Treisman said that while she was not looking for a story that touched on topical issues of sexual agency specifically, when this piece came in, she did hope to get it into the magazine “sooner rather than later.”

The piece—which you can read here if you haven’t already and save yourself both spoilers and holiday-party alienation—follows a 20-year-old college student named Margot as she goes on a date with an older man, Robert, then breaks things off with him. And while it’s fiction, for many women, it felt a little too real.

hi i'm halfway thru the cat person new yorker story and i'm taking a break to find a support group please help please send help i'm . i'm . not even done yet — darcie wilder (@333333333433333) December 10, 2017

In the piece, Margot comes off as polite, a little narcissistic, and more than a little confused. Like most young daters, she relies primarily on Robert’s short texts to divine his personality. And Robert is a creepy enigma who nevertheless does nothing technically wrong, until the end of the piece.

At one point, Margot goes over to Robert’s house (willingly) and (presumably) to have sex. And then, she experiences this emotion:

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.

What is the word for this emotion? It’s not quite regret, because you haven’t done anything yet. It’s not quite disinterest, because, well, you’re at his house, aren’t you? Is it guilt? More importantly, if she feels so uneasy, why is she going ahead with it? Is she just afraid to be rude? Is it out of self-protection? What are we to make of a sexual encounter that is technically consensual, but which Margot still considers to be “the worst life decision” she’s ever made?

In the recent powerful-man purge, and in the rape-on-campus crisis before that, there’s been a reckoning over the true meaning of consent. Some have questioned whether women who get drunk, go to men’s dorms, and even initiate intercourse could later have a genuine claim of sexual assault. Margot was at his house, wasn’t she? To some women, this passage in the story underscored the importance of the “enthusiastic” part of the new “enthusiastic consent” standard.

tl;dr: We need sex education that focuses on pleasure, not just on risk. We need to create a culture of enthusiastic consent. And we need to talk about all of the nuances of consent in order to fix our broken culture. — ella dawson (ft. olivia newton-john) (@brosandprose) December 9, 2017

Treisman said she hopes the piece might make people, “stop and consider what’s driving them in any given encounter of a romantic kind ... I think the fact that it’s generated this conversation has been a healthy thing.”