Cat & Dog Dichotomy: Is it gendered?

Sasha + Izzy. August 26, 2014.

This photo was taken in my kitchen back home in the Bay Area (East Palo Alto), it reminds me of how cats and dogs are always made to seem as if they are against each other. My dog Sasha is in the spotlight of the photo, meanwhile Izzy is in the background kind of blending in with the door. 

                  

             Most of us have interacted or been around cats and/or dogs, therefore I find an importance in discussing a topic of interest: the cat and dog dichotomy. I have been asked whether I am more of a dog or cat person at least 10 times, ever since I could remember and maybe you also remember this incident happening to you. I love both equally so I can’t ever choose one over the other in these incidents. However, I recently came across a journal by the sociologist, Lisa Wade, who unraveled the idea about how this dichotomy has been gendered. I believe she is pointing to a valid socially constructed dichotomy that has been embedded into our society that now some cannot convey it. She states, “And don’t we think men with cats are a little femmy or, at minimum, sweeter than most…And don’t we imagine that chicks with dogs are a little less girly than most, a little more rough and tumble? The cat person/dog person dichotomy is gendered.” She then explains the idea about having too many cats is thought of as crazy, yet having one dog or a lot of dogs has been normalized to seem cool. Usually when we think of someone having too many cats, we think of a crazy cat lady and how someone with a dog or a lot of dogs are much more outgoing than the crazy cat lady would. There has been a socially constructed gender dichotomy between dog or canine people and cat or feline people, where feminine identified people are paired with felines and masculine identified people with canines. This is important when it comes to speaking about dogs versus cats because dogs are given a sense of hierarchal power because of the coolness they get entailed with, meanwhile cats are used to get the millions of views on YouTube for simply doing what cats do. One example of this is the cartoon show Cat Dog, where the cat is always the most intelligent and the dog does something silly or idiotic. What are your thoughts?