Who's Sick of Crazy Cat Lady Stereotypes?

Am I a crazy cat lady? Maybe but I am also the crazy animal rescue lady and the crazy grandma and the crazy dog lady and the crazy Christmas lady and the crazy human rights lady and the crazy honor the veterans lady - well, you get the picture. Just because you are passionate does NOT mean you are crazy. However, I say that with a caveat: I do not condone hoarding where the animals and the human being suffers immeasurably.

Last week, PEOPLEPets.com associate editor Helin Jung caught a special segment on ABC devoted to so-called cat ladies, a term she came to question as she watched. See what Jung (the proud owner of a 9-year-old Maltese named Ethel) has to say, and join in on the discussion!

20/20 ran a special last week called, "Cat Ladies: Why Do They Do It?" It was a feature about director Christie Callan-Jones's new documentary, Cat Ladies, which follows the lives of four women "whose lives and self-worth have become intractably linked to cats." Any of this feeling inappropriate yet? How about this: 20/20 conducted an interview with one of Callan-Jones's subjects, with the subject sitting in her bed under the covers.

A friend of mine in her mid-20s has a standard refrain she uses after a break-up: "I'm doomed, and I'm going to end up a crazy cat lady." Everything about that sentiment is absurd, not to mention the fact that she's allergic to cats. When I adopted a shelter cat, the first thing all of my friends did was to warn me against adopting any more because I was going to, yes, turn into a crazy cat lady. Which brings us to this notion of crazy cat ladies — women who are loveless, alone in the world and totally batty.

Bella DePaulo of Psychology Today wrote a scathing column about both the documentary and the TV segment, criticizing both for creating "a gratuitous link between being single and being a crazy cat lady."

So what is a cat lady, exactly? The film synopsis takes a stab at it: "It's not the number of cats that defines someone as a "cat lady," but rather their attachment, or non-attachment, to human beings. They create a world with their cats in which they are accepted and in control - a world where they ultimately have value."

Apart from the documentary's inherently condescending view of these women, it perpetuates an inaccurate stereotype of cat people as a freak show that only encourages the cultural bullying that cat owners (and female ones, especially) have to deal with. Then we end up with tongue-in-cheek novelty items such as the Crazy Cat Lady Board Game ("Assuming you still have human friends, the aim of this 2-4 player game is to collect as many cats as you can") and the Crazy Cat Lady Action Figure (She "has a wild look in her eye and comes with six cats"). And, maybe the crazy cat lady character on The Simpsons is funny, but in general, we're over it.