Considering how many cat photos there are, the internet sure hates cats. “Cats are evil” and “I hate cats” are common attitudes that rarely face any pushback; even among cat lovers, it’s in vogue to say you love cats because they’re evil and you appreciate that. Conversely, if you suggest that dogs are evil, you’ll be treated as though you kicked, well, a dog.
The “cats are evil” meme would be a harmful one even if it had no further implications, because it’s a perfect example of a, um, dogmatic idea held regardless of evidence. Affection from cats is just a ploy so you’ll feed them (never mind that dogs are far more food-motivated). Any example of a cat who seems sweet is just proof that cats are really good manipulators and even more evil than we thought. A really nice cat is, in No True Scotsman fashion, “really a dog.” The joke of responding to any positive article about a cat with “Did a cat write this?” is a joke about dismissing any information you disagree with as inherently suspect.
Training your brain to cling to a conclusion and reject all evidence to the contrary is bad practice even when the idea in question is not important, because these are the same reasoning skills you apply to the rest of your life. If you’re used to interpreting all information about cats as proof that they’re evil, your brain is primed to think about people the same way.
But internet jokes don’t exist in a vacuum, and cats, especially when anthropomorphized with human thoughts and motivations, are not just cats.
The metaphor of cats as women and dogs as men is centuries old and well entrenched in our social consciousness. Dogs, so the thinking goes, represent masculine traits like loyalty, honesty, and hard work, while cats represent female traits like vanity, coyness, and inscrutability. Thus, what we say about cats reveals what we think about women. Cats are hateable because women are hateable. Dogs must be universally adored because masculinity is inviolable.
And what kind of women do cats represent? Bad women. Witches, villainesses, seductresses. Cats capture and amplify all our latent fears about conniving, manipulative women and the ways they supposedly take advantage of men.
The narrative of women as the unworthy recipients of love is as old as civilization. Men love women with pure, unselfish love, so the story goes, but women are too shallow and self-centered to ever return their feelings. So it’s men’s eternal tragedy to lavish love onto undeserving women who are themselves incapable of feeling true affection, and who see relationships with men only as a means to get money or power.
I trust I don’t need to explain how this relates to “cats only pretend to like you so you’ll feed them.”
The entire broad narrative that cats are evil creatures with no redeeming values and it’s completely inexplicable why people love them is, in fact, just a repackaging of a narrative originally applied to women. Far from a harmless internet joke about animals, it serves to reinforce the harmful gendered ideas that have real effects on our society. Let’s dispense with the “cats are evil” meme and pay more attention to the underlying implications of the things we say.
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