I've always held the belief that men hate cats because cats are so much like women. Show me a man who cannot abide the presence of a cat, and I'll show you a man who has issues with women. This isn't always true, of course, and it doesn't address the women who can't stand cats. Suffice it to say that I haven't been issued a grant from a major university to study this theory, and I think it also goes without saying that…wait, if it goes without saying I ought not to.
I think the main issue men have with cats is they don't understand the function of cats. Cats are here to be cats. Any expectation beyond the last sentence and you're going to be either frustrated, annoyed, or confused. Cats were revered as gods in Egypt, and I suspect that a lot of that was centered on the way cats behave; cats believe they are gods, why shouldn't we? All it took was one Pharaoh who loved cats it was on. Since that time they've lost none of their self deification, and they don't much understand those other critters, like us, who did lose it.
A lot of cats lack a sense of proportionality. This accounts for some of their self-image, true, but it also explains why a seven-pound house cat will take on a one hundred sixty-five pound man and come out ahead. The first cat I lived with, Abbi Gale The Cat From Hell, was so bad that when the vet asked me to hold her down while he took out her stitches I flatly refused. One, I was paying him good money to fix the cat. Help you earn money from me? That doesn't make sense to me at all. Two, unlike dogs, cats remember. Cats remember when you've done something that pisses them off, and unlike dogs, they'll settle the score soon as. Abbi was going to make you bleed if you pissed her off, and it finally took me explaining the concept of “cat-apult” to get her to stop attacking me whenever I turned my back. Abbi drew blood like she was a nurse's aid at a blood bank. Seven pounds of pure unadulterated feline, Abbi wasn't much interested in what anyone else wanted, needed, liked, or was doing. Abbi swung hard, often, and always for the fence. I kept a water gun at my side for the first six months.
This isn't to say that women are violent, or they don't care what men want. Women, by and large, are far less aggressive then men, and they are also, again generally speaking, more nurturing. But women also have their own minds, and they have their own way of making their minds up, and some men, like me, cannot fathom what it is that makes women think they way they do.
A woman I was dating called me up one day and told me, and these are her exact words “I don't know if I'm mad at you or not.”
Now, most men I know when they're mad they know it, and they don't have a hard time letting other men know it too. I've never had a guy sit down with me and discuss if he's angry or not. Is. Is not. No middle ground.
Had I been thinking on my feet, which I wasn't, my response would have been, “Well, just in case it was my fault, let me make it up to you by taking you out to dinner tonight.” Instead, I blurted out, “How in the hell can you not know if you're mad or not?”
Needless to say, soon after that least remark, she discovered that she was indeed angry, and she stayed that way for another week or so. As it turns out, she wasn't mad at me for something I had done, she was mad at me because I didn't realize what I had done might have made her mad. It didn't make her mad, but I didn't realize that it might have made her mad, and that was what made her mad.
Men, one hundred thousand times out of one hundred thousand times, you will not only lose that argument, anything and everything you say will only make things much worse.
Things that piss cats off are equally misunderstood. Abbi jumped up in my lap one night and proudly dropped her latest catch in my lap. Abbi had stalked, captured and killed, the wild frozen chicken breast. In fact, it was identical to the one I had thawing out in the sink. In Abbi's mind, this was prey she brought to me so we might share it. To me, it was my supper being preyed upon by Abbi. Not only did I take it away from her, I didn't share it with her after I baked it in the oven. Abbi very calmly waited until my guard was down then she leapt upon the dinner table, swatted the chicken to the floor and then ran away as fast as she could.
I don't think a woman would do anything like that, no, it's just that there are things women do that I totally do not understand. I had a woman stomp out of my apartment, yell at me that I was a complete jerk, slam the door on the way out, and all the while me sitting there wondering what had happened. The next day, everything was fine and she didn't want to talk about it. Okay, we won't talk about it. She left in a huff again.
I've done pretty well with cats, I think, if you look at my track record with women.
