The XX Factor: What women really think.

The Cat Restaurant Next Door That Sabotaged My Relationships With Pets

Today at the deli while waiting for my egg-and-cheese I found myself speaking in affectionate tones to the obese white cat that resides by the cleaning products. It was a strange moment, because for the first thirty years of my life I had a sort of borderline autism (Catberger syndrome?) regarding my relationship with pets. I've lived with many, but never, I am not proud to report, really loved them, even during the three years I didn't eat meat (for environmental reasons, but mostly because of a boyfriend.) Reading today's Washington Post story on the Chinese protests over the cat meat smuggling trade it finally dawned on me why that was: 

"Cats have a strong flavor. Dogs taste much better, but if you really want cat meat, I can have it delivered by tomorrow," said the butcher, who gave only her surname, Huang.

It was just this attitude that outraged about 40 cat lovers who unfurled banners in a tearful protest outside the Guangdong government office in Beijing. Many were retirees who care for stray felines they said were being rounded up by dealers.

 It is not uncommon for people (like myself) who once lived in China to read news stories about modern-day China that describes a nation that strikes them as thoroughly unrecognizable, but still: when I lived in Guangzhou as a kid in the early nineties I lived next door to a cat restaurant. We knew it was a cat restaurant because the window was adorned with a large cartoon of a cat in a frying pan. I found this kind of gross at first, but having never had pets (allergies) the idea of eating cats did not bother me on a level much more visceral than the idea of eating bird vomit or tripe, especially once I started learning about the innumerable tragedies (see, for instance, here)  that had befallen the Chinese people. Well…

The protest was the latest clash between age-old traditions and the new sensibilities made possible by China's growing affluence. Pet ownership was once rare because the Communist Party condemned it as bourgeois and most people simply couldn't afford a cat or dog.

Well what do you know? I guess the Chinese Communist Party succeeded in indoctrinating at least one expatriate kid with the notion that pets were for the bourgeois. (Admittedly at ten I was, myself, a little bourgeois.) Because it still mystifies me a little to know that the cat protest story will drive a few hundred times more internet traffic than, say, Tuesday's story about the much larger (and um, arguably more important?) protest movement in China targeted at getting the government to rein in exploitative employers and crippling inflation.

Although, to be sure, I suppose their concerns are pretty bourgeois as well:

Drivers shared plans for the strike by text message and word of mouth. Taxi driver Liu Mingsheng said the purpose of the strike "spoke to my heart."

"With my salary, I can have an ordinary life. I can buy books, toys and have medical treatment when I need it. But I can no longer have money to pay the bills and to go to dinner and drinks with friends," said Liu, 38, who used to work as a chauffeur for a state-owned company.

 Break my bourgeois heart! You know how I feel about drinking with friends. And come to think of it, the last time I got really drunk I ended the night practically spooning a friend's dog. There's a bestseller in there somewhere.

Do Women Drink To Replace What Was Lost When We Got The Pill?

Jennifer,

I don't think my reaction to 'Gender Bender' was so different from yours. Ultimately I just found it unsatisfying. Because you're right: it's a problem both genders share. So why? What does it signify? And what can be done?

About 10 years ago I took a class with the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, who was in the process of publishing a book called The Great Disruption about the breakdown in social capital or "trust" in the Western World that resulted from the social upheaval of the sixties and seventies. "Trust" -- the mystical ingredient that prompts people to shovel their driveways and pick up litter and correct inaccurate Wikipedia entries, join bowling leagues and not cheat on their taxes -- is also, in Fukuyama's view, what made Toyota the undisputed leader of the auto sector and much of East Asia such a manufacturing powerhouse. And I would argue that "trust" is largely what many members of my generation --"Kate" the bitchy I-banker who drinks to  seem more "fun" around her male colleagues included -- is trying to replace when we get bombed.

And that is where feminism becomes relevant. Fukuyama famously blamed the Pill, among other innovations, for destroying social capital in the process of emancipating women from the confines of monogamous, procreative relationships. (You might call it "procreative destruction"!) In hindsight Fukuyama's singling out of the Pill seems somewhat packaged to appeal to his then-neoconservative "base," because I do remember thinking it was secretly subversive. Because the political right had long since replaced America's belief in "trust" with a crippling fear of the "moral hazard" that might accompany it. Right now we mostly equate moral hazard, which describes the shift in behavior that accompanies the removal of risk from a certain activity, with the reckless financial institutions in which the Fed is now "injecting" funds. Those financial institutions now seem equally bent on convincing us that renegotiating mortgages for people facing foreclosure would create a similar "moral hazard" just as welfare creates the moral hazard that people will be lazy, the Pill perpetuated the moral "hazard" that women who took advantage of it would have more sex earlier and fewer children later in life and being thrust from suburban automobile-reliant upringings into a city with a bar downstairs that's open till '4 might disincentivize abstemiousness.

And yes, all that has happened. But life without "social capital" is no life, and we must take it as part of a virtuous overall phenomenon that our generation devised a few ways to replace it during those years during which we put off having kids. We repopulated cities, we found "virtual" friends through blogs and grassroots political movements. Where real estate was too costly -- and it has generally been so for my peers in the ever-downsizing industries -- we figured out how to meet regularly with one another in public spaces. And it so happened that bars were a natural, not generally being managed by corporations bent solely on increasing turnover times or transaction size. They're open late. They're everywhere. And many of them -- and many of their regulars -- have been around for generations, connecting us with our pasts and a less complicated period in history in a way that is comforting.

And sure, drinking five nights a week is a less-than-ideal way to achieve all this. But it can't be denied that to patronize a bar regularly, tip forty percent or whatever you can afford, catch up with a regular group of friends, spend nine dollars at the jukebox playing songs you just heard on your iPod because they sound better in the presence of other people and escort home anyone who overindulges all in the confidence that the phone you forgot will be there in the morning -- all that generates and sustains trust. Hazards also: every densely-taverned town invariably houses an equally-fertile network of AA meeting places, halfway houses, and rehab centers, staffed in large part on a trust basis by people who invariably spent a big chunk of their lives being highly un-trustworthy. Maybe a larger percentage of my generation will wind up patronizing the latter category of venues in our imperfect quest to fulfill this basic human need, but in the meantime behind the slips and slurs and self-mockery exists an earnest effort to prevent that from happening to the people we care about. If anything, Alex Morris's story is merely evidence of that.

Alcoholics Synonymous

Moe,

We came away from that piece yesterday with entirely different thoughts. You reacted to the condemnatory tone and the assertion that hard-drinking women are drinking to be like men (which I thought was a shaky point, too). I reacted to the fact that, from what Morris said, these self-proclaimed feminists seem to be drinking their way to self-fulfillment.

Today, I have a somewhat different reaction. I don't think it's about gender, feminism, or equality. More than ever, both women and men are looking for a way to tune out the drone of their daily lives and just have a little fun—looking for a place where they feel free and soothed and courageous and everything else Morris said. 

But self-fulfillment doesn't come from a bottle. When the buzz wears off, life and all of its pressures are still there, waiting. Another drink or two or 20 won't ever erase that fact. (Not to mention that, as you might have heard once or twice, heavy drinking destroys your liver and kidneys and lends you all the professionalism of a college frat boy.) The only "equality" here is that, male and female, we've got the same problem, and we need to find another way to deal.