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Lets not forget that Cat was thrilled about the prospect of getting to fuck an incapacitated Lister – pretty sure they are up for anything.

Given Camille, you could say that the Cat is bi but only for himself…

… self-loathing is a more predominant trait for him than it is for others.

What a nice way of putting it!

I always felt that Series 1-2 Cat was rooted in a sort of 1950s jazz aesthetic, all slicked-back hair and sharp suits. Which I guess aligns with being a “cool cat”.

Yes – I absolutely love that the Cat in the early seasons is really partly a walking jazz slang reference.

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Also, this conversation has reminded me of this part of the “test” taken by the crew in the first issue of the Smegazine…

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To be fair, if anyone is confused about gender, it’s me. I’ve no idea what gender is. I don’t mean that derisively either, I genuinely don’t get the concept. So if anyone could help, I would appreciate.
I mean, you’ve got men and women. And in my experience, they are virtually identical save for the body parts. All that stuff about masculinity and femininity are just social stereotypes and personality traits. 
Some men and women are what we would call masculine and some men and women are what we could call feminine.
But how we get from that to identifying as different genders, I have no idea. It just confuses me. Why would anyone bother identifying as a man or woman when they can just be “I’m a woman but I am into masculine stuff”. It seems overcomplicated.
Because to me personally, being a man just means being a human being with a willy. 
Sorry if it’s offensive to anyone, I am just confused.

No problem, you’re not being offensive (I’m trans myself). :) It is a very slippery concept to get your head around, and everyone has different ideas about it. Gender is certainly made up of social stereotypes, but those still have real effects (an example I like to give is that money is fundamentally not real, it is a social construct, but it obviously still affects you if you have none of it!). People may feel that they fit more into one made-up box than the other, or into neither.

A scenario people often use to explain the idea of having an internal sense of gender identity is that of your consciousness suddenly being transplanted into the body of either the opposite sex (appropriately enough, like Rimmer in Better Than Life the novel…), or a completely genderless robot. Most cisgender people would say that they would still feel in some way like a man or a woman, regardless of their physical body – it’s part of their identity and sense of self. Most cisgender people also wouldn’t like being referred to in a way that doesn’t align with their internal sense of self. For instance, cisgender actors who have played transgender or cross-gender roles sometimes report feeling what is essentially gender dysphoria, a sense of deep discomfort or depression at not being treated as the gender they are or at having to present in a way that doesn’t align with it.

There’s also something to be said for the fact that “men” and “women” haven’t always been fixed, biologically based categories in every society. There are many societies which incorporate(d) third gender roles or the ability for people to live as a gender different from their sex assigned at birth. (Not to mention that sex itself is a spectrum, not a binary, but that’s another discussion.)

I hope that was at least somewhat helpful and not too long-winded! It is indeed very difficult to explain…

Given a lot of the visual inspiration for the Cat is older fashions, it just goes to show how unfixed and nebulous applying gender to clothing is. Like how heels and pink were initially masculine coded in Western culture.

Absolutely – I’m casually into historical men’s fashion, and part of the reason I love the Cat’s design so much is that it incorporates so many of my favourite clothing elements which have sadly fallen out of the norm.

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Can I ask how you arrived at that conclusion?
Because from all I’ve seen, he’s a pretty basic typical male. 

Haha, I’m exaggerating somewhat. And I don’t mean that he’s not cisgender, or that he thinks anything consciously of his presentation (that isn’t just that it’s better than everyone else’s). More that he’s very flamboyant and wears a lot of colours, clothing items or accessories that the other characters would probably consider too feminine for them, not to mention his makeup. So, since he doesn’t seem to worry about appearing very masculine, it wouldn’t make sense for his Low self to be more GNC than him (and in fact Low Cat has no fashion sense to speak of at all – horror!).

By “doesn’t have much idea what gender is”, I mean that since he’s a cat, I assume that he thinks entirely in terms of biological sex and doesn’t deep it otherwise. You certainly wouldn’t find him reading Judith Butler.

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It’s definitely the shallowest of the character deconstructions in the bubble era. Even if we can put the ‘lowness’ of crossdressing Rimmer and Lister enjoying casual sex down to early ‘90s prudishness, the bunkroom with cinema hotdogs and bad horror films feels closer to the Cyberia stuff in Last Human than any real moral exploration. 

I agree – I thought of interpreting them as subjective because it honestly just makes it a bit more interesting as a concept. In some ways, I think it makes more sense, too.

I’ll admit that this is also partly to make Low Rimmer a bit more palatable, as a queer person myself! I do think it bears examining why, to put it bluntly, only Rimmer is a gay crossdresser. I’d guess that, from the writers’ perspective, it’s because Rimmer is the least “red-blooded” of the main (humanoid) cast, and consequently the most insecure about his masculinity and sexuality. But working under the canon explanation that the Low versions arise from real thoughts, traits or urges in their original characters, Low Rimmer is… what? The part of Rimmer that is gay? As much as I’d support the headcanon, I don’t believe that’s what Grant Naylor were intending to put across…

If we assume that the triplicator works subjectively, this makes much more sense to me. Rimmer is the only one who would be so neurotically afraid of being queer or gender non-conforming. Lister seems fairly comfortable in his masculinity and sexuality – for instance, never rising to Rimmer’s jabs about him and Ace – and the Cat is, quite frankly, pretty gender non-conforming already, not that he probably has much idea what gender is.

If the maggots spread the seeds it’d still be a win for the strawberry.

Exactly! My biologist’s brain can’t in good conscience see decay as a bad thing!

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Thank you for all the responses! (And sorry about the odd formatting in my original post, I have no idea why the line breaks show up like that.)

Yes, I didn’t mention that in addition to probably not being bothered to move out, Lister does know that Holly brought Rimmer back in order to keep him sane. Even if he initially doesn’t believe that it works, he could realise it on his own terms and recognise that he goes off the deep end without someone else there to maintain a routine. That said, as Flap Jack points out, Holly never said that Rimmer needs to literally sleep in the same bunk as Lister; Watsonianly they do have the option of just being neighbours. I could believe that Rimmer is afraid of the dark and sleeping alone, though – and that actually living with Lister and sharing a space with him allows him a more satisfying way to “exert his petty authority” over him than otherwise! I like the idea of Rimmer inventing an official-sounding excuse to stay and Lister making a show of begrudgingly letting him, while they both kind of know deep down that the other actually just wants to stay with them.

… And on that note, the romantic love explanation is of course always possible!

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Apologies for the fright that replying here apparently elicits, but I just wanted to say that “Chris Barrie has updated his website” has brought yet another new user to the site. I was looking yesterday for more specifics on Barrie’s unfortunate smeghead tendencies, found this thread and read through all 28 pages in hysterics. The disappointment of realising the full extent to which Barrie has gone off his rocker has been more than compensated for by the sexy details et al. Not that I would have thought I had a sense of humour so easily tickled as to be moved to tears by sexy details. All rather worrying frankly…

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