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Are Women Prizes for Men to Win? “Cat Person” Says No
@henryracette ends a recent editorial with a plea to “re-establish the idea that women are, once again, prizes to be won by men.” I’m sure Henry means well by this, but women playing the role of men’s sexual prizes strikes me as part of the problem, not the solution, at least where women’s regrets about sex are concerned. Besides the fact that a man who believed he had “earned his prize” might be less inclined to take “no” for an answer, the short story “Cat Person” suggests that women seeing themselves as a sexual prize for men may be yet another prompt for women to “bestow” the “prize” of themselves unwisely, simply to gratify their own image of themselves as men’s “prize”.
Margot is the protagonist of “Cat Person.” Margot, a college student, flirts with Robert, an older man who’s no Master of the Universe. Robert’s not ripped, or powerful, or wealthy, just an ordinary Joe Margot met by chance, a Joe whom Margot knows little about, despite the two of them having struck up an elaborate texting correspondence. Robert, who says he has two cats, is a beguilingly witty texter. In person, though, Robert seems awkward, less than what Margot hoped from their texting. At times, Margot even seems to judge Robert as a loser, and yet she sleeps with him. Why? Chiefly, it seems, because she falls under the spell of her own vanity: she sees herself as Robert’s prize and falls in love with herself in that role.
What arouses Margot most about Robert isn’t Robert himself, but how Robert sees her. It’s not until she believes he has treated her “as though she were something precious” outside a 7-Eleven that she begins to feel “a sparkly lightness… the sign of an incipient crush.” The next moment she feels magic with him in person (and not via text) likewise focuses on how she sees Robert seeing her:
But, when Robert saw her face crumpling, a kind of magic happened. All the tension drained out of his posture; he stood up straight and wrapped his bearlike arms around her. “Oh, sweetheart,” he said. “Oh, honey, it’s O.K., it’s all right. Please don’t feel bad.” She let herself be folded against him, and she was flooded with the same feeling she’d had outside the 7-Eleven—that she was a delicate, precious thing he was afraid he might break. He kissed the top of her head, and she laughed and wiped her tears away.
“I can’t believe I’m crying because I didn’t get into a bar,” she said. “You must think I’m such an idiot.” But she knew he didn’t think that, from the way he was gazing at her; in his eyes, she could see how pretty she looked, smiling through her tears in the chalky glow of the streetlight, with a few flakes of snow coming down.
When she begins to imagine what sex with Robert would be like, although she guesses (correctly) she wouldn’t find sex with him satisfying, what excites her is “imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her”. When he reacts to her
as if she were something too bright and painful to look at,
she finds that
sexy, too, being made to feel like a kind of irresistible temptation.
Once Margot ends up in his bedroom, with him undressing, she finds herself overwhelmed by her predicament:
[T]he 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. It wasn’t that she was scared he would try to force her to do something against her will but that insisting that they stop now, after everything she’d done to push this forward, would make her seem spoiled and capricious, as if she’d ordered something at a restaurant and then, once the food arrived, had changed her mind and sent it back.
Nonetheless, seeing herself as his prize is what gets her stalled motor running again:
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.
The more she imagined his arousal, the more turned-on she got
When things stall again, she imagines herself “herself from above, naked and spread-eagled” while Robert touches her. Though the image disgusts and humiliates her, it still manages to fill her with “a kind of perverse cousin to arousal,” which is apparently enough to keep the tryst going.
Again and again, seeing herself as a sexual prize motivates Margot to press forward with Robert, no matter how little she desires Robert for himself or how much she might regret it later. If Margot were simply out for her own pleasure, and less fixated on how lavish a prize Robert must find her, she’d be less motivated to go so far with him so fast. But Margot is lost in her own fantasy, where she stars as some man’s prize – which man’s prize seems to matter less than that the prize is her.
Perhaps if Margot also believed marriage were a prerequisite for sex, both she and Robert would be less harmed by her role as sexual prize. After all, marriage forces you to consider who the other person is and whether you could stand a lifetime of him – or, for that matter, whether he could stand a lifetime of you. No matter how fixated a woman might be on her role as sexual prize during the honeymoon, no matter how much that fantasy might stroke her ego, it’s difficult to get to a honeymoon on ego alone. Even if Margot weren’t waiting all the way ’til marriage for sex, if she saw her role in dating as delaying sex, that would still buy her time to question whether the ego-stroke of being a man’s sex-prize is reason enough for sex with him. In both these cases, it’s the willingness to delay sex that makes women’s playing the role of sexual prize acceptably conservative. By itself, the role of woman as sexual prize has little to offer those of conservative sensibilities.
Treating a woman as if she’s your prize is a fantastic way to get a woman’s attention, true. A man looking to bowl a woman over for quick seduction could do worse than treat her as if she were some rare carved gem, some priceless treasure. Do that to a susceptible woman, and you might soon have her on her knees – if not kneeling to you, then to her deity of choice, begging for the strength to resist you. But it’s not her vision of herself as a prize to be won by men that would prompt her to resist your sexual advances. It would have to be something else. Perhaps her sense that her worth is not in whether she is a prize to be won by men. Perhaps some other shyness or modesty. Indeed, if she disagreed with your claim that she’s the sex-prize you’ve been anticipating, that by itself might be enough to render her bashful: nobody wishes to be revealed as a sexual disappointment.
Women are more vulnerable than men in important respects, so it makes sense for the notion of female honor to reflect that. Because women are more vulnerable, it makes sense for women to screen men carefully, to be sexually reticent, to consider their sexual reticence a part of their feminine honor. While we could call the screening process a test of male “worthiness”, it’s not the same as envisioning women’s role as “prizes to be won by men”.
Even saying women’s screening of men measures “worthiness” is slightly problematic: there are, after all, many worthy men we may have to screen out. I can count more men I’ve met who seemed worthy of me than I can those who proved clearly unworthy. And yet I’m married to one man and expect that marriage to last a lifetime. If I were a prize to be awarded to the worthiest man, which man should I have gone to? And where would I get social permission to refuse offering my body as a prize to any man who met my threshold of worthiness?
Now that I’m married, I can resort to niceties like reasoning that any man other than my husband who expected me to offer my body to him would by his very expectation prove himself unworthy. But when I was single, it wasn’t so simple. Moreover, men are people in their own right, and expecting me to value their worthiness purely in terms of their mate-value to me is really too ridiculous! If I thought I risked making a worthy man seriously unhappy if we coupled, should I yield? In practice, I did not. That decision carries wistfulness, but no regret.
That women should consider themselves “worth the wait” and hence delay sex might strike a man as equivalent to “the idea that women are, once again, prizes to be won by men.” But if we wish young women to behave the way I think we want them to, I would not teach them that they’re prizes to be won by men. Nor, really, would I teach young men that lesson, either, to spare young men the heartbreak, frustration, and anger of believing they’d earned their prize, only to have their prize turn them down.
It is odd that in modern time we can not figure out the simplest of things such as courtship. My granny described it perfectly decades ago with knowledge all at that time knew. “A man chases a woman until she catches him”.
Well, yeah. I basically took it for granted that that women prizing themselves would go hand in hand with the idea that sex should wait until marriage.
You are lucky. Many middle and upper class women are lucky: lower class women may be a lot more likely to encounter men who are just not good husband material-men who deal drugs, who are involved in criminal activity, who have children with multiple women. Upper class men can obviously be unworthy too, but usually in different ways that may be less blatantly obvious.
The bottom line is, if a man is not willing to marry you, he is unworthy. Yes, there may be more than one man who wants to marry you, and the fact in itself that he wants to marry you isn’t enough-he may be unworthy in other ways. There will be lots of otherwise worthy men who won’t want to marry us; that’s fine, but they have no right to expect sex.
What’s that thing @andrewklavan says–the body is a language the soul speaks?
I like the idea of teaching boys and girls the fairy-tale version of this. It’s a spiritual thing–the princess is a prize for the young man to win, by slaying dragons or perhaps by winning the war against Sauron and becoming king of Gondor.
That captures the spiritual reality pretty well, and the young mind can understand well enough the marriage rituals that make the arrangement permanent. Later they can learn about the sexual aspect of the thing, and they’ll understand how it works–claiming the woman as a sexual prize is just the way of physically enacting that spiritual reality of wooing, winning, and marrying the princess.
It should be pointed out, though, that even in the good old days before the sexual revolution, many women did not wait until marriage-but most of them did wait for some amount of time. A much longer amount of time than is common in some circles today. And that is a good thing; ideally, everyone will wait until marriage, but waiting six months is a lot better than not waiting at all: a man who is willing to wait six months is far more worthy than a man who is not willing to wait at all. He is also far less likely to give you a disease, leave you if you get pregnant, leave you at all.
The fact that many women in the past who didn’t wait for marriage did still wait may have more to do with the fact that the men involved often ended up marrying them than shotgun weddings. The girlfriend of one of my male cousins got pregnant before they were married; this was 40 years ago. I will never forget the look on his 19 year old face as he told us his girlfriend was having a baby: he was elated. I don’t think I have ever seen anyone so happy. 40 years later, they are still married, have 5 children, and I don’t even know how many grandchildren, but theirs was never a shotgun wedding: he really loved her, and still does.
Waiting for marriage is ideal, but at least waiting for some amount of time is far better than not waiting at all-and women who value themselves and are encouraged to wait until marriage are a lot more likely to at least wait, if not for marriage, then at least for some amount of time. And they are far less likely to wake up one morning to realize that they have slept with a man who cared nothing for them.
This makes sense when sex is seen as something a woman only agrees to with a man who wishes to marry her and whom she would willingly marry. But in that case, male “worthiness” has to do with marriage, not with the nature of the woman as a prize.
If we divorce the notion of woman as a “prize” man is “worthy” of from marriage specifically, I am not sure what good could come of it. And if the notion of woman as “prize” for a “worthy” man is always attached to marriage, then it’s serving as a fanciful “princess and hero” fairy-tale description of marriage. While it’s good to have fairy-tales dramatizing the ritual of marriage, such tales are not intrinsically about women being prizes for men – they’re intrinsically about marriage.
We are blessed to not have to worry about it, but in other times and places, the female “prizes” men won have included slave girls and the spoils of war. Won fair and square according to the rules of the time/place. The more modern notion that a man wins a woman fair and square by spending a certain amount of time and money on impressing her is maybe not so different. Most modern men would not collect their prize by force if it came to it, but the prize notion doesn’t really rule force out.
Agreed, but who is trying to divorce those two ideas?
Beautiful.
Fanciful, yes, but that don’t make them untrue–when interpreted allegorically.
Yes.
With respect, are you sure Henry’s position is that sex with a woman is the prize to be won?
We speak of winning a woman’s heart, favor, admiration, or trust. Convincing a woman to [redact] isn’t spoken of as winning so much as scoring. Real life requires winning.
Nevertheless; when you have sufficient fire, heart-favor-admiration-trust-[redact]ing kind of blur in a heat shimmer. Add alcohol to aid in combustion.
First, it seems to me that these quotes from Cat Person make the whole story sound like a piece of bodice-ripper soft porn, and I don’t know that such a story is where I would look for accurate insights into the sexual psychology of men or women. I would also rule out Fifty Shades of Grey as a reliable source. There’s a reason they call it fiction.
Second, the tendency to find someone attractive if they seem to adore you is not limited to women. It goes in both directions. Maybe even more in the other direction. As my favorite author, Robert Heinlein put it, “A man does not insist on physical beauty in a woman who builds up his morale. After a while he realizes that she is beautiful — he just hadn’t noticed it at first.” I think that anyone who has ever flirted with a member of the opposite sex understands the power of flattering someone’s ego.
Third, I submit that the subjects of human sexuality and sexual attraction are simply too complex for everything to be reduced to the binary issue of whether society encourages women to defer sex until after marriage. Marriage is important, of course, but there are a lot of posts here on Ricochet that really stretch to connect every dot back to that single metric. I think the truth is more complicated than that.
I do have to push back on this a bit, and @midge covered this herself. I speak from a bit of painful (but highly educational) experience here, both of my own and that of my friends.
Set aside the sex itself, as not all young men are pursuing that as the prize. Many young men (myself included at that time) have their eyes on the real prize: marriage to a wonderful woman. They believe fully in the notion of pursuing a princess and slaying dragons on her behalf, and thus winning her gratitude, her love, and her hand in marriage. They’re taught that if they do the right things, then the reward is a surety – they’ll win the girl’s heart. But it isn’t a surety because life doesn’t work by checklists, nor people by checkboxes.
Instead men need to be taught a higher lesson: do the right thing by the women in your lives, not in expectation of any reward, but because it is the right thing to do in and of itself. If you set out to slay someone else’s dragons (and that’s a discussion all by itself), do so because you want to help them just for the sake of helping them. If you go in hoping for a reward, much less expecting a reward, then your motivations are suspect.
Are they prizes to be won, or should they be prizes to be won? Those are two separate questions.
This is the same message many action movies were teaching young men in the 80’s and 90’s; you can be a marginal young man but still win the love of a beautiful woman if you kill a bunch of terrorists and be a hero.
They were written that way because it was a fantasy of the young men who wrote those movies, and as those men grew up, so did the fantasy. After the 90’s there were a bunch of movies with women being the main character, because you can be a hero by proxy if you marry a heroine. Then when those writers got even older, they started making movies about training their daughters (never sons) to be heroines, so that as fathers, they could be responsible for creating a hero.
I wonder what they’ll think of next.
Anything rare and valuable should be prized. A good life-partner is definitely rare and valuable.
Most prizes, however, are not actually rare and valuable. The intrinsic value of an Olympic medal or an Oscar statuette, for example, is actually quite low. Once acquired, most prizes are merely symbols of the effort one exerted for their acquisition.
Therein lies the paradox.
Is “Cat Person” a sexually-explicit story? Yes. But it’s a story about the disappointments of modern sex, a topic difficult to write about without describing modern sex. In that sense, it’s rather the opposite of the romance genre. It strikes me as a deliberately self-parodying account of being “swept away by passion”, and psychologically astute. Quite different from something like FSoG.
Some fiction is meant to be escapist or idealizing fantasy. Romance novels are escapist. Tolkien’s fiction is idealizing. But other fiction is meant to illustrate not the world as it could be, but to hold a mirror up to the world as it is. “Cat Person” is in this latter category.
Sure, it goes both directions.
I’m not claiming only women respond to having their ego flattered, as if men didn’t. Just that the “I am woman: I’m his prize” attitude isn’t immune to quick flattery, and so doesn’t guarantee women’s sexual reticence. And if I’m not mistaken, @henryracette advanced the “women as prize” trope out of belief it would increase women’s sexual reticence, leading to fewer instances of regrettable sex.
In my post, while I mention deferring sex until marriage as a goal, I didn’t reduce delaying sex to the binary issue of whether it was before or after marriage.
Are today’s young women having an unnecessary amount of regrettable sex? If so, what norms would help them avoid it? (An issue not mentioned in the OP, but worth thinking about, is how much should traditional sex-avoidance norms adapt to the presence of effective contraception?) It’s possible to argue young women aren’t having an unnecessary amount of regrettable sex – that the regrettable sex they’re having is simply necessary for girls’ education in a technically-advanced society – but I wouldn’t argue that.
Yes, and it can be crushing for a man to find himself in that situation.
We often worry — with reason — about how girls and young women might learn the wrong lessons from romantic literature, but rarely about what boys or young men might take away from it. Being a hero doesn’t entitle you to a princess, let along a specific princess.
Fair enough. I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. Still, I see a lot of fingers pointed at the “sexual revolution” (meaning women were more open about having sex before marriage) as the root cause of all kinds of social problems, some of which seem to me to have very little to do with any “sexual revolution.” I thought I detected that in your piece. I apologize if I was mistaken.
And even if the princess does feel her hero is entitled to her, if she has good reason to believe his “right” to her is unlikely to support his lasting well-being, what’s better, her honoring his entitlement, or her desiring the good for him, which may not be her?
Why did this woman think a man would think like that?
I mean, I’ve never thought when lusting after 20 year old women that “her skin is flawless.” Then again I haven’t lusted after 20 year old women while being myself significantly older, so maybe I’m sigificantly alienated from what a man who would end up in this situation would be thinking. But either way, it seems as though these thoughts reveal what a woman would find desirable about herself, rather than what a man would himself be thinking.
To put it another way, that there is a lack of empathy on the part of Margot, because Margot is a narcissist. She is incapable of relating to Robert or anyone else on any deeper level, because they are merely props in her universe that seek to re-affirm to her things she wants to be true about herself. She isn’t seeking love, she’s seeking narcissistic supply. Expecting that her life would be better if she acted in a more ethically upright fashion kind of misses that her ludicrous sexual behavior is not the cause of her problem, but the result of it.
Now, maybe you could argue that Margot would be less destructive to herself and everyone around her if she was taught to value being desireable to men differently. That if someone gave her a different idea of desirability, she would engage in less sexual behavior. But, that wouldn’t change that Margot is going to be a toxic drain on everyone she interacts with. She would still be using people for affirmation, just the thing being affirmed would be something other than her great skin or whatever.
I think maybe the lesson we should learn from this story is that some individuals shouldn’t be used as the lens through which we decide how society should be, because those people have deeper problems than the ones we’d prefer to address.
To me, the idea of women prizing themselves is about screening bad men out; it isn’t about seeing yourself as some of kind of prize to be awarded to some winner. Love is a mystery; a man cannot make a woman love him by being a good guy, but he can make it a lot more likely that she will love him. There are no guarantees, but there are lots of things you can do to improve your odds.
Many young women today do not seem to think at all in terms of whether the man they are sleeping with is a morally good person; part of this is because they have been told that it is wrong to judge, and that it is wrong to have any expectations of men at all. But this non judgementalism doesn’t make the world a kinder, gentler place for most men: it means that all of the advantages go to the best looking, or the most wealthy.
^That’s another layer, yes.
Agreed. Margot has a screw loose; women like her should be viewed with pity, and men should be forewarned: any woman, but especially a much younger woman, who is willing to immediately sleep with you has a screw loose. A woman who has sex with a man she has been dating for months is being unwise; a woman who immediately agrees to sex is not playing with a full deck.
Also Midge alluded to earlier, it’s not exactly unheard of for a woman finding herself pursued by two worthy guys.* While that sounds like a good kind of problem to have, it can be heartbreaking for all of those involved.
In that situation, her rejection of one for another is not necessarily a judgement of his character or general worthiness. It could be a reflection of her estimation of the relationship rather than the man, or simply be a matter of circumstance; a woman — single or married — shouldn’t be expected to drop a good man simply because a better one appears.
Binary choices sometimes veil more than they reveal.
* Or, for a guy to find himself sought by two worthy gals.
Does heroism entitle one to any sort of reward?
If one expects a reward, does that disqualify one from being a hero?
Firefighters are paid a good salary for risking their lives. Does that negate their heroism? Without that good salary, far fewer people would choose to become firefighters.
Heroism is (presumably) a good thing. Good things should be encouraged. Rewards are a very effective form of encouragement.
I see your point, and it’s a good one, but a lot depends on what is meant by “prize” and “to be won”. Both components are important; I’ll start with the second one. By itself “prize” doesn’t mean “special”. The toy you get in a Cracker Jack box (yes, I’m old enough to remember when you actually got a toy) is a prize. But a prize that you won, as opposed to one that you were just given, is different. The prize that you compete for, that you prove you are worthy of earning, those are the prizes that are treasured and cherished. They aren’t something you get and then discard once the glory fades. And you really have to win it. A guy that feels he has “earned the prize” and doesn’t take “No” for an answer hasn’t actually won the prize. He’s trying to steal the trophy, but he should know that the prize is not really his. It’s also really important to teach young men (and young women) what the prize actually is. It’s not sex. If the quote had been that we need to teach that “sex is a prize to be won by men” then I’d agree with you completely that it’s problematic. But it’s that the woman is the prize, and women are a lot more than just sex. The real prize is a woman who wants to put your needs ahead of her own, and the only way to truly win that prize and be worthy of it is to always put her needs first. (The wonderful thing about marriage is how often both sides can do this and both be successful at the same time.) Sure, if you win the prize you’ll get the sex, but young men should know that it’s so much better when you’ve won her heart first.
Exactly.
That’s true. “Cat Person” is a story about how easy it is for modern dating to devolve into a matter of narcissistic supply.
Treating “Cat Person” as a story of Margot’s extremely abnormal psychology misses its point, I think. The power of the story relies on Margot’s not being so very abnormal. It takes ethical development to not use dating as a “magic mirror” that seeks to affirm the things we want to be true about ourselves. I don’t think it’s terribly rare to have developed ethically beyond Margot’s level of narcissism before we even begin to date, but I also don’t think it’s rare for people to start dating first, then develop other-regarding romantic ethics later – if they do at all – by learning from their mistakes.
One good thing about romance is that it can prompt us to become the good, desirable people we wish we were, for the sake of attracting another’s affections – desire can make us want to become better people. Or, we could skip the self-betterment and decide the fact we’re desired is by itself proof of our awesome awesomeness, turning those who desire us into props in a cheap fantasy of our being better than we are.
Great post, I haven’t gotten to the end yet, nor read all the comments but I couldn’t resist.
I’m pretty sure that the only reason I get laid as often as I do by my wife is that occasionally something approximating what happens above happens for her. So I can’t knock this mechanism in a woman’s mind completely. :)
It’s arguable that princesses are the prize for heroism in fairy tales because they’re cheaper than giving the hero a monetary or territorial reward.
“The kingdom is saved from the dragon, and I have one less non-productive offspring I have to feed? It’s win-win!”
I think, if we insist on using “prize to be won” language, yours is the most sensible interpretation of it. For a lot of people, though, “prize to be won” language comes with baggage that’s not just about screening.
“Screening”, on the other hand, is an excellent way to describe screening :-)