Cat Lady

Miu Miu is currently an anomaly in the luxury fashion market; where sales have been mostly down for most other brands, they’ve just reported 93% growth in the first half of the year, up from 2023. As it turns out, Miu Miu is popular with Gen Z, the first generation to grow up completely digitally native in a land where cats rule. Could we be making a transition from cat ladies to cat girls, from a symbol of spinsterhood to girlhood?

Dazed editor Claire Marie Healy wrote about Film’s Obsession With Cats and Teenage Girls, an article which observes the link between cats and girlhood through the lens of the critically acclaimed 2018 film Madeline’s Madeline.

She writes:

…‘cat’ comes from ‘cattere’ – to see, to observe. Like Sharna Osborne’s cat that watched over the girl-models at Miu Miu, we associate cats with what they see as much as what they do. They seem to contemplate us, to know something we don’t – maybe that’s why Ancient Egyptians held them aloft as all-knowing deities.

Cats, then, more than stand-ins for “crazy” feel more like metaphors for interiority. I wrote briefly about Marie Antoinette in my last post and discovered this fun fact: legend has it that all Maine Coons are descended from six cats that Marie Antoinette owned and managed to escape to America on a boat during the French Revolution. Sofia Coppola, who directed the film Marie Antoinette, is known for her depictions of girlhood, and specifically, what she has done to strike a nerve is her attention to detail and to the interior lives of those who typically weren’t shown to have them.

It seems silly now, given everything that I know about cats, that I didn’t always like them. I wasn’t always a cat lady, both in the literal sense of being a lady who has and loves cats and in the archetypal sense of being a unmarried (technically divorced, as forms apparently need to know) childless/free woman of a certain age, who is also introverted and has no limit other than condo strata rules of the number of cats I could have.

The trope of the cat lady and its various incarnations across cultures, have been pounded into me since I was a little girl. But in the grand scheme of my life, cats are new to me. I went from cat-neutral to cat-lover.

So today, when I think about the malleability of human beings, I always think about cats. I think about how often we make declarations about who we are before we know, and about how often we let others tell us, how whether we like it or not, whether we even believe it or not, we let their opinions shape us, their validation and approval define us.

What is it about cats that have so strongly attached themselves to the idea of an independent woman? Sure, there’s the whole association with witches thing, but beyond that, once you’ve had a cat, as I’ve discovered, you start to get it.

Cats have the label of “pet” but they pretty much domesticated themselves for their benefit, the only animal to do so. They didn’t change anything about themselves to live with humans. They don’t think or behave as if you own them and will pretty much just do whatever they want. Which I get it, sounds like a nightmare for some people. They also do this funny thing called “cat-culating”, in which you can literally see the gears in their brains moving as they judge their next move and often succeed with Simone Biles-like precision.

Cat-culating, of course, comes from calculating. We’ve heard this word before, often applied to women who think and act strategically, i.e. with thought and intent. We most often hear it as derogatory because it goes against our picture of the ideal woman or girl, someone who is compliant, nice, Cool. (Amy, as we know, is the ultimate calculating woman to its murderous extremes, hiding behind a visage of Cool Girl. Also, I rewatched Gone Girl and realized I’d somehow completely missed the presence of a cat the first time.) We hear it so much, both in public discourse and in our own inner monologues, when it comes to powerful, ambitious women and women who show a trajectory or inclination (or let’s be honest, a tiny whisper) towards power or ambition, even if it’s towards the power and ambition to be oneself.

It doesn’t surprise me at all that the woman the whole world is watching right now, Presidential nominee Kamala Harris, is at the centre of a soundbite around childless cat ladies. Or that Taylor Swift is dragged into the conversation as one of the world’s most powerful people. It’s the lowest common denominator insult hardly any woman is immune to.

Our primary value as a society for women is childbearing or youth. Neither? You’re a cat lady. Being a cat lady associates the independence many of us desire and work so hard for with undesirability. When aging already provides us all the physical signs of loss, tropes like this amplify the emotional loss of the short blip in time women are allowed to be independent people. It happened to me. I only felt like I had recently started to enjoy my adulthood before I felt the pressure, like age had finally settled in and I was meant to take my place. My timeline to decide very important life decisions felt, similarly, like a blip. And then I was over the hill. Youth is relative, sure, but it’s always the relative prize.

I woke up a couple mornings ago to Ask Polly’s advice to a young letter-writer, newly graduated, who wanted to know: “Why Did No One Tell Me That Life Was So Limited?” I think a lot of people feel this way, not just women. But I think that this feeling can come suddenly and overwhelmingly for women especially, and for many, regardless of whether or not you’re a mother, there is grief of a life lost somewhere. I’m at the age where everyone I know has now made their choice, and whatever that is, the road is clearly diverging, identities and futures seemingly locked in.

“Cat lady” is like cowboy but not really like it at all. Call someone a cowboy and they’re probably loving it to the same degree as flying to space (because remember, cowboys and spacemen are two sides of the same frontier). Call them a cat lady and yes, cats are great and cute and almighty even, but there’s a feeling of being further reduced to the sidelines when women have already been sidelined throughout most of history. Invalidation is the punishment for choosing to take the road less taken.

Add “crazy” and there’s no better than example than Eleanor Abernathy from The Simpsons, THE “Crazy Cat Lady”, the very first cat lady my cultural consciousness was exposed to. Eleanor once had dreams of being both a doctor and lawyer, having attended both Harvard and Yale Universities. In the show, she’s portrayed as an elderly woman but here’s the kicker: she’s only 40 years old.

Susan Sontag writes in On Women:

Far more extensive than the hard sense of loss suffered during menopause (which, with increased longevity, tends to arrive later and later) is the depression about aging, which may not be set off by any real event in a woman's life, but is a recurrent state of "possession" of her imagination, ordained by society-that is, ordained by the way this society limits how women feel free to imagine themselves.

…almost all women endure some version of this suffering: a recurrent seizure of the imagination that usually begins quite young, in which they project themselves into a calculation of loss.

It only helped when I stopped seeing what I was losing, and instead what I could gain.

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely help-ful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier-and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are caPablo, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived.

And:

Any serious program for liberating women must start from the premise that liberation is not just about equality (the "liberal" idea). It is about power.

These excerpts were written in the early 1970s. We’re fifty years out and still trying because clearly, equality in the eyes of the law is not enough when we still give others the power to decide and shape our lives. Unlike cats, we only have one.

So let’s call it what it is: cat lady summer. The summer that (s)purred defiance, love, wonder, hijinks, chaos, and energy. Where we demand, not just comply. Where we dance, not just strive. It’s okay to be a bit messy, dumb puns and hapless schedules, changed minds and unanswered questions—and all of you, even if you can’t have all of it.