We need to talk about catgirls
Really.
When I was a teenager, I had a deep, overriding thing for girls that were also cats. You might assume, if you’ve been with me for a while, that it had something to do with my aforementioned near-lifelong devotion to Catwoman, but it was actually weirder than that: my boyfriend at the time meowed off-handedly on the phone, a high-pitched, girly-and-also-convincingly-feline sound that…well, it wasn’t meant to be seductive but it was, at least to me. Around that same time, I started wearing a glittering pair of black ceramic cat ears (painted with pink on the inside!) every single day. I don’t remember my parents questioning this life decision. New Orleans = costume as transformation and also constume as everyday affair.
My first year of college, a close artist friend drew me a mesmerizing picture of a glamorous catgirl for my birthday; I wish I still had it. Around that same time, my future roommate and I rented a film that I am in no way recommending. I forgot everything about it deliberately as I watched it, because despite the talents in its cast, it is dramatically terrible. I don’t even want to give you the title. Even the title is that bad. But what made the experience worth it, and what I never, ever forgot, was Rose McGowan as:
For two decades, I resigned this thing I had to the giggle-worthy follies of youth and moved on. Right? We move on? Our drives change, or something? It seemed like what happened. Until the Met Gala hit my Twitter feed and fucking Doja Cat whose music I do not even connect to (strikes me from what I hear as hypersexual-yet-void-of-sensuality-which-I-am-passionately-against) had to go and…and…and…
So, plus sa change as I sit here in the full-body burn of realization that none of this ever went away. I thought I had already learned the lesson that when I, personally, declare to all and sundry that I’ve moved on from or grown out of a thing, what I’m really saying is that that thing is no longer accessible to me or cannot exist in this world of ours. But everything exists, even catgirls, clearly. She’s missing whiskers and that’s a damn shame but she makes up for it with that nose.
I grew up with dogs, by the way. I’m not even a cat person. None of this makes any sense, but very few of my inclinations do. My plan to justify this Hot and Disabled installment was to talk about the unconventional and transcendent beauty and sexiness of creatures who are indisputably woman and also indisputably cat, and then make some very literary connection between that specific form of hotness and disability. Seems easy enough! But it falters, for two reasons:
1.) Once you start explicitly concieving of the disabled body as beautiful, you start to attract undesirables, like dudes who have fetishes for disability or a former Actual Friend of mine who told me that a lot of men will be attracted to my crutches because they make me look submissive. (I…I was friends with this person for many, many years. Anyway! Don’t fall into the trap of believing that because somebody was in your life early on they should stay there on this strength alone! It is circumstance, not itself strength!)
2.) If I try to intellectualize my deep-seated thing for catgirls, all of you will be like, “uhhh clearly you’re just horny and trying to be all writerly about it.” Which would definitely be the case. And so I won’t bother pretending there’s some philisophical anything behind all this. As Emily Dickenson said, “The heart wants what it wants — or else it does not care.”
I care a little bit, I’m not entirely unembarrassed. But I am enough so not to keep all this a secret anymore. Blame Doja Cat. And here I thought I was long past the age that Doja Cat could have an impact on me. The fountain of youth takes mysterious forms.