Ask the Flytrap: Feeling Catty

Welcome to your new favorite advice column from your favorite feminist journalism collective! New editions are published every Wednesday. Read on for the drama, the tea, and the commiseration—and if you want to submit a question, scroll on down to the bottom of this post for more info.

Let's get into it:

Dear Ask The Flytrap,

I get annoyed when people who interact with my two cats call them by made up nicknames that aren’t the nicknames I make up for my cats. In some instances, the nicknames they use directly contradict aspects of the cats’ personalities, or names that my guests have heard me use. How can I counter or suppress my reactions when this happens? I don’t want these people to feel unwelcome in my home (my cats are indoor-only); I invited them to be here, and my cats are part of the experience of being in my home. I want to be a better host, but this one thing is proving to be a stumbling block.

— Crying Uncle

As a long-time cat guardian, I have to be tough, but fair, here: You just gotta suck it up. And as a person who really dislikes being disrespected and has Big Feelings about things being unfair, I know how infuriating this is, I'm sorry. I've had people assign all kinds of weird nicknames to my cats, misgender them, mangle their actual names, etc. and it is frustrating!

This is exactly how my cat Loki (RIP) came to be known as Big Tuna: He had tuna treats, he went gonzo for them, a catsitter thought it was cute. Did I refer to him as Big Tuna? No. Did anyone else? Also no. But for those catsitters, his name was just Big Tuna, and that was how it went. I appreciated that they bonded and cared with him enough to give him a nickname, I guess?

If you make a to-do out of it, people are going to start fixating on it and you can have a real Streisand Effect on your hands. Reasonable guests will go "ah, Crying Uncle really doesn't like it when I refer to Susie as Midsized Honda, I'm going to stop doing that." Less reasonable guests may stop doing it, but privately roll their eyes and be subtly jerky about it. Very unreasonable guests will think it's cute and funny to repeatedly call your cat Midsized Honda (I'd argue that those unreasonable guests are probably not actual friends and you might not want them in your house for other reasons because that's pretty disrespectful but YMMV).

For some reason, asserting boundaries around your pets sometimes makes people act ridiculous...and I try to keep in mind that people can be assholes about human names when people express their preferences too. Anyone with a nickname-able name has probably had the "can you please not" conversation many times, e.g. my friend Michael, whose name is Michael, not Mike or Mikey. Those of us who don't have nickname-able names have STILL had to ask people to stop calling us weird things that we didn't ask for.

If there is a nickname that you have a really hard line on and you are ready to die on this hill, I really encourage you to sit with that and make SURE you want to take up this battle. Like, racial slur? Absolutely not, what the fuck are you doing, get out of my house and never come back. Midsized Honda? Pretty fucking annoying, I know, but...Jim only comes over twice a year. In cases where you do need to say something about a nickname that's grating on you, it's "my cat's name is Susie, or you can call her Sou-Sou or Croissant Enjoyer (CE for short). I really don't like it when you call her Midsized Honda," and if they keep doing it, it's "as I said, my cat's name is Susie..." and consider asking a mutual friend to take them aside and let them know that this is really seriously not cute and funny for you and they should stop doing it.

The positive spin to put on this is this: In a sense, when someone has some goofy-ass name for my cat that only they use and I hate, I try to tell myself that they encounter a different part of my cat's whole vibe than I do, because cats are mysterious creatures with many facets. And I'd much rather have guests who engage with my cats and want to get to know them than guests who simply ignore them ("guests" who are not nice to my cats are not welcome in my home or life).

I'll let T.S. Eliot and his iconic "The Naming of Cats" play us out here, especially the final stanzas:

The name that no human research can discover—
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.

—Yours, s.e. (and Ash and Tricycle, pictured below)

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