Bogus Trend of the Week: Dudes With Cats

Jack Shafer in Slate:

Screenhunter_14_oct_09_0912If the New York Times‘ Sunday Styles were a hairdo, it would be a wig. If it were on the menu, it would be a meringue. If it were a retail outlet, it would be Spencer’s Gifts. As a mélange of fashion notes, celebrity reporting, personal essays, and piffle, Sunday Styles resembles the old-fashioned supermarket tabloids in that it knows that it’s a stinking pile of entertaining trash and makes no apologies for it.

So bestowing a “Bogus Trend of the Week” award upon Sunday Styles is a tad like berating Slobodan Milosevic for tracking mud across your nice, clean linoleum floor. The section exists to advance the bogus. Yet sometimes Sunday Styles promotes premises so flimsy that somebody must shout stop, if only to restore the section to its honest awfulness.

That moment arrived last Sunday (Oct. 5) in “Sorry, Fido, It’s Just a Guy Thing,” in which writer Abby Ellin revealed that more and more guys—single, straight guys!—are digging pussycats.

More here.