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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   36906 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025

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Occams razor imo: Cats are higher pitched and smaller than almost all dog breeds, and the smaller toy breeds of dog are feminine coded.

Some of this may have to do with experience with prior generations of dogs and cats that were much more rarely neutered if male or spayed if female. Male dogs are notorious for humping furniture, people's legs, attempting to mate with many things that aren't really hump-able. Historical phrases have left me with notions of what a bitch-in-heat is like, with remarkable aggression (especially to other female dogs) but googling they can also be very clingy.

In German, "der Hund" is masculine while "die Katze" is feminine, in French "chien" is masculine while "chat" is (Edit: correction thanks to @pigeonburger ) either masculine but can be used for both ("chatte" for a female cat). In Old English apparently a dog is a "hund" (plural hundas), while "catt" is used for male cats and "catte" is used for female cats.

Someone smarter than me could expound on the terms "bitch"(animal, pejorative(maybe pejoratives, since it seems to mean "very obnoxious" for women exclusively, but can also mean "dishonorable/cowardly" for men) and "pussy"(animal, vulgar term for anatomy, pejorative). Someone probably has, and it's probably buried in some Sociology or Women's/Gender Studies journal.

In German, "der Hund" is masculine while "die Katze" is feminine, in French "chien" is masculine while "chat" is...

Whenever you are tempted to interpret grammatical gender as meaningful remember that in spanish pussy (coño) is male and cock (polla) is female.

in spanish pussy (coño) is male and cock (polla) is female.

On the other hand, penis is male while vagina female.

Note that in both french "chatte" and german "Muschi", a word for cat is used to refer to female genitalia, like "pussy". Pussy and muschi obviously have the same root, but that still leaves at least two language inventors who looked at a cat and were erotically inspired by its femininity.

I think they were looking at something else and erotically inspired by its looking like cat fur.

French "chien" is masculine while "chat" is either.

That would be news to me, a native French speaker. Chat is a masculine word (and is used to denote a specifically male cat, or a cat of a non-specified gender).

Good to know, will markout in edit.

And, to note, the 'proper' term for a male dog is... dog. The term 'dog fox' or 'dog coyote' refers to a male, while a female is a 'vixen' or 'coyote bitch'.

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