#kristen-roupenian quotes

[wepicy]

Dating Quote By Kristen Roupenian, “Oh, my God, Ted, she moaned, fakely.They dated for the next four months.” Kristen Roupenian, - You Know You Want This

[kitchen-light]

In “On Writing and Book Culture,” a 2009 essay published in Présence Africaine, Nganang writes about how he always imagined that one day his books would sit on the shelves in his father’s library, an ostensibly straightforward goal complicated by the fact that his father was, for many years, the librarian for the Cameroonian Ministry of Internal Affairs—that is, for the oppressive Cameroonian state. Nganang’s essay describes the way his formative understanding of his father’s library—which contained newspapers, pamphlets, and scholarly dissertations, as well as novels and poetry—led him to be skeptical of genre distinctions that would cordon off “literature” from other kinds of text. He would define literature in the broadest of terms, as “a combination of letters,” and a writer as simply someone who puts those letters down on a page. “This lack of discrimination between texts makes me see the platform of a writer as being extremely potent, for it certainly makes me see no distinction between writing a novel and writing an interventionist essay,” he wrote. Nor would he distinguish between “writing a poem and using the Internet to build a network of writers, to defend the constitution of Cameroon.”

Kristen Roupenian, from her essay “When a Novel Reimagines a Nation”, June 20, 2022

[anatomiadellamemoria]

Era quasi perturbante, sul piano esistenziale, il fatto che due persone in un tale stato di prossimità fisica potessero vivere lo stesso momento in modi tanto diversi.

Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person

[howifeltabouthim]

He had no faith in love's capacity to cause him anything but pain.

Kristen Roupenian, from You Know You Want This

[frammento]

Was there a point at which your ego was crushed so completely that it died, and you no longer had to lug around the burden of yourself? There must be a German word for this feeling, when the elaborate contortions of your own thinking rose to the surface and became suddenly and unpleasantly visible. Like walking past a mirror in a crowded mall and thinking: Who is that dude with the terrible posture, and why is he cringing like he expects someone to punch him, I’d like to punch him—oh wait, that’s me.

Kristen Roupenian, The Good Guy

[a-broader--sensibility]

hi, I was wondering if u could explain "being sexualized" vs "expressing sexuality" bc tiny clothes (so men can look at u), songs abt abuse=cool etc are sexualizing and seem slimy but at what point is it women "feeling sexy" and not being pushed into it for others benefit, idk if this makes sense

This is a great question, and I’m sorry I’m so late to respond. Before I answer, please keep in mind that this is the opinion of one person on the internet and you should consider many perspectives before making up your own mind.

I want to reverse your question a bit and begin with the idea of “expressing sexuality” rather than “being sexualized.” Plenty of ink has been spilled on the topic of objectifying women, so I want to discuss this idea that there is a way of expressing your own personal sexuality via clothing in a way that is empowering. Frankly, given that sexual desire is usually about desiring other people (besides yourself, unless you’re a narcissist), it doesn’t really make sense to think that the clothing you yourself wear can express your sexual desires. As a straight woman, I definitely find certain types of clothing on men attractive, but what I myself wear has no bearing on how attracted I am to a given man. If I were to wear lingerie, that wouldn’t affect my desire for another person. I am not attracted to myself. 

Some women have expressed that wearing sexy clothing or lingerie makes them “feel sexy.” I would counter that feeling sexy means feeling that you are sexually attractive to others—i.e. pleasing to other people, not yourself. Feel sexual =/= feeling “sexy.” Sexual feelings (arousal, desire, etc.) are about your desire to engage in sexual activities either with a partner or alone, whereas feeling sexy or beautiful is a type of confidence about how much your appearance pleases other people. It is possible to feel beautiful or desirable to others without feeling any arousal at all. Similarly, it is possible to feel arousal in a private setting where you aren’t even thinking about how you appear to other people (for example, while masturbating.)

It is true that many men are especially turned on by skimpy clothes or lingerie, but we also know that sexuality is extremely diverse and complicated. The notion that lingerie or short shorts makes you sexy is predicated on the presumption that most people (let’s be honest—most men) are turned on by the same narrow set of Western commercial beauty ideals. My experience of dating—however narrow—has been that even “straight cis” men are actually attracted to a variety of body types, types of clothing, and choices to wear or not wear makeup. No matter how you are dressed right this instant, someone out there would probably find you irresistible and someone else would find you hideous. It depends on who you ask.

A lot of women mistake being desired with experiencing arousal. Kristen Roupenian really explored this notion in her short story Cat Person. Here’s a quote taken from a sex scene where the main character, Margot, has sex with an older man she has earlier admitted to finding a bit disgusting and unattractive:

“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...”

I’m not judging anyone who makes this mistake, because it’s super normal for women—almost universal. We are so programmed to believe that other people’s desire for our bodies is our own sexual desire that we feel defensive when feminists point out that crop tops, mini-bras, corsets and the like are schmattes. They are garments sold by Hot Topic and Victoria’s Secret and whoever else. They’re fabric. Your sexuality is your body, your physiological response to complex scenarios that are personal to you, and they cannot be purchased for $19.99 at a mall. Clothing doesn’t make you sexually aroused, but it can make you more sexually appealing to others. 

If we say that Billie Eilish wearing a corset in Vogue is an expression of her sexuality, then what does that mean about Billie? Is she sexually attracted to her own body, like an extreme narcissist? Was she meant to be have been sexually aroused during the photo shoot (a professional event, a workplace environment, surrounded by probably 20+ photographers, assistants, aides, stylists, cateres, etc.)? Are we to understand that the desire that anonymous male viewers of her images feel for Billie is the same as Billie Eilish’s own desires? I know your question wasn’t about Billie, but I feel it’s relevant.

Anyways, I hope this was useful to you. I know this was a wordy response, but I felt the need to clarify exactly what I meant. I’m not against female sexuality, but sexuality is desire and arousal—not pride in one’s appearance.

[kitchen-light]

Shortly after he was freed, Nganang released a statement titled “In Defense of the Anglophones,” and subtitled “Declaration made to the Criminal Court in Yaoundé.” Addressing the judge in charge of determining his sentence, he denounces the state for pressing “charges against me for what is clearly fictional.” In particular, he says, "I stand before you accused of . . . things that are clearly linked to writing, by which I mean the use of the alphabet to make meaning, for in the end, I used nothing more than twenty-six letters to write the contested text. Nothing more. So, I will prove to you in my statement that those twenty-six letters, such as I employed them, cannot in any way constitute a threat to the Head of State."

Kristen Roupenian quoting Patrice Nganang, from her essay “When a Novel Reimagines a Nation”, June 20, 2022

[anatomiadellamemoria]

Anna ama Ted, ma non lo desidera in un modo che le causa sofferenza; non lo desidera disperatamente, suo malgrado. E invece è proprio quello il modo in cui Ted ha sempre voluto essere desiderato: il modo in cui ha sempre desiderato le donne.

Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person

[frammento]

Still, she really did seem to be absurdly into this. It was almost existentially unsettling, that two people in such close physical proximity could be experiencing the same moment so differently.

Kristen Roupenian, The Good Guy

[dude-with-wings]

After reading the story “Cat Person (Links to an external site.)” by Kristen Ro

After reading the story “Cat Person (Links to an external site.)” by Kristen Ro

After reading the story “Cat Person (Links to an external site.)” by Kristen Roupenian What is Roupenian’s argument about modern romantic relationships as it pertains to gender? Does this resonate with your own sense of gender identities? Why or why not? Make sure to answer the guiding question using quoted text evidence and specific, concrete examples. If it helps, feel free to use the template…

[gwen-chan]

After reading the story “Cat Person (Links to an external site.)” by Kristen Ro

After reading the story “Cat Person (Links to an external site.)” by Kristen Ro

After reading the story “Cat Person (Links to an external site.)” by Kristen Roupenian What is Roupenian’s argument about modern romantic relationships as it pertains to gender? Does this resonate with your own sense of gender identities? Why or why not? Make sure to answer the guiding question using quoted text evidence and specific, concrete examples. If it helps, feel free to use the template…

[phroyd]

WASHINGTON — I’ve noticed a weird pattern, in fiction and life, about sexual encounters: Women decide they’re not attracted to a guy they’re nestling with. Limerence is not in the cards. But they go ahead and have sex anyhow.

First, we have college student Margot in The New Yorker’s much-discussed short fictional story “Cat Person” who recoils as she watches Robert undress. “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.” Margot doesn’t want to seem spoiled or capricious, so she takes a sip of whiskey to “bludgeon her resistance into submission.”

Then we have the 23-year-old Brooklyn-based photographer who hooked up with comedian Aziz Ansari at his TriBeCa apartment and talked about it anonymously to the website Babe. She was distressed by his arbitrary choice of white wine at dinner, his rush to sex, the way he jammed two fingers in a V-shape down her throat.

But at his request, she gave him oral sex twice; he briefly performed it on her once.

On “60 Minutes,” Stormy Daniels told Anderson Cooper that she was not at all attracted to Donald Trump but she had sex with him (without a condom). She said that she thought maybe “I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone’s room alone.”

After “Cat Person” became a phenomenon on the perils of romance in the digital age, its 36-year-old author, Kristen Roupenian, told The New Yorker that Margot succumbing “speaks to the way that many women, especially young women, move through the world: not making people angry, taking responsibility for other people’s emotions, working extremely hard to keep everyone around them happy. It’s reflexive and self-protective, and it’s also exhausting.”

So you’d rather have bad sex with someone who doesn’t appeal to you than find a way to extricate yourself? You can Lean In but you can’t Walk Out?

I call Joanna Coles, the chief content officer of Hearst magazines and the former editrix of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire. The 55-year-old Brit has a new book called “Love Rules,” a guide to avoiding the digital sand traps in relationships.

“Getting naked and having sex with strangers is hard,” she tells me. “We portray it as fun and we pretend it’s fun. But people crave intimacy, which is not easy to create in a hookup. That’s why Britain just appointed a loneliness minister.”

The inspiration for Coles’s book was a conversation she had with Sally, the daughter of a friend. Sally described her weekends at a liberal arts college this way: “My friends and I all go out on Friday nights, get drunk and hook up. And on Saturday morning, we go down to the health center together to get Plan B.”

Coles was nonplused, and it’s hard to shock someone who edited Cosmo and can talk comfortably about Pokémon porn and vodka-soaked tampons.

“I know alcohol is confidence in a glass and it’s politically incorrect to say, but know your limits,” she says. “There’s nothing empowering about being black-out drunk. Who wants to wake up the next morning in bed unable to remember what you did?”

Citing a study calculating that half of all sexual assaults involve alcohol, Coles asks: If hooking up is so much fun for young women, why do they need to be insensate to do it?

Leah Fessler wrote a popular piece in Quartz in 2016 about her disillusionment with the hookup culture at Middlebury College. No one wants to go back to sock hops and going steady, she said, but “to attempt to separate emotions from sex is not only illogical, given that emotion intensely augments pleasure, but also impossible for almost all women.”

In her book, Coles quotes cyberpsychologist Mary Aiken on the dangers of losing your inhibitions more easily when you are in the “immersive environment” of cyberspace — a space designed by men.

“Online dating is very crowded,” Aiken said. “There are four people in it: two real, normal selves, and two virtual selves.”

Echoing a theme from “Cat Person,” Coles tells me: “Things go from naught to 60 really fast. When you have a lot of communication online before you go out with someone, it builds up a false sense of who the person is. There’s a tendency to fill in the blanks with positive information.” (She points to a study showing a sixfold increase in sexual assault associated with online dating.)

“It’s very easy to imagine someone online in a positive way,” she says, “but it’s only when you sit down, with all five senses in play, that you can really tell, ‘Do I find this person attractive?’”

When I ask her why women would have sex with men whose looks or behavior is turning them off, she replies, “The fear is that dating apps make women interchangeable.”

Coles talks about porn and living in a culture where teenagers check their phones a minimum of 75 times a day, always “one click away from some of the most aggressive porn imaginable.”

In “Cat Person,” Margot thinks it is absurd when Robert flips her around as though she is “a prop” for the porno “playing in his head.”

In her book, Coles interviews women who explain why they hesitate to tell men that porn sex is not pleasurable to them.

“There’s a new sense in which young women feel that they are now in competition with porn, and if they don’t put out, it’s easy for the guy to go home, log in to Pornhub and get what he needs there,” Coles says. “They’re sublimating their own needs to try and please the guy. Then they realize their needs weren’t being met at all.

“Porn sex is designed to get men off in six to eight minutes. Many men don’t know how to interpret female behavior in bed unless it replicates a porno film.”

She says something has gone badly wrong when 20 percent of young women are on antidepressants, when there have to be ad campaigns about consent before sex, when everything is about connecting but you don’t really know who you’re connecting to.

“Good sex is a wonderful high,” Coles says. “It’s what great novels and great music are about. And it’s free! But we’ve lost track of what a brilliant thing it is. It’s so transactional now, it’s bleak.”

I invite you to follow me on Twitter (@MaureenDowd) and join me on Facebook.

Phroyd

[theantipoet]

I invented new needs just to satisfy them.

Kristen Roupenian, Scarred

[theresistanettes-blog]

Response #1 to “Cat Person” by Kristen Roupenian

Dearest Bean (Ariana),

I’m so glad that we are writing to each other and talking about life and art. My female friendships are so important to me. It feels so good to have a community of women back! I’ve been scared about the state of the world since the election. Being a woman feels especially precarious these days; our rights are being chipped away behind closed doors. I’m glad that stories of men harassing women are coming out but hearing about these things and dealing with them every day is distressing. Some days I wake up and feel immediately exhausted. I’ve been relying on the support of my females to drag me back up after each fight.

Let’s talk about Cat Person.

I was so affected by Cat Person because it reminded me of one of the conditions of being a woman that I most despise, the trained niceness, the politeness that is expected in every encounter. We are only accepted and praised for being “good girls,” girl that listen not speak, girls that agree not argue. To go against the grain is to go against society. I think Margot’s reluctance to say no to her date is based on this niceness that is taught to women, and also this idea that women are responsible for the disappointment of men. Women’s guilt. My favorite but also the most disturbing line of the story is, “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.”

Still, I think that Margot was raped. Is that even controversial to say and WHY? Because we conceive of rape as a hold her down, gun to her head type of thing. In reality, we know that rape is often committed by people we know, in situations that are all too familiar but still confusing.

What is confusing about rape versus bad sex for people? People cannot bring themselves to use the word rape unless a woman says no out loud (perhaps multiple times) to having sex. The problem with this line of thinking is that our culture teaches women to be quiet and obedient. I know there are those who will take issue with the declaration that women do not have to voice a no for a man to have raped her. You might say, where is the line? How do we judge what rape is if we do not have a definition? I understand that people want to quantify physical hurt because that’s how our culture and our legal system work. If we can obtain enough PROOF of this outward hurt, then we are allowed to believe, and then perhaps to retaliate.

But it is also true that we live in a culture that has taught women to shut up and do what’s best for everyone else.

We need to think about the legal definition of rape. “The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” This legal definition does not do women any favors. Rape is not always so clear cut. So many women are struggling with this hurt and sadness that comes from so called “bad sex.” Our definition of rape allows for this gray area of behavior that is unpunishable.  

An upsetting parallel can be drawn to the recent debate about allegations against Aziz Ansari. A lot of people thought Ansari’s behavior just wasn’t bad enough to be considered rape. But how hurt do we need women to be before we support them? Do we need them to be dead or deeply emotionally scarred? The answer is yes, if we acknowledge their pain and punish any behaviors. The line that is crossed between “bad sex” and rape is the moment that women like Margot realize that they do not want to have sex with someone, but still do. Let’s think about that. THEY DON’T WANT TO, BUT THEY STILL DO. Acquiescence is not consent; it is not an enthusiastic “yes.” It doesn’t matter the reason, whether a woman is held down, or emotionally manipulated into having sex, it should not be acceptable. The pressure that Margot felt to have sex was not a physical one, but it was just as dangerous. Women’s mental/emotional space is often forgotten during sexual encounters and this leads to rape.    

I just want us to remember that we don’t have to settle for this antiquated definition and system that women adhere to when speaking about their being raped. I know women who are afraid to say that they were raped because “it wasn’t that bad, he didn’t have a gun.” I want to say, IT IS THAT BAD, and SOMETHING SHOULD BE DONE ABOUT IT.

The man in Cat Person isn’t the worst human being alive. He probably has a family that loves him. I just wonder, what if that family had talked to him early on about how to treat women? What would make this man less of a terrible human being? For one thing, the man is delighted and uplifted when Margot is distressed and feels denigrated. What is that? Insecurity, probably, but also power dynamics. Sometimes I think it is easier for men to interact with women when they clearly have the upper hand. But don’t they ALWAYS?

Also, what if the man simply asked Margot more questions- literally any, so that he knew more about her instead of making up a version of Margot that was his ideal woman? What if he had known how to express his feelings of inadequacy instead of staying silent and angry? Anger is often the go to emotion for men because it’s allowed. One of my favorite quotes about this comes from bell hooks in The Will to Change, Men Masculinity, and Love. She says, “[Boys] know the rules: they know they must not express feelings, with the exception of anger; that they must not do anything considered feminine or womanly…boys agreed that to be truly manly, they must command respect, be tough, not talk about problems, and dominate females.”

We need to think of ways to speak to men about understanding harassment and abuse of women, and we need to support, not attack, women who ask for our help changing social norms.

I want this topic to be one that is close to home for everybody. I think we need to start in our homes with the men that we know and aim outward. Because, so many women know men who abuse, and yet so many men know none. And, too often feminism is lonely. It makes us feel separate from the world. I want the world to come to us, start with our thoughts.

-- Nicole

[frammento]

Ted was wildly uncomfortable. He wasn’t quite sure who Rachel was on a date with, but it didn’t seem to be him. He’d contributed nothing to the outing; as far as he could tell, she could have brought an inflatable doll with her to the movie and had an equally good time.

Kristen Roupenian, The Good Guy

[frammento]

Every so often, over the next day or so, she would find herself in a gray, daydreamy mood, missing something, and she’d realize that it was Robert she missed, not the real Robert but the Robert she’d imagined on the other end of all those text messages during break.

Kristen Roupenian, Cat Person