Owning a Cat Is the Only Sexual Service Most Men on Earth Can Legally Buy

This afternoon I paid 80 dollars at an animal shelter in Austin and brought home a three-year-old orange cat.

Author: Koutian Wu; GitHub: ktwu01

The paperwork was simple: show a photo ID, swipe a card, sign. She left with me on the spot. Right now she is getting to know her territory in my living room. She drinks from an IKEA bowl, and when she is done she jumps onto the couch, as entitled as if she paid the rent.

On the way home I kept turning one thing over. In that transaction, what exactly did my money buy?

A female. A female who lives with me, rubs against me all day, and will very likely climb into bed with me at night. I paid once, I will keep paying for her food, housing, and vet bills, and her attitude toward me depends entirely on her mood.

Think about it. In most of the world, is this the only package of its kind a man can legally pay for?

I have a habit: once I say a joke out loud, I want to check whether it is true. So I actually checked. I pulled in ten helpers across nine disciplines, economics, law, sociology, psychology, linguistics, history, philosophy, public health, and demography, and each wrote a proper paper. The tenth collected the papers and summarized the arguments.

How do I put the result?

Nine papers, nine conclusions, all the same. Every one ruled that the claim holds once it is redefined.

To be honest, agreement that neat usually shows up in academia only when someone is faking data. This time the neatness comes from how solidly the joke itself is built. Read on and you’ll see.

First, the harshest part. Taken literally, the claim is false, with no room at all.

The law objects first. In the eyes of the law, a cat is property, a chattel. She is not a service provider. She cannot even sign a contract. The adoption agreement I just signed had no spot for a paw print. I signed for her.

Psychology objects too. The human brain runs at least three systems, one for attachment, one for caregiving, one for mating, and they usually keep to themselves. A cat activates the first two. The calm you feel petting a cat runs on the same circuit as being held as a child. It is on a different channel from the thing in the title.

So the nine experts lined up and welded the literal door shut.

But ask the question with a different definition, and the claim suddenly comes alive.

Don’t ask whether it is that kind of service. Ask what a man actually gets after paying. He gets a companion who lives with him, comes to him on her own, sleeps with him, and demands affection from him without apology. Can money buy that? Is it legal? How many men on Earth can buy this, but cannot buy the other kind?

Once the question changes, the numbers start talking.

Start with what cannot be bought. There are roughly 4.1 billion men in the world today. That is the denominator. The numerator is the number of men living in jurisdictions where buying is illegal. Two kinds of jurisdiction count: full prohibition, where both selling and buying are crimes, and the Nordic model, where sellers are not prosecuted but buyers are. It sounds civilized, and for the buyer it amounts to the same thing. China is on the list. India is on the list. Those two countries alone hold more than 1.4 billion men.

The demographer added up the big countries one by one. Counting only the largest prohibition countries, the numerator already passes 3.2 billion. 3.2 billion over 4.1 billion is about 78 percent. Fill in the remaining smaller jurisdictions, and the share lands between 85 and 95 percent.

In terms a schoolchild could follow: of every 100 men on Earth, 85 to 95 have lived since birth in front of a closed door. The small legal minority, Germany, the Netherlands, New Zealand, parts of Australia, a few counties in Nevada, adds up to a few hundred million men at most.

One more note, to head off the hecklers. The share describes whether a legal channel exists, not whether these men want to buy. Even if 90 percent of men never think about it, the conclusion stands. A closed door is a closed door, whether or not you want to walk through it.

Back to the cat. This door is open almost everywhere in the world.

Buying a cat is legal in nearly every country. Legal enough to be taxed and insured, and before the sale the shelter screens you first, to check whether your home suits her. The point of the screening is to protect her. Think about that detail for a moment. No transaction the title hints at has ever come with this kind of pre-sale service.

The price is posted, too. The adoption or purchase fee is a one-time 50 to 200 dollars, and after that a few dozen dollars a month for food and litter. Americans spend about 150 billion dollars a year on pets in total. This is a market in full daylight. And my purchase today, 80 dollars, drew not a single extra glance at the register.

Good. The foundation is laid. Let’s unpack what I bought.

The service package I bought today has four items. Item one is cohabitation. From today she lives in my home, 365 days a year, with no business hours and no clocking out. No service billed by the hour can deliver this.

Item two is physical contact. She rubs against your legs, kneads your chest, and sits precisely on the keyboard while you type. In the car I worried she would be shy. Now she has started patrolling the whole apartment. One survey number struck me as especially interesting: more than half of cat owners sleep with their cats. Plenty of married people can’t count on that.

Item three is the most interesting, because it runs the other way. She asks you for intimacy on her own, often, without warning. If you stop, she complains and asks you to continue.

Item four is zero stigma. I can post her photo on social media and my mom will like it. I can put her in a dating profile, where she might even earn me points. The sociologist stressed this item in particular in his paper, and called it possibly the most valuable parameter in the whole package.

Psychology also offered an explanation of the mechanism. A cat has a baby-like face, big eyes and a round head, and that look directly triggers the human caregiving instinct, so you can’t help wanting to look after her. Petting a cat also lowers stress hormones a little. The public health expert put it more bluntly: in his field this kind of substitution has a proper name, harm reduction. The same need for companionship, and the risk column, a long list, drops straight to zero.

At this point the strongest objection should take the stage. It has four legs, and it’s called a dog.

A dog is just as legal, just as live-in, and far more enthusiastic than a cat. If the claim were about a market, the dog alone would bankrupt its uniqueness on the spot. That is exactly what the economist wrote. He voted against, and wrote it with full confidence.

Then the linguist picked his vote back up.

He said, you’ve got it wrong. The claim’s uniqueness was never in the market. It is in the dictionary.

The word “pussy” meaning a cat appears in 16th-century English dictionaries, several hundred years older than its slang meaning. Nobody invented this title as a new pun. It wakes up an old word that has lain in the dictionary for nearly five hundred years. Dogs don’t have this name. Neither do hamsters or parrots. Once the rule is set at the level of language, the shortlist has exactly one contestant from start to finish.

When I read that paragraph, I froze. A Chinese title, and its frame turns out to be a 16th-century English nail. In Chinese, the phrase “sexual service” has nothing to do with cats. The joke works only because both the person telling it and the person hearing it carry two languages in their heads. In a monolingual world, this joke would never have been born.

The historian poured the last bucket of cold water, and with good reason. He said the claim holds only for modern people. The indoor cat that sleeps on the bed, lives in the bedroom, eats commercial food, and uses commercial litter is a product of 20th-century industry. Your great-grandfather’s generation could not buy this package, for the plainest reason: it had not reached the market yet. So the precise version of the claim needs one more word, modern. Only the great majority of modern men stand inside this historical window.

Good, that’s the fun part. Last, one point the nine papers all raised independently, and the one I find hits hardest.

When everyone carefully tallied the direction of service, it turned out to run backward.

I’m the one who feeds her. I’m the one who scoops the litter. I’m the one who pays the vet bills. And today, I’m the one who signed the papers and brought her home. Going by the ledger, the hired party seems to be me.

The philosopher added the final line. If this really were the kind of service in the title, the other party could not give consent, and that would be very serious and not funny at all. Precisely because it isn’t, it is simply a relationship of care. You look after her, she happens to heal you, and none of it can be booked under services.

To me this point does not weaken the claim. It completes it.

Someone willingly spends money and time and ends up as the employee. Isn’t that relationship itself the thing money can’t buy anywhere else? The market can sell you many things. Only one can make you glad to serve, and even that depends on her mood.

So here is the final conclusion, the sentence the nine experts signed together, exactly as written.

Every fact in this article is true. The population numbers are true, the laws are true, the prices are true, even the share of people who sleep with their cats is true. Only the label in the title is contraband. It lives on a pun from five hundred years ago, and that is exactly what the title itself is saying: all a man can legally buy is a name that fits.

By the time I wrote this, she had finished patrolling the living room and gone back to sleep on the couch, in the spot I had been sitting in before I got up for water. It was still warm.

80 dollars. One roommate, one lifetime employment contract, and a title written in the 16th century.

I think it was worth it.

Postscript

On the third day after adoption, the night of November 2, she ran away.

I didn’t see when the door opened. By the time I noticed the couch was empty, she had already run up to the second floor. My roommate D and I searched the whole place and couldn’t find her, so we chased her outside. It was D’s sharp ears that caught the meowing and led us to her. She was crouched by the low wall downstairs. As soon as I got close, she bolted, far away.

D took one look and said, in my home country, a cat like yours would get caught and steamed for dinner.

She wasn’t nearly so polite to me. I coaxed and pleaded, said “meow” a hundred times, and only then did she come over and grudgingly let me pet her once. The moment I reached to pick her up, she turned and ran.

All night I tried everything. I put the carrier where she eats, with food at the very back. She poked her head in, went a quarter of the way inside, and backed out. I threw a towel to cover her, and she ran faster than the towel. In the end I went home first. She stayed downstairs, less than twenty meters from me, and neither of us would give in first.

Today I borrowed a proper humane trap, the kind where a door drops shut when she steps on the trigger. Tonight it goes where she eats, with the food at the very back. Then I walk away. Whether she goes in is entirely up to her mood.

When I wrote this article, I thought 80 dollars bought cohabitation, companionship, and the right to pet her. Tonight I add one more line: this service has a hidden clause. She accepts being used, not being possessed.

A cat is a bitch. A bitch can only be used, never possessed. The harder you try to persuade her to settle down, the deeper you sink and the more time you waste. Let go of the urge to rescue the cat, and respect another cat’s fate.

One more note, about where she came from.

I don’t know her origin. The adoption papers don’t say whether someone surrendered her or she was picked up off the street. The only clues are two dates. On October 16, the shelter gave her a rabies shot. On October 21, the shelter spayed her. Only an unclaimed cat gets all of that done by the shelter before being listed for adoption.

So she is most likely a stray. In a stray’s dictionary there is no “home,” only “where do I sleep tonight.” It isn’t that she doesn’t want to live with me. She has simply never lived this way. Three years of instinct against a two-day contract, and instinct won.