Asexual Analysis of Cat Person (2023)
Short stories don’t often go viral, but in December 2017, one did. “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian was perfectly matched to the #MeToo movement.
Here’s an archived version of “Cat Person” at The New Yorker Magazine.
This story created a lot of buzz at the time:
As Margot and Robert’s relationship develops, and the balance of power between them shifts back and forth, she cycles rapidly between imagining Robert as an adorable naïf who is overwhelmed by her young beauty and sophistication, and imagining him as a vicious and murderous brute.
“Margot keeps trying to construct an image of Robert based on incomplete and unreliable information, which is why her interpretation of him can’t stay still,” Roupenian said in an interview. “The point at which she receives unequivocal evidence about the kind of person he is is the point at which the story ends.”
Vox: The uproar over the New Yorker short story “Cat Person,” explained
How a short story about a bad date sparked a conversation about gender, sex, and privilege by Constance Grady on December 12, 2017 1:00 pm
Read — or refresh — your memory of the short story and you’ll see it’s no Brokeback Mountain. Meaning, it’s very hard to eke a full-length movie adaptation out of that short piece. (Brokeback Mountain is a complex feature-length film which started out as a short story by Annie Proulx.)
In adapting Cat Person (2023), director Susanna Fogel and screenwriter Michelle Ashford were faced with the task of taking the essence of Roupenian’s story — just a few scenes — and embellishing the plot.
Something wholly unexpected happened: Although there was literally nothing explicitly asexual about the 2017 viral short story, the 2023 film includes very on-the-page asexual “representation”.
Notice I’ve put “representation” in rubber-glove quote marks.
Content note: The annoying thing about this whole thing is, despite including asexuality in the story, many asexuals will be simply unable to engage with either the short story or the film because of the nature of the sexual content, which has been written to evoke cringe, fear and disgust. Including for trauma related reasons, a significant proportion of potential viewers (regardless of orientation) will be unable to delve into the story itself.
In this analysis, I stay away from describing the sexual content itself, and instead take a closer look at why the film-makers may have inserted asexuality into a film when it wasn’t there in the original short story.
- Do they seem to understand what asexuality really is?
- And is the insertion of asexuality a net gain for the aspec community?
But first…
Is the Cat Person film adaptation generally successful?
Right now, the film adaptation of Cat Person scores 6/10 on IMDb — not great, except a bit of basic arithmetic is necessary here. IMDb is a heavily masculine site, so I have learned to add a full point to any film about women and women’s issues, and deduct a full point to films which centre on specifically men’s issues. By this calculation, Cat Person gets 7/10 and The Godfather gets 8.2.
However, this calculation doesn’t work where there are political issues done badly. If the overall messaging is poor, it slides back down in my estimation.
Common critical reactions to Cat Person:
- The main characters are both unlikeable (not an issue for me — that’s not something I require from certain genres, including this one)
- The film seems to be going for a feminist message, which is completely undercut by how the feminist best friend is written (super annoying and not the least bit witty — the feminist harpy archetype)
- The metaphors are so bad they basically fail. E.g. the queen ant and the smashed glass colony, and the worker ants who don’t protect her.
- The ending is bad and wrong. (I agree — this is the sort of ending films get when screenwriters don’t know how else to end it. I’m yet to read a reviewer who thinks the ending is good.)
Is Cat Person a cautionary tale?
The short story avoids ending with morality, but the film adaptation pulls out the blazing guns. Numerous critics have pointed out that the storytellers may have tried to make a feminist statement, but ended up saying the opposite:
- The men who find women genuinely attractive are rendered clumsy and awkward by their very attraction.
- Post #MeToo young women have been exposed to so much feminist cultural theory by now that straight men as a cohort are looking unnecessarily scary.
- Give men a chance.
Note: I am not saying these things. I’m pointing out that this is one possible reading of the film.
There are also things I really like about this film:
- The main actors are perfectly cast. “Cousin Greg” (Nicholas Braun from Succession) is perfect as the very tall, possibly dangerous man who is also bumbling and childlike. Emilia Jones does a great job of depicting the pretty young Margot who is, despite her looks, a bit of a social outsider.
- Love the soundtrack!
- The story has interesting things to say about why people have sex — it’s not just a straight line from attraction + libido > desire > action. Margot’s reasons for having sex with Robert are complicated, and explored in a way not frequently seen across storytelling, let alone in cinema, where interiority is notoriously difficult to depict.
- Margot’s dissociation during sex with Robert is conveyed very well via the duplication of an imaginary version of the actress, who sits near the wall of Robert’s bedroom and converses with the real Margot as she goes through with something she’ll regret.
- The film editing trope of showing something terrible then cutting back in time to reveal that the terrible thing only happened inside the character’s imagination is pretty old by now, and can easily get annoying. But in this film it feels fresh— the scenes in which Margot imagines Robert in conversation with a therapist is especially revealing of her thoughts towards Robert, achieving the interiority which written narrative is so good at, but which film tends to struggle with.
Do I think the Cat Person adaptation is wholly successful? Nope. But I’m not here to do a global review — others already have.
Instead, I’m discussing Cat Person (2023) from an asexual perspective.
As usual, I find the discussion (including film reviews and social media chatter) about the asexual content in Cat Person as interesting (and dispiriting) as the media itself. So I’ll also be taking a look at that.
THE ASEXUAL EX-BOYFRIEND IN CAT PERSON
CONTEXT
Half an hour into the film, Margot and Robert have been on one disastrous date, in which Margot shows Robert the science lab where she studies ants under her professor. They both find themselves locked inside the lab office, unable to escape. Margot panics. She thinks Robert may have shut them in on purpose and has ill-intentions. Robert also panics, and breaks the door open. In doing so, he accidentally smashes the ant farm which is encased in glass. This gets them both into trouble with Margot’s professor.
Saying goodbye for the evening, Margot and Robert agree not to count this as their first ‘date’. Margot tells Robert she plans to go home tgo her family for a short break. Robert kisses her forehead in paternalistic fashion, leaving Margot with even more questions about his intentions.
Cut to Margot at a social gathering back in her home town. Initially, I wondered if Clay was her brother. But no, Clay is her high school boyfriend.
Clay’s coming-out scene pans out as follows:
CLAY: Who’s texting?
MARGOT: That would be Robert.
CLAY: Robert? All right. I’m listening.
MARGOT: He’s great. I mean, we haven’t gone on an official date or anything yet, but… I think I really like him.
CLAY: Good. Well, he’s got to go through me first, so…
MARGOT: So?
CLAY: Hm?
MARGOT: What about you? Anyone special?
CLAY: Um…
MARGOT: Any… any guys?
CLAY: Oh, yeah, right, last time we talked, I was exploring sex with men. Um…
MARGOT: You’re not still?
CLAY: Uh, what I’ve realized, actually, is… I’m an ace… Uh, which is what asexuals call themselves. Do you remember when we were together just how, like, out of my body I was, how I could never really, like, enjoy sex? So I thought I must be gay, and so then I tried that, and then that was just, like, even weirder. Like, all of this, like, bizarre pressure to, like, perform and to, like, be this, like, sexual Tarzan or something, and it felt awful. So then I looked it up, and it turns out that being asexual is, like, a real thing, and since then, I’ve just felt this relief because I finally don’t have to pretend to like sex anymore. Is-is that okay for me to say?
MARGOT: Oh, my God, yeah, of course.
CLAY: Okay.
MARGOT: Of course. I…
CLAY: But it’s not like it was because of, like, you. If you’d been the hottest girl in the world, I would’ve still been, like… And-and not that you’re not. Not that you’re —
MARGOT: Okay.
CLAY: Because you are.
MARGOT: Clay, I get it.
CLAY: Okay.
MARGOT: Stop looking mortified.
Noted with interest that when the (presumably allosexual) film-makers wrote asexual Clay’s dialogue, they have him say this is how asexuals describe themselves. Not ourselves. This is very small and may not say much on its own, except I believe the film-makers had trouble truly understanding what it’s like to come out, and to live, as asexual.
Nor is this my biggest point, but certain people have an oversized reaction when a character comes out as asexual. (This reflects many real-world experiences, too.)
Take the following paragraph, written by a film critic of Cat Person:
College sophomore Margot (Emilia Jones) is trying to navigate a minefield of modern gender relations, which is not exactly helped when her ex-boyfriend back home excitedly announces he’s now asexual.
— Dennis Harvey, Screen Grabs: Love on the rocks may be the least of their problems, 48hills
Watching the scene play out on screen, I would not use the word ‘excitedly’. Margot’s ex-boyfriend seems happy to have finally worked himself out — sure — but there is nothing ‘excited’ in his delivery. In fact, he seems mindful that this news may be hard for Margot to hear, given as how they used to have sex together. It can be confronting to learn your partner was never attracted to you.
Something about asexuals existing as asexual — or just mentioning it — is typically interpreted by allosexuals as some kind of forcefulness. As if we are forcing our identities on other people. On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with being ‘excited’ about sharing your identity… except this descriptor is just plain wrong. The guy gently comes out, and only because Margot’s questioning has led him to it. Margot literally tells him to “stop looking mortified”, because that’s how the actor looks. Mortified. Mortified does not mean ‘excited’. In fact, to look mortified is to look as if you might die. ‘Excited’ is pretty much the inverse of mortified.
Most of all, to use the phrase ‘excitedly announces’ when there is no discernible ‘excitement’ suggests the critic expected its inverse from a man faced with the task of ‘confessing’ his asexuality: shame.
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT IN THE STORY?
Riding the coach back to college, Margot texts Robert a selfie of her cleavage. When he doesn’t respond, she starts to doubt herself. She tells him she never meant to send it to him, and moves the conversation on. Robert responds as if he never saw the selfie, which confuses Margot. Did he see it, or did he just ignore it? If he ignored it, why? What is he thinking? What are his intentions with her?
It turns out Robert is still interested in her. They go on a traditional romantic date, out to dinner. During dinner, Margot makes the decision that she will have sex with Robert. In private, she runs this past her feminist bestie, who advises strongly against it. Everything the best friend has heard about Robert (via Margot) is dodgy.
Margot is the one who makes the move. Robert seems slightly surprised and happy that she has offered to go back to his place.
Unfortunately, the sex is terrible. Margot fakes an orgasm to signal she’s had enough. Robert finishes and then says, “Good girl.” He paws at her breasts. The close-up on her face shows the audience she’s not enjoying any of this in the slightest, though Robert himself has failed to pick it up.
“This is the worst life decision I’ve ever made,” Margot mutters as Robert disposes of the condom in the trash can. He immediately jumps to, “Do you want to watch a movie?” This will no doubt be the sort of movie Margot can’t stand — they have very different taste. Robert likes movies with a very specific sort of romance — the man persuades and dominates the woman — the woman acquiesces with pressure. Very meta — a film criticising film.
We learn later just how cringe Margot finds Robert’s infantilization of her — she and her best friend have talked about it, and the best friend would like to tease her about it, only for Margot the joke is “too soon”.
Still in bed after the regrettable sex Margot endures with Robert, Margot feels she needs to hang around. Robert awkwardly hugs her stomach and expresses his concern that he is 13 years her senior:
MARGOT: How old are you?
ROBERT: Thirty-three. [In the short story he is 34. I have no idea why this was changed.]
MARGOT: Thirty-three?
ROBERT: Yeah, is that… is that a problem?
MARGOT: No, it’s not a problem.
ROBERT: You sure?
MARGOT: Yeah.
ROBERT: Okay. I mean, I was gonna — I was gonna tell you, but I wasn’t sure how you’d take it.
MARGOT: [shakes her head as if to say, ‘What am I supposed to do with that?’]
ROBERT: [relieved laugh] Okay. [closes laptop with boring movie on it] To tell you the truth, I was actually really worried when you went home… You know, for break… Because… I kind of thought that we were together — I mean, I know it was mostly text, but I thought that we were starting something, and then, well, I guessed that you were committed to me or not commit — But, like, a little committed to me. And so… you went home, and then this weird loop kept playing in my head that was like, a girl as pretty as Margot, she definitely went out with some stud boyfriend in high school, and I kept thinking, she’s definitely gonna hook up with this guy, despite what’s happening between us, and then you sent that — that photo of your breasts, and then you said it was a mistake, and I thought, that’s definitely for that f*cking total douche boyfriend, and, you know, you’re probably considering f*cking him if you weren’t already f*cking him. And now I know that was… obviously wrong, and I should’ve just trusted you.
MARGOT: My former boyfriend is asexual now, as in doesn’t want to have sex with anyone ever again.
ROBERT: Well, that’s — that’s good to know, because I — I think we’re really good together. I mean, I had a good time tonight. Didn’t you?
MARGOT: Yeah, I did. Yeah. Um, but I should… probably go now.
ROBERT: N-no. No, you got to stay over.
MARGOT: I can’t.
ROBERT: No, I’ll make you scrambled eggs in the morning.
MARGOT: Thank you, but, um, my roommate will be worried.
ASEXUAL COMMENTARY
After witnessing Clay’s coming-out scene, I feel like the screenwriter and/or director of the film adaptation of Cat Person had just read (the excellent) book by Angela Chen — Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex. Did they see in this film an opportunity to… spread awareness, or something??
Back to Roupenian’s short story: Margot imagines a boyfriend to get out of a situation with a real man, whereas this wholly imagined boyfriend becomes ‘real’ in the world of the film adaptation:
My high-school boyfriend is gay, Margot imagined telling him. We were pretty sure of it in high school, but after a year of sleeping around at college he’s definitely figured it out. In fact, he’s not even a hundred per cent positive that he identifies as a man anymore; we spent a lot of time over break talking about what it would mean for him to come out as non-binary, so sex with him wasn’t going to happen, and you could have asked me about that if you were worried; you could have asked me about a lot of things. But she didn’t say any of that; she just lay silently, emanating a black, hateful aura, until finally Robert trailed off.
— “Cat Person”, 2017.
The film makers are observant about one thing, at least: A non-binary ex is very likely queer, and non-binary gender identity is very common for us aspecs. This was less well-known in 2017, but ‘asexual awareness’ is working, kinda.
Just as likely, the film adaptation version of the asexual boyfriend drew from Roupenian’s short story collection, from stories outside Cat Person itself. The author’s 2019 collection You Know You Want This includes another short story called “The Good Guy” (less well-received than “Cat Person”) and some commentators see asexual representation in the titular character:
Roupenian spends fifty pages tracking one man’s descent from overenthusiastic teenage crushes to a habitual deception in which he presents as “cheerfully asexual, utterly unthreatening, scrubbed clean of any whiff of need.” Thus armoured against rejection, young Ted goes on to begrudgingly befriend a female classmate who becomes the star of his sexual imagination.
— review of You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian, 2019, PRISM International, Justina Elias
I can’t comment on any asexual rep in “The Good Guy” as I haven’t read it. I do note with interest how yet another reviewer is decoding a Roupenian male character as asexual, then describes him in review as “cheerfully asexual”. Once again, I wonder if (allosexual) reviewers expect asexuals to be ashamed. Anything less than asexual shame is somehow read as “cheerful”. (Do the allos hate that we’re happy??)
Back to the wonderful Angela Chen. Angela Chen talks about how people have sex for many reasons, and having sex ‘because you’re super attracted to the person’ probably doesn’t even describe many of those instances. In a 2023 interview at the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, Chen lists just some of the reasons why people might choose to have partnered sex, other than plain old sexual attraction:
- boredom, something to do
- to feel closer to someone
- because it meets certain emotional needs — perhaps complicated needs which may not even be acknowledged by the person seeking sex
- to start some kind of ‘drama’ or ‘interest’ in your life, since having partnered sex gives you something to talk about with your friends.
By the way, people outside the ace community have also written about this exact topic:
- Why women have sex: understanding sexual motivations from adventure to revenge (and everything in between) is a 2009 book by Cindy Meston and David Buss.
- Justin Lehmiller has an episode called “How Many Reasons Are There to Have Sex?” at his Sex and Psychology podcast (Episode 50, 2021).
Watch enough Hollywood movies and audiences might come away thinking that the main reason people have sex comes down to unbridled, undeniable, white-hot attraction… This film can subvert that. It can, but does it?
WHAT IS THE NARRATIVE PURPOSE OF ASEXUAL EX-BOYFRIEND CLAY?
…and the asexual commentary?
Some reviewers find mention of asexuality in this film rings hollow, indicating a crass attempt on the part of the film-makers to appear sufficiently ‘with-it’ — the screenwriter and director are both older women writing outside their own generations. Whereas I can’t see it — being older myself — apparently there are things in this film which feel inauthentic to young women. One young reviewer gives the example of the mobile phone use, which feels to her like a commentary on how ‘young people these days are attached to their phones’. Specifically, Margot feels the need to open her phone every time she receives an incoming text, which is — apparently — not how young people use their phones. (I didn’t know this — whenever I get a text, I want to see the entire text, and to do that I have to open the app. Maybe I’m receiving longer texts? Maybe the length of my texts is the very thing that marks me out as old?)
The film signposts the characters’ progressive politics at every turn. Margot’s fiercely feminist room-mate Taylor (Geraldine Viswanathan) moderates a subreddit called The Vagenda, and Margot’s ex-boyfriend is asexual. It is about as subtle as being bashed over the head with a copy of The Second Sex — the politics are great, the hammering of them less so.
— Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen, Short story Cat Person was a viral hit. Pity the film adaptation is a mess, November 23, 2023
I agree with Au-Nhien Nguyen that the feminist best friend is an ineffective caricature of a young feminist. As an older asexual, though, it feels bizarre for a young reviewer to accuse older filmmakers of trying to ‘hammer audiences over the head’ by including a minor asexual character on screen. Ironically, when a young person accuses a storyteller of using my identity to sound with-it, that makes the young person sound old-fashioned.
I’m very used to the idea that the terminology my community uses to describe our identities sound made-up and bullshit to most people outside the community. When reviewers accuse storytellers who include characters with my own identity of nefarious motivation, I feel that personally. Note that this criticism comes from the left as as well as from the right.
First, such accusations hardly encourage further exploration of ace rep in fiction. Second, I’m reminded, once again, how little the wider public understands about people like me. Clay is fictional but we are real people. None of us chose to be such a divisive identity, one which — in truth — divides the queer illiterate from the queer illiterate/intolerant.
‘The politics are great’, the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer continues. But here’s the thing: They’re not, even?
I’m all for ace rep, but not this kind of ace rep.
ASEXUALITY DESCRIBES AN ORIENTATATION, NOT A LIFELONG SUBSCRIPTION TO CELIBACY
When Clay comes out to Margot, he explains very clearly that it’s such a relief to know he is asexual, because now he doesn’t have to pretend he’s someone he’s not. At no point does he tell her that he’ll never be having sex with anyone ever again. However, in her post-coital conversation with Robert, Margot tells Robert — and the audience — that because Clay is asexual, that means he’ll never be having sex again. This is simply not how asexuality works. When Clay told Margot about his asexuality, he was telling her about his orientation, not about his (absence of) plans for future sexual behaviour. Perhaps we are to believe that the conversation continued off-screen. Writers frequently do this — and we see examples of it in this very film — earlier conversations are alluded to.
However, in this example, there was a very clear end to the coming-out conversation between Margot and Clay, mostly because Margot seemed uncomfortable with it. Clay sensed that Margot was taking it personally, as his erstwhile sexual partner. Audiences, too, will see exactly why Margot isn’t more gushing and kind when her friend comes out to her.
Margot thinks that because Clay is asexual (an orientation) he will never have sex again (a behaviour).
So Margot has not understood asexuality at all. If audiences en masse understood asexuality refers to orientation and not behaviour, then audiences could be trusted to get that Margot’s lack of understanding and asexual acceptance is a character flaw in Margot, personally. But audiences are absolutely nowhere near that point. Therein lies a problem for writers who try to depict asexuality in fiction. There’s still an obligation to explain what it is, which always slows the narrative drive. Storytellers make a small sacrifice in getting all pedagogical. Audiences don’t watch psychological thrillers to learn something. Not overtly, anyway.
In this case, it seems the writers thought they were doing a good enough job of explaining asexuality to their audience (via Clay’s coming-out scene), but then messed it up entirely by having Margot (or perhaps the film-makers themselves) completely misunderstand what asexuality really means. Robert, too, has no idea what asexuality is. Nor does he care. All he knows is that this ex-boyfriend of Margot’s isn’t in the picture.
Which brings me to my next point.
ASEXUAL PEDAGOGY ALL MESSED UP
When Robert hears that Margot’s hometown boyfriend is asexual, the boyfriend is automatically wiped off as a sexual and as a romantic threat.
I’m not sure how many in the audience of Cat Person will get this, but Clay is a much better romantic match for Margot than Robert. Clay and Margot have settled into an easy, communicative relationship. To write off a man because he is asexual is to emasculate and underestimate him. No one actually knows in this film if Clay is aromantic as well as asexual. For all its supposed virtue signalling, the film doesn’t get into that distinction.
There is no doubt that my (asexual) reaction to this film is outside the norm. What an asexual viewer takes away will be very different from what a queer-illiterate allosexual viewer takes away.
To take just one example from the r/movies sub-Reddit:
Just watched it, this movie made me wish I never have to interact with women romantically. I understand why her boyfriend became gay then asexual.
— AlanRoofies on Reddit (the username says it all)
well it doesn’t explain why he went asexual if as a gay man he was only romantically involved with men
— rimrockbuzz
While I wouldn’t expect a guy with ‘roofies’ in his Reddit username to understand the nuances of the asexual community, let alone women, I am not one bit surprised that he came away from this film believing that an unpleasant woman can ‘turn’ a man gay or asexual.
Rimrockbuzz, who replies to this comment, still has absolutely no idea what asexual means, let alone any notion of a distinction between asexuality and aromanticism.
As a side note, it’s worth mentioning that, at the root of aphobia, is ableism. From the very same thread, we have this gem:
From r/movies:
The guy seems autistic.
— Psychological_Gas271
There is definitely something developmentally/socially wrong with Robert.
No well-adjusted 33 year old man would pursue a 20 year old girl in the first place. There’s a reason he wanted to date someone immature.
— woah-oh92
Rarely makes eye contact, doesn’t pick up on social ques, obsessive compulsive to a weird degree and difficulty regulating his emotions. Definitely on the spectrum.
— Psychological_Gas271
Note that for these viewers, Autistic equals ‘wrong’ and ‘weird’. Notice, too, how these Redditors appropriate the language of psychology. They have learned clever-sounding phrases such as ‘difficulty regulating emotions’ and ‘developmentally’. But they have no idea what Autism really looks like, let alone this: Non-Autistic men are frequently interested in much younger women. Nope, that’s a straight man thing, spanning the neurotypes.
FURTHER UNDERCUTTING OF ASEXUAL “REPRESENTATION” IN CAT PERSON
CAT PERSON: Oof. Big miss for me. Emilia Jones does her best, but the script is just not good. Narrative devices that don’t land, or weren’t set up, unnatural dialogue, the works. Also, a scene where a character comes out as asexual, which I was, at first, thrilled to see, because I NEVER see it. The actor portrays it beautifully. Then it’s immediately undercut by the protag making this coming out about herself. Ace guy never shows up again. Hated that, & I don’t remember it in the short story.
— @annalikestweets, Jan 26, 2023
I agree with Anna Likes Tweets.
Another reviewer picked that the storytelling role of Clay is to elicit insecurities in Margot, but fails to realise how this isn’t so great for the asexual community when our identity is used in this way:
The focus on some shared trait between [Margo and Robert] is somewhat fascinating. They’re both insecure: Margot because a former boyfriend back home tells her he has discovered he’s asexual and Robert, apparently, because he is older and single at a point in his life when he think he shouldn’t be.
(Assuming they’re different people), the reviewer below says basically the same thing, with the added lack of understanding that an asexual man has not simply ‘decided’ to become asexual, in the same way a gay man has not simply ‘decided’ to become gay:
But when she’s about to return to campus Robert mysteriously withdraws. Margot, discomforted at the change in the dynamic (the fact that her old boyfriend back home has decided he’s asexual doesn’t help her self-esteem), agrees right away when he finally asks her to a movie. This turns out to be Star Wars, which Robert has seen countless times. He’s a nerdy superfan. Not a good sign.
— Markie Robson-Scott, 26 October 2023, Cat Person review — the dynamics of dating and bad sex, The Arts Desk
Note that these reviewers have seen the movie. They saw asexuality described on screen. Yet they still write crap like that. How much of this is the direct fault of the movie?
Some; not all.
In the world of the Cat Person movie, as it is presented, asexuality is a nothing rather than a something. As evinced by the parenthetical comment in the review above, this was the takeaway for a significant proportion of the viewing public, too. Note that movie reviewers are far more likely than the average casual-viewing public to do any kind of close reading.
Asexual Clay only exists as a flat character. We know literally nothing else about him. He’s The Asexual Ex.
But… flat characters are allowed to exist, right? A story can’t turn everyone into a rounded, individuated character. And the story is about Margot, after all.
Partly, the flatness of Clay is a problem which exists beyond this one film. If there were more and better ace representation across storytelling, we wouldn’t crave more from Clay.
But actually, I am really icked out about how Clay was used to develop Margot’s character. My criticism centres entirely on this particular film.
Here’s why:
In Cat Person, Clay’s coming-out instigates an identity crisis in Margot. She’s starting to second-guess her choice in men. Thanks to pop-psychology, it’s well-known to audiences that until we work on ourselves, we tend to choose the same wrong people time and again. So although audiences don’t have full access to Margot’s thoughts, it is made very clear via the bra-selfie scene that Margot is starting to worry that she’s attracted yet another sexually dubious man. If so, that says something worrisome about her. The audience, too, will be recalling that kiss Robert planted on her forehead — a decidedly non-sexual move.
But we’ve also seen the imagery of violence flash through Margot’s imagination as she wonders if the large and bumbling Robert is a rapist.
Now the reason for asexual Clay’s existence becomes clearer. He’s there as juxtaposition. Is this new guy, Robert, a rapist (bad) or is he at the other end of the spectrum (an asexual) — a completely different kind of bad (but still bad)?
The implication is this: For allo-heterosexual Margot, she has faced two kinds of death: Literal death (if Robert is a psycho), or sexual death (if she keeps attracting asexual men or — just as bad — if she keeps attracting sexually inadept men).
Where am I getting this reading? From the wider culture in which this story grew, as much as from the story itself. This is a story which can really only make sense within our Western culture of compulsory sexuality. By this way of thinking, Margot cannot achieve self-actualisation and separation from her mother-figure feminist best friend until she finds sexual release, away from the safety of home (symbolised by the university dorm). When we run our lives under the spectre of compulsory sexuality, sex equals freedom, independence and adulthood. Ideally, of course, sex also equals joy. But before finding joy, contemporary young women are kissing a lot of frogs, some of them deadly poisonous.
As the film explores, there are dangers to both staying on the path (of chastity) and also from straying from it. Metaphorically, this is no different from your classic American road trip story.
In a road trip story — itself an evolution on the very old Odyssean mythic journey — the suburbs are the ‘safe’ zone. So are the major highways, connecting the safety of civilisation represented by towns. But typically in stories, characters get lost. They may decide to take one of the old highways, now desolate. They may stray from the accepted path to seek something forbidden, exciting.
There’s no winning in these stories. Stay on the path, you learn nothing. You lead a safe and boring life. Leave the path, test yourself with danger, you risk losing everything, but you may also gain enlightenment, and find out who you really are.
When Margot goes home with Robert, she’s leaving the safety of civilization (represented by Clay, her safe high school boyfriend) and enters the wilderness of one-night stands with potential axe murderers (represented by Robert).
In this YouTube video, the director of Cat Person explains how the film is about how men and women bring different fears to their dating lives. For women, there’s an “innate” fear around dating men because men, as a cohort, are much larger and stronger. Whereas for men, the fears are more about ridicule and possibly doing something wrong.
Thematically, it would seem that the director’s decision to insert the example of an asexual man has something to do with not wishing to tar all types of men with the same (dangerous) brush.
But I believe there are unintended negative consequences for the aspec community when asexual men are used in this way in stories…
Did this film do anything good for the asexual community?
Because of how the asexual character is being used, the flattening of Clay equals the flattening of an entire identity: Asexual men as safe men.
Perhaps you wonder at this point, What is wrong with that? If anything, that’s a good stereotype to be saddled with?
Well, no — that ignores the current political reality for asexual people, and for asexual men in particular. There are people out in the world who truly believe there’s no such thing as asexuality, and that anyone who uses that label for ourselves is using it as some kind of cover.
Dr James Cantor, self-styled expert in p**dophilia, is one vocal example. Himself a gay (somewhat deposed) academic from Toronto, Cantor is as transphobic as he is acephobic. (Transphobia and aphobia are one and the same thing.) Cantor has said on record that a proportion of people calling ourselves asexual are in fact attracted to minors, and that we are using the ‘safe’ label of asexual as some kind of ruse.
To join those unlikely dots, one must first believe that asexuality is, indeed, a ‘safe’ orientation.
But that in itself is an assumption.
I do believe that asexuality offers protective effects from abusing others unintentionally. That much seems clear, since asexuals are, indeed, less likely to be involved in hook-up and drunken party culture sex, where a proportion of sexual assault occurs. But asexual people are human and diverse, like any other group of people. It would be dehumanising and infantilising to believe that asexuals are incapable of causing harm, especially once understanding that sexual assault has very little to do with attraction in the first place.*
*Note that anyone who has self-reflected to the point where they can call themselves asexual (or transgender, or Autistic…) is very likely a decent human being. Deep self-reflection and human decency are co-occurring conditions. Watch out instead for the non-reflective people who eschew identity labels altogether. These people may have good reason not to dig deep into their own psyches.
Inclusion does not equal diverse representation.
If you use, say, CommonSense Media for your reviews, you may notice they now have a “Diverse Representations” field. The person who filled in the details for Cat Person wrote:
Female-focused story with women writers and directors. Explores how vulnerable and targeted many women feel, how it can be hard to trust a man you don’t already know or who isn’t introduced by friends. At the same time, it relays the confusion and challenges that some well-intentioned men can face in the dating world. Main characters are White, but one has best friends who are of Indian descent. Gay and asexual supporting characters.
— CommonSense Media
This illuminates the issues with a checkbox approach to diversity because, as any minority can tell you, “appearance” in media does not equal “representation”.
THE COMPLEXITIES OF DESIRE
I don’t believe the creators of this film are sufficiently wise to say anything useful or interesting about asexuality. They have clearly used a rudimentary idea of what asexuality looks like in an attempt to create a juxtaposition between two ‘opposite’ types of men.
But I do think Cat Person, both film and short story, says something interesting about the oftentimes tenuous link between sexual attraction and sexual behaviour. This affects allosexuals and sex-favourable asexuals alike.
Why does Margot have sex, even though we are shown, very clearly, that she is not physically attracted to Robert, at times actively repelled by his body, by his taste in movies, his failure to hold up his end of a conversation?
I believe the story gives us the answer to this: All through their first ‘real’ date, Margot is checking in with Taylor, her feminist bff. Although Taylor is telling her not to go home with this dude— or perhaps because the bff is telling her not to — Margot goes ahead with it anyway.
- Perhaps Margot is a little attracted to the danger of not knowing a man before going home with him. Anxiety and sexual excitement can feel similar, on paper.
- Perhaps she is wanting to place some distance between herself and Taylor who, we learn via an argument between them later, is not having the frequency of partnered sex that gives her social cache. Sure, audiences found the feminist friend annoying and cringe, but we’re supposed to. Because Margot does, too. She does not want to be that kind of ‘man-hating’ feminist. The best way to prove she’s one of the Cool Girls? To have sex with a man.
- There’s more to it, though. As Margot explains to the feminist friend by phone, there’s pleasure in being the object of someone else’s attraction. And for straight women, it can be especially pleasant to be wanted by a man. In fact, I would suggest that second-hand attraction is the way into partnered sex for many young women especially.
SELF-OBJECTIFICATION AS A WAY INTO DESIRE
The short story itself seems to be about this very phenomenon, as Margot views her own body as she imagines Robert views her. Rather than focus on Robert’s body, which is unattractive to her, she instead imagines giving Robert the pleasure of viewing her own:
As they kissed, she found herself carried away by a fantasy of such pure ego that she could hardly admit even to herself that she was having it. Look at this beautiful girl, she imagined him thinking. She’s so perfect, her body is perfect, everything about her is perfect, she’s only twenty years old, her skin is flawless, I want her so badly, I want her more than I’ve ever wanted anyone else, I want her so bad I might die.
— from “Cat Person”, the New Yorker short story (2017)
LIBIDO, ATTRACTION & DESIRE
Events which typically occur to together are frequently misperceived as being a single phenomenon.
The asexual community will tell you that attraction and libido are two completely different things. This fact is so very clear to asexuals that it becomes mind-blowingly frustrating after a while to realise many allosexuals have difficulty separating the two concepts.
Angela Chen uses a hamburger analogy: Libido is like being hungry; sexual attraction is like you want to eat a hamburger. To clarify further, sexual attraction is libido with an object.
I put it to you that sexual desire is something different again.
Co-opting the hamburger analogy, it’s possible to be hungry, to see a tasty hamburger, but still not want to eat it. Maybe you just ate. Maybe you sometimes like hamburgers but not right now. Maybe you ate a dodgy hamburger last week and aren’t quite ready to give another hamburger a go.
Libido plus sexual attraction are, for most people, whatever their orientation, enough to create the desire to actually have sex with another real life person. But not always.
Now I’ve clearly explained the difference between libido, sexual attraction and desire, let’s turn back to the fictional Margot. What’s she got going on? (And why does she feel so relatable to so many people. mostly young women?)
- She seems to have a libido. (This is assumed.)
- She does not have sexual attraction — not for Robert, and also not for anyone else in her periphery at this time. It would seem Robert’s the closest she’s got right now. If she can’t have ‘attractive’, she can have ‘intriguing’. It seems deliberate that she does not ask him basic things about his life, preferring to imagine the sorts of jobs he might have rather than to ask. (Late in the film, exasperated, Robert informs her that he is a nurse.)
- She desires partnered sex.
Here’s what the movie could have said: No matter your orientation, partnered sex is complex, and not always about sexual attraction at all. An asexual character could have been very useful in conveying that message. I that how the asexual character was used, though? Hell no!
Cat Person could have been much better. Made by allosexuals who clearly looked up the definition of asexuality without really delving into the nuances of what it means to live as asexual do have insightful things to convey.
To anyone interested in why people have sex, the asexual community is super interesting. After all, a significant proportion of asexuals who never experience attraction do manage to find sexual pleasure nonetheless. I can see how the creators of this story would have found their way towards asexual discourse when delving deep into the nature of human sexual desire. Asexuals shouldn’t need to be sexual to be considered human, but the existence of asexuals who do have sex seems to fascinate and baffle much of the allosexual public, some of whom refuse believe asexuality even exists.
Perhaps because aspecs are dismissed and dehumanised so frequently, it’s easy for (allosexual) storytellers to lose sight of the reality that asexual people exist as full human-beings. Asexuality is an orientation in its own right. It’s a something, not a nothing. We are not here to serve as flat juxtaposition in your stories, or to serve as lab rats so allosexuals might understand themselves a little better.
In this era of asexual “representation” on screen, allosexual storytellers seem interested in asexuals only insofar as we can “teach” the allosexuals something about themselves. They still don’t get who we are.
Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand. Yes, I wrote an entire book because I’m sick of other people messing it up so badly. Walk the talk, so they say.
