I got my first cat as a gift for my 12th birthday. My mom and I were wandering the adoption room at the Toronto Humane Society when we spotted a brown tabby kitten swiping his little paws through the bars of his cage, meowing with vive-la-résistance indignance. The other cats were sleepily resigned to their fate, but this tiny creature was busy staging an uprising. We brought him home that day.
We were cautioned that it would take our new kitten a while to adapt to his new environs, but he strolled assuredly across the living room and lounged on the wine-hued Persian carpet. We all lay down to admire him. At this point, he leapt up onto the arm of the couch, his oversized ears resembling the points of a too-large crown; the spotted markings on his silky flanks calling to mind the heraldic symbols of a regal cloak. He surveyed us from above, a newly throned monarch overseeing his dominion. In that moment, we named him Julius. It was the beginning of an era for our family (and the end of one for our upholstered furniture).
While cats are worshipped and admired by those like my family, they have historically been viewed as, well, an underdog. In fact cats, and their owners, have long been maligned and ridiculed. But recently, there has been a shift in pop culture that’s finally seeing cats take their rightful place as meowing main characters in TV series, movies and viral social media trends.
The history of anti-cat sentiment
In his new book, “Cats: A History,” Carleton University professor Rod Phillips elucidates all that makes cats fascinating and misunderstood, but also traces the tradition of anti-cat sentiment. “In a sense, the book is a history of the hatred of cats,” Phillips said.
As a cat lover, reading the book occasionally felt distressing, as though I was learning about some gruesome injustice in my own ancestral history. Phillips writes that the 1771 British Encyclopaedia Britannica defined cats as “the most equivocal and suspicious” of domesticated animals. “They possess at the same time an innate malice and perverse disposition which increases as they grow up … constantly bent upon theft and rapine.”
By the 19th century, cats were viewed — often by nationalists and conservatives — as exotic and dangerous. “It’s much like today, with people on the right fixating on the notion of ‘outsiders,’” Phillips observed. For instance, in 1930s Germany, Nazi-supporting author Will Vesper described cats as “the Jews of the animal world.” He went on: “Cats are an alien, untrustworthy breed. They come from the East, from Egypt. They belong in no community. Germans love dogs.”
Masculine, feminine, feline
Cats have also been negatively associated with the feminine. For centuries, they were viewed as purringly seductive, freedom-loving and ungovernable, like that most threatening breed: the undomesticable woman.
“When we say that cats have long been associated with women, it’s more than men have associated women with cats,” said Phillips. “In cats, men saw a model of what would happen if you didn’t control women: they would become feral.”
But this gender-biased PR pendulum (spool of yarn?) is finally swinging. Cats are becoming avatars of a hardscrabble, street-smart masculinity.
Ricky Gervais’ new Netflix adult-animated series “Alley Cats” follows a gang of thuggish, crotch-scratching, filthy-mouthed man cats. The show’s poster resembles a feline version of the iconic 1983 film “The Outsiders,” if Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon had whiskers and a taste for tuna. Its tag line, “nine lives, zero f—-s,” channels both the Rat Pack and today’s menopausal-woman ZF discourse (which, of course, cats invented).
Meanwhile, online, the “gangster cat” trend strutting through TikTok to the propulsive rhythm of Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise” features videos of cats staring down massive, terrified dogs, and wandering urban streets with more swagger than Snoop.
Next March, the Pixar film “Gatto” will tell the story of a black cat named Nero’s entanglements with a feline mob boss. The trailer reminds me of the opening scene of Francis Ford Coppola’s “The Godfather,” in which Marlon Brando’s Don Corleone tenderly strokes a cat whilst speaking of murder. Gatto flips the script: the Brando character is a cat.
It’s no surprise cats are becoming the heroes of cinema and television: obedience and reliability don’t make for the most compelling characters. Cats, in their spontaneity, inscrutability and renegade commitment to their own comfort and agenda, have a built-in badassery. (I once looked after a neighbour’s cat who would only drink water if it was served in a wine glass or champagne coupe. You can only imagine how many rejected bowls, cups and tumblers it took for me to reach this conclusion.)
Cats as ‘green flag’
Simply liking cats currently furnishes cultural currency, reading as a sign of healthy, attractive masculinity. NBA stars including Milwaukee Bucks’ Myles Turner and New Orleans Pelicans guard Jordan Poole are proud cat owners; there is apparently even a “secret society of NBA cat dads” spearheaded by Poole, who has also become a Friskies ambassador.
In a post-game press interview, NFL player Jamaal Williams said, “I’m ready to get home, honestly; I’m ready to see my cats.” Looking genuinely bereft, he added, “They’re probably going crazy wondering where their dad is at!” Online comments included: “Sexiest thing I’ve heard a sports guy say!”
I recently mentioned to a Gen Z acquaintance that my 11-year-old son loves cats. “A man who loves cats is the ultimate green flag,” she said. “My boyfriend loves cats!”
I asked Phillips what he thought about this phenomenon; he said it makes sense to him. “Yes, loving cats could well signal that here is a person who does not need control over their environment” — or over their partner.
An exchange I had at 13 with my paternal grandmother, not a warm woman and not a cat person, pounced to mind. “Do you love Julius?” she asked me in her trademark claws-out way. “Yes,” I answered.
“Why? Cats won’t perform for you,” she said sharply, unwittingly providing one major reason why I respect and admire them so deeply. If the tragically non-feline spend our lives trying to please, making compromises and being compromised, cats, thrillingly, don’t.
My current cat Bambi, a dilute tabby whose pastel colouring makes her look like she’s strolled off a John Singer Sargent canvas, wakes me by hovering her paw directly above my face when it’s time for her breakfast service.
When I inevitably open my eyelids with a start, she looks at me queryingly, confused and uncomfortable at the sight of a servant off her feet. I get up and dutifully head to the kitchen — I perform for her. The natural order is restored.
