What Cat People Can Teach Us
In the cats-versus-dogs debate, pop culture tends to skew in one direction. Many animated movies portray cats as manipulative and nefarious, and dogs as the (less canny) embodiments of loyalty and love. Cats also have a long association with the witchy and supernatural, underscoring their folkloric legacy as otherworldly beings. While some recent works have broadened depictions of felines, a new series from Netflix does the same for the humans who love them.
Released this month, the delightful six-part documentary Cat People introduces us to individuals in different parts of the world who have built a life around cats; more important, the show pulls back the layers of judgment and cliché that these people contend with. The six subjects come from an array of backgrounds and cultures, but what they all share—apart from their love of cats—is the experience of being perceived as oddballs by other people. What the cats make of them, we can only guess.
The show both explodes the narrow definition of a “cat person” and reclaims the label. The docuseries is a defense of the sort of person who should need no defending and yet often does, because of misguided assumptions about gender, race, and even labor and art. In the popular imagination, a cat person is usually a woman who lives alone and is devoted to animals that many observers dismiss as aloof or unfeeling. Sometimes known as the “crazy cat lady,” she’s pathologized and pitied. The presumption is that her feelings are silly because they could never be returned, that she dotes on her pets to the exclusion of caring for human children.
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/07/netflix-cat-people/619514/
= new reply since forum marked as read
for many years I can tell you with certainty that there is a certain number of cats one generally has beyond the norm for which the label ‘cat person’ (have to say it was usually cat lady) applies.
It was a whole ‘nother universe. To tell you stories would be too difficult and bizarre. Still I was quite fond of them for the most part.
Thanks. I bookmarked the article. 
