Consent, concession, the blurred lines between the two: The work of fiction, and the analysis of it, are each in their own ways deeply true. And they struck a cultural nerve this week—Dawson’s essay, titled “Bad Sex, or the Sex We Don’t Want but Have Anyway,” went viral along with Roupenian’s story—because they highlight, together, something that is widely recognized but rarely talked about: the version of sex that is bad not in a criminal sense, but in an emotional one. The kind that can happen, as Dawson suggested, partly as a result of cultural forces that exert themselves on women in particular: the demand that they be accommodating. That they be pleasing. That they capitulate to the feelings of others, and maintain a kind of sunny status quo—both in the immediate moment of a given social situation, and more broadly: Wait for the raise to be offered. Put in that extra minute of effort with the eye makeup. Nod. Smile. Once you’ve consented, don’t make things weird by saying, out loud, that you’ve changed your mind. “Cat Person,” on top of everything else, is an exploration of awkwardness as a form of social coercion; the conversation it sparked, accordingly, in “Bad Sex” and Facebook posts and essays and tweet threads, has been a consideration of that kind of awkwardness as a condition—and a chronic one.
That these conversations would be occasioned by a work of fiction is both ironic and revealing: The world itself, the one that is all too real, has long provided its own stories of perilous awkwardness. As revelations of sexual harassment and assault have come to light in recent months, awkwardness—and discomfort—and embarrassment—and, in general, Americans’ deeply ingrained impulse to avoid involvement in an Awkward Moment When—have also shown their darker sides. Harvey Weinstein, on the tape recorded by the model Ambra Battilana Gutierrez as part of a New York Police Department sting operation, told her: “Don’t embarrass me in the hotel.” And “Honey, don’t have a fight with me in the hallway.” And “Please, you’re making a big scene here. Please.” So many of the other men accused of predation, it has now become painfully clear, have in their own ways used those soft but crushing social pressures as weapons, both in the moments of abuse and beyond: Don’t be dramatic. Don’t make a scene. Please. [...]
No one knew what to say. It’s one of the simplest and most widespread mechanisms that helps open secrets to stay secret for so long: the impulse to avoid making scenes, to avoid making things weird. Women bear the brunt of these mandates; men, of course, experience them, too. The people around her, Wildman suggests, felt awkward talking about harassment; as a result, her claims about her own experience—and she herself—got ignored. Awkwardness became a cyclical force, weaponized not through malice, but through the convenient delusions of benign neglect. Here is Franklin Foer, the former editor of the New Republic—and now a national correspondent for The Atlantic—speaking, with admirable candor, about his reaction to hearing some of the comments Wieseltier seems to have made about women at the magazine: [...]
And Americans, in particular, have long written easiness and chattiness and pleasantry into our shared scripts. Many other cultures are perfectly content with moments of silence in the midst of a conversation; Americans, on the other hand—we who reflexively append awkward to silence—tend to rush to fill the void with idle, but blessedly voluminous, chit-chat. We have “real talk,” with the qualifier revealing as much as the conversation itself, and, relatedly, a deep and dedicated aversion to conducting what human-resources departments euphemize as “uncomfortable conversations.” Several years ago, The Atlantic coined the term phaking—and also dodge dialing, and also the cell phone side step—to describe the very common act of pretending to be on one’s phone to avoid in-person interaction with others. Urban Dictionary’s top definition of awkward explains the word as the situation in which “no one really knows what to say, or choose not to say anything.” It advises the reader, should she find herself in such a wretched circumstance: “Just back slowly away.”
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