When I bring up the subject of cats on this blog, as I so often do, it’s party because, well, I’m a bit of a fan. But it’s also because I know it confuses and irritates the misogynists who read this blog, inveterate cat-haters all (or almost all). I’ve never quite understood the depth of the animosity the guys in the manosphere seem to have towards cats.
But now one of these cat haters has provided us with a theoretical explanation for his catphobia. In a post with the suggestive title “Limp-Wristed Cat Lovers, Beautiful Dog Lovers,” the guy behind the PUA blog LaidInNYC explains why real men — and real women — hate cats and love dogs instead.
Dogs are loyal, obedient, and affectionate.
Masculine men love these qualities in our companions, and they are qualities we want in our women as well.
Cats are selfish, independent, and alpha.
Masculine men hate these qualities in our companions. This is because masculine men are the owners, not the owned.
Huh. It’s weird how these descriptions of “alpha males” often read like confessions of massive insecurity. So “masculine men” are so insecure they can’t stand being challenged even by their pets? They’re so threatened by the independence of other creatures that they can’t tolerate a pet that might sometimes wander off into another room to take a nap?
But according to Mr. LaidInNYC, it’s the cat-loving dudes who are the sissies:
95% of men who love cats are either gay or have sub fantasies*. If you like cats, you like not being in control.
Well, all except for a small-percentage of super-alpha dudes who are so manly they can tame even the mighty housecat:
There are a small percentage of straight alpha seducers that like to own cats. The reason is they love dominating an already dominant living thing. They like to stare down and dominate their cats just because they can.
Welcome to my world.
Well, ok, sometimes the cats stare me down.
But what about the women? If masculine men love dogs, shouldn’t feminine women love cats? Then why do manosphere dudes so regularly hurl abuse on women with cats?
Well, LaidInNYC has an answer for that: it turns out that truly feminine women actually prefer dogs to cats, but for a totally different reason than men.
While men love the loyalty and obedience, girls are much more likely to coo over a dogs unconditional love, furry cuddles, and “look how cute he looks when he does that thing with his paw” type stuff.
Feminine girls love their dogs but they don’t enjoy training them, letting them run in an open field and feeling pride when the dog comes right back when called, punishing them when necessary, etc. …
Most of the feminine dog lovers I know already have strong male dominance types in their life, be it a strong father, boyfriend, or husband, and they just like the dog as another source of love. … cats are superfluous when you have a man to obey.
It’s a different story indeed for “the masculine, ugly, old, short-haired, barren feminists who end up being cat ladies.”
Ugly masculine girls, on the other hand, cannot find a male to dominate them in their social life because they lack the beauty. Since being dominated by a strong independent entity who doesn’t need her is so important to a woman, she must seek out that domination. Ugly girls find this in either a career, feminism, cats, or some combination of the three.
A job, a cat, some feminism: the holy trinity of MISANDRY.
I’m not not exactly sure how any of these things “dominate” women, but since Mr. LaidInNYC doesn’t actually seem to know anything about anything, I guess I’ll let that one slide.
In the meantime, I would like to treat you all to pictures of some of the evil independent creatures that make alpha males tremble in fear:
It’s really an absolute obsession with dominating others, status, authority and control. These guys feel they must have absolute control over everything and everyone, and the thought of things they don’t have control over (whether a woman will have sex with them, people not acknowledging their “status”, and now, apparently, pets not looking away when they try to stare the pets down) disturbs them.
The mangled evo psych/animal hypotheses are just something they latch onto to try to rationalize their beliefs and actions and make them sound sciency.
RE: Andrew Johnston
Because golfers hit balls with clubs! Obviously!
RE: SittieKitty
Yeah, I’ve run across a handful of stories about vagina dentata, haunted vaginas, and other stuff about women’s genitals attacking and/or devouring people through paranormal means, I’ve never seen a similar thing for penises… unless you count Se7en, and that was specifically a strap-on, not the fleshy sort. I don’t know whether it’s because the male authors just can’t conceive any other way for a vulva to harm them or what, but it definitely skeeves me out.
@LBT:
In our cultural consciousness, penises don’t have to be supernatural to hurt people.
This guy’s post also reminds me of reading pua discussions on music and how they’ll be worried about what kind of music they should listen to, because “music today is so beta!” and they’ll conclude that to purify their alphaness, they should only listen to “alpha” music like hardcore gangsta rap and death metal.
Maybe it can be a joint venture with my ranch of misfit pets. It’ll be full of rescued bait dogs, racing greyhounds, pitties, that kind of thing.
I once co-wrote a short story where one of the characters was named Vagina Dentata.
RE: cloudiah
Was she a superhero? She should’ve been a superhero.
@ becausescience
I suppose I have always assumed that the men and women most “alpha” were the ones that didn’t need constant external validation and were not easily threatened by “challenges”.
“Only the weak are cruel. Gentleness can only be expected from the strong.” Leo Buscaglia
Quote for the day from r/mr:
But feminists are so stupid for thinking that rich men got together and made a bunch of rules to favor men. (And yes, I know it’s more complicated than that; I just think it’s funny when they hold contradictory ideas and are completely unaware of it.)
Okay, wait, one more:
That seems like a very specific phobia.
Woman golfer = Lesbian: The thinking here is that golf is an upper-body-strength sport, primarily. So any woman who has upper body strength enough to whack a little white ball down the course MUST be a lesbian, because that’s totally a trait that God/Nature restricted to Manly Man’s Men (Men’s Men? What’s the proper plural form of “a Man’s Man”?).
Funny thing–the one woman I knew to be really into horses (an ages-ago ex) was also virulently homophobic (hers was so strong that it actually is what pushed me out of my ‘safely neutral’ stance, so, thanks, Baby Jesus, I guess, for sending me a True Believer who would make me a better progressive?).
dsfrogs
Okay, would it be horrible of me to admit that I sometimes hope that Legolas will scratch at my wife’s art portfolio case and thereby earn the wrath of… The Squirt Bottle? ‘Cause honestly, his reaction after getting squirted (run, hide, come back looking piteously at me and trying to make amends) is amusing as heck. (That’s as serious a ‘punishment’ as they get in our place, though ShiShi is also convinced that trips to the vet qualify, with the added ‘cruel and unusual’ phrasing added, to-boot.)
Haunted vaginas? As in, Nancy Drew and the Case of the Haunted Vagina? I would read that.
That sounds awesome! I love Nancy Drew books.
Yep.
Seriously, what’s with MRAs and the door thing? If you’re at the door first, and someone else is reasonably close, you hold it for them. It’s not a chivalry thing, it’s a not being an asshole thing.
Discussions of vagina dentata require this to be posted:
http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20040121.html
It’s an established law of Teh Innerwebs that I totally just made up just now.
Another one is that any link to Queen of Wands must be followed up by this one:
http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20031208.html
Which is totally appropriate to any discussion of MRAs, anyway.
So these people hate cats because cats are too alpha for them? That makes sense, if we are talking about pretentious control freaks, although I know how to get my cat to mind me, so I’m thinking they just don’t know what they are doing (imagine that). My cat is no more difficult to deal with than any dog I’ve owned.
I really wish I could see for myself how this really went down. I think he’s leaving out some important details of his story. My bet is that he glares at attractive women or women with strollers, and they respond to him with insults or glares. Either that, or none of it ever happened, but it could in theory, so he is pissed off anyway.
RE: hellkell
I am sad to say that in my travels, without actually looking, I have seen TWO stories on which the key thing was ‘haunted vaginas.’ One is an infamous comic. The other was this WRETCHED little book by some guy who apparently thought that writing about his Freudian neuroses in a quantum state of irony was ‘edgy.’
I don’t know which was sadder: that that book existed, or that I read the whole goddamned thing. *cries*
What a strange, little life
to live so full of bile and strife
that cats become conquered and
dogs rendered docile,
In order to shape up
a state of affairs
Where grabbing an entity
and wringing it of personality, fallibility and ability
is being dominant
And where shapeless, formless (be less)
pretender people
march in lock step, uniform
uniformly
down the corridors of the cracked space
that used to be a place where people came to meet
But by the grand order of some delusion
has now been recast and remade
Because cats are beta or alpha and some day soon too
will be coffee bars, alcohol and music that doesn’t involve at least an hard drug reference or two
—
This is quite strange, frankly.
LBT- I am pleased to have met someone else who read that wretched thing, if only so I can confirm its existence in some way other than, y’know, the way it continues to exist on my bathroom shelf. (My husband went: “Haunted vagina? That’s worth a try!” Then it turned out not to be. The end.)
RE: LabRat
OH GOD MORE THAN ONE COPY GOT BOUGHT IN THIS WORLD?
I’m trapped between being horrified and relieved because this mean that if THAT can sell, I should have no problem.
Where’d you find the book, anyway, out of curiosity?
Dvar’s right, the dog world IS heavily female-dominated, and not just conformation. (The beauty contest portion- or, more charitably, the portion in which the breeding stock are physically judged against the standard.) I was actually about to argue with the characterization that only “most” dog sports are female-dominated, then I remembered that gun dog people are still mostly men- though with the way women are flooding into the hunt trials from the rest of the dog world, I expect that to no longer be true in another generation or so. But I’ve been either spectating or helping someone else out at conformation shows, obedience trials, agility trials, herding trials, lure coursing, schutzhund, tracking, and mondioring, and the people in there working the dogs or judging the events are usually and sometimes *entirely* women.
I also own and (on a very limited scale) breed a guardian breed with a reputation for independence, and we try to see guys like this fellow coming so we can spare our dogs, animal control, and the world in general from the consequences of treating a dog with that attitude. If they don’t create abuse cases, they create dogs that bite, sometimes both. Dogs need a leader, not a “dominator”, and a dog capable of guarding is likely to eventually defend itself when repeatedly “attacked” by someone trying to force it to submit over and over again for no reason it can understand.
Horses- I actually have my own theory about why sections of the horse world tend to be female-dominated as much of the dog world is, and it has nothing to do with bizarre psychosexual ideas and everything to do with the idea that animal training and breeding was seen as an acceptably “feminine” thing for upper-class women to do around the time that animal breeding became an upper-class interest.
LBT- a friend of mine with a general interest in the bizarre pointed it out to me, in a “ha ha this is a thing that exists” sort of way. Where he found it, I’ve no idea.
Does that mean if you like cats and dogs equally, you must be bi-curious or something? Whatever. It’s all nonsense anyway.
It never made sense to me that cats are considered inherently “feminine” while dogs are “masculine” – because they act that way, regardless of their gender, as a species. I also doubt owning one or the other indicates how feminine or masculine a person is as much as the practicality of it. For example, I tend to prefer cats due to their independence. They are not as high maintenance as dogs and generally are better to have if you live in a small place. You could get a small dog too but that still encompasses the same needs as bigger dogs: you need to take them on walks, clean up after them, and make sure they’re well-fed because too little or too much makes a noticeable difference. That and you need to put a lot of time in training them.
I also like the fact cats can mind their own business and go off to do their own thing, giving me some personal time as well, whereas keeping a dog entertained is practically a full-time job.