I don’t mean to turn this into a feline forum (though there is certainly enough material to do so), but I just adopted a new cat a couple of weeks ago, a female adult that I have named Bella. I’m a modern guy, and a feminist, but I have never in my life had a female pet before, and I didn’t realize that it takes some adjustments:
* I feel strange changing clothes in front of her. Asking her to leave (with a polite, ‘Could you please excuse me, dear?’) doesn’t work very well. I find myself wanting to leave the room to change. When she watches, I can almost hear her thinking, “Oh, yeah – that’s attractive.”
* My ‘pet names’ require a total retooling. Although ‘cutie’ is still appropriate, ‘handsome’ has lost its resonance, ‘big beast’ seems insulting, and I cannot quite bring myself to call my cat ‘beautiful’ – it seems a bit overdone, no? Maybe I will import ‘sweetheart’ into my repertoire, but I am really starting to fear my girlfriends noticing that I address them and my cat in the exact same terms. Moreover, I think Bella has been thinking the same thing, and it is an even more offensive thought to her.
* The bathroom is off-limits – period.
* For some reason, even when my cats aren’t fat, I call them fat, and doing that with a female may be risky, especially since Bella (aka Bella Reese) is, in fact, a whole lot of woman. I almost feel like she looks at me funny when I call her ‘chunky’ or ‘big mama.’ As if she is saying, “Excuse me, motherfucker?”
* When my male cats whined for whatever reason, I would ignore them and certainly never reinforce their whining by giving them what they were looking for. However, when Bella whines, I feel compelled to be an understanding man, hear her out, and show respect for her feelings and wishes, even though I’m well aware of the fact that she, just like my previous male cats, is pretty much saying, “Food, dickhead,” or “Pet me, hairless ape.”
* When I brush her, I feel like I have to be more careful and get things just right. She's sitting there and saying, "Look, big boy, I'm not one of these disheveled bitches you're always hanging around with." When I meekly say, "I'll try harder. I'm sorry," she replies, "I'm sorry too."
