PUSSY

daaa be da-da da da da-da DA da da da da da da-da

Robert Smith, The Lovecats (1983)

What’s New Pussycat?

Where's the cat? The Toilet, by Francis Boucher (1742) (Detail)

It should take no great mind to figure out that there is a relationship between pussy and puss, right? The second is, as with so many -y words, a diminutive form of the first.

Etymologically, puss comes from a family of Germanic words, including the Dutch ‘poes’ (= ‘cat’, or ‘a large soft mass’), and this is one of those words that has had a telling journey from its initial meaning to its modern significance. In simple form, of course, it just means ‘cat’, with a tendency towards the proper name, as in Puss In Boots. The dictionary refines this to a ‘call-name’ or ‘nursery term’ for a cat, perhaps originating in the sort of ‘tsk tsk tsk’ noises even the most Serious People inevitably make when seduced by the classic paws, ears and whiskers combo (‘Here puss puss!’).

Around the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, pussy hit its most common modern usage as ‘the female genitals’ (‘the vulva or vagina’, specifically), with an attendant list of seductive compounds and phrases: eat pussy, pussy posse, pussy patrol, pussylicker… &c. For the moment, though, eyes on the road: pussy’s earliest non-feline meaning was ‘a girl or woman exhibiting characteristics associated with a cat, especially sweetness or amiability’ (1580s), where it could also be used as a term of endearment (pussycat. Oh, Mr Jones, really…).

This is, natch, a colloquial usage, as is its subsidiary meaning under this banner, ‘a sweet or effeminate man’. Only later does this degenerate into the unarguably opprobrious, as ‘a weakling, a coward, a sissy’, in which sense citations tend to link it to the idea of ‘a domesticated man’, akin to a ‘house-cat’ (of which more presently). Of course, suggestions about sexuality are never far away from such mockery, and a pussy could, from its earliest beginnings, refer also to ‘a male homosexual’ (where it sits in parallel to pussy‘s final meaning as ‘the anus or mouth of a man as an object of sexual penetration’, connecting it to ‘weakling’ through the concomitant feminisation such penetration implies).

Perfect As Cats

Where's the cat in Jan Steer's The Morning Toilet (1663)? (Detail)

But to really answer the question of when and why cats became synonymous with all this, we must, as usual, ask another question: when and why did cats enter our everyday lives in the first place? It happened late: like so many modern phenomena, cats-as-companions were an eighteenth-century innovation. They had been knocking around before, of course, but primarily as pest control; those showing undue affection for their felines were considered, at best, as a bit eccentric, and, at worst, in league with Satan, and the pagan forces of Nature. Dogs had had a bit more success elbowing their way into domesticity, due to their usefulness in hunting and their essential biddability, but even for them, the eighteenth century was a golden time.

See, it’s easy to forget the fear and awe this Nature lark could inspire in the centuries before efficient systems to keep it under ‘control’, and as the European traveller elbowed his way into Asian and American forests at the dawn of the Enlightenment, he must have felt he was asserting mastery over the very earth (along with the pesky native peoples already living there, of course). With confidence comes bravado, and this increasing satisfaction with Man’s superiority over the elements quickly sparked a fashion for adopting domestic creatures. And so it was that throughout the eighteenth century, cats were welcomed into the home partially as symbols of conquest (where they were painted, along with those Definite Symbols of Conquest, monkeys, parrots and exotically dressed African slave boys).

Inevitably, anything to do with the domestic sphere comes under the auspices of the woman, and the pet-keeping craze was almost universally spoken of as a female-driven trend (although cats were also the favoured companions of weirdo intellectual types like Samuel Johnson, Christopher Smart and Horace Walpole): while the men were out brokering deals down the coffee-house, their wives lounged around in their hoop skirts with an army of diverting creatures to keep them from complete mind-numbing boredom. Of course, fail to go down the coffee-house as a Man, and you risk mockery as a ‘pussy’ in the literal sense of ‘the creature that stays at home with the woman’, viz., a house husband.

Kitten As A Cat

Where's the cat? Where's the cat? 'Le Lever de Fanchon', c18th.

So we have here a consortium of pets, creatures the woman owns, something special to her, a possession and constant companion – and it is easy to see the short step from the woman’s private domestic world to pussy in its Naughty Connotation (spot the cat! spot the cat! passim). So the coincident lexical trend that ended in pussy as genitals must have begun with something along the lines of the now-common association of pet and owner – not a surprising association, since pussy‘s cousin, moggy originally meant just plain old ‘woman or girl’, and didn’t acquire its feline associations until the early twentieth century.

And these associations were standard: we only have to look at the legion eighteenth-century portrait variants on the theme of a girl holding a kitten to see a perceived resemblance extending even to the facial: something about the cat made it a perfect image of womanhood. Its furriness could hardly have been irrelevant (nudge nudge), but the cat’s synonymity with the female must have had a lot to do with felines’ status as a convenient symbol of beauty and cruelty, known to play with their prey before killing it. Thus, little girls looking at Joshua Reynolds’ contribution to the girl/kitten portrait were instructed by an accompanying Moral Poem to look at ‘this thy furry care’ and see ‘an emblem of thyself’, since, once grown, both girl and kitten will find delight in torturing, respectively, ‘some trembling MOUSE’ and ‘some sighing SWAIN’.

We’re gift-wrapped kitty-cats…

The sexual symbolism a cat could suggest also found expression in a series of male-dominated complaints about something slightly more insidious: the familiarities their would-be lovers allowed their pets – from monkeys sharing their mistress’ beds upwards. And, unsurprisingly, there was a particularly misogynistic strain of such writing aimed at the ‘old maid’, who had replaced the never-appeared fiancé and family with a veritable menagerie of domestic animals (an idea that endures to this day, for who else is the ‘crazy cat lady’?), with an inevitable imputation in many cases that there was some kind of sexual element to the displacement, however repressed it might be.

It is perhaps unsurprising, then, to find that pussy eventually resolves itself into a final definition as ‘a woman, or women collectively, regarded as a source of sexual intercourse’ (thus pussy patrol), and, in specifically prison-based slang, as ‘a man or boy regarded in this way’ (cf. bitch). Curious that feline and canine should find themselves so aligned…

NEXT WEEK: Q is for Queen

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