DISPATCHES

Like the vagina, which is nicknamed for her, the cat is soft and accommodating, but she also has teeth. Her requests may become decrees and, when unsatisfied, rebukes or worse. "Cats like . . . reliable service and can be very demanding if standards are allowed to slip," commented the cat-book writer Howard Loxton.

    

The cat invites or ignores, rewards or punishes at her pleasure, and for her pleasure alone. "Of all God's creatures," wrote Mark Twain, "there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash." Indeed, the cat not only resists the lash, she wields it. The nine braided leather tails that torture the flesh are a cat's — not, for a reason, a monkey's or a dog's. The cat, in short, is a dominatrix, and the cat lover her slave. No one who loves dogs, those starvelings for discipline and approval, can ever truly love a cat. Dog lovers are tops, cat lovers bottoms.

    

Unaccountably, the cat barely appears in the canon of Western sexual obsessions. Krafft-Ebing's classic catalog of perversions, Psychopathia Sexualis, mentions cats only in passing, under "beast-fetichism." The beast fetishist, though, is more into the feel than the feelings of sex; he is moved not by love or nostalgia, power or humiliation, but by "a peculiar idiosyncracy of the tactile Hooksexups which . . . produces . . . lustful emotions" when he touches fur.

    

Freud was also interested less in the cat qua cat, and more in the beast as symbol. For him, the cat, like the rat, wolf or snake, was only a representation of human desire for (or terror of) another human, playing on the stage of dreams, wearing a whiskered or scaley mask. Kinsey the pragmatist cited convenience above all when explaining why rural boys turned to livestock for their sexual "outlets" and city boys to "the household pets." But Kinsey named horses, sheep, dogs. Never cats.

    

If sexual science has not officially recognized the cat as a fetish object, the publishing industry surely has. As an E-Z-reading bestseller, the cat book is a perennial, only fleetingly outflanked by volumes on Monica or menopausal women, anorexics or angels. Cat books work on the felinophile as the Sears catalog

does on the pedophile: kitty porn inflames the cat lover's most unappeasable fantasy, which is to please — and by pleasing, to possess — the kitty. Cat Massage: A Whiskers-to-Tail Guide to Your Cat's Ultimate Petting Experience trades shamelessly on the impossible desire for more erotic intimacy in the owner-pet relationship. Other titles read like the personals ads in Bondage Times. Have you ever heard so abject a string of words as 250 Things You Can Do to Make Your Cat Adore You? So hopeless a come-on as 25 Ways to Cook a Mouse for the Gourmet Cat? The true cat-loving chef knows deep in her gut that, likely as not, Herself will scarf down the delicacy without once raising her head from the dish, turn prettily, smile haughtily and bite the hand that fed her.

    

"We get something from them, but what?" asked the writer Martha Roth, mother of an "extremely unresponsive and selfish" gray cat named Nathan. "Take, take, take." Martha, like many cat keepers, is a writer, and thus inured to slights. Henry Morgan, the seventeenth-century Welsh bucaneer, remarked, "People with insufficient personalities are fond of cats. They adore being ignored."

    

We give the furry, fickle female part with fish on its breath the name pussy: the cat is usually associated with female sexuality. In one of the rare psychological case histories of cat obsession, Jung tells of a male patient who fell so hard for an Egyptian cat sculpture that he forked over 40,000 francs for it and then could not rest if it was near him. So he locked the enchantress in a box in the attic, only to long to climb up and liberate it. It was not until the man understood that he did not crave the cat itself, but rather this
representation of the female principle, and a particular beloved woman, that the sculpture lost its power and the sufferer regained his peace of mind.

    

As much as a cat resembles a supercilious woman, however, the pattern of seduction and rejection that makes her so irresistible is equally descriptive of the behavior of a come-on-strong, commitment-phobic — that is, maddeningly attractive — man: the tomcat. This explains the predominance among cat fanciers of gay men and straight women. Do straight women and gay men tend toward masochism? I stretch a point, surely. Still, I am not the first to notice a correlation between certain sexes and sexualities and the love of the cat. The gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz, who has himself served a succession of male tabbies named after prominent nineteenth-century inverts, referred
me to a 1920 article in The Alienist and Neurologist by a young
doctor named W. C. Rivers, who hypothesized that cat-love, homosexuality and effeminacy are related. Rivers began his researches when he noticed that one obviously inverted patient "kept a large cat of whom he seemed very fond," and that many of the man's friends entertained similar tastes in humans and animals. He then reviewed the list of eminent inverts in Magnus Hirschfeld's magnum opus on homosexuality (which omitted this symptom!), and discovered that four of thirty-one owned cats. Similarly,

he found hints of homosexuality in a number of "eminent cat-loving men." From this rather paltry evidence, Rivers reached his conclusion, adding, "If fondness for cats be entitled to a place among male homosexual traits, the reasons will be that it is a woman's taste."

    

In this age of protean genders and sexual proclivities, it would be dangerous to fix the trans-species relationship into any category of erotic taste. Surely there are feline-human liaisons wherein the partners are "switchable" — the human "master" assumes actual mastery from time to time, and the cat bestows the favor of her submission. When I was in college, I knew a hefty white short-hair named Poody-Oody who permitted Charles, her human, to insert the round end of a Bic pen into her most private part. In my own home, in the early morning hours, Julius, a feline of what I call the domestic orange jumbo breed, offers up his Creamsicle belly for stroking and snuggling. He even lets me bury my face in it.

    

Yet sadomasochism is the donning of roles, and the layers of artifice are multiple; all players collaborate in pretending to trick and be tricked by the other players. So the top sucks the bottom, and that gives the bottom physical pleasure, even an orgasm, but both players understand they are satisfying, first and foremost, the top's desire to control, to give, to do something with his or her mouth. The official story between Charles and Poody-Oody was that the Bic operation was performed to relieve Charles of his cat's infernal yowling while in heat. But the true arrangement was that the cat took the Bic until she'd had her fill, and not one instant longer. When that moment arrived, the whining supplicant would pull herself off the invader and, brisk as a call girl, take her leave.

    

My own Jules does not go long without reasserting his dominance. Recovering from the limp, splayed beatitude of Christ in a pieta, he jumps from my lap and trots to the bathroom. While he arrays himself on the mat, I take my place, kneeling beside him. A session of what we call "Bities" ensues.

    

I will not divulge the exact nature of this ritual. I will say only that my own teeth are not involved. I cannot entice the cat to do it if he is not in the mood.

    

And I live for the privilege of surrender.

For more Judith Levine, read:
Kitty Porn
Crack Addiction
Randy Rubes and Lusty Lawyers

©1999
Judith Levine and hooksexup.com

The cat is a tease. The Cheshire Cat appears, smiles tantalizingly, and, losing interest, evaporates. She is a devil. The witch's cat purrs for a stroke at the hearth, then black-magically engineers her victim's tumble into the flames.