Wake Up America, Politically You’re Pity F*cking Your President

Before I start, I should state that I am by no means a political commentator, but I am a woman and that means I know a pity f*ck when I see one, and that I’m afraid is what I see when I look at what is going on in America at the moment, and particularly the democratic party.

As this is White Ink, we shall start where we always do on these matters, and that is with a bit of literature, and specifically pity f*cks in literature.

I give you Cat Person, the short story written by Kristen Roupenian for The New Yorker. When it appeared in 2017, this story instantly went viral – and that’s unusual for a short story let me tell you. It resulted in a two-book deal for Roupenian, and later became a film of the same name that came out this year.

So why all the fuss about Cat Person? Well, I believe it is because it resonated with a lot of people, and I have to say mainly women, and one of the reasons for that is that it demonstrated perfectly the pity f*ck, and its after effects – which I will come to.

For those who don’t know, a pity f*ck, also known as a charity f*ck, is when women agree to have sex with a man because they feel too sorry for him to refuse (I presume this works the other way round too, but not being a man I can’t say for sure). As far as women go, it can be for other reasons, they might be afraid of things getting heated (and not in a good way) if they refuse. But the point is, it is going through with having sex with someone that you don’t really want to, or even like, just so that you don’t hurt their feelings.

The story itself is brilliantly told, and I reread it this morning in a coffee shop in order to write this piece and gasped and cringed and laughed out loud at the utter horror of it, just like I had on first reading almost seven years ago.

You can read it here if you haven’t done already.

To summarise, it involves the story of Margot who meets a guy called Robert at the cinema where she works. They enjoy great banter over text, they decide to go out on a date, which is awkward and awful and there is a kiss which is pretty much the same, but Margot decides to go back to his place:

‘By her third beer, she was thinking about what it would be like to have sex with Robert. Probably it would be like that bad kiss, clumsy and excessive, but imagining how excited he would be, how hungry and eager to impress her, she felt a twinge of desire pluck at her belly, as distinct and painful as the snap of an elastic band against her skin.'

And so she goes and they arrive back there, and she is horrified by his house, his body, him in general, yet she goes through with the sex anyway because:

‘…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. 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.’

This, America, sums up for me the way you are behaving towards Joe Biden right now. It is ok to change your mind, that awkward conversation is going to be just that, but it isn’t impossible.

This week, in the joke that is President Biden, he has referred to his deputy as ‘Vice President Trump’ and Ukraine’s President Zelensky as ‘President Putin.’ Everyone is saying ‘why doesn’t he step aside?’ but do you think a man who you do not believe has the capacity to run an entire country, has the capacity to make that decision for himself? I may not be a political commentator, but I’ve written three books about dementia and the blankness in his stare is not totally unfamiliar. I am also not diagnosing him with dementia, all I am saying is that an 80-year-old brain does not function as well as one twenty years younger, that surely has to be a fact without sounding ageist.

And so Joe Biden stays there while people look at him and shake their heads and well, pity him. But we’re talking about the guy who can put his finger on the red button and end life on earth as we know it?!

But back to Cat Person.

After having sex with Robert, Margot instantly regrets it: ‘…she thought, brightly, This is the worst life decision I have ever made! And she marvelled at herself for a while, at the mystery of this person who’d just done this bizarre, inexplicable thing.’

America, I’m looking at you again. You too will be marvelling at yourselves if you allow this to go on much longer. It is cringingly embarrassing, almost as bad as the sex that Margot and Robert had (you really must read the story if you haven’t already), but unlike Margot you can stop this, and you must, right now, and not just because George Clooney said so.

You can’t keep a president because you feel sorry for him. But the problem is that as a society we do feel sorry for men. Why?