real-life refusals shows there's a formula we use to mitigate the offence. It goes: hesitate + hedge + express regret + give a culturally acceptable reason. As in 'um, well, I'd love to, but I promised I'd be home early tonight'. Or '[pause] I'm sorry, but I've got a report to finish'.Imagine responding to someone who suggests going for a drink after work with a simple unvarnished 'no'. Or 'no, I can't', or 'no, I don't want to'. The person you said this to would think you'd been raised by wolves. It's curt, it's rude, and it will be heard as arrogant or aggressive. Why would we imagine that saying 'no', firmly, is a reasonable thing to tell a woman to do in a situation where she has reason to fear the consequences of giving offence? Why would we blame her for trying to refuse diplomatically, when we'd do the same ourselves in far less risky situations? And why would we believe that 'men don't understand anything less direct than "no"'? The formula for (non-sexual) refusals is used and understood by speakers of both sexes. It's absolutely normal. Saying 'no' is not.
coupled with LB's
The expectation that some significant number of men are going to be socially uncooperative about taking a polite refusal makes normal politeness break down around sex as soon as anything gets confused at all
are kind of blowing my mind at the moment, in the sense that this is a thought I haven't considered before, and it's making me reconsider a whole lot of encounters from long ago.
In other words, young Heebie bought into the notion that the uncooperativeness of young men to hear "no" was a failing solely of my own, and something that I should just roll with. (I had a very high standard for myself not to be fazed by such things, in a I'm-not-like-other-girls! internalized misogyny.)
(Young Heebie was a super big idiot, for the record, about a lot of things. Getting older is the best.)
67: If somebody says "86 the X" it means "We don't have any X". I have not the slightest idea why, but I'd heard the term before I ever worked in a restaurant.
Getting older is the best
Respectfully disagree. Still clinging to the position that it's the best option in unfortunate circumstances.
70 addendum: To be clear, the restaurant usage is "we're out of X". The informal usage is more "X needs to be gotten rid of".
70: I think there's a whole diner/restaurant based numerical code, but obsolete now and 86 might be the only bit of it that made it to common slang.
45.2: She's a lovely person and I'll see her at a protest tomorrow, probably. I was in no state to be dating anyone and as a wise friend told me off-blog, it sounded like a pleasant date with someone I don't want to be dating, which I think is accurate. She has since found a girlfriend she seems to really like, so happy ending all around. (Becoming Facebook friends and so on isn't necessary, though I find myself in that situation with three of the four women I went on dates with and the fourth is a moderator of a group I'm in and leading a reading group I don't attend for other reasons. Straight people in a larger social world wouldn't do this, I don't think, but I reached out to her and a few other people after the election to make sure we were all going to be okay and the roller derby star refriended me for being political about Black Lives Matter in a thread preparing for Pride. Lots of good people out there!)
Since this is the dating thread, I should probably point out that ankle-damage fetishists only have 4-6 weeks until I'm out of this boot and then three(ish?) small scars will have to be enough to make me alluring, which I bet they won't be. Time is finally running out!
I think it is important to discuss a cultural shift. Twenty years ago (15? 5? Yesterday?), women and men were still conditioned that women saying yes outside of marriage was bad in all kinds of ways. Perhaps with less shame about saying yes in the less number of years, then no is more powerful. One hopes for a better future in part to this kinds of discussions and reflections (self and otherwise.)
70: I'd only ever encountered the meaning "get rid of" and I'd never have guessed it was from the restaurant business. I assumed either radio code (like "10-4") or military slang (like "Section 8").
Snopes (again) is sceptical about the "restaurant code" and notes that as early as 1944 it was being used for "banned from this establishment".
https://www.snopes.com/language/stories/86.asp
I didn't know the military was big on housing for people with low incomes.
At which point you needed a public indecency lawyer. They usually set up shop in the dumpsters.
Law & Order: "Endgame"
69: Part of what makes this a little hard to see is that the politeness situation is peculiar, even outside sex.
Look at my baptism hypo in the beginning of 33: the person who says they can't make it is being perfectly normal and polite -- you don't have to go to a baptism just because you were invited if you don't feel like it (unless there's some specific family/whatever reason why you really do have an obligation). Despite that, when the inviter refuses to play along with the polite refusal, and throws the situation off the rails by trying to get past the excuse, the inviter doesn't sound rude, they sound warmly inviting, or at the worst a little dopey and clueless. There's a strong argument that the inviter is being rude in a larger sense by pushing, but all the immediately apparent rudeness is on the either transparently-lying or coldly-brusque refuser.
Usually the polite refusal script works fine, but when it does break down, all the social penalty is on the refuser, even outside of sex: inviters are allowed to push past polite refusals without being apparently rude themselves. (All statements about normal manners, of course are 'seems to me this is how things work'. Rely on my sense of how normal people behave at your own peril.)
Paragraph 2 and I'm already outraged. How dare she question the choice of Red Vines! Now if she had questioned eating them right out of the box, that would be a whole different thing. The key to delicious Red Vines, as many West Coasters know, is to let them get stale.
Whereas Moby is objectively wrong about Twizzlers They are disgusting in all circumstances.
Rely on my sense of how normal people behave at your own peril.
Right. The whole topic is cross-cut with different cultural norms where "culture" is a very fine-grained set of distinctions.
80.2: Try breathing through Red Wines while your head is trapped underwater and see how well that works.
81: Man, you didn't have to agree with me that my sense of what normal people are like is shaky that fast. Now I'm wounded.
76: Huh. Snopes seems oddly quick to have dismissed the 1933 newspaper citation for the diner code as a hoax. I mean, maybe it was a hoax, but it's at least a venerable hoax (and one that predates the 'banned' usage).
I wasn't just thinking about it that way.
But with invitations in general, there are weird effects of politeness going both ways. Because some people feel obligated to invite some people to events even when they would rather not have them there. So, the inviting party might take the first refusal as the invitee saying "I'm sure you're only offering the invitation because you feel you must" and thus the tendency to treat the first refusal as an opportunity to reaffirm the invitation instead of saying "I'm not just inviting you because my mom said I needed to include that whole side of the family."
This is less related to the topic, but boy was my family of origin terrible about accepting polite refusals, or accepting any negative opinion. The rules were:
1. Be in a good mood and ready to joke at all times, and always be agreeable
2. Gamely badger someone relentlessly if they try to to violate 1. Badger them in a jokey-but-serious way that never, ever ends until they decide it's easier just to abandon whatever shred of refusal/negativity/etc they were attached to.
Hooray for therapy!
Unlike Red Vines, Twizzlers can double as straws. On the other hand, although it's been years since I had any, I recall the Red Vines have some impressive weight to them. So if you need an impromptu weapon, you're better off with a bundle of Red Vines than with Twizzlers.
Because we condition young women to feel guilty if they change their mind. After all, you've already made it back to his place, or you're already on the bed, or you've already taken off your clothes, or you've already said yes. Do you really want to have an awkward conversation about why you want to stop? What if it hurts his feelings? What if it ruins the relationship? What if you seem like a bitch?
I liked the way that this was phrased in the story:
But the thought of what it would take to stop what she had set in motion was overwhelming; it would require an amount of tact and gentleness that she felt was impossible to summon.
Thinking about it, saying that all sex has to be great sex feels like setting the bar impossibly high in a way that seems liberating but actually ends up being sort of anxiety-producing as yet one more thing to worry about with sex.
I thought about Alyssa Rosenberg's comments about "bad sex" (which, incidentally, seems perfectly appropriate written by a woman, but would seem creepy and weird if it was written by a man).
I would never suggest that more education is a bad idea. But at a certain point, consent education programs bump up against a difficult reality that's worth acknowledging: No matter how many classes you take, or how clever they are, you can't implement affirmative consent, or enthusiastic consent, or whatever the term of art of the moment is without really understanding what you like.
There's a reason sexual intercourse used to be known by the now-antiquated but still-evocative term "carnal knowledge." And as much as we want college students to be not simply safe and healthy but happy too, we should remember that sometimes the only way to have good sex is to have bad sex first.
87.1 is pwned. I think it reflects poorly on both of us.
Not trying to interrupt the conversation about polite refusals which is great and a really helpful thing to make explicit.
You're not interrupting. We were just wrapping up that and getting read to move on.
I'd join the polite refusal conversation but I really have to wash my hair right now.
92: That shouldn't take long. Why don't I wait right outside your bathroom?
I retract my statement that Twizzlers are always disgusting and will grant exceptions for being trapped under 8" of water* or having my jaw wired shut and no straw in sight.
*It doesn't appear as though the 2' variety are hollow.
I have found that being retired provides you with a lot less cover for why you don't want to do things.
And it brings a lot of new opportunities for awkwardly working out whether you are ever going to socialize with someone again.
But still much, much less stressful than teens/twenties potential/actual relationship maneuvering*.
*I struggled to come up with a good word to describe this. "maneuvering" seems a bit to one-sided and maybe cynical, but not coming up with an alternative.
Bless heebie's heart for for convincing me to join in. She's not the kind to let someone just stew in the corner. What a spark plug!
"Maneuver", literally, "work of the hand". Only one-sided if you're sexist.
My mom has chronic over-committedness problems. To hear her talk, they're quite severe, but when something has been going on for 70 years, does it still count as severe? Or is it just how she likes to roll?
In particular, she can't ever walk back a commitment that she made at any point in time, so every nice thing she's ever done has become a time-honored tradition.
Also I have this problem - do things once and it becomes a rigid routine and I don't even realize I'm being rigid - but am a much less nice person.
I totally failed in 87. I was confusing Red Vines with the licorice we used to buy out of a bin at a local store growing up. That stuff was heavy enough to do some damage. Red Vines are wimpy by comparison.
I know I've told it here before, but I want to retell my story about stopping PIV intercourse in progress and a few minutes later singing "The Greatest Love of All" in bed. It's so on-topic! I'm not *sure* but I think that is the very last time I had sex that I was just kind of going along with. Apparently I decided right in the middle that I was done with that stage of my life.
(I think I said something like, "this isn't right for me." As it happens it was *both* that it was physically not enjoyable and emotionally not right, and the reasons that it might not be emotionally right were likely to be so obvious to that guy that he didn't ask me to elaborate. It was an overall friendly and chill interaction!)
99.last: And then you wind up doing a bunch of stuff while your male colleagues does less and gets awards.
100: Yeah, Red Vines wouldn't be my go-to weapon of choice. Comity!
My wife and her daughter have a serious ongoing fight over Twizzlers and Red Vines, but I'm a horrible husband and stepfather, because I don't remember which side each them are on. I don't like any of that chewy candy.
"What, if during your first awkward junior high dance a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This dance as you now live it and have lived it, you will live once more and innumerable times more until your late twenties' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous junior high dance when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine."
Not necessarily excellent enough that I'd want to read it once more and innumerable times more. But excellent.
In retrospect, I think that demon would have got it just about right.
Lazy Nietzcheian demon. If it were of Maxwell's variety it would handle the good-dance/bad-dance sorting for you.
Also I don't understand why Nietzsche is on Facebook.
Bad at math too. How can have innumerable dances just in your twenties?
Because somebody told him it was a better way to meet women than Tinder.
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Thanks to the people who recommended Ublock Origin.
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111: "The Statistical Physics of Awkward Junior High School Dances". Sounds like something DARPA might fund. Maybe I'll send in a proposal.
Already tried. They won't fund it.
I thought Wagner was more a Youtube guy?
The music one or the power painter one?
119: "A few modest thoughts on the non-Germanic peoples (10:56:34)" by WagnerTheDog69
Two instances of prior Twizzlers/Red Vines art from the archives:
1) Some familiar people weigh in on their respective merits.
2) A classic thread of the "urple confronts food" genre. (I do recommend at reading at least the urple-initiated subthread.)
88 last:
This seems to require a taxonomy of bad sex which at the very least separates "this isn't overwhelmingly fun in itself" from "I really don't want to be doing this and that's why it's not fun". You may need to have a lot of the former kind of sex before you get to the good sex, but you don't really need to have very much of the latter, if any. I also think that most people are able to distinguish between "I kinda don't want to be doing this, but I suspect I'll actually enjoy it once I start" and "I really don't want to be doing this at all".
A lot of this "but how will [implicitly young women] ever have good sex if they don't have bad sex first" stuff seems to reflect an unconscious bias against trusting women's descriptions of their experiences. It seems to assume that young women, alone among humans, can't differentiate"this is sort of meh, but it's a learning experience/affirming the relationship/etc and so I'm basically okay with it" from "I don't want to do this at all, just doing it is horrible and demoralizing". Hand-wringing pundits seem to assume that young women expect everything to be either stars and rainbows like a romance novel or some kind of horrible violation of consent.
Young women are actually, IME of living as one and being friends with a number, pretty smart about determining whether a given sexual encounter was more on the fun/tolerable/desired end of the spectrum or more on the "I wish I hadn't done that, I feel bad" end. It's just that young women are routinely taught that their feelings don't matter or that they should doubt their own feelings if they don't want to do something.
Bad at math too. How can have innumerable dances just in your twenties?
Cantor High School prom.
126: Dancing is very tiring--and that's before you take into account all the trauma and drama of high school emotions. So let's say that you choose to sit out the middle third of each dance; it's the only way you can process the pheromones, the rejection, the elation, the latest awful dance hits. But in a way now you have two dances to go to, the one at the beginning and the one at the end. Hegemonic adaptation makes them each just as tiring, so of course you have to take a break in each.
Iterate countably many times and your one dance has become a fractal descent into the worst puberty has to offer. The good news is that you don't actually experience any single song for an entire interval, so it'll be easy to run to the washroom to deal with whatever the hell is going wrong now.
s/hegemonic adaptation/hedonistic adaptation/, unless you're, I dunno, Tallyrand.
125: Right, very much so. Enthusiastic consent is a shibboleth from a couple of years ago, but it's still a useful concept -- you don't need to know anything at all about what you're doing to enthusiastically consent to some particular sex act. After the fact, it might turn out to have been bad sex because you didn't know what something new would be like, or you hadn't yet developed judgment about what kind of person you're likely to have good sex with, so in that sense a person might be likely to have bad sex before they learned how to have better, more enjoyable sex.
But there's no knowledge-based reason why anyone should be having undesired and only ambiguously consented to sex -- if you needed to have experience with sex to desire it, no one would ever get around to it. (Cf. La Rochefoucauld: "If no one had ever learned to read, very few people would fall in love.")
That's not the only argument against universal literacy, but it's a good one.
125/129: I think these comments do a good job explicating why I say the column would have been creepy had it been written by a man. As it is, do you think (a) that Alyssa Rosenberg would disagree with the statements you're making, (b) that the column is poorly written in that it could imply disagreement even if she wouldn't personally disagree, or (c) that it's possible for her to both agree and have written that column? (I ask because, if I had to guess, I'd say (c) -- I think we're looking at a difference of emphasis rather than opinion -- but I could be wrong about that).
127: not to mention the anguish of realising that it is logically impossible for you ever to make it all the way across the floor to ask out the girl you fancy (though you can get arbitrarily close to reaching her).
132: I remember my Calculus TA making a joke like that to explain the difference between engineers and mathematicians.
It's definitely possible for you to go to more dances than you can imagine in your twenties. Just represent each dance with an otter.
I think I'm stuck on a or b -- I don't know what she'd agree with if we were taking about it back and forth, but the column includes things I flatly disagree with:
No matter how many classes you take, or how clever they are, you can't implement affirmative consent, or enthusiastic consent, or whatever the term of art of the moment is without really understanding what you like.I have affirmatively and enthusiastically consented to sex that it turns out I didn't like at all. No harm done, we were trying something new, and what we tried wasn't for me. I don't think I could have figured out that I wouldn't enjoy it without trying it, so the paradigm of getting through bad sex to better sex works. But it don't think there's any sense in which my consent wasn't real, affirmative, and enthusiastic just because I didn't end up enjoying myself.
The quoted language there sounds like Rosenberg's saying that there's no way to affirmatively consent to anything that's new to you, and I can't see how that makes sense.
134: That's idiotic -- it's not possible to dance successfully in an airplane cabin, much less in the overhead compartments.
you don't need to know anything at all about what you're doing to enthusiastically consent to some particular sex act.
You at least need to have some rough idea of what you are consenting too. Which may not be the case if one partner is experienced and one isn't and the experienced partner isn't honest.
(The second line of 135 is a quote from Rosenberg -- blockquoting it failed.)
I mean, there's apparently a member of Congress going around to his staff saying "surrogate motherhood" involves fucking him.
137: Oh, sure, there are situations where lack of knowledge can turn into non-consent, or flawed consent, particularly, as you say, if you have a dishonest partner or one who's pressuring you. But Rosenberg seems to me to be saying that affirmative consent is completely impossible with "really understanding what you like" which I take to mean prior experience with pretty much exactly the act you're consenting to. And that can't be right.
So let's say that you choose to sit out the middle third of each dance; it's the only way you can process the pheromones, the rejection, the elation, the latest awful dance hits. But in a way now you have two dances to go to, the one at the beginning and the one at the end. Hegemonic adaptation makes them each just as tiring, so of course you have to take a break in each.
In the end, each moment of each dance is an isolated moment apart from all other moments of the dance. It's a really jarring way to dance.
140: I don't know exactly what she is saying, but certainly it seems that finding an honest partner who won't pressure you may be the key issue and not something you want to assume was taken care of.
But Rosenberg seems to me to be saying that affirmative consent is completely impossible with "really understanding what you like" which I take to mean prior experience with pretty much exactly the act you're consenting to. And that can't be right.
Yeah, I understand why you're saying that, but I would also be surprised if that was what she meant. Looking up other columns of hers, how do you feel about the framing here ("Lies Pop Culture Tells Us About Sex" a brief post responding to a twitter discussion)(emphasis mine)?
One thing that was particularly interesting about this conversation to me was gender disparity that emerged in the assumptions people discussed in heterosexual sex (which is the vast majority of sex portrayed on television). ... Sex is spontaneous, solely involves penetration, and requires no foreplay for anyone involved to have any fun. Contraception is invisible. All participants are seriousness potentially to the point of grimness. No one talks, but everyone orgasms. Maybe this is a fantasy of what we'd like sex to be like. But it's a set of assumptions that leaves out an awful lot of fun and emotional connection -- as well as the fact that not all sex, even consensual sex between loving, knowledgeable partners, is good sex.
In that excerpt she isn't, exactly, making the claim that "bad sex" is necessary, just that it's a part of most people's experience. That isn't talking about the same thing as the other piece that I quoted -- but I think that is at least part of what she has in mind when she's thinking about "bad sex"
The disagreement comes down to thinking that whoever said 'always' or 'never' first is usually going to be wrong -- absolute statements are very rarely accurate.
But she's saying that you can't implement affirmative consent without prior knowledge of what you're doing and how you'll feel about it. And of course you can, if you have whatever knowledge is available without direct experience, and a trustworthy partner who isn't working against you, and everything perfectly obvious in theory (even though it may be difficult to achieve in practice).
144 was to 142. To 143, I don't know to what extent I'd agree with everything Rosenberg thinks about sex if I were talking to her and we had the opportunity to explain anything unclear or poorly phrased. All I'm sure of is that I disagree with what she said (as opposed to what she might have meant) in the piece linked from 88.
But, to use a common example, you might enthusiastically consent to yiffing, but if you've never tried to achieve arousal while wearing a fur suit, I don't see how your enthusiasm wouldn't be tempered by trepidation in a way wouldn't be the case if you had direct (positive) experience.
The disagreement comes down to thinking that whoever said 'always' or 'never' first is usually going to be wrong -- absolute statements are very rarely accurate.
That's helpful. Looking at the line that you'd quoted:
But at a certain point, consent education programs bump up against a difficult reality that's worth acknowledging: No matter how many classes you take, or how clever they are, you can't implement affirmative consent, or enthusiastic consent, or whatever the term of art of the moment is without really understanding what you like.
I'd read that differently than you do. To me, "at a certain point" is signaling that consent education can help in many situations, but it can't completely eliminate the problem. A certain amount of difficulty or ambiguity is still going to occur even if we try (appropriate) to minimize that.
I think the line is ambiguous, but I read "no matter how many classes . . ." as being a statement about populations rather than individuals -- not that any given person is unable to handle consent knowledgeably, but that on can't assume that classes will allow everybody to handle consent knowledgeably.
144 was to 142.
Though, as it turns out, I think it might clarify our disagreement, so thank you.
Leaving your deliberately disturbing specifics firmly to one side, so? People intentionally do scary things all the time in non-sexual contexts, and no one thinks that an element of nervousness means that they're necessarily not consenting or not enthusiastic about what they're doing. Think of any dangerous/adventurous sports type thing -- bungee jumping, skiing, skydiving.
Following up on 147, I'd also guess that Rosenberg thinks that almost all people will have some experiences in which their own desires or responses are [ambiguous/confusing/difficult to process] but not specifically due to issues around consent -- just because sex is complicated. But I use the word "guess" because that is general inference, not something I take from that specific column.
I'm really unenthusiastic about the lunch I brought today.
152: I'd offer to trade, but I already ate my pb & j sandwich.
My main problem with this story is that it's not really a story. It's more like a Salon essay: One Weird Thing That Happened to Me When I Dated A Customer!
Or: My Worst Date Ever!
There's also the issue of the faux-realism (this is how the writer THINKS 20 year old women act and think, not how they actually act/think), but I'm on less certain ground there.
yeah, well, I'm not that into you either.
154: Is there something about it that makes it not a story? I think the only thing that makes it seems like it's not a story is that it is so topical and up-to-date. Otherwise I think it has a very typical short story structure.
151: The thing is, Rosenberg is doing a weird amount of handwringing about this, and it's difficult not to see it as a political gesture against the idea that young women should have fairly high expectations about how they are treated during sex. It seems to me like she's saying "we're always worried about consent and how not having consent is bad, but many students don't even know what they want...could we fix that? Well, [and she literally says this] no amount of education can teach you as much as actually having sex, so we just have to accept that young women will have bad sex at college, regardless of what we do". And that seems to be a kind of intentional muddying the waters about consent, sexual education and what is sexually enjoyable.
"Most people who have not had a lot of sex will have some bad sex until they figure it out" is a really trite statement. I'm not sure why you need to bring it into a conversation about education and consent unless you are trying to trivialize the ways that sex is worse without education and consent. It also seems to me that she is trying to make it unclear whether young women are complaining about sex being bad for consent and education reasons or whether they are complaining because hey, it's just bad until you're experience, right?
Also "you can't consent to a sexual act unless you have total familiarity with it, possibly not until you've actually done it already" is such a bizarre thing to say. "You can't really consent to something until you're totally familiar with it or possibly have already done it" would be ridiculous if applied to any other topic - have I spent my entire life, like, non-consensually ice-skating, non-consensually trying stewed beancurd, non-consensually using Filemaker, etc? I mean, you might as well argue that all consent is void, since what do I really know of Filemaker, ice-skating and beancurd? Not as much as God, that's for sure! Maybe I'll never know enough to truly consent to eating dinner, so therefore there's no meaningful difference between force-feeding and ordering a meal at a restaurant, right?
155: Give it five more minutes. You're almost there.
156: I'm having a hard time thinking that Maupassant would have been satisfied by the predictability
"You can't really consent to something until you're totally familiar with it or possibly have already done it" would be ridiculous if applied to any other topic
I think Celine sort-of made that argument about going to war.
157: Yep. That all sounds exactly right to me. Who knows what exactly Rosenberg was thinking, but if she had asked me beforehand if the linked piece was a useful addition to the conversation, I'd say it wasn't because it does seem to have the effects described.
149: It is true that people consent to stuff like that. I'm not saying they don't. But it's also pretty common to attempt to instruct or train people before just sending them out there to jump from a plane.
159: Maybe not, but there is a bit of a surprise ending.
141: "Let's do the Time Slice again!"
162: Right! Which is why it seems weird that Rosenberg is saying that education is inevitably insufficient. She's not clear enough that I'm sure what her point is, but she's unclear in a way that makes me react just like Frowner.
Since when do all unfoggers hail from the south? It's ok to be rude.
I think where education fails is that it can't really teach you how to figure out if the other person is a shithead.
Not that you can't give some tips.
|| Have we had a recent podcast recommendation thread? I am doing extremely tedious non phone work for a couple of days and I finished my friend Maddie's podcast about the wetterling case. So, what else should I listen to?||>
But it's also pretty common to attempt to instruct or train people before just sending them out there to jump from a plane.
When it comes to sky diving sex, consent and clear communication are key. Those and a functioning parachute.
Probably at least two. If only one partner has a parachute, issues of consent immediately become fraught.
156 gets it right. The whole thing, especially the last paragraph, couldn't be more "short story"-y.
170.2: This is where Nancy Reagan's rule comes in handy -- when it comes sky diving sex, all you need to remember is just say no.
Anyway, I've never done bungee jumping or sky diving and, baring verifiable death threats against myself, will never try either. I have skied (poorly). It seems to be that while objectively I know that skiing is probably more dangerous than sky diving or bungee jumping, at least I know that I can withdraw consent at any point along the way after starting.
Podcasts: Karina Longworth, BBC4's In these times, I have Esther Perel's "Where should we begin," real-life thereapty sessions in my personal queue to try.
The thing is, Rosenberg is doing a weird amount of handwringing about this, and it's difficult not to see it as a political gesture against the idea that young women should have fairly high expectations about how they are treated during sex.
One more comment . . .
1) I'm open to the idea that the essay linked in 88 is a bad piece. I find it interesting but part of what it stuck in my memory when I read it is that there is something a little odd about it. What struck my as surprising was that it seemed more immediately offensive to people than, say, buttercup's 5, whereas I would have seen them as different but on a continuum. But, to the extent we disagree, you may be correct. I was pushing back because I was surprised at how strong your reaction was, but I'm not necessarily arguing against it.
2) That said, I'm clearly inclined to a sympathetic reading because I have read a fair amount of her blog (and think of her as somebody who might be familiar to the unfogged crowd because I first came across her when she guest-blogged for Yglesias at think progress, and assumed that she might be on other people's blog-radar as well). When you say that she, "is doing a weird amount of handwringing . . ." I can say that I have read something else by her (which I can't find at the moment) in which she specifically said that she was a sheltered kid who started dating late and that it took her a lot of work to figure out sex and dating (and, if I recall correctly, took some cultivation of the mindset that, "it is appropriate that this takes work and effort") and I think that may be the motivation for some of what she's writing. I would put her in a very different category than Laura Kipnis, for example.
I should be clear that I'm arguing without having read the essay in 88. I already read three things for this thread before that point and I didn't want to risk another.
Re: Rosenberg, I think she is trying to trying to introduce the idea of "informed consent" into the discussion of sex. I'm a little surprised she didn't use that phrase itself.
And as with anything that involves information, it's a continuum, and you end up drawing somewhat arbitrary lines to indicate whether a person's information is good enough to constitute informed consent. Knowledge is never perfect, so consent is never perfect.
I suspect the vast majority of people enter into their sexual lives without having achieved anything like informed consent. But maybe I'm just projecting from my own experience.
171: not necessarily, and this suggests a method of escape far more dramatic than the "angel shot" nonsense mentioned above. Simply arrange for all dates to take place on board a suitable aircraft; if things are going badly, leap out and parachute to safety.
Have we had a recent podcast recommendation thread?
I don't listen to many podcasts, but I've been really enjoying Ana Marie Cox' With Friends Like These. For specific episodes I would recommend "Too Tired To Be Angry", "Post Office With Guns", or "Scale of Awfullness" as particularly strong episodes.
(runaway italics in 176, I was just trying to emphasize "her")
Ana Marie Cox' With Friends Like These
It can be hard to listen to a Lincoln accent for that long.
I have found that being retired provides you with a lot less cover for why you don't want to do things.
Wrong! Just tell them you have to go to one of your many doctors for one of your many embarrassing ailments.
You can also drink corn whisky and call it "rheumatism medicine".
Why I don't think it's a story:
(1) You need characters in a story. These are more like positions, or puppets. Enlightened 20 Year Old woman v. Jerk 35 year old man. (Though I'm not sure why she's supposed to be more enlightened than he is. Because she's 20? Because she's not fat?)
(2) Especially in a short story, you need craft and cohesion. This is a sprawling mess. That's why it reads like a Salon essay rather than a story. There's no structure here, no center. Nothing leads to anything. We don't have X because of Y leading to Z; we just have X and then Y and then Z.
(3) What makes it work to the extent it does is the bad graphic sex and that last line. The bad graphic sex scene is pretty good, I'll give the writer that. If it had been in a real story I would have liked it.
(4) The last line has a nice effect on us, but it's entirely unearned, if you see what I mean. Nothing about this story makes us think this woman has done anything to develop a decent relationship with this guy. Nothing about this woman makes us think she's any better than he is, in other words.
So why should we be shocked when he attacks her? I *get* that we're supposed to be upset because he goes from nice guy to whore in less than sixty seconds, and that's topical, but that's something from outside the story. We're responding to something from our culture, not something the writer has done. It's unearned.
Hmm. I found the characters super believable and appropriately complex.
As long as nobody is a wizard, I find all characters believable.
I don't think we ARE supposed to see her as better than he is, or at least not see her as "Enlightened". We are now expecting that, because the story has gone viral billed as "The thing that men have to read to see what it's like to be a woman and why it sucks to be a woman and why women hate men", and because the sentence excerpted in the social media links is about how he is bad at sex. But I don't know if the author meant it that way at all.
Do I need to read the linked piece in detail, or is the vague sense of skin crawling unpleasantness that I got from just skimming it good enough?
I also skipped a bunch of the middle.
which is what she'd have liked to do with his body
The most unrealistic thing for me in the story is that over all the time that they have been communicating with each other she doesn't know what kind of job he has (or if he has a job for that matter).
194: It's there in the title. He's a cat.
187: I think you're imposing your essay-style assumptions on the story, and they don't fit. Most obviously, this isn't Enlightened 20 Year Old woman v. Jerk 35 year old man. That could be a topic for an essay, but in fact, both characters are pretty confused, and both are treated reasonably sympathetically.
In your reading, why is the last line unearned? If the speaker has been portrayed as "Jerk 35-year-old man," then the last line is obvious and follows necessarily from everything before it. In fact, it was (a little) surprising, but only because the man as a character was presented with sympathy and texture.
I'll repeat the disclaimer in 38.last, but I found both characters very natural, normal and nuanced. I think it would be very hard for someone to read your description and connect it to the story as written.
187: These all read like critiques of fiction. Even if they're all valid and it's bad fiction, it's still fiction.
196: ???
Or as my sister used to say
That's my name!
Say it again
And I'll tell you the same!
This would me so angry I couldn't help myself that I would exclaim her name again.
It's like you don't even remember the time you were outed as Princess Fluffykins Hussein Obama.
aka Robert, the unpleasant 34 year old.
Why did your parents name somebody Puddin' Tame?
202: I have a cat's name, but I never said that I was an actual cat.
203: Sadly, peep, an unpleasant 54 year old.
Most awkward declination of an invitation, non-sexual genre: I told my assistant that I was very sorry my wife and I had a prior commitment, and couldn't make it to her daughter's wedding. Then I realized that said assistant has access to my Outlook calendar, which typically includes social events. I invented an out-of-state family celebration of a minor Jewish holiday that fortuitously fell on the wedding day.
I knew most Jewish holidays were just invented excuses.
I invented an out-of-state family celebration of a minor Jewish holiday that fortuitously fell on the wedding day.
And it was awkward because you suddenly remembered that your assistant knows your family isn't Jewish.
you might enthusiastically consent to yiffing, but if you've never tried to achieve arousal while wearing a fur suit..
Is there something you want to tell us, Moby?
you might enthusiastically consent to yiffing, but if you've never tried to achieve arousal while wearing a fur suit..
Is there something you want to tell us, Moby?
Right, because you've had the experience.
I think it would have been simultaneously less realistic AND a better short story had it omitted the last line, which made it read like a (perfectly valid, perfectly realistic, but still) more crude message piece.
You can discount this aesthetic assessment by the fact that I'm a simple unfrozen caveman-wannabe lawyer and that this is the first short story I've read in years (I boycott the New Yorker on principle, but I've now forgotten what the principle was. I think it was "I don't need every profile, however short, to include the name of the person's college" or maybe it was it was "too much with the New York")
I didn't think the story took place in New York, because of the Red Vines.
And because he lived in a house.
Living in a house is great. But it costs hundreds of dollars a month.
205: On the internet, everybody infers it.
Urple's twitter thread from 58 is very infuriating. Why am I still reading it?
I am a naif; I have long thought "red vines" was just a generic name for that sort of candy, including red Twizzlers.
I'm saving y'all from whatever my bad Cat Person takes would be by not having read it.
Good lord, I'm still getting you and delagar mixed up. That was delagar who didn't like it upthread.
I don't think I actually read much, just sort of look vaguely at words.
Heh, I did that recently, too. I was surprised by the smartness of my take, briefly. The trick is that her name has a descender in it, mine doesn't. And she's much more likely to be able to critically analyze literature, while I have more expertise at bad math jokes.
A completely on-topic lawsuit I'm in the middle of: The bad guys are arguing that when a pop up ad offers you a chance to play a sweepstakes game, and you press a button saying "I confirm" on a page that shows your name, address and phone number, you have provided "express written consent" to being called by about 50 different telemarketers.*
I'm just saying, don't date a telemarketer.
*there's a link, in a font size that is unreadable on a phone, to a different page that names the telemarketers.
213.1: I bet the author spent a lot of time pondering that last line. Ending the story with a one-word slur seems right to me, but the choice of "whore" carries a set of political implications that I can see being read as delivering a crude message in an essay-like fashion.
I think "whore" adds a necessary sexual dimension to the hostility and misogyny of, say, "bitch." As for crude messaging, the personal really can be political !
j2. 19: I am a bit curious as to what in it is infuriating you.
226 is confusing to me, so, to be explicit: E. Messily isn't talking about the thread where urple discovers how cookies are made.
"How are articles liket his not viewed as sexism? Idk, it just feels like it implies this stuff doesn't happen to men. It does."
It's really boring dumbness and it's the same dumbness that happens in every conversation about anything, ever. UGH!
No, I love that thread with all my heart.
228, 230: Ah. Was in a waiting room on the phone and assumed that is in fact what it was referring to....
"[T]witter" maybe should have been a giveaway.
Someone linked the interview with the story author earlier in the thread where she talks about how she was thinking about the characters. Authorial intent doesn't rule all, but if I'm paraphrasing her right, she says she didn't write the woman to be a sympathetic character, but does hope that at the end readers feel more sympathy for the woman because of what happens.
I think the story's weakness, for me (40something dude so take this fwiw) is that it doesn't add anything to the image of the Nice Guy™ I already know from the young feminist inter webs, Jezebel Sadie Doyle etc etc etc.
If you told me it was written by a committee of bloggers whose only experience with Nice Guys™ was knowing how loathed they are on the internet, I'd nod and agree; then again, I mean, what is "literary realism" these days if not a presentation of life as we know it must be from the internet?
TL;DR: It's a totally fine short story written at a time when the form has never been less interesting
233 - Same demographic, recognize the problem in 233 but I think the writing about the young woman's perspective (and especially the sex scene -- so hard to do that well) was really really good and felt somewhat novel to me, the parts about making half-hearted decisions and changing your mind felt very well crafted and poignant. The guy was underdeveloped but that seemed like a reasonable aesthetic choice since kinda the whole point of his character is that he's an underdeveloped character whom the woman doesn't know well.
As I said above, I didn't like the ending which wrapped it up too neatly IMO into a 2017 morality play -- it may be absolutely true that the soi-disant nice guys are the ones most likely to vindictively call out "whore", but that not only doesn't feel like a particularly trenchant or new observation these days, but feels like a cliche, and so the decision to end wrather complex play in the early part of the story got wrapped up too neatly for my taste.
I have less ability to comment meaningfully on this compared even with other blathering on the internet, so take accordingly. But I felt better off for having read the story.
I like dj lurker. We don't do proper welcomes anymore but I'm gesturing at one.
I more or less agreed with 213.1 but not so much the "nice guy" part. He's 34 or 35, I forget which, dating a 20 year old college student. It's not Humbert Humbert but most the 35 year old guys I've known who wanted to date 20 year olds were guys I'd really rather not have known.
233, 234: I cannot be the only person so cynical as to observe that the short story is dilapidated and despised a genre that it looks to Twitter FeminismTM for vigor.
236 - I meant "nice guy" only in internet sense of "self-conscious loser around women who doesn't see himself as a monster but acts like one anyway, while not being particularly self-aware." Seemed to me that part of the story was that the guy was obviously failing at adult life.
"it may be absolutely true that the soi-disant nice guys are the ones most likely to vindictively call out "whore"," - hmmm maybe "even" the soi-disant "nice guys"? I don't think the story is about "most likely". Very very good bad sex writing, i agree!
At any rate we're all carrying on a grand tradition of American Letters, var. Bright Young Female Author Irks The Men, see Mary McCarthy https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mary-mccarthy-edmund-wilson-and-the-short-story-that-ruined-a-marriage , Anita Loos https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=2335658013325087&id=1936293209928238&__tn__=C-R etc etc etc
237 - presumably it needs to look to TwitterFeminismTM for an audience, since women are basically the only people who read fiction. That's why the publisher made me publish my novella about campus sexual mores under a female pseudonym.
In case that was too vague, let me just say that "Francine Pascal" was not the real author of "Sweet Valley High: Double Trouble."
Let me be the first to suggest "Dame Judi Dench."
240: Be strong, sister. Your readers are looking forward to "Sweet Valley Special Victims Unit: The Red Day of Revenge."
I boycott the New Yorker on principle, but I've now forgotten what the principle was
I am saving all the New Yorker fiction to read when I retire. Unfortunately, it seems much more likely that I will die before retirement age anyway. Oh well. Everything is horrible.
[So, not to be snide about it, but, this story y'all are discussing is about white people, right? Cause I don't really see any explicit discussion of race happening, but it's totally a white people thing, right?]
I think the story's weakness, for me (40something dude so take this fwiw) is that it doesn't add anything to the image of the Nice Guy™ I already know from the young feminist inter webs, Jezebel Sadie Doyle etc etc etc.
I didn't think he was a prototypical nice guy.
Right -- the 'Nice Guy' is a man whose female friends don't want to date him and is aggrieved about it. This story is a different pattern.
I don't think I'm a 40-year old man, but I had the same reaction to the short story as 213/234 and to a lesser extent 187. I thought the ending ruined what had otherwise been a nuanced exploration of being 20 and that feeling of control and indecision that comes with being an older teen, and that both characters were developed in a way that let you read between the lines about the sorts of people they were. (Young student thinking she's more mature than she is, an older man who is both pathetic and in retrospect creepy in a way that's harder to pick up on when you're 20 and feel yourself an adult.)
I also think I disagree with 125, in that while I think we do (and should) talk more about young women's experiences, young men if anything are more likely to not have a language to describe coercive sex as anything but "bad sex." Obviously this is not a cultural moment for "what about the menz,"* but I think that young men are trained that they're not supposed to ever not want sex and that they're incapable of being coerced into heterosexual sex, when clearly training about sex and sexuality is utterly dire for all genders in the US. I had a male roommate who was classically date-raped by a woman. And while the experience was clearly traumatic for him, he had no framework or language to process it as anything other than "bad sex," even after I pointed out that it was cut-and-dried sexual assault. The sad thing is I don't think the woman had any idea she was raping my friend, because I don't think she had an idea of male non-consent as a thing.
Anyways, I don't think my opinion contributes much to the conversation politically, except as part of maybe "the patriarchy hurts men too." Maybe a bigger point is that American attitudes towards sex are so deeply fucked up and problematic that everyone is having terrible sex due to all the guilt and horribleness and sexism involved. I grew up blessedly free from the influence of American sexual attitudes so I'm approaching much of this conversation as a bit of an outsider, which maybe makes my intuitions a bit different.
*Although male sexual abuse isn't simply targeted at women, and male-on-male sexual abuse doesn't necessarily get much attention, in part due to the shame on the part of the victims.
Or a nice guy whatsoever. He didn't feel entitled to her once he'd showered her with sufficient friendsville. He didn't ever fake a friendship to get with her. He's kind of a sad-ass, and also petty and pouty, but that's different.
It vaguely reminds me of GhostWorld, but not perfectly.
GhostWorld being the last time I saw a culturally relevant movie.
I guess it took me much longer to write 249 than I realized.
[So, not to be snide about it, but, this story y'all are discussing is about white people, right? Cause I don't really see any explicit discussion of race happening, but it's totally a white people thing, right?]
There are so many different ways to be white! Don't lump us all together in a white box.
Also I went to middle school with the Sweet Valley High twins.
But what I was reacting to most in the piece, and which sometimes annoys me about the concept 'enthusiastic consent,' is the idea that sex should always be puppies and rainbows and unicorns. It feels like the mirror image of sex as terrible: sex either has to be terrible or wonderful, but we don't allow it to be mundane. It's not a thing you can just do and not really have it affect you, and it feels part of the larger American to-do with sex as something weirdly removed from the rhythms of daily life. There's also something very "American summer camp" about the idea sex always has to be done enthusiastically. We don't ask that you cook dinner or eat ice cream or pick up dry cleaning or knit or run or watch TV enthusiastically, so why does sex have to have this special extra emotional/affective requirement in order to be done acceptably?
In an age of Harvey Weinstein I'm not sure this is a conversation that's important to have, but it feels like a stumbling block to truly getting to healthy views on sexuality. Maybe it's where we need to be now, but it feels like flipping puritanical sex attitudes on their head is still exhausting and anxiety-producing and unhealthy.
We don't ask that you cook dinner or eat ice cream or pick up dry cleaning or knit or run or watch TV enthusiastically, so why does sex have to have this special extra emotional/affective requirement in order to be done acceptably?
Service with a smile.
I don't think I'm a 40-year old man...
See if you can go through the night without getting up to pee.
There's also something very "American summer camp" about the idea sex always has to be done enthusiastically.
What did I miss by not going to summer camp?
Yeah, those of you who said he's not a classical Nice Guy™ are right. It's the ending, primarily, that transposes him into that key (and I'm with Halford on the ending's weakness). The wanting her to have been a Virgin > calling her a Whore dynamic is where the whole grimy machinery of the Short Story starts creaking audibly.....
which sometimes annoys me about the concept 'enthusiastic consent,'
The consent just has to be enthusiastic. The sex can be 'meh'.
260
I've sometimes found it hard to convince people that the consent is enthusiastic if the affect reads "meh" in Standard American.
I was thinking he's probably a Nice Guy amongst women his own age.
Isn't the movie theater the most likely place to find stale red vines?
Seems to me that the story provides a pretty clear example of enthusiastic consent to meh or worse sex, a useful examination of both the advantages and the limitations of the concept.
And I wish people would stop blaming the Puritans for everything. In Calvin's Geneva we'd have clear rules and none of these problems.
263: I was just mansplaining for Thorn. She needs a bit more assertiveness, the poor dear.
Just for the record, I thought the story was good, and quite believable (while outside my personal experience).
a pretty clear example of enthusiastic consent to meh or worse sex
I think that only works if you believe that "sex" started at the moment that they left the bar. From that point forward she felt decreasing enthusiasm and increasing concern.
265
Right. From this woman's outward behavior, she is initiating taking things to the next level at every step of the way. It's not really the man's fault that he can't read her inner monologue of doubt when her outward behavior is enthusiastic. I think this is why it's much more powerful as a piece about what it's like to have shitty sexual experiences as a young person than as a piece about a man behaving badly (even though there is obviously something a bit creepy about an older man dating a college student).
From this woman's outward behavior, she is initiating taking things to the next level at every step of the way.
I think that's broadly correct, and a good point, but not 100% correct. Re-reading the description of what happens when they get to his house she is not entirely the initiator (though she did suggest going back to his place):
"I like it," she said, truthfully, and, as she did, she identified the emotion she was feeling as relief. It occurred to her that she'd never gone to someone's house to have sex before; because she'd dated only guys her age, there had always been some element of sneaking around, to avoid roommates. It was new, and a little frightening, to be so completely on someone else's turf, and the fact that Robert's house gave evidence of his having interests that she shared, if only in their broadest categories--art, games, books, music--struck her as a reassuring endorsement of her choice.
As she thought this, she saw that Robert was watching her closely, observing the impression the room had made. ... But then he was kissing her, throwing her bag and their coats on the couch and ushering her into the bedroom, groping her ass and pawing at her chest, with the avid clumsiness of that first kiss.
270
Right, rereading he's sexually aggressive at times, but not in a way that's unreasonable if your assuming a consensual relationship based on mutual escalation. Even after she's pretty sure she's not attracted to him you get things like this:
"The more she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got, and soon they were rocking against each other, getting into a rhythm, and she reached into his underwear and took his penis in her hand and felt the pearled droplet of moisture on its tip. He made that sound again, that high-pitched feminine whine, and she wished there were a way she could ask him not to do that, but she couldn't think of any. Then his hand was inside her underwear, and when he felt that she was wet he visibly relaxed. He fingered her a little, very softly, and she bit her lip and put on a show for him, but then he poked her too hard and she flinched, and he jerked his hand away. "Sorry!" he said."
This sounds like terrible sex, but at no point does it seem like coercive, un-enthusiastically consented-to sex.
271.last Are people saying otherwise? Are there tweets saying this is what sexual assault looks like? Do I want to know?
(Appreciating your comments on this thread, btw.)
sex either has to be terrible or wonderful, but we don't allow it to be mundane
[banal joke omitted]
271.2 That reminds me of something that I've been trying to figure out how to say without coming across as obnoxious. There's the quote about "men fear that women will laugh at them; women fear that men will kill them." (and, in the story, she does occasionally worry that he might be a psychotic murderer) The point is to emphasize the asymmetry of the fear. However it also true that the fear of being laughed at is not minor (and not gendered, women certainly fear that their partners will ridicule them) and the points in the story at which she is least sympathetic to me, are the ones in which she's does imagine laughing at him:
. . . she imagined that somewhere, out there in the universe, there was a boy who would think that this moment was just as awful yet hilarious as she did, and that sometime, far in the future, she would tell the boy this story. She'd say, "And then he said, 'You make my dick so hard,' " and the boy would shriek in agony and grab her leg, saying, "Oh, my God, stop, please, no, I can't take it anymore," and the two of them would collapse into each other's arms and laugh and laugh . . .
or
She grabbed the friend she was with, a guy named Albert. "Oh, my God, that's him," she whispered. "The guy from the movie theatre!" By then, Albert had heard a version of the story, though not quite the true one; nearly all her friends had. Albert stepped in front of her, shielding her from Robert's view . . . It was all so over-the-top that she wondered if she was acting like a mean girl, but, at the same time, she truly did feel sick and scared.
Neither of those are unreasonable responses or behavior on her part, but they also aren't good. She may have less impulse than he does to behave cruelly, but there is an element of cruelty there.
And, again, that's just part of life. It's difficult (and probably a bad idea) to always avoid being cruel, but I don't think she is presented as necessarily behaving well in the situation.
273
This is from a guardian article:
"So much of sex is about power, and in Cat Person Roupenian sketches a scenario familiar to many women: one where they feel powerless to stop a sexual encounter."
"After Weinstein, after #MeToo, it's imperative we examine the minutiae of sexual encounters, because it's the only way we'll redefine positive and participatory sex, where consent is enthusiastic and fluid between partners, and no one feels bad afterwards. "
But here's the thing. No one is a mind reader, and if the person forcing you to have sex with another person is your own superego, that's about sexism and gender roles in society, but it's not actually about power between the two people present. In this story, the sex is horrible and the woman is not enthusiastic. But she *performs* enthusiasm to a point where no one would be able to tell otherwise. She grabs his dick. She is moaning and super wet. When he goes limp after she laughs at him, she does what she can to get him aroused. *She* is the one coercing herself here. That is absolutely about sexism and larger social discourses about expected women's sex roles, but it's nothing to do with the two people in the room. If the conversation can be about that and not how the man is a creep (which he is, but doesn't seem relevant here).
Women are taught to be passive-aggressive martyrs who put our own needs last. My mother was the queen of this sort of behavior, and I've picked up a lot of it. What I've learned through therapy, however, is that I'm an adult who should voice my own desires/needs and not expect people to intuit them for me. For example, expecting my husband to fetch me water without asking him to and getting huffy when he doesn't isn't really acceptable communication or an OK way to treat him. I'm not sure why sex is somehow magically different, such that we can get mad at our individual partners for what is really a problem with ourselves and our society.
275
Yeah, I thought the story did a good job of getting the casual cruelty and self-absorption of a 20 year old, which made the story actually much richer than simply "icky man coerces young woman into sex."
Ending the story with a one-word slur seems right to me, but the choice of "whore" carries a set of political implications that I can see being read as delivering a crude message in an essay-like fashion.
I think "whore" adds a necessary sexual dimension to the hostility and misogyny of, say, "bitch."
It can also incorporate self-loathing.
- You're a whore for being enthusiastic about sleeping with an unattractive guy like myself who you apparently don't even like. If you sleep with me, you'll sleep with anyone.
275, 277: I got the sense (more or less confirmed by the author) that the 20 year old wasn't supposed to be sympathetic just because it's her perspective. I mean, even if you leave out the end, the guy is pretty off-putting even when not downright creepy, but neither of them would do well at a sympathy contest. I even thought the story did a good job in the early part making you wonder if the protagonist was being unfair to the guy, who she's still trying to gauge as a person, and if maybe someone else would describe him more sympathetically.
So in that respect the ending does seem unearned, as delagar says*, because it almost forces a choice between sympathy for one or the other, when I was ok through the whole story up until the end thinking about how they both weren't coming across well. But if it had ended ambiguously I probably wouldn't have given the story much thought because I don't really relate to it except in the sense of feeling like being basically a hermit has its benefits.
*Unless "unearned" is just referring to the way it attaches to the current cultural moment?
Buttercup's 276 put me in mind of a spasm of hatred I felt for Elizabeth Hardwick the other day:
Women are taught to be passive-aggressive martyrs who put our own needs last. My mother was the queen of this sort of behavior, and I've picked up a lot of it. What I've learned through therapy, however, is that I'm an adult who should voice my own desires/needs and not expect people to intuit them for me. For example, expecting my husband to fetch me water without asking him to and getting huffy when he doesn't isn't really acceptable communication or an OK way to treat him. I'm not sure why sex is somehow magically different, such that we can get mad at our individual partners for what is really a problem with ourselves and our society.
"In the long run wives are to be paid in a peculiar coin -- consideration of their feelings. And it usually turns out this is an enormous, unthinkable inflation few men will remit, or if they will, only with a sense of being overcharged"
*I stole this from the TLS. I don't actually read or possess her essays. Terry Pratchett is more my style
280 Sorry, where's the first block quote from?
||
'I honored Confucius but did not know why Confucius deserved
honor. I was "like a short man watching a play behind a tall man."'
|>
To Buttercup generally -- I completely agree that what's going on in this story isn't a sexual assault. While she's not actually enthusiastic about the sex, she's consenting to it affirmatively and in way that I'd call 'enthusiastic'. The story has her in a position where she (eventually) doesn't want to have sex, but her options for changing her mind and leaving all seem like they're going to be more difficult and unpleasant than going ahead with it, so she goes ahead with it, and it's kind of awful but not a major trauma.
And definitely, I don't think either of the characters is supposed to be completely sympathetic -- he obviously isn't, but neither is she, and they both at different points treat the other one badly.
But I can't go as far as this: *She* is the one coercing herself here. That is absolutely about sexism and larger social discourses about expected women's sex roles, but it's nothing to do with the two people in the room. If the conversation can be about that and not how the man is a creep (which he is, but doesn't seem relevant here).
That is, her self-coercion is a a response to the specific person she's in the room with: she can't make herself make a polite excuse and leave because her sense of the particular man she's dealing with is that doing that will be more difficult and unpleasant than she feels able to deal with. That doesn't make him a rapist, and it doesn't make the bad sex they have sexual assault, but it's not completely separable from her (within the story, accurate, and I think realistically so) perception of him as kind of a bully and a creep. I think that kind of dynamic is what the Guardian piece you quoted in 276 (which is clear that the sex in 'Cat People' isn't a rape) is about, and I do think it's worth thinking about.
What if he were a Democratic senator from a state with a Democratic governor who has a serious heart condition and the lieutenant governor is a Republican?
1. I think this is a mobilizing/movement story, not a work of literature for the ages. I think that's okay. These are interesting times.
2. What I took from the ending was "under patriarchy, women and men can have mediocre, fail-y experiences where both of them are kind of not that great....and a frequent straight male response is to move to rhetorical or literal violence in response, instead of just being kind of annoying and moving on". It's not unearned, it's absolutely realistic, and it reflects the way in which women are not allowed to be meh. There is no - no! - way in which the average straight young woman is going to respond to a casual, not-that-great relationship by escalating to aggression and threats. There is no term to leverage against straight men that is the equivalent of "whore" leveraged against women. The ending only seems "unearned" if you're looking for the story to speak to a "greater truth" than the reality of young women.
I agree with Frowny. The ending should be read as mundane and not particularly scary to the narrator, just the escalation to violent rhetoric that this sadsack reaches for, probably drunk.
When I get drunk, I make worse puns.
It doesn't matter if I'm threatened or not.
I think the puns *are* the threat.
I agree with Frowny. The ending should be read as mundane and not particularly scary to the narrator, just the escalation to violent rhetoric that this sadsack reaches for, probably drunk.
But if it's not scary and he's a sadsack, I don't see how this is an example of him "leveraging" something in a way that gives men power but not women.
It's troll-power, right? He's drunk and what's coming out of his mouth is the comments section of any feminist writer.
293: I don't see how this is an example of him "leveraging" something in a way that gives men power but not women.
Well, look back to the sex they had, which, in the moment, he wanted to have and she didn't. It still wasn't sexual assault, there's still nothing on the face of the story indicating that he had any intent to have sex with her without her consent. But the reason that she ended up talking herself into feigning enthusiasm and going ahead with with it was that she thought backing out would be difficult and unpleasant in a way she couldn't handle.
And turns out that when she wanted to not see or interact with him any more, he in fact did get verbally abusive -- her guess that saying 'no' to him would be difficult and unpleasant looks, in retrospect, to have been accurate. Getting the word 'whore' texted to you isn't terribly frightening if it doesn't go on for long, but that sort of interaction in person could be much scarier.
So, the world in which women know that saying no to men is going to be difficult and unpleasant, is a world where men sometimes have sex that they want to have and their sex partners don't want to have, even though they aren't rapists. Calling her a whore for stopping talking to him helps maintain that status quo.
Does that make sense?
285: You let the trolley run over the Republican, of course.
Trolley-power, the left's answer to troll-power.
(Saying 'in fact' about any of this is a little odd, because the whole story's fiction. But none of the interactions seem implausible to me.)
In re threats:
I think this is something that cis men maybe are not going to get, and that people who live or have lived as women do get.
When some dude keeps insisting via text, email or phonecall - over and over again, and your lack of response doesn't stop him - it feels threatening. Very often, the next step is the guy showing up at your work, or posting stuff on the internet, or moving to physical threats. Sure, sometimes it's just talk, but you don't know. I have experienced something similar to this story, and it was scary and anxiety-producing; it led me to avoid a part of town for a while. I stress that I am not very social nor a beauty queen, so if it has happened to me a couple of times, it's happened to most women more often.
Also - and again, I'm just going to have to folks to believe me here - for a lot of people who live/have lived as women, that pattern of polite-to-demanding-to ugly slur is itself hurtful. It's easy to believe that sticks and stones, etc, and grown up women should just be able to ignore stuff like that, but it makes you feel bad, and it makes you feel bad in a way that stays with you. Again, I've had this kind of thing happen to me, and even though I know the men in question were assholes and have, like, made fun of them to friends over the years, I still get an ugly, rotten, self-hating kind of feeling from recalling the names I was called.
"Whore" is not a term like "bitch"; it's more like calling a woman a cunt. It's not in normal casual usage, there are no t-shirts t equivalent to the "ha ha I'm a bitch and it's great". It's a word that is unfairly shaming (since it's anti-sex worker) and is also laden with violence and hate.
Women and people who have lived as women are taught to minimize how powerful language is and how scary it can be, because we are on the receiving end of so much hateful garbage that we have no power to stop. There is no real social sanction, except, like, New Yorker stories that make men mad, for this particular "I am mad that you rejected me, now I am going to get really ugly and leave it open whether I am also going to get stalky" dynamic. In general, men who do not do this kind of thing don't want to acknowledge that it is both common and really actually kind of traumatic, because that means reevaluating how they think of our shared experience of the world.
It's not in normal casual usage
If you like, I chould introduce you to British people some time.
Also, I agree with the last paragraph of 300. I never did acknowledge it until Twitter and Trump made it too hard to not notice.
One of the worst things about the casual exposure to foreigners young people get on the internet -- having to explain to your teenagers that although 'cunt' is ordinary casual swearing to people from the UK, it's still genuinely taboo over here, and I say that as someone who swears a lot in conversation.
Sally used it in passing in a clearly British-influenced context once when she was thirteen or so, and I had a heartfelt "Trust me. I'm not telling you to stop saying 'fuck', I realize that's not on the cards. But this one's different."
I don't really have time to comment, so this is just a drop by response to 295, but I want to point out the story is written solely from the woman's POV. We don't know what the man's internal monologue is, and we don't actually know he wanted to have sex any more than she did. We know that she assumed he did, but then women are trained in the US to assumed that heterosexual men always want sex. The fact he keeps losing his erection might imply he wasn't any more into it than she was.
Again, I don't want to make this "what about the menz," but patriarchy can produce bad sex for everyone that isn't even about the specific power dynamic between the two people. The woman is the victim of shitty sexual narratives and social expectations, but she's not really the victim of this particular man "getting" sex out of her. From his POV, she's wet and moaning and grabbing his dick, and maybe he doesn't want to fuck her either but feels she'll judge him as unmanly if he turns her down.
I do in general agree with 300 though, in terms of threats and worries about actual violence, which is why I agree the very end took the story somewhere a bit different.
I have lots of thoughts though, on what we expect out of people and my discomfort about having systematically different behavior expectations for men vs. women* that bring in my agreement with 300 in conflict with my Kantianism, but I have no time to say them until the afternoon.
*I.e. if you as a man have sex with a woman and then ghost her after actively pursuing a relationship for months, plenty of women will be hurt and blow up your phone with texts and call you bad names their friends. I really don't think that's the gender aspect, or if you're going to ask men not to be hurt by being fucked and ghosted, you're asking them to fundamentally not to have human emotions, and I wouldn't feel comfortable asking the same thing of women. Obviously the sexual violence aspect gets involved here, and the general entitlement men seem to feel towards women's bodies makes it harder to disentangle.
We do, in the context of the story, know that his reaction to the sex they have is to continue to pursue her rather than to drop the acquaintance. Nothing's certain, the story's not written from his point of view, sure, but your reading seems implausible.
304 last: he afraid she's going to laugh at him, and he's right: she's already laughing at him, so it's totally no-win.
I still don't have any sympathy for him. What's he think dating a 20 year old is going to be like? Sounded good in his head, I guess.
305 We have systematically different expectations because of the systematic power imbalance. Fear of getting laughed at and fear of being killed can't be made equivalent.
We do, in the context of the story, know that his reaction to the sex they have is to continue to pursue her rather than to drop the acquaintance.
Argh! I shouldn't be doing this now because I really need to work, but this is *precisely* the argument that men make about women who are raped, and that feminists push back against. "How could you see him again if he raped you?" "If he coerced you into sex, why didn't you dump him immediately?" Sex and people's reactions to bad sex, coercive sex, and even straight up rape are pretty complex. From his outward willingness to see her again, we can make approximately zero assumptions about his willingness to have sex in that one particular moment.
Argh! I shouldn't be doing this now because I really need to work...
In my experience, really needing to work is the leading cause of arguing on the internets.
I think this is a mobilizing/movement story, not a work of literature for the ages. I think that's okay.
I think this is what unearned is getting at. It's a criticism of the story as fiction, not a criticism of it as a picture of reality. Unearned doesn't mean it's not believable.
The men of men reacting to Cat Person are probably mostly not saying the ending is unearned, they're saying it's unfair. They're also apparently too stupid to get that it's fiction.
No, it's not precisely the same argument at all -- arguments have specifics. "How could you see him again if he raped you" "Why didn't you dump him immediately" are questions with reasonable answers in specific contexts -- generally they're going to come down to 'we were embedded in a social context where shunning the guy would have had significant negative consequences'. And I don't see how to make any such argument about him in the context of this story. There's also quite a lot of space between 'willingness to see someone again' and 'insistent, repeated, mostly unresponded-to attempts to contact'.
I mean, sure, no one can really know anything ever, but your reading that it's plausible that he felt pressured into undesired sex seems odd.
Anyway, I'm not going to continue arguing about unearned because at this point I'd just be devil's advocating and would annoy even myself. With a different ending I probably wouldn't have read it, and I liked it more or less.
Speaking of fiction with unreliable narrators, my son's class was assigned a novel where (Spoiler Alert!*) the narrator is searching for the killer of her mother but in the end it turns out she killed her mother. He was livid when he got to the end.
* Do I need a spoiler alert if I don't know the name of what I'm spoiling?
But he was just raging for a good ten minutes about how the author had cheated. I'm thinking of giving him And Then There Were None, but I doubt he'd be able to get into it.
300: I think I'm just hung up on the difference between "threatening behavior" from the POV of the aggression target, which seems to me to include generic aggression, and "escalating to threats," which takes the POV of the aggressor, and I would have taken to mean threatening specific actions. It makes sense to me that his texts might reasonably be *scary*, for the reasons you mentioned.
(On reflection, "specific actions" is too narrow - "directly threatening action" is closer.)
315: Take him to see Murder on the Orient Express?
He'll make fun of my lack of hipster facial hair.
312
I mean, I don't think it's the most plausible reading, but I think it's worth remembering he's a character presenting solely through a woman's internal monologue/POV, and she's an immature, self-absorbed 20-year old (like all 20 year-olds are). We don't get anything resembling an objective description of either of their behaviors, so saying that "he got what he wanted and she didn't doesn't seem like a fair reading given the narration. I don't think he's a sympathetic character, but I don't think we can read her being pressured into sex as coming directly from him, rather than from society's patriarchal sexual norms that the girl has grown up in.
I'm also uncomfortable with saying that women only continue to see rapists because they feel external pressure of actual negative consequences. AGAIN, people create their own social pressure in their heads, and they do all sorts of things to make sex "OK." Plenty of women actively reach out to their rapists to initiate sex because they feel like if they choose to have sex a second time it gives them a form of agency over the encounter. Plenty of women love their rapists, and want to still date them. Women don't only stay because of fear. It's really not that different, especially given that we're getting his actions as filtered through one of the characters in it.
I like the dog & lizard story about the systematic power imbalance. With the thermostat. However, it probably violates the analogy ban. Do metaphors count as analogies?
I'm also uncomfortable with saying that women only continue to see rapists because they feel external pressure of actual negative consequences.
I don't know why I bother making qualified statements to begin with.
Yeah, I thought the ending, while you could see it coming a way off, was needed to make the tale complete. I think most men grow out of that sort of thing by 35; or they should.
Surprised not to see more talk about the zeitgeisty aspect of Cat Person: it's a decently put together story but its resonance is what's interesting, no? My feeling about MAGA, the wearing of red caps and white polo shirts, wanking into plant pots, etc. etc. is that they've taken a pitcher of cold lumpy porridge and upended it over gender relations; it's as if no one is going to get laid (in English-speaking countries) until things are straightened out. In a different time, the miserabilism of Cat Person surely wouldn't connect. And this is why the takes you see along the lines of - men, you realise you're bad at sex, why can't you be better at doing sex - look sort of silly. Of course bad sex sometimes happens: that's surely no surprise. Is it?
312 doesn't actually seem like it describes any of the cases I've heard about. Often people are confused about what happened for a while, especially if they were coerced into sex by someone they'd previously felt close to and trusted.
But anyways, Americans have an idea that men always want sex, and women rarely want sex, and women only have sex as something they do for men to get things from them (love, affection, marriage). It's really really toxic, and the flip side to training women to put their own sexual desire first is also to train people that men can be sensitive and have complex emotions and not want sex either. Most American women I know are super offended at the idea they'd offer sex and a man would turn them down, because they completely believe heterosexual men constantly want sex with anything that moves. Dismantling sexism is also going to require dismantling the idea men are horndogs for whom sex doesn't have meaning or complexity either.
Sorry! I REALLY have to get to work! Agh! Deadlines!
I mean, sure, no one can really know anything ever, but your reading that it's plausible that he felt pressured into undesired sex seems odd.
It's always plausible. If she initiates anything he thinks
A) I can't turn her down, she would be insulted and get mad
B) I can't turn her down, that's not what men do, there is no script for that
Also as Buttercup notes, the failure to maintain an erection, though this is seen by Margot as merely a symptom of his being a fatso
I couldn't agree with 326 more in general, but I also still can't see any plausible reading of this story that makes it salient here specifically.
323: You strongly implied that anything else is a sufficiently marginal case that it nullifies the equivalence Buttercup was drawing.
also to train people that men can be sensitive and have complex emotions and not want sex either
I have complex emotions, but honestly I prefer the whole "just stifle them" thing. It saves so much time.
Maybe "it's always plausible" should be "it's always possible".
It's here, starting partway down the page. (Just after the line that's all italics).
323
Eh, I'm writing quickly so of course what you wrote is more nuanced. But you said you can't see why, in this instance, a man would reach out repeatedly to a woman who ghosted him if he'd not wanted sex in the first place. But this gets back to us knowing absolutely nothing about the dude in the first place, as we get him solely through the woman. I know multiple cases of women who've had coercive one-night stands that were much rapier than the one in this story, and they've been the stalkery ones blowing up the man's phone later. To the man's male friends, a dude sleeps with a woman and then she wants more and he doesn't. To the woman, she had a rapey encounter she's trying to turn into non-rape by initiating sex with her rapist to make it something she's in control of. We'd know absolutely none of that from a story written from the man's POV.
Anyways, I don't know why I picked this hill to die on, it's not like I think this guy wasn't a creepy loser. #notallcreepylosers
332 to 321. Or not "to" it exactly, but following.
#notallcreepylosers
Truly the hashtag activism for our times.
In a different time, the miserabilism of Cat Person surely wouldn't connect.
I don't know if I agree, but I sure do love the word miserabilism and this whole sentence.
But you said you can't see why, in this instance, a man would reach out repeatedly to a woman who ghosted him if he'd not wanted sex in the first place.
And why he'd have an immediate post-sex conversation about the intensity of his feelings for her. And why he'd want her to stay the night so that he could make her breakfast in the morning. And why he'd drive her home and drop her off with an insistently initiated passionate kiss, followed by an immediate heart-eyes emoji text.
In general, can men feel pressured into sex they didn't want to have, because they're always supposed to want sex? Of course! But in this particular story, there really isn't textual evidence that the sex they had was something he didn't desire.
312: There are all sorts of plausible scenarios in which this dude would continue to pursue post-bad sex; we don't get much of a glimpse into his perspective. It might be that he likes the idea of dating (his idea of) the girl, or just a 20 year old, and the sex something he thinks is expected. It could be that he feels inadequate and defeated by his "failure" and feels the need to redeem himself. It could be he genuinely likes her and thinks the sex will get better. Who knows? Not the reader.
I'm no good at literature, and could not work out the role in the story of cats, or of being a cat person
I just started reading it again, both because I'm procrastinating and because I too was interested in understanding this. So far, I think it's something like this: they make up stories about the cats and their relationship to each other, in the same way that we make up stories about people and our relationships to each other. The idea of a cat person contains both someone with tender, caring energy and someone whose caring energy is expended on animals that make this show of independence but are ultimately trapped indoors with you, and don't talk back. It's not a problem to have this relationship with pets, but these expectations sometimes present in our relationships with people. You can also read the title with an implicit academic slash, and think about the instability of our view of others, how we can flicker back and forth between seeing others as people and failing to.
338: Can we maintain the distinction between 'bad sex' (knowable only in retrospect) and 'undesired sex' (known to the person who doesn't desire it beforehand), as well as the distinction between both of those and 'unconsented-to sex'? Whether or not he perceived the sex as bad, in retrospect, is different from the question of whether he would have preferred to not have sex with her.
To make the 'he would have preferred to not have sex with her' narrative work, you need to get past the fact that he is immediately afterwards and continuously for a period after that demonstrating explicit enthusiasm for maintaining a relationship in which he continues to have sex with her again. And anything like that is possible: could be he's deeply religious and tortured by his relationship with God and with the chastity that his religion requires, and has sex to punish himself for his unworthiness. You could write a story about someone like that. But nothing like that is apparent on the face of the story as written.
337
Eh, all of those can be extremely common behaviors in cases of date rape. Normalization is as common a response to trauma as withdrawal. Again, I agree reading him as being coerced into sex isn't a super plausible reading, but it's not off the table given the evidence we've been presented.
Seeing both of them as having shitty sex because of the shitty cultural scripts they have in their head seems like the most plausible reading, in my opinion. I don't think we have any evidence that tells us the sex was wonderful for the man, and plenty of evidence it was not (i.e. repeatedly losing his erection.)
I couldn't agree with 326 more in general, but I also still can't see any plausible reading of this story that makes it salient here specifically.
#notallcreepylosers
In general, can men feel pressured into sex they didn't want to have, because they're always supposed to want sex? Of course! But in this particular story, there really isn't textual evidence that the sex they had was something he didn't desire.
I appreciate some of buttercup's pushing back against the story because it helps me understand why some men would object to it. I thought the story was realistic and believeable but it's also true that, as presented in the story, the man is not only mildly- to moderately-creepy he's totally a loser.
He's bad a flirting (except through text messages, most of which we don't see). He's bad at reading her, bad a sex, unattractive, we know nothing about his job (and the author suggests that there may be a class barrier)*, and as far as we can tell he doesn't have any friends. At the end of the story she is walking in with friends and he's, "alone ... silently, hunched over a beer."
All of that is believable, particularly as a description of the sort of 34yo who would go on a date with a 20yo that he barely knows, but it is also a almost uniformly negative presentation. I take Buttercup as saying that if we try to imagine him as a person with feelings and goals (other than just painfully "seducing" a 20yo) that requires, to some extent, inventing things which aren't in the text.
I do think there's a hint of class tension in the story: Robert teases Margot about her "highbrow" taste in movies, and repeatedly brings up her college education in a way that (in my mind) suggests the possibility that he hasn't gone to college himself. Margot, certainly, interprets his behavior in this way: she believes that he's intimidated by her, that she has the upper hand, and this appeals to her. ... Again, we don't know. Margot, and the reader, can project practically anything onto Robert, because there's so little there.
339: I read it as a joke about furries.
I thought it was an Andrew Lloyd Webber reference.
I take it back; it's actually a hidden reference to the author's favorite deli.
Part of what (I thought) the story did nicely was render (accurately) just how complex and shifting sexual desire is. It's difficult -- particularly early on in a sexual relationship -- to extricate sexual desire from ego, self-regard, assuagement of feelings of inadequacy, assessments of body types one is encouraged or discouraged from desiring, hopes and fears for the future, etc., etc., etc. Since it is so complex, it is legitimately possible, even probable, to desire and not desire sex at exactly the same time (as, again, I thought the story showed quite nicely). It seemed likely that this ambiguity of desire was something going on with both characters, including the guy. So, while it seems implausible that the man (or the woman) was "coerced" into sex in any clear way it seems like both characters probably both desire and don't desire the sexual encounter.
It think it might have been aesthetically nicer to let that ambiguity hang, because dealing with that ambiguity of desire is hard to sort out and something only art, not polemic, can really do. Hence my problem with the ending. But, to be clear, I do think that it's more "realistic" that amongst the 35-year-old-male-losers-dating-20-year-olds set the complexity of desire, faced with rejection, curdles quickly into hatred, and that's a true and important point, even if probably a more familiar one.
I don't think talking about the ambiguity of desire is particularly politically palatable these days (thus I don't think this was really an "activism" story), because these days ambiguity of desire is brought up almost exclusively as a bad-faith argument to confuse issues of consent in the context of sexual assault. That, of course, is nonsense. For example, whatever the ambiguities of the sex shown in the story, the fact that both characters seem to conform to an outward "enthusiastic consent" standard is obviously and unambiguously a good thing -- it's what makes the encounter emotionally ambiguous, difficult sex and not a horroshow of violent rape. But ambiguous desire is a real thing that the piece does a nice job of picking up.
I don't think we have any evidence that tells us the sex was wonderful for the man,
And I don't think anyone's made any argument on the story dependent on a claim that the sex was wonderful for him. It could perfectly well have been in some sense a shitty experience. That's distinct from whether it was an experience he wished to have.
There are possible readings under which he didn't wish to have sex with her, sure, but I don't think there are such any plausible readings of the story as written in detail.
I take it back; it's actually a hidden reference to the author's favorite deli.
...meat.
346 is good -- I'm getting cross arguing with Buttercup, who seems to be importing things into the story that just aren't there. But the complexity Halford is talking about is there.
It's difficult -- particularly early on in a sexual relationship -- to extricate sexual desire from ego, self-regard, assuagement of feelings of inadequacy, assessments of body types one is encouraged or discouraged from desiring, hopes and fears for the future, etc., etc., etc. Since it is so complex, it is legitimately possible, even probable, to desire and not desire sex at exactly the same time (as, again, I thought the story showed quite nicely).
From a male POV, I think Big Star's "Back Of A Car" is particularly good at capturing that feeling.
I also completely agree with 346.
I think that's why I'm resistant to fitting the story into the present cultural narrative about power and coercion in heterosexual sex, because it really isn't about that, until you get to the ending, and it's not the most powerful or interesting part of the piece. I also agree that talking about ambiguity and complexity in sexual desire isn't really politically what we need at this moment, which is why I wouldn't bring up any of my concerns outside of a place like unfogged.
Cat Person goes viral (assuming the internet exists) during Bill Clinton's presidency? Just can't see it. Clinton surely didn't behave well - and men everywhere were surely behaving badly - but the cigar / 'kiss it' stuff was broadcast for general levity and entertainment.
354: I think it went viral because it resonates with women, and it would have resonated just fine two years ago.
You could make the case that perhaps men might not have paid much attention then, and kind of given it a 50-shades-of-gray-side-eye, but I don't know whether men are really paying that much attention to it anyway, present company excluded.
Finally, because I am procrastinating real bad today, I'm going to reiterate something I said somewhere else. I liked the whole story, including the last line. What is powerful and interesting about the last line is the way that everything else fades to black around it. The very fact that after that bit of misogynistic abuse it becomes hard to understand their interaction as two people both fantasizing about each other and enacting some shitty gendered scripts in ways that don't reward either of them, even though that's more or less what they were doing, is part of the richness of the story. The actual ambiguity in the encounter isn't gone, but thinking or feeling about it is foreclosed. All of a sudden he takes up this cudgel and no one has to or gets to learn or grow or think anymore. If we imagine her text to her friends about it, it's "haha gross what a loser" over a semi-conscious "that was painful, especially because I was ambivalent about my choices," and that much more deadening of her expectation that she is seen as a human being, a deadening which also inhibits her ability to mature into seeing the people she's dating as more than fantasy objects either. I can't think of another ending that I think would have been more effective.
I've decided that "Cat Person" is the author's way of saying the narrator might be unreliable because of how Sean Young allegedly went a little too eager to get the part of Catwoman.
Originally the story was called Cat Stevens, but she didn't want to get into copyright issues.
importing things into the story that just aren't there.
I can't speak for Buttercup, but under my reading there is very little little there at all to support one position or another. Which is not a criticism of the story; it just doesn't speak to that and wasn't meant to.
In the interests of forestalling your being cross, I will acknowledge that such evidence as there is suggests he's OK. (but I don't think that gets you very far as there's not a lot of it and it relies on him not being fucked up)
Anyway, Trump's tweet today about Senator Gillibrand is a very good reminder the general cultural narrative and who uses it as a weapon.
It's a buried character detail that Margot is frivolous with her movie theater money; we know because she has her cat purse on.
359: Not even that he's okay! The story's wide open to the possibility that he could have been terribly hurt by the whole experience, or that he could be dealing with prior trauma, or anything. But Buttercup's position that the story is meaningfully ambiguous to the point that "we don't actually know he wanted to have sex any more than she did" seems like freakishly strained reading to me.
Is that like a thing women like now? I'm trying to fight the war on Christmas.
Has Kate Spade come down in the world? That's a name I haven't thought of since my law firm days, but back then I thought of the brand as handbags I couldn't sensibly afford even at my inflated salary.
David Spade has come down in the world.
362: I'm totally on board with that reading. I can see another, but if I think for a minute, there's ambiguity. Not in Margot's mind, but objectively.
The age issue kind of skews things when it comes to judging the guy. It's true that we're seeing everything from this woman's perspective and she could a an unreliable narrator. But this is offset by the fact that defaulting to "probably pretty sketchy" when assessing a man in his mid thirties who dates 20 year old college students is a pretty common and reasonable reaction to have.
367
Right, that's my reading. In general, 34 year-old men sleeping with 20 year-old women are in my mind a bit sketchy and not likely to be victims of ambiguous bad sex. But, in this particular story, we're given no evidence of him either way, so it's not "freakishly strained" to point it could have been bad for him. My main point is we're getting an unreliable narrator and he's presented to us solely through the woman, so we can't know anything about him we can use as reliable evidence for his feelings, behaviors, and motivations. I don't think it's important that he be a developed character, but I also don't think we can read it clearly as him getting what he wants while she's ambivalent, because that information is simply lacking.
This from 246 was really key to me:
For example, whatever the ambiguities of the sex shown in the story, the fact that both characters seem to conform to an outward "enthusiastic consent" standard is obviously and unambiguously a good thing -- it's what makes the encounter emotionally ambiguous, difficult sex and not a horroshow of violent rape. But ambiguous desire is a real thing that the piece does a nice job of picking up.
They both appear to be enthusiastically consenting, but we get an internal monologue from the woman that she's pretty ambivalent about the whole experience. If it's about the limits of the performance of enthusiastic consent, given shitty cultural narratives, then I don't think we should straightforwardly assume that the woman's interpretations of the man's behavior automatically reflect his inner thoughts, any more than her behaviors reflect her thoughts.
My main point is we're getting an unreliable narrator and he's presented to us solely through the woman, so we can't know anything about him we can use as reliable evidence for his feelings, behaviors, and motivations.
The story is told in third person -- while we don't have access to his inner monologue in the same way we have hers, we do have presumptively accurate reporting of his actions. Which do not, considered as a whole, reflect symmetrical levels of ambivalence toward/distaste for the sex they had -- the argument that he didn't want to have sex with her is specifically based, as far as I can tell on (a) his erection went soft at times and (b) anything's possible, sometimes men have undesired sex (a true statement!).
I don't know why this is irritating me so much.
And what does it mean to be 'a victim of ambiguous bad sex'?
If the love glove doesn't fit, he must not have wanted it.
I'm picturing 371 being spoken by an intense FM morning radio DJ.
"FM Mourning" was the subtitle for "Video Killed the Radio Star."
355: can't say that it wouldn't have worked prior to MAGA.
Not to defend a fictional character - but our tubby 35 yo could have been suffering from that anxiety in bed which all too often spells death for erections. That very excellent and addicting first time thrill is ... also the problem. Motivations, feelings for your partner, your gendered script? Nope: too much adrenalin. Our 20 yo doesn't know this, we suppose.
I have a neighbor on Nextdoor who is offering to take in stray and feral cats tonight (or bring out shelters, maybe) because it is going to get down to 19 degrees. I'm trying to figure out how this will work.
(On topic because 'cat people'.)
Our moment doesn't just have Trump, Weinstein, and Franken, et al., there's also Roy Moore.
To be fair to our moment. Roy Moore has been around as a piece of shit for a very long time. He's just added pedophile to his resume.
Anyway, unless you're going to bait and trap them, I don't know how you get around the fact that every winter a largish number of feral cats join Star Clan.
362
She is the one who initiated the sex so a reading where she wanted sex more than he did (at least at the start) is reasonable. He is unattractive and bad at sex so he probably is a little anxious about the whole deal. (and he is right to be anxious- she is repulsed by sex with him)
374: the response invoked in me personally dates to the part of my life from 1995-2005, roughly. I'm guessing that most of the women identifying with this are:
- older than 19
- thinking of a dynamic from when they were college age
...and thus pre-MAGA. And really, this blew up because women felt something upon reading it that resonated with their experience at age 20.
(I included "older than 19" to give them a starting date of adulthood pre-Trump. That didn't have any special meaning relative to the narrator being 20.)
I didn't see that ending coming.
In retrospect I suppose I could have, but it was so different from how the rest of the story had been told, which described far more messages than it ever quoted.
I have more time than to get into the details of a short story that probably doesn't deserve such a close reading, but again, my problem, which is one I don't voice out loud generally because I don't think the politics are all that helpful, tie back into what I see as a bracketing of sexuality from normal life, as this weird fraught thing. To me I find it to be one of the most inexplicable parts of American culture, and maybe a way I feel most foreign. Sex should be a positive, empowering experience that can either be meaningful or trivial, and I find it hard when it feels like people who are my political allies are simply flipping sexist norms on their head in a way that doesn't actually undo them.
I also hesitate because it easily can be read or picked up as bad-faith victim-blamey, but if we want women to truly have good, pleasurable, empowering sex, then women are going to have to be agents in their own sexual experience, and we're going to ask that women communicate directly and not like passive-aggressive martyrs, and the same of course goes for men, of course. Also, sometimes we have to do things that make people feel bad, and being an adult means standing up for yourself even if someone else feels bad. If you live your life deciding that you never ever want to make anyone feel bad, that is a choice you're making and you don't then get to be resentful of the people you're acquiescing to. Therapists tell you to knock that shit out, and that's true with sex too!
With sex, anyone has the right to not have sex at any stage of the sexual encounter. Anyone has the right to stop sex in the middle of sex, and everyone has the right to refuse sex and not be pressured or punished. That said, *no one* has the right to demand the other person not be hurt or embarrassed or defensive by being sexually rejected. That's getting into the level of trying to control other's thoughts and emotions, which is impossible and perverse. With this story, we see zero evidence the guy would have pressured her to continue if she'd backed out. When she winced, he said sorry and stopped the encounter, and it ended until she decided to re-initiate. This is precisely what we ask men to do. I'm really having a hard time with, "I give every outward sign I want to do X in a way that appears like I'm an agentive adult who's into the sexual encounter, but you should have intuited that I find you a physically repulsive loser and that I'm only having sex with you to hide that fact from you, and so you should have stopped the sexual encounter."
Like, the guy is awkward and a loser and horrendously bad in bed. But I'm not seeing how this is a power dynamic *in the particular encounter* that isn't the woman playing out a gendered cultural script in her own head. In which case it is about gendered bad sex, but it's about a woman projecting all these obligations onto the man and then feeling upset that that he didn't pick up that she was performing a script she didn't necessarily (though at times she did) want to.
Thanks, Buttercup, for articulating things throughout the thread that I find valuable to have as part of the discussion.
384 seconded -- I appreciate that you've continued to elaborate your thoughts.
Like, the guy is awkward and a loser and horrendously bad in bed. But I'm not seeing how this is a power dynamic *in the particular encounter* that isn't the woman playing out a gendered cultural script in her own head.
One of the strengths of the story, I think, is the way in which portrays multiple different power dynamics fluctuating throughout the story.
Also, from the interview pf linked in 38, here is what the author says about each of the characters:
Q: Which of these characters do you feel the most sympathy for, at the end of the story?
A: Well, at the end of the story, Robert calls Margot a "whore," so I hope that most people lose sympathy for him then. But, for most of the story, I wanted to leave a lot of space for people to sympathize with Robert, or at least, like Margot, to be able to imagine a version of him--clueless, but well-meaning--that they can sympathize with. I wanted that version of Robert to exist alongside the possibility of a much more sinister one.
I have more genuine sympathy for Margot, but I'm also frustrated by her: she's so quick to over-read Robert, to assume that she understands him, and to interpret his behavior in a way that's flattering to herself. I think it's telling that the moment of purest sexual satisfaction she experiences in the story is the one when she imagines what Robert sees as he looks at her: she's seduced by the vision she's created of herself--of someone perfect and beautiful and young. So much of dating involves this interplay of empathy and narcissism: you weave an entire narrative out of a tiny amount of information, and then, having created a compelling story about someone, you fall in love with what you've created.
The moment when I feel the most sympathy for Margot is when, after she spends the entire story wondering about Robert--what he's thinking, feeling, doing--she is left marvelling the most at herself, and at her own decision to have sex with him, "at this person who'd just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing."
which case it is about gendered bad sex, but it's about a woman projecting all these obligations onto the man and then feeling upset that that he didn't pick up that she was performing a script she didn't necessarily (though at times she did) want to.
I didn't think that she blamed him at all for having sex with her. Some readers have faulted him, but she blames herself.
I'm really having a hard time with, "I give every outward sign I want to do X in a way that appears like I'm an agentive adult who's into the sexual encounter, but you should have intuited that I find you a physically repulsive loser and that I'm only having sex with you to hide that fact from you, and so you should have stopped the sexual encounter."
Who have you seen take this position that you're disagreeing with?
That is, I don't think anyone in this thread has said that he was responsible for stopping the sexual encounter -- I know I haven't, and I didn't see anyone else say that. Is there a discussion someplace else that characterizes the sex in the story as an assault that you're responding to? If there is, I might understand your comments better.
Is 383 about Robert not wanting to have sex?
If you're asking, I'd rather not right now for a number of reasons that I don't need to share with the blog.
My feelings are a little hurt. Whore.
Comments should be shut off after 390 and 391.
387/388
I'm reacting to 284:
That is, her self-coercion is a a response to the specific person she's in the room with: she can't make herself make a polite excuse and leave because her sense of the particular man she's dealing with is that doing that will be more difficult and unpleasant than she feels able to deal with. That doesn't make him a rapist, and it doesn't make the bad sex they have sexual assault, but it's not completely separable from her (within the story, accurate, and I think realistically so) perception of him as kind of a bully and a creep. I think that kind of dynamic is what the Guardian piece you quoted in 276 (which is clear that the sex in 'Cat People' isn't a rape) is about, and I do think it's worth thinking about.
There's lots of room between rape and bad truly consensual sex, and I think we're drawing the line in different places. Not-rape but the power dynamic makes it icky is one thing, not-rape but socially toxic scripts makes women do things they wouldn't do if more empowered is something else. I don't think him wanting and believing she's into the sex makes him a bully and a creep, and I don't think her script would vary if it were another guy. That is, I don't think the mental script has anything to do with the particulars of the man.
I guess what I find frustrating with this narrative in general (not to pick on you particularly) is that it feels like we're asking for people to move backwards in terms of adult communication but only around this one particular issue. If having sex with her makes him a bully and a creep because she doesn't ever not enthusiastically consent, but assumes he'd sulk if she did, then what would he have to do to not be a bully and a creep? Not be ugly and fat and really bad in bed? Be someone she's attracted to? He's actually portrayed as quite receptive to her overt signs of interest, being relieved that she's wet (a sign she's aroused), and losing his erection when he senses she's not interested in the sex after she laughs. Again, outside of asking him to be a mind reader, how is he supposed to get that she's not into it if she's performing being into it?
OK, almost caught up, so now I'll contribute to where the conversation was awhile ago:
I'm liking a lot of what Buttercup is saying, but 287 is right on.
I don't really buy the logic of 300, because it uses how he reacts after she's shitty to him to "prove" that he would have been awful if she had been kind to him.
Mild version of the argument: if she'd indicated mid-sex that she couldn't keep going in any sort of tolerably polite way, he might have gotten sad or awkward or even tried to wheedle/guilt her into resuming. But there's no textual evidence that he would have gotten abusive*, and in fact, every previous time she thought he was acting cold/distant/shitty, later evidence showed that he was probably nervous/anxious/unconfident.
Stronger form: when she asks for a ride home, there's very much the sort of dance-of-politeness dynamic that so often surrounds christenings, and he takes her home without much fuss (albeit with some snark). But then he sends her a goofy, enthusiastic text. IOW, when she cuts the evening short and disappoints his postcoital expectations, he's not nasty or bitter. But then when she acts shitty twice over (the brusque textual breakup and then the ridiculous bar behavior), he lashes out. And I get the significance and implications of that lashing out, and what it suggests was always underneath. But it provides little, if any, accurate information about how he'd have reacted to her behaving decently to cut the sex short.
*this is setting aside the fear of being in his house, effectively stranded; that's underlying, but not in any way specific to Robert
It's OK, everyone, the BBC has this covered:
I don't think him wanting and believing she's into the sex makes him a bully and a creep, and I don't think her script would vary if it were another guy. That is, I don't think the mental script has anything to do with the particulars of the man.
Finally, we've got a disagreement I recognize and can understand. I still disagree with you, but now I know what you're talking about.
You've got two parts to that sentence there, and I agree with the first but not the second.
Absolutely, his wanting and believing she's into the sex isn't what makes him a bully and a creep. All the evidence we've got about the encounter is that he's got no reasonable way of knowing that she isn't into it -- I don't see any reason to think that his belief that she's fully consenting is anything but honest.
Calling him a bully and a creep doesn't turn on the moment of the sexual encounter, it turns on the whole rest of the story: he's a 34 year-old-man dating a 20-year-old woman; when they're on the date he becomes disturbingly upset until she figures out how to keep him placated (should that be her reaction to a man being upset? Of course not, she should stand up for herself, go, team! But that is how she reacts, and if he were behaving differently she'd react differently); and when she ghosts him he ultimately becomes abusive. He's not the worst person in the world, and she also behaves badly, but a bully and a creep seems to me like a fair description of his reported behavior in the story, rather than merely of her reaction to him.
And "I don't think her script would vary if it were another guy. That is, I don't think the mental script has anything to do with the particulars of the man," seems way off to me. There's a contrast in her mind between him and her imagined possible future boyfriend who would understand what a ridiculously unpleasant thing was happening; there's the possibly non-binary past boyfriend she talks about having had sex with for the first time in an extensively negotiated and emotionally supportive and meaningful way. The character isn't written as someone who's reflexively afraid of and deferential to men generally, she's afraid of and deferential to this guy, because he's kind of creepy and kind of scaring her.
Her somewhat fearful and deferential reaction to him isn't totally his fault -- the fact that she has sex with him without really wanting to doesn't seem to be something he intended at all. But that doesn't make the fear or the deference something that's purely a result of her internal, messed up gender narrative. In the world of the story as it's written, she's picked up something real about him when she finds him scary.
Well, an asymmetry of power in any encounter looks to reduce freedom for one party, yes. Aside from circumstantials such as, it's his place, he's bigger, is that the situation depicted in this short story? Not clear. Mainly, what made me think we'd get to the last line that we got to was: this is where the wider conversation is at. In _that_ conversation, men are often seen to insult women who have rejected them. This transfers to the character in the story.
... but then, I suppose I'd have to get it from there. If the story contains an accurate psychological portrait of a 'nice guy' who isn't, I don't feel well placed to recognise it.
Let's all list our SAT scores and how many erections we've lost.
Do they have to be separate numbers?
It's not lost if you're pretty sure it'll turn up if you keep fumbling around for it, right?
Special erections are hard to predict.
Sometimes it's hard to see the wood for the trees.
I guess I can't ever say I'm a cat person again.
402: would the answer be "several" or "the same one, several times"? (see "Beards".)
I think there a two systems of male domination with respect to heterosexual relations.
A patriachy-ish one that emphasizes male control of female sexuality and often idealizes women at the same time it it works to oppress them and restrict their freedom. At the extreme, women are viewed as (often valuable) possessions.
The other system is a misogynist-ish one which denigrates women but has less control of female sexuality.
this book written in the seventies suggests the M/F sex ratio often controls whether the patriachy-ish or misogynist-ish system is mainly active:
https://www.amazon.com/Too-Many-Women-Ratio-Question/dp/0803919190
when the M/F ratio is high, men generally get desperate to get married (especially since as people do couple up the effective M/F ratio gets bigger and bigger). Male societal power is expressed in a patriarchal-ish way.
when the M/F ratio is low, the men most in demand don't want to get tied down. So it leads to more short term hook ups (and a rise in sexual innovation). Male societal power is expressed in a misogynist-ish way, but it also spikes a revival of feminism as unattached women necessarily enter the work force (and there is thus some increasing constraint on male societal power). The 20s (as a result of WWI deaths) and the 60s-70s (as a result of baby boom and women dating 2-3 years younger) are examples of misogynist-ish systems and feminist revival of a low M/F ratio.
To me the "cat person" scenario, is one developed within the current low M/F ratio collegiate and post collegiate environment. Margot is dismayed by the quality of suitors (Robert is fat and likely less educated) , but open to express her sexuality and confident that her reference community (if not her suitors) won't judge her for sexual decisions. Robert is bad at sex and ill adjusted to the misogynist-ish moment but attempts mimic current hostile misogynist dating rituals anyway. The insult "whore" that Robert texts (while very bad and pretty much all insults hurt) falls a little flat considering it shows Robert as longing for patriarchy-ish control of female sexuality that he does have access to.
407 is really interesting. I remember at one point hearing a professor go on about equality of household chores and second shifts and so on, and I (being Margot-aged or a little older, but still living like a total slob on my own) said something like, "what about the sexism of judging women only on their looks and their ability to hang on to their youth?" and the speaker couldn't really integrate these two ideas.
Obviously plenty of ink has been spilled about both, but I hadn't thought about them being like the clutch-and-gas pedals.
And allowing either polygamy (e.g. Saudi Arabia) or encouraging wealthy, older men to marry very young women (Roy Moore's Alabama) has the effect of creating a high M/F ratio for most men and thus the patriarchal pattern can happen without needing to go through the bother of having lots of women die in childbirth or something.
Stop fat-shaming me.
409.1: Weren't both ideas adequately addressed in that Enjoli perfume commercial from the 70s?
A college student today has never seen a clutch pedal because they have only ever driven a Prius, a hover board, or an organic unicorn.
A college student today can't tell the difference between a thirty-year-old's penis and the stick shift of a 2003 Honda Accord unless the penis loses its erection.
410
yes, the book goes into that as well. "Too Many Women?" is a great book that should be much wider known. Unfortunately, the main author, Marcia Guttentag, died before she could finish it and her husband who did finish it is a lot worse of a writer. His chapters are stiff, defensive, and statistics-filled discussions of maybe too provocative topics like low M/F ratios in the black community and whether orthodox Jewish sexual taboos naturally lead to a high M/F ratio.
Guttentag was aiming for a best seller and if she had finished the book it could have been one because her chapters are well-written, fact-filled, historical surveys of the evidence.
Date-onomics is a recent book influenced by "to many women?" with a lot of interesting updates but the author strips away Guttentag's explicitly feminist framework because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I bet googling "Guttentag Too Many Women" gets you a lot of less than academic hits.
They could not really have done the work in the early 1980s, when the book was researched and written, but a look at Soviet patterns would have been very illuminating for theories about sex ratios shaping roles within society. Because 1941-45 put such a massive dent in the USSR's male population, if you were going to see something like determinism from a rise in the female share of the overall population, you would probably have seen it in the Soviet Union.
The dating situation in Russia is apparently pretty dire for women http://www.latitudenews.com/story/in-russia-a-lack-of-men-forces-women-to-settle-for-less/
414 That would explain why they no longer make out in cars