Butching Up The Cat

According to the New York Times, more and more hetero men are embracing cat ownership, upending the public's perception that cats are for women and gay men.

[A] growing number of single — and yes, heterosexual — men who seem to be coming out of the cat closet and unabashedly embracing their feline side. To that end, they are posting photographs and videos of their little buddies on YouTube and on Web sites like menandcats.com, and Twittering about them to anyone who will listen.

Indeed, it seems that man’s best friend is no longer a golden retriever, but a cuddly cat named Fluffy. This movement, such as it is, is in direct contrast to the most notable in the recent spate of reports about the relationship between a man and a cat, which were far darker; they focused on a young actor who was recently on trial in New York City for killing his girlfriend’s cat — he said it attacked him — only to have a jury decide after several days that it could not reach a verdict. If it had been a little less violent, that case might have been more in line with what the world seems to expect of men and cats.

Writer John Slalzi says the sissification of the cat began in '70s Hollywood when gay characters began to appear.

Mr. Scalzi, who is now married and has a daughter, blames Hollywood for the continual bad rap that has befallen the male cat owner. Originally, he said, only strong men like Don Corleone, or the villains in a James Bond film, had cats. “But then in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties, Hollywood decided that we need to have the token gay man as the witty sidekick friend of the main female protagonist,” he said. “ ‘What kind of signature thing can we give him to convey that he is not an entirely masculine being? I know! We’ll give him a big fluffy cat!’ ”

Scalzi makes the argument that insecure men gravitate towards dogs because they are more subservient. That's an interesting theory. I think there might be a corollary regarding gay men who use big aggressive dogs as a masculinity amplifier.