Did you notice the shout-out to cat lovers in the ManBoobz post? I’ll replay it for you in case you didn’t.
Men’s Rights blogger The Native Canadian put it this way:
PTSD from being a feminist on the internet? Yeah I bet she wakes up screaming at night because of all the mean words! Must be hard going day to day with flash backs of your friends being called “femnazi’s” right in front of you! How ever do you handle life? Fucking disgraceful b****. Let’s see her tell that to someone who really knows what living with PTSD is like. …
I’m sorry but I am totally shocked, I don’t know what else to say, other than, is there nothing sacred to these cat lovers?
Commenters were surprised by that, but I wasn’t. We’ve seen the “women / feminists = cat people” trope before. Remember? I went back into the archive to refresh my memory. Remember? October 2012? (Gee this has been going on for a long time, hasn’t it?)
Reap Paden is another Mencken, or even Hitchens
I kid, I kid.
He drops in here with his totally cool angry atheist avatar and his rapier wit, and he puts me in my place.
I apologize if someone has already made this point–
Ophelia I think I can speak on behalf of at least a whole hell of a lot of people when I ask “When are you going to deflate your head and come down for a landing?” Some of the incredible things I have seen you post lately make me wonder if you have been eating too much cat food or something.
Feminist cat food.
Lesbian-feminist cat food.
Old (feminist) maid cat food.
Either way, woman-who-hates-men-loves-cats-as-pathetic-replacement cat food.
Jerry Coyne over at whyevolutionistrue has identified the cat as the official atheists’ pet.
Specifically http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/friday-felids-a-dg-travesty-and-a-patient-cat/
Elderly people struggling to survive in poverty by eating cat food isn’t funny. It’s reprehensible, but not surprising that Reap thinks it is and uses it as a slur. Har-har, starvation! Get it? The suffering of others is a big ‘ol joke.
There is no low too low for this creep.
Maybe women and cats should be burned at the stake together, like in the good old Dark Ages?
It’s a common trope that feminists won’t be able to land men and end up “alone with their cats,” which doesn’t sound very alone to me.
Hmm, I wonder how The Native Canadian or Reap Paden would categorize male feminist cat lovers (such as your friendly neighborhood queer shoop)…
Hmm, I’m straight, male and a cat lover. I am also probably a feminist. Never tasted cat food though. I’d assume it tastes good, my cat always liked it…
They do have me pegged in the sense that I love cats and have had a cat (cats, counting childhood ones). But I have learned to love dogs just as much (conflict! conflict!!) and I haven’t had a cat in years.
I do eat cat food though. Mix in a little horseradish, some balsamic vinegar, and a tablespoon of Nutella and yummmmmmmm.
I reckon the doglover vs catlover rivalry (which is mostly hostility from the dog camp) largely revolves around psychosocial and neurocognitive conditioning with regard to submission displays.
Anyone with an interest in anthropology knows that human status hierarchies revolve around ritualised dominance-submission displays. It should come as no surprise that monkey studies show that dominance drives dopamine: mammalian brains seem predisposed to get a boost to our pleasure centres when other mammals submit to us. Most people don’t get to experience overt submission displays from other humans that often, but dogs’ pack-behaviour can be relied upon to deliver submission displays over and over again.
I reckon some people get so much pleasure from the feel-good neurotransmitters stimulated by canine submission that they get very resentful that cats don’t offer the same thing. (Domesticated cats do still offer submissive affection behaviours to their humans, they’re just more subtle and cats often refuse to do those behaviours in front of other people, and thus the display aspect is missing and without that some folks deem it to be worthless.)
I don’t understand the people who deem anything they don’t personally esteem or enjoy as an affront to all right-thinking persons, but I’ve seen it happen often enough to recognise that it’s all too common. This is just another example.
He, uh… he kind of implies that there’s something wrong with being a cat person. Cat people tend to be independent, self-reliant, and smart. Not that dog people can’t be those things, it’s just that they don’t appreciate those qualities in others.
Oh, the bygone mirth of Reap’s wall-o-text rants. I got giggling all over again at “I think I can speak on behalf of at least a whole hell of a lot of people”
I remember the cat-lady thing was a Slymey hit for a while. ‘Lonely old mentally unstable sex-negative lady’ is clearly the intent, but I don’t really understand why that stereotype has legs at all. Cat fondness is such a heterogeneous endeavor, there really can’t be well-defined edges to it.
tigtog (#9)
I can definitely do without the one that involves grooming my face and ears for me.
A. Noyd
But that’s the part I love best! 😀
I’ll amend your claim to dog-only people, since I grew up as a cats-AND-dogs child in a cats-AND-dogs clan and I know plenty more families just like mine.
Given cats’ well-known capriciousness in the affection displays department, does this mean that cat people are indeed more self-reliant, at least in terms of requiring constant reassurance of affection? Does this make them harder for other humans to manipulate by withholding affection, and therefore more difficult to dominate generally, and therefore they make alpha-dude bonerz cry? It’s an hypothesis, certainly.
Does this also suggest that the cats-are-worthless crowd might know (and relish) that they can also get their dopamine hits by
creeping other people outmaking other people nervous/anxious via agressions both micro and macro? And that they might be made extremely angry if someone proposed interrupting their supply of intimidations perpetrated (by enforcing codes of conduct perhaps)?It’s a fruitful area for study, methinks.
@rq (#13)
Blech. I much prefer my smaller cat’s technique of doing an impression of a dead spider monkey till I skritch her belly, whereupon she molds herself around my hand like a furry, vibrating glove.
I always thought my fate was to die alone and be gnawed at by my faithful but hungry German shepherd.
They really can’t make up their mind, can they?