Treating Women and Cats as Interchangeable is Dehumanizing and Misogynistic

It doesn’t require a genius to understand that women are human beings, not cats. So why are we suddenly treating cats as a stand-in for women?

An animal is being given the role and platform of representing women instead of simply recognizing women as women. Why do women have to be reduced to a cat just to receive more recognition, coverage, sympathy, or protection, and even then, still not receive it fully? Why does it take comparing women to cats for people to begin acknowledging issues women have already been speaking about? Why can’t women simply be recognized and advocated for as women?

It’s baffling how cats are increasingly being treated with more respect, receiving more rights, hold more cultural significance, and receive more recognition and concern than the women whose experiences give this narrative its substance.

I swear, these cat nutters are so performative and disingenuous. They care more about cats than they do about actual women, even if it means reducing women to a symbolic comparison with an animal.

They’re more concerned with “cat slander” and people disliking cats, to the point of calling it “misogynistic,” than they are with the actual issues and misogyny women are facing.

Women are being used as a way for humanizing and elevating cats, while women’s experiences and struggles while women’s own experiences and struggles get used to make points about cats.

The challenges women face and women-centered spaces exist for women. Whatever has to do with cats is a completely separate matter. Yet those same concerns are being appropriated to promote cats, to the point that the focus shifts toward cats and their welfare, placing them before women.

This is also why we need to stop anthropomorphizing animals and applying human gender norms to them. Cats aren’t feminine and they don’t represent femininity.