Saying goodbye to Jasper

He wasn't even my cat, really. One of a pair of gorgeous Burmese, he belonged serially to two sets of friends of mine. I was the go-between for the adoption and cat-sat him for a year in the interim while his new parents were on sabbatical. When I die and my deeds good and bad are toted up, if such things matter, making this adoption happen should stand me in good credit. For Jasper's new parents it was a life-changing event, in the best possible way.

He was terrified when he first arrived, cowering in the nethermost corner of his carrier, only his rump showing, his tail curled under him. He was shiny and sable brown, with a few stray white hairs on his chest. While his "sister" Truffle was a regal specimen of her kind, with an impressive pedigree going back to the original Burmese, Jasper's papers only said "DO NOT BREED". We suspected the white blaze was an unforgivable aberration. He was also much sleeker than the average Burmese and had a mighty Siamese yowl that could be heard far and wide. Because of that yowl, and his reputation for being a bit of a brat, his adoption was only conditional.

And what a brat he was! It took him a while to overcome his initial fear -- he even disappeared for a few days into the uncharted recesses of the basement -- but once he got comfortable, he showed his true colours. He first gleefully destroyed a chair cushion. Then he shifted his attentions to the brand new wool broadloom on the stairs. Over time he clawed his way through it in several places all the way to the wood beneath, despite numerous scratching posts being made available for his claw-sharpening pleasure. He staged random attacks on Truffle, who nevertheless ruled the roost, leaving tufts of her fur for me to find. He was very jealous of any attention she received. Once he even nipped her while she was sleeping on my chest, minding her own business, and in her panic to flee, and getting a claw caught in my top, she bit me.

Nevertheless he stayed, saved by the fact that he was a great cuddler. They both were: "I am trapped under cats" became a wonderful excuse both for me and for my friends not to do things. He also had a loud purr and was as soft as silk. At night he would curl up next to me under the covers and generate massive amounts of heat, while Truffle would come and go, her departures announced by a soft thump. And as he mellowed with age, he became less bratty. The carpet would never be safe from him, but he never again attacked a cushion. He even stopped attacking Truffle.

Truffle died two years ago and we were all very, very sad, but as my friends said, when they returned from the vet they still had Jasper to come home to. Jasper missed Truffle and yowled even more plaintively as he searched for her all throughout the house. He became even needier than he had been, if that was possible. Then, in the way of male cats, he developed kidney disease and over the space of about year he dwindled away to nothing. First he lost his ability to jump and run, then by the end he couldn't even walk. But he still had his yowl, if somewhat muted, and his fur was soft and shiny to his last day. And he still loved to cuddle.

Of all the cats I had known, and there had been many, Jasper was my favorite.

I'll miss you, buddy.

When I was 18 ...

When I was eighteen my English teacher hosted a party at his house to celebrate the end of the school year. My sweet, overprotective mother, worried that I'd be driven home by some randy drunk boy my own age, phoned him and asked him to make sure that I got home safely. To her great relief he told her that he would personally drive me home. But when the party was over, and everybody else was gone, he seemed in no great hurry go anywhere. He poured another glass of wine, put on some sexy music, sat down next to me, and said "I want to make mad, passionate love to you." There was some clumsy groping, which I participated in because I was curious, but then it became abundantly clear to me that this was going to be a non-starter, and I asked him to take me home. He did, and that was the end of it. The incident became a funny anecdote and great ammunition against my mother's persistent over-protectiveness.

Never in a million years would it occur to me now to go gunning for him as a perv, even if he were a Conservative politician.

Do we remember what it was like to be eighteen? We think we are all grown up and we are champing at the bit to get on with life and to experience as much of it as possible. Back in my day that meant the freedom to engage in sexual experimentation with older men, because there was a persistent myth that they were experienced and would be better at sex than our own fumbling male cohort. The only thing wrong with my English teacher, from my perspective, was that he was not my French teacher, whom I wanted to make mad, passionate love to. I would have happily exchanged one thirty-something authority figure for another. And I may or may not have been disappointed in the experience, but I certainly would not have felt taken advantage of.

What we are doing now is taking away agency and responsibility from our girls. At eighteen I would have been outraged at society telling me that I could not choose to experiment with an older man, or any man for that matter. That's agency. Responsibility is in choosing the man and the circumstance. For instance, I would have never gotten drunk in a bar and let a man take me home; being a grown-up meant thinking of the consequences of my actions. But now it seems eighteen-year-old women are judged to be little more than children who cannot exercise judgment and therefore need society's protection. In fact, there is talk of extending the upper limits of adolescence to twenty-four because of the suggestion that under that age youngsters are incapable of weighing the consequences of what they do. What kind of stuff and nonsense is that?

I have a young relative who is in her first year of university and a few months ago she told me that some of her house-mates came home in tears because a group of boys made fun of them. My cohort would have sent the boys packing with a few zingers about their manhood and laughed about the experience. What have our young women become if they cannot even defend themselves verbally against a clutch of boys their own age? And why are we encouraging their infantilization?

I have long been an advocate of self-defense training for girls. I grew up in a society where men were predators and women moved about with the knowledge that they were prey. My attitude has always been that if men had to worry about their own physical safety when they raped a woman, there would be fewer rapes and assaults. But in this discussion about thirty-something politicians taking eighteen-year-old women to their rooms, we are not speaking about rape, but consensual sex. Are we now saying that eighteen-year-old women are not allowed to have consensual sex? Are we trying to limit the age of the men they have consensual sex with? Or are we saying that men who have had sexual relationships with young adult women when they were in their thirties should not contemplate entering politics?

Some would retort that the issue is the power imbalance between the eighteen-year-old woman and the much older politician, or teacher, or professor. And to that I would say that the answer is not for society to say that the young woman needs protection because she cannot take care of herself or be trusted to know her own mind, but for society to empower that young woman to exercise agency. That power is not in her saying #metoo ten, twenty, thirty years later. That power is for her to be able to decide, in the moment, whether this is a sexual encounter she wants, and to be able to walk away without consequences. That's what I hope #metoo leads to.