Ever since a group of people that I had invited over for dinner had a rousing discussion about how much they all hated cats at my dinner table (in my house full of cats*), I have wanted to write a piece about cats, but have never quite figured out how to frame it.
The fact is that it’s very difficult to write about cats without offending someone or being labeled as what my contractor today immediately called me when he walked into my (clean) apartment and saw one (1) well-groomed cat: a “crazy cat lady.” I’m not sure exactly why cats are such a symbolic issue for people in America. They aren’t in countries like Turkey, where wealthy and successful Turkish businessmen surround themselves with cats. They weren’t in ancient Egypt. They weren’t in the 1800s, when no one could draw a cat to save their lives (or maybe cats just looked different back then?)
The reason why I can’t write the article that I want to write is that it involves making a lot of generalizations about women, and that in turn entails making a lot of generalizations about men, and also trying to make the intuitive but elusive point that in mainstream American culture cats have somehow gotten tangled up with femininity for better or worse (actually pretty much only for worse). It’s not just the crazy cat lady stereotype. People just sometimes feel the need to vocally attest that they hate cats the way in other circles people vocally attest that they got vaccinated or buy organic or voted for Bernie in 2016.
I have so far successfully resisted the urge, when a particularly irritating young man (it’s almost always a young man) decides to run down my choice of pet, to observe that in my experience and that of some others, men who particularly despise cats also look down on women and other things they cannot control.**
This would be rude. And then they would be uncomfortable, as I am currently uncomfortable, and they would be more uncomfortable than my cats are already making them for reasons that I do not understand but they are continually trying to describe. Cats are sinister, unreadable, creepy. Cats just don’t seem nice. Cats are passive aggressive (dogs, I guess, are aggressive aggressive?) Cats don’t like them, and dogs like them, and they prefer to be liked. I do not pointedly ask why cats don’t like them.
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