Cat Person, 2017 Brain, and Women's Happiness

What would a 2023-Brained Cat Person movie look like?

Seemingly out of nowhere and for nobody, the trailer for Cat Person was released this past week. The original short story was Ohtani-esque, a phenomenon so rare that there’s a 99% chance we will never see it again in our lifetimes. Did anyone seriously think that a New Yorker short story, in this day and age, would ever capture our imaginations and conversation the way Kristen Roupenian’s did? 

The short story’s protagonist is Margot, a 20-year old college student in NYC who meets Robert while she’s working at a movie theatre concession stand. After she flirts with him, he eventually asks for her phone number. They start going out and a certain point, when she can’t get into a bar, she confesses she’s 20, to which he reveals that he’s 34. Neither mind, and he invites her over to her place. She has second thoughts about having sex with him, but she feels guilty because they’ve already come this far. Plus, she revels in the idea of being the hot young thing of Robert’s fantasy. After that night, she ignores his texts while thinking of a way to end things. One night, she randomly goes to the same bar where Robert is, but avoids him. The story ends with a flurry of gradually more hostile texts from him, the final one being, “Whore.”

The movie looks like a complete failure, mutating a story that thrilled many readers with its mundane relatability into something that will bore us with its melodramatic lecturing. It’s jarring to see Robert—whom I pictured as a scraggly and lumbering, though not ugly, chubby guy (Roupenian describes him as “on the heavy side” with a tendency to wear heavy coats that “hid his belly”)—now personified by the more boyish Nicholas Braun with all the smarminess of season 4 Cousin Greg. One tweet (that I now realize was by Felix from Chapo Trap House), summed it up well:

Yes, there is a stale 2017ness to this whole movie, and the less-than-stellar reviews back this up. A Polygon review says, “[t]his is a film that includes both a therapist who appears to state the subtext as text, then vanishes, and a one-dimensional best friend of color who exists solely to drop feminist buzzwords from five years ago (Geraldine Viswanathan, who deserves better).” 

It made me think of what a Cat Person movie that wasn’t so 2017 Brained would look like. Of course, a Cat Person movie that was faithful to the original could’ve been good and relevant since it’s not as if we’ve come to a determined conclusion about the sexual dynamics raised in the short story. But 2017 Brain was maximally hypervigilant about sex, dating, and even flirting in the wake of Trump and Weinstein. Just a few weeks after Cat Person was published, the Aziz Ansari babe.net story would be published as well. It was a different time.

So, since the movie stars Nicholas Braun, why not make the movie about someone like the real-life him? Earlier this year as the final season of Succession was airing, there were lots of allegations about how Braun was a sexual predator. Some said he preyed on high schoolers. Others said he uses a bar he owns in NYC as a hub to constantly meet 20-something female fans to hook up with (Braun is in his mid-30s). A Google search for “Nicholas Braun allegations” results in hits to what look like celebrity news blogs with links to TikToks and Reddit threads, some of which have been deleted.

The stories seem to have died now, but regardless of what Braun has or hasn’t done, his alleged behavior is worth discussing. Let’s exclude the accusations about underaged girls, not because they’re unimportant, but because it’s obvious that an adult man shouldn’t be dating or having sex with a 15-year old. But what about a significantly younger, though still adult, woman? And what if the man is rich and famous?

None of the Braun allegations, to my knowledge, have included rape or assault allegations. These are all consensual encounters, with accounts of how young adult women will specifically go to Braun’s bar to hook up with him. If so, what’s the wrongdoing here? I’m not asking that rhetorically. Because if you’re socially conservative, the answer is clear: sex is sacred, men and women should wait until marriage (or at perhaps until falling in love), and so forth. But most of the anger against Braun and his type isn’t coming from conservatives railing against bicoastal metropolitan hedonism. They’re mainly coming from liberal women.

We’re at a weird place with sex right now. It used to be that conservatives were against sex and its depictions, and liberals were the opposite. Now, it’s become more nuanced, where conservative vs liberal approval/disapproval of sex depends on who’s the primary beneficiary of that sexualization. To put it generally, liberals still are for promiscuity and flaunting of sexuality, except for the benefit of straight men. In contrast, conservatives are suddenly all about sex, but only for the benefit of straight men.

Both men and women are still highly dissatisfied with dating apps and much of the online gender wars is about which gender has it worse these days in this regard, but some surveys show that men report higher satisfaction. Much has been written about the decline in women’s happiness, and a factor in that decline must be because women feel trapped, that whether we move forward or backward, it’s lose-lose for them. Go backwards, and we’re in the 1950s, or worse. But go forwards with social and technological progress, and now there’s an un-virtuous cycle that undermines their dating happiness. Social progress has enabled women to now be more educated than men, but women still want educated men, which means educated men are at a premium, which means educated men have a distinct advantage in dating, which is further compounded by a liberal sexual philosophy that encourages free-love ideals for both men and women (ultimately favouring men), which is enabled to unprecedented heights by dating apps.

Both social and technological progress are the pillars of liberalism's belief in a better tomorrow (e.g. "Diversity is our strength" and "I fucking love science") and they're very good at improving a lot of things. Liberal social progress means less homophobia and technological progress means more medical cures, for obvious examples. So it has to be very discouraging for women to see that their personal romantic hopes are actually going to have to be sacrificed in the pursuit of their own political and societal ideals. And it's not as if they’re going to become a Luddite or conservative because they do genuinely believe in the merits of liberal social and technological progress.

The only way to reconcile all this is to redefine "social progress" to account for straight women's romantic preferences, in order to mesh clashing notions of what was socially progressive and what many women want romantically. The stereotypical dichotomy of the Fundamentalist Christian prude vs. a free-love hippie will make way for the hippie prude. The empowered and liberated woman will prefer traditional dating norms not because she is oppressed, but because she is empowered and liberated, because what makes women happier is by definition empowering and liberating for women. Some examples of this already happening are progressive aversion to straight sex scenes in movies, policing of age gap relationships involving two obvious adults, and progressives’ intolerance of -isms in all areas of life except in women's dating lives.

Is happiness a suitable foundation for an ideology? The Declaration of Independence does list the “pursuit of happiness” alongside “life” and “liberty.“ But happiness is an especially nebulous and often self-contradictory concept, and so, such fixation on a capricious ideal is going to start a ton of fights.

And conflict is the basis of all drama, so thus, the new Cat Person movie! Since you’ve already cast Nicholas Braun and the stories about him are going to start up again, just have Robert be a Braun-like character: he’s a 30-something actor who’s finally becoming a name in a show that’s very buzzy with the right sort of people in NYC media. Margot is an NYC college student who’s a big fan of the show, loves the character Robert plays, and knowing his reputation, goes out to seek him, partly wanting to prove to herself (and others) that out of all the girls in NYC that he could choose from, he’ll choose her (at least for that night). Much to her thrill, she succeeds. The sex is actually boring, but that wasn’t the point anyway. He’s nice—thankfully, not rapey—but cold. Afterwards, she never hears from him again, as she expected. And she’s perfectly fine with that because she accomplished her goal and she now has a cool story, thus making her the “winner” of that encounter. But as time goes on, especially as she hears more ongoing stories about Robert, she gets angrier.

The story would raise a lot of intriguing and uncomfortable questions. What are Robert’s sexual obligations as a male celebrity when he has a whole city of women that wants to fuck him? What is that whole-city-of-women’s sexual obligations in abstaining from fucking him? Should men have a promiscuity penalty? Are women supposed to control their own desires? Are men supposed to protect women from their own desires? Do men owe women committed relationships? Do women owe men sex? Is it misogynistic for men to cheat on women? If so, is it misandrist for a woman to cheat on a man? If not, does that imply that women are more dependent on relationships than men? And many more questions that I’ve left out. Perhaps readers can put them in the comments below.

The disappointing thing is that Roupenian herself did not have any hand in writing the film adaptation of her own story. She wrote Bodies Bodies Bodies, which I thought was great and made sharp and funny observations about young people’s social interactions. I would’ve loved to seen her cinematic take on her own story and to see her 2023 Brain at work.