Film

Why Is ‘Cats’ (2019) So Unspeakably Horny?

Idris Elba could chain me to a barge, and I'd thank him.

by Patrick Lenton  19 December 2019
Cats horny review

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Cats (2019) is here, and nothing will ever be the same again — because I am ashamed to inform you that the titular cats are regrettably horny.

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I didn’t go into Cats looking to be turned on by the shifting, uncanny, CGI face of  a spooky spinning, miniature Jason Derulo.

I never thought that my gaze would be unerringly drawn to the weird blank void where Idris Elba’s pixellated cat penis should be swinging, as he threateningly dances towards a hairy, mostly nude Dame Judi Dench.

I did not ever assume that I would audibly gasp when Taylor Swift’s featureless cat-breasts… jiggled. I never thought that the Lord above would send me the image of Rebel Wilson unzipping her own naked skin to reveal a spangly outfit underneath to test me.

Yet here I am! Here… we all are. It’s insane to think that only one year ago, nobody had ever been subjected to the cursed, lustful cat bodies and their beautiful songs.

Cats is best described as a long sexual nightmare, a phenergan inspired mind orgy, an all-singing, all-dancing wank to an explicit Freudian textbook. It reminded me of the time when I was a fourteen year old in maths class, on a horrifically hot day, and I was more bored than I’d ever been before, uncomfortable, confused by the subject matter — and yet, because I was a teen boy, inexplicably horny.

That is Cats (2019).

It’s genuinely made me wonder whether singing human/cat hybrids SHOULD be objects of lust? Is there anything inherently wrong with it? I’m an open-minded guy, and I don’t want to be clutching my pearls at the concept of sexy cats. It’s not that I think there’s something INHERENTLY, or ETHICALLY, or SPIRITUALLY wrong with these hot, magic cats.

So what is my problem exactly?

My problem is that now that I’ve been turned on by the cavorting form of Mr Mistoffelees (the magic cat), I have been irrevocably changed. Will I ever be… normal again?

These Cats Are Meant To Be Horny

I cannot stress how cursed these cats are.

Their human faces shift uneasily over their cat heads like oil on water, like a discarded Korean face mask. The blighted technology used to create them has made them look soft and pettable, but also firm with defined muscles and shifting, rippling skin. Obscenely tactile, yet also weightless, physically inconsequential, CGI motes drifting through a blurred screensaver.

Most of the cats are nude, yet sexless — some wear hats and coats and heels. Much like the strippers of yore discovered eons ago, there’s something more titillating, more sexual about the idea of nudity when it is slightly withheld from completion by a carefully draped coat, or accentuated by a shoe, by a hat, mildly obscured by a collar with a bell.

There is a meme well-beloved by dog owners, where you remove their collar, perhaps to give them a bath, and you immediately say “you’re nakey!”

The cats from Cats are nakey. And you cannot spend a single moment not thinking about it.

The Cats From Cats Fuck

I want to die, because these cats fuck — but I don’t know how they fuck.

Like, sexual attraction exists in this universe, I’m not just an uncomfortably horny boy bringing his lust into a virginal garden of Eden populated only be singing cats, I swear. Reproduction exists. It is implied that Grizabella was sexually ruined by Macavity (the evil cat).

In the Rum Tug Tugger song, there is very clearly attraction and horniness exhibited towards him. The lady cats (homophobic btw) purr and meow and preen towards him, as he does his horny song about being unable to choose (big vers pansexual energy).

Rum Tug Tugger is DESIGNED to be sexual. I remember him being a sexy, slinky macho cat in the stage musical I saw. But in the stage musical, it was a man in a suit — not an insane, graphically neutered nightmare.

Rum Tum Tugger in the film, and I cannot stress this enough, is about as charismatic as a Sim, standing blank-eyed in the room which you’d forgotten to build a door into. However, and I also cannot stress THIS enough, he could push me off the Leaning Tower Of Pisa, all wild eyes and taut butthole tail, and I’d still wanna marry him.

Jason Derulo who played Mr Tugger himself claims that the film edited his wang out.

“They CGI’d the dick out,” he complained. “Yeah, they did CGI. I noticed that.”

And it’s true I guess… but they did it for everyone. Everyone sported a smooth, furred void — and when I looked into that void, nothing looked back.

While Rum Tum Tugger was the most overtly sexual cat, there is competition — Idris Elba’s Macavity, for example. Clearly designed to have a kind of dastardly sexual attraction. Or what about those twins who broke into the house and destroyed things? Or what about the unfriendly lady cats? Or even the horrifying Magician Cat?

What about Judi Dench.

They’re all weird and hot.

What Does This Mean For Me, And For The Nation?

I had to wonder if perhaps this newfound attraction, this cinematic event-specific kink, meant something new for me.

The most obvious had to be that now I was perhaps a furry? That I would be sinking money into an elaborate fur-suit, and yiffing it up with some other sweaty weirdos? But after a little research, I’ve learned that basically there’s no correlation between finding the horrendous Cthulian Jellicle creatures attractive, and being a furry. In fact, while some furries do also find the unearthly computer mutants attractive, many find them… disgusting.

It feels weird to blindside my therapist with a NEW weird brain problem at this late date, so I feel like I have to unpack this issue for myself.

Is there anything that connects my past lovers and partners to this horrific attraction, I wondered? Some could sing, some were tiny, and some were a terrible idea (is this sentence an Ariana Grande hit song???), which is all a good description of Cats (2019) — but no, it doesn’t really work out.

The more I thought about it, the more I had to wonder if I truly found these cats sexual? Sure, as we’ve established, they’re both sexualised AND canonically horny — but did I truly respond in an authentically horny manner? (‘authentically horny’ is my new Grindr bio). Or was it perhaps some kind of weird fight or flight reaction? Did my body get flooded with adrenalin, and I mistook that for sexual attraction? It’s not the first time that’s happened.

When I think about the kind of men Instagram serves me, the insanely perfect yet bland twinks, smiling vacantly next to a pool, or surrounded by an angel wing mural in LA, all smooth abs and huge white teeth and empty shark eyes, I realise that there is… confluence between the two. I’ve been trained for years, by Photoshop, by unrealistic standards of beauty, by the coven of influencers that run YouTube, by Sean Cody himself, to believe that unearthly, impossible, uncanny beauty is… attractive. Is hot.

What is Rum Tug Tugger, if not the ultimate ideal of this scam? Lithe, other-worldy, engineered beauty, that masquerades as sex, without any carnality… literally without any genitals?

That’s the answer — the problem is SOCIETY, and not me. It’s INSTAGRAM. Is this a long bow? Unspeakably. It is floating away into heaven.

In 2019, we are all horny for Cats (2019), in some form or another.

Cats is in cinemas on boxing day. It is horny.

Patrick Lenton is the Editor of Junkee.