"Why women prefer cats
When it comes to a faithful companion, most females prefer to have a puss on the pillow. Barbara Ellen finds out why.
It has always amazed me how acceptable it is to mock and despise the many single women who just happen to prefer cats as pets.
We all know the stereotype — the sad, overlooked, dried-up desperado trawling lonely as a cloud around the supermarket on a Saturday afternoon.
Supposedly, to look into the female singleton's trolley is to gaze upon human despair in its purest form. The meals-for-one, the glossy magazines shrieking their self-help messages so loudly people three aisles away can hear, those furtive bars of high-quality healthyfood brought as a substitute for the low-quality sex they were having before they decided enough was enough.
All these items could be exhibited as evidence in the socio-emotional kangaroo courts that even today persist in judging the solitary female as worthless and hopeless simply because she is mate-less.
However, the real clincher is the six-pack of top-of-the-range cat food. A kilo of heroin couldn't be more socially incriminating.
What cat food says about the single female is that she's got a cat and that's all she's got.
All rubbish, of course, and nicely disproved by a recent report that says a parasite living on cats can infect their female owners and make them sexy, desirable, fun-loving and unfaithful.
Great, we go from drudges to sluts, no middle ground, and isn't that always the way? Still, having known plenty of lovely cats, both when single and attached, I can't help but see it as progress of sorts for the female cat-owner to finally be acknowledged as a sex kitten.
Women with cats have had to get used to abuse over the centuries. Once denounced as witches, then mocked as socially inadequate, the female's relationship with her feline has always been considered suspect. Even today, she has enemies.
A vivid and enduring cliche, the single woman living on her own with her cat has come to be viewed as one of the ultimate icons of neutered 21st-century femininity — all hope gone, all sexuality spewed out of them.
It is probably a rare woman who hasn't had at least one man say to her, "You're going to end up living alone with cats", which is only hurtful if you allow it to be.
I replied, "True, I could end up like that. Alternatively, it could go all wrong for me."
It goes without saying that single men don't get the judged-by-pet treatment when they dash around parks with their dogs.
While a woman who so much as coos to her cat is instantly written off as emotionally needy and possibly psychopathic, a man running around throwing sticks for his pooch is viewed as sensitive and desirable.
Indeed, a single man would have to literally marry his dog before it would be seen as a woman substitute in the same way that a single woman's cat is seen as a man/baby/life substitute.
As for cats being men substitutes, a truly great cat can be cute, arrogant, cuddly, self sufficient, smart, loving, vulnerable and interesting all at the same time, all in the same moment.
If men were as much fun as that, women would spend all their time tickling their tummies, too.
It's very easy to deal with boyfriends who complain you treat your cat better than you do them. Just say: "Once you've produced evidence that an ancient civilisation worshipped you, then perhaps we'll talk."
It could even be argued that some men end up being very poor cat substitutes. ("I just couldn't meet the right cat so I decided to have a relationship instead.")
In reality, women don't substitute cats for relationships, at the very most they might substitute cats for horrible relationships they're very glad they didn't have — their moggies providing a furry Linus blanket until someone nice comes along.
Which sounds intelligent enough to me. That's why even though this latest report could be considered mildly suspect (it is probably more the case that cat owners, like their pets, are naturally fun-loving and naughty), it should also be celebrated as a long overdue move away from the psychosexual stigma of female cat-ownership.
In the meantime, all female cat lovers out there should enjoy "catching" being fun-loving, sexy, desirable, even unfaithful.
Men have always blamed the dog for bad smells; it's only fair that we get to blame some things on the cat."
- Observer
