We gave the cat a flea bath yesterday. Or rather, he did. He has such a knack for it that I let him. Okay fine, I made him do it. Besides, he adores her… even though she constantly gets in his way and trips him up, bringing him crashing down on the cold, hard floor every now and then, just inches away from death. With her black hair and clumsiness, she reminds him too much of me.

So the joke is that he’s a sucker for black-haired pussy, and black-haired pussy will be his downfall.

You can take that to mean the cat or myself, if you like, with all the connotations of potential evil from the feminine side. You certainly wouldn’t be the first to take that view. I had a professor whose entire course studied the relationship and similarities between woman and animal, describing the “fantasies of feminine evil” that were regularly entertained in the late nineteenth century. I kid you not.

The professor wrote this book, which features a lot of classic art where nude women lounge around with animals. It seems the 19th century male saw females as evil distractions in the path of evolution. Gold-digging vampires we were, demanding man’s essence for ourselves when man needed it to grow, succeed, evolve. We were idols of perversity, dragging men down from their ladders to the sky. To surrender to us would be to surrender to Satan, hence all the comparisons to animals; we were primitive, earthy, and dirty.

In modern-day language? We were ball-breaking bitches who really, really loved sex, and sex for pleasure in those days was A VERY BAD THING. The black-haired pussy joke he, the cat and I share would not have been well-received because sensitive men back then were merely castrated pussies. Mama’s boys.

It’s a good thing we no longer think in that way these days, or I would have had to give the cat a bath myself, and washing my own pussy is never as much fun as having someone else do it for me.

I’m sure all you cat owners out there know what I mean.

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