It is not every day that a short story goes viral. Indeed, it is not every day that many people pay attention to short stories at all. As a form, in Britain at least, they are notoriously difficult to get published, and their authors are rarely granted the effusive praise that is dished out to the long form novelist.

Yet this week, Kristen Roupenian’s first story to be printed in the New Yorker was greeted with unparalleled enthusiasm on social media and off it as well. But why? There are no stylistic fireworks on display in Cat Person, a simply written tale of Margot, a 20-year-old college student’s sexual encounter with 34-year-old Robert. Nor are there daring experimentations with form or structure.

It is a tale, straightforwardly told through the eyes of a young woman, of an unpleasant sexual encounter that she has with a somewhat ambiguous stranger who turns out to be actively unpleasant. And lord, has it resonated painfully, especially with young women.

But the timing of this discussion is no coincidence. Since the explosion of #MeToo, women’s experiences of sexual encounters, both consensual and not, are finally being heard. Our perspectives on sexual dynamics that were for so long ignored are being taken seriously. We are being granted authority and respect. We are being listened to. Though the New Yorker story is fiction, Cat Person has found a place in this brave new world where suddenly our thoughts and feelings about the men we meet, our boundaries and our behaviours matter.

In some ways Cat Person can be summed up in Margaret Atwood’s line: “Men are afraid women will laugh at them. Women are afraid men will kill them.” The female character has sex with her date because she fears hurting his feelings, not only because she doesn’t know what violence he could be capable of (his moods have already proved unpredictable, his actions manipulative), but because she has been conditioned to believe that wounding a man’s pride is to be avoided at all costs, even if it means transgressing her own boundaries to the point where she feels physically sick at thought of the sexual contact.

There is an element of astonishment that something so seemingly banal and universal in terms of female experience has gone uncommented on for so long

“It 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,” Roupenian said in an interview about the piece. It is this same impulse that might leave a woman frozen, smiling awkwardly as a powerful man masturbates into a plant pot in front of her, rather than running for the door. It explores a nest of feelings that are rarely articulated in public.

The way women respond in uncomfortable sexual situations has been up for scrutiny of late. Cat Person allows us a peek into one young woman’s motivations. Neither of the characters are especially fleshed out – encouraging the reader perhaps somewhat to regard them as ciphers for their own experiences. Margot thinks unkind thoughts about Robert’s flabby belly, and ultimately rejects him.

How horribly relatable, women readers have cried. “What a bitch,” certain male readers have responded. Such has been the backlash that a Twitter account has been set up to chronicle men’s responses. The female gaze, and its appraisal of male bodies, is foreign territory in much contemporary fiction. We are used to one gender being objectified, not the other. So no wonder this story and its sudden fame makes some men feel uncomfortable, wounded even. I’m not in the game of policing the thoughts of fictional characters, nor do I turn to literature for moral guidance. Others do, and have made their feelings known. Discussions have been passionate.

No doubt the fuss will die down, as it always does. But like Patricia Lockwood’s viral poem Rape Joke from 2013, Cat Person has neatly encapsulated where we are in terms of public discussion of the dynamics between men and women. It raises far more issues than there are space for here, including the still new and frequently befuddling internet dating landscape, and the way we can project our ideas about love on to people we barely know.

It also raises questions about the nature of fiction, and how women writers are often considered as mere recorders of human experience rather than gifted the creative imaginations to invent whole literary worlds, as men so often are – many readers have responded to the story as though it were a personal essay, not a work of fiction.

Whether you love Cat Person or not, and I don’t especially, I hope that new converts to the short story form will not abandon it after this one’s moment in the sun, and will instead now delve into the works of Alice Munro, Lucia Berlin and Lydia Davis. The way Cat Person has been received most of all highlights how infrequently the interior lives of young women are given serious literary attention.

As with the hype around the bad-sex Girls on HBO, there is an element of astonishment with the fact that something so seemingly banal and universal in terms of female experience has gone uncommented on for so long. If so many of us feel this way, in other words, then why has it gone unsaid until now? And, more importantly, will men start to listen?

• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist