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78 Cultural norms influence our interpersonal ties, establishing what other people and animals we connect with and how. Part of our modern thinking about pet keeping is the association of certain pets with men and others with women. People have historically identified dogs as masculine and cats as feminine (Serpell 1988). This connection is now normative, built into our culture as a takenfor -granted preference, with sanctions to ensure widespread conformity. To wit, one study of greeting cards aimed at children (Murphy 1994) found that these cards reinforced the idea that boys like dogs and girls like cats. Popularly written books also convey this theme. Titles such as Cat Women: Female Writers and Their Feline Friends (McMorris 2007), The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection of Women and Cats (Simon 2003), and Women and Cats: A History of a Love Affair (Lorvic 2003) are reminders of how deeply woven the gendering of cats is into our history and everyday thinking, but there are no books with similar titles for men. Dog and cat products are also gendered . The Blue Buffalo Trading Company, a pet food company, makes it possible for dog and cat owners to create virtual trading cards of their pets; dog cards are colored blue, but cat cards are pink; in the sample trading cards, the dog is described as liking to play tug of war, whereas the cat likes 5 Gender Displays 5.1. Woman with five cats. R. Bogdan coll. Gender Displays 79 snuggling. And in pet stores, items such as brushes will often be blue for dogs and pink for cats. Because cats are women’s pets in modern Western societies, men can find their masculinity being questioned if they own cats and show them special affection (Perrine and Osbourne 1998). Such gendering of pets has not been missed by popular television series; in one show, a male character is teased for having a cat because it suggests he is homosexual or effeminate. To defend themselves from doubt, some men will explain their cat preference by letting others know that they “always had owned dogs” or that they were “also dog people.” Our modern sentiment about domestic cat keeping also sees women, but not men, as having special relationships with cats, sometimes involving multiple animals at once. The appeal of cats to women is so strong, the assumption goes, that many cannot control the urge to have more and are driven to collect scores of them. The “crazy cat lady,” the pejorative stereotype of an eccentric old spinster who lives in a decrepit house with dozens of untamed cats, became a fixture in American popular culture and mythology at some point in the twentieth century. The Simpsons features a Crazy Cat Lady character; Wikipedia has an entry titled “Cat Ladies”; there is even a “Crazy Cat Lady” action figure, who has a “wild look in her eye” and comes with lots of plastic cats; and for a few dollars more you can buy the Crazy Cat Lady Game, which features on its cover a woman with a crazed look and a description of the goal of this “insane game” as the collection of the most cats. By the 1990s, scholars started to study more seriously people who hoard animals, finding that about two-thirds of them are women who come close to this stereotype (Patronek 1999) and that many live in conditions not fit for humans or other animals and are totally preoccupied with their animals ’ lives, often to the point of severely neglecting themselves, their human family and friends, and their obligations (Arluke and Killeen 2009). Modern thinking takes women’s intense involvement with cats one step further when it blurs interspecies boundaries. It is not just that their cat connections are more intense, but that their thinking , feeling, acting, even appearance become catlike . A completely fictional woman–cat hybrid, the cat woman, started in a 1950 Batman comic book and was followed by decades of comic iterations and full-length movies, most recently starring Halle Berry (Cat Woman, 2005) and Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises (2011). There are cat woman costumes or simply masks for women to buy. These mass-media icons and pop-culture fashions draw on and exaggerate the image of cats as sensual and sexual beings, making for a hypersexualized “frisky feline.” Human traits of cunning, seductiveness, sleekness, and sexuality anthropomorphize cats; conversely, women are sexualized when called “cat,” “sex kitten,” or “pussy.” How modern is the contemporary...

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