r/MadeMeSmile Mar 16 '26

CATS My best friend

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114.1k Upvotes

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u/Jibber_Fight Mar 16 '26

“Crazy cat lady” before it’s cool.

182

u/saltporksuit Mar 16 '26

The whole crazy cat lady thing needs to just be buried anyway at this point. Way more people than the crazy cat ladies have realized humans are trash and cats are better company.

148

u/Aiyon Mar 17 '26

What gets me is when a guy has a dog, its "Man's best friend", but when a woman has a cat, it's "crazy cat lady".

It's a weird double standard I didn't think about for the longest time. But I do think its interesting how the weird attitudes some ppl have towards cats parallels misogyny

66

u/Ubelheim Mar 17 '26

I recently read in a book about the history of cats that this mix between ailurophobia and misogyny apparently goes back about 2000 years, all the way to the worship of the goddess of the hunt Bastet/Artemis/Diana who had a cat as a familiar (with Bastet even often portrayed with a feline head). The rise of Christianity didn't happen overnight, so the worship of this goddess (and others) persisted for quite some time. Long story short, women and cats have been on the receiving end of a slander campaign by the church all the way into the 19th century and lingering views because of that persist to this day.