homunculus-argument:

Also hey, cultural history time: The reason why cats are associated with women wasn’t ultimately and originally about women as sly, cruel, or capricious creatures, but about cats as mothers to their kittens. And yes, sure, reducing womanhood to motherhood and a woman’s worth to her fertility is Much Bad, but nonetheless I want to stress that the reason cats became the symbol animal of so many goddesses and were associated with women from thereon wasn’t over some “cats and women are sly and selfish, dogs and men are straightforward and loyal uwu” dichtonomy.

It was about cats’ tendency to go “I am 4kg of whoop-ass and if you try to touch my eight beautiful children I will fucking kill you.”

This seems… strange and counterintuitive to me

because 1. dogs can be just as viciously protective of their young

and 2. the view of cats as being feminine (at least, the way that comparison always seemed to come up in old novels I’ve read) …always felt to me more like a snarky observation by men who were frustrated at their advances being spurned by women

….and who didn’t do much introspection… because the idea of women as being like cats (fickle, capricious, elusive, stingy with their affections) wasn’t really being contrasted against an idea that dogs (emotionally generous, loving, loyal, unthinkingly obedient, eager to please) were like men…

…but rather that this concept of dogs was what the men in question wanted women to be like.

…IDK. I guess my own assumption of the male/female dog/cat analogy was shaped by a Lucy Maud Montgomery short story I read ages ago…

about a woman who was notoriously distrustful of men, and didn’t like cats because they were “too much like the men for me,” and when confronted with the argument that “cats have always been supposed to be feminine,” she retorted, “twas a man that supposed it, then.”