Sexy Cat Person

Can't take my eye off the tiger.

When it comes to animal symbolism, a major association of felines is with sex. Any feline-themed character is likely to be very sexually attractive and probably the most sexualized character in the work. This can range from actual Funny Animal cats, to characters who are to some degree feline-human hybrids or shifters, to alien or fantasy Cat Folk, to entirely human characters who have a cat theme. Because Most Writers Are Male, this usually applies to female characters, although there are male examples.

It's easy to see why: cat ownership and feline traits have been historically associated with women (although in Real Life an equal number of men and women own cats). Many things men found attractive in women were projected onto cats. They are viewed as graceful, gymnastic, and flexible; they have a mercurial temperament; if they aren't neutered, they make it obvious to everyone around when they're in heat, and even when not in heat, they have no shame in their love of being petted and stroked. It can't be a coincidence that "sex kitten" rapidly became a term for female sex symbols. ^note Big cats such as tigers and lions, however, are seen as masculine felines instead due to their stocky builds and powerful muscles. They are thus associated more often with Hunks or Amazonian Beauties.

Note that for this to be the case, the character's sexiness and feline associations must both be unusual within the work — if a work has a cast made up mostly of anthropomorphic cats, don't add the sexy one. It also has to be the case within the work, so Self-Fanservice of a character who happens to be a feline but isn't particularly sexualized in canon — such as, say, Blaze from the Sonic the Hedgehog series — doesn't count.

There is a very strong overlap with Classy Cat-Burglar. See also Cat Girl, although they vary in their degree of sexualisation, with some being platonically "cute". Compare to Cool Cat.

See also Foxy Vixen for this trope's canid counterpart, as well as Snakes Are Sexy and Seductive Spider.

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Examples:

Advertising

• Deconstructed with Biggie Bear's Miss Pussycat — she's the only girl, and looks rather nice enough. Enough for the titular character to sexually assault her.

Anime & Manga

• Yoruichi from Bleach is a sexy tanned kunoichi who can turn into a black cat and would wind up naked when reverting to her human form.
• Yukari Kotozume aka Cure Macaron from KiraKira★Pretty Cure à la Mode who has a cat motif. She is portrayed as the most attractive member of the group to the point that Even the Girls Want Her. She can also come off flirtatious to others. Even her Cure outfit is out there compare to the other's outfits.
• In Ranma ½, Shampoo is a beautiful Chinese warrior woman who aggressively pursues the protagonist, and turns into a cat whenever splashed with cold water.
• Fairy Tail: Erza's kitty-obsessed childhood friend Milliana began sporting an extremely revealing outfit and sexy attitude after she went through adolescence during the first Time Skip.
• Aisha Clanclan from Outlaw Star, a member of a race of catlike aliens, fits snugly into this trope.
• Soul Eater: Blair is a magic cat who can shapeshift into a human. In human form she's a woman who dresses very skimpily and flirts with any man she meets. (In one Gender Bender story where she's temporarily changed into a man, she's just as sexy and sexually-active.)
• Obi in Snow White with the Red Hair has a restrained cat theme and is a sexy dude.

Comic Books

• Blacksad:
  • Natalia Wilford, Alma Meyer, Luanne Eva Lange and Donna Blacksad. All of whom fit this trope to a T. They are all drawn as conventionally attractive Cat Folk, with even Blacksad himself being presented as a Hunk on occasion, like the Funny Background Event with all the boyfriends arguing with their girlfriends for looking at him.
  • Blacksad and Weekly watch a leopard exotic dancer in the opening of A Silent Hell.
• The DCU:
  • The Trope Codifier in many ways is Selina Kyle a.k.a. Catwoman, a morally ambiguous villain-turned-(anti)hero and arguably the Ms. Fanservice of the whole DC universe. She's a Classy Cat-Burglar and Femme Fatale who serves as an occasional ally and love interest for Batman himself, while her outfit tends to be some version of a Spy Catsuit or even having her Dressed Like a Dominatrix.
  • On the male side, the villain Catman spent decades as something of a C-list joke... until Gail Simone got her hands on him in Secret Six and reinvented him as a badass, frequently shirtless, bisexual Anti-Villain.
  • Wonder Woman villain Cheetah has been this at times. Her Golden Age version was a beautiful Badass Normal woman in a fur-print catsuit with hand and foot claws. Later versions have made her a feline-human hybrid, sometimes sexy but sometimes more bestial and uncanny-looking.
• Teen Titans:
  • Starfire is a downplayed example. She's an alien whose species evolved from cat-like creatures and she's a beautiful, flirtatious, Innocent Fanservice Girl in a skimpy costume who became notorious by being one of the first heroic characters to have non-marital sex in a DC comic. However, there's relatively little feline about her appearance or personality, and the "evolved from cats" thing is rarely mentioned.
  • Jade Nguyen, a.k.a Cheshire, is a flirtatious assassin who takes her alias from the Cheshire Cat of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She tends to wear revealing outfits that show off her body and has been known to use her looks to her advantage. Her portrayal in Young Justice (2010) plays up the cat motif even further by giving her a cat mask and she retains the seductive personality in her interactions with Will Harper.
• Marvel Comics has Catwoman's Alternate Company Equivalent Black Cat, and Tigra, a furry half-feline heroine in a bikini with definite animal instincts who provides the current page image.
• The heroine of the Porn with Plot pioneering adult furry comic Omaha the Cat Dancer is an anthropomorphic feline stripper with frequent on panel nudity and sex scenes.
• Parodied in Empowered with Ocelotina, a cat-themed purported supervillainess who is basically an in-universe porn star.
• The Angel (IDW) post-show comics introduced an assassin named Dez, a female jaguar given the magical ability to shapeshift into a human. She was depicted as a Shameless Fanservice Girl with many nude scenes.
• In The Wicked + The Divine, Sakhmet, who incarnates the Egyptian Cat Girl war goddess, is the most sexualised and sexually active of all the gods, hardly caring for anything except physical pleasure.
• Flare has Tigress, whose usual Stripperific tiger-print costume includes thigh boots and fingerless gloves. She once claimed to have been worshiped in ancient Egypt as the goddess Bast.
• Shakara featured a minor female character from a species of Cat Folk who tries to betray the assassin Valentine D'Eath after sleeping with him.

Fan Works

• Vow of Nudity: In a series loaded with sexualized characters, Fiora the forest witch still manages to stand out due to her mischievous nature, unbridled sex drive, frequent and unashamed use of magic in lewdly-unintended ways, and her gray morality letting her get away with far more lecherous behaviors than other good-aligned characters.

Film — Animated

• The Shrek series and spin-offs portray the Puss in Boots as a Dashing Hispanic who likes to flirt with women, while Kitty Softpaws is characterized as a seductive Classy Cat-Burglar.
• Sawyer, the feline female character from Cats Don't Dance. Though not heavily sexualised, she does boast a rather curvaceous body, is a very skilled dancer and is the love interest to Danny.
• El Arca has Panthy, a Femme Fatale panther club singer with an Impossible Hourglass Figure.
• Treasure Planet: Captain Amelia is the most noticeably feminine character in the cast while being a member of the Cat Folk, with much emphasis on her agility and accent. She eventually becomes a love interest for Doctor Doppler and marries him by the end.

Film — Live-Action

• All of the major film versions of Catwoman — in Batman Returns, Catwoman (2004),The Dark Knight Rises, and The Batman (2022) — were at least intended to be Ms. Fanservice.
• Cats tried this. Heavy emphasis on "tried."
• Star Trek V: The Final Frontier featured a humanoid feline alien woman in two scenes working as an exotic dancer at a seedy tavern on Paradise.
• The famous 1942 horror film Cat People expresses a major theme of fear of female sexuality in the story of a woman who (rightly or wrongly) believes that she will shift into a killer big cat if she becomes sexually active. It was remade in 1982 under the same title, and made much less ambiguous and much more graphically sexual.
• Animala in the B-Movie parody The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra and sequel. Supposedly she's a mix of four different animals, none of them cats, but is basically an attractive actress in a leotard with clawed gloves who goes around purring in a sensual manner. "Rowrr..."
• Monkeybone: Miss Kitty, the Cat Girl waitress who works in Down Town. She's a Little Bit Beastly character (with cat ears, a nose, whiskers, and a tail) who dresses in a tight black and gold outfit, and she's sympathetic to the protagonist's desire to return home throughout the film. Before disappearing for the ending, she gives the characters a rough Furry Reminder by devouring the sapient Rat who enslaves the protagonist.

Literature

• Discworld: When Nanny Ogg's cat Greebo is at times magically transformed into a human, he is described as a battle-scarred Hell-Bent for Leather tough guy exuding enough bad-boy sexuality to leave any non-lesbian woman who sees him practically catatonic.
• In the October Daye books, Tybalt is the king of the local Court of Cats and a cat shifter. When he is first introduced, he is explicitly described as "basically walking sex appeal". Much attention is paid to how he looks in tight leather pants.
• There's a very dark example in various works by the British SF writer Richard Calder, starting with the Dead Girls/Dead Boys/Dead Things trilogy. "Catgirls" in them are the result of a human mutation that makes them beautiful, instinctive and malicious Femme Fatales. They are also intensely masochistic, to the point of seeking out and enjoying their own Questionable Consent sexual murders.
• The were-leopards of City of Devils are all extraordinarily good looking and ooze sex appeal. Unfortunately for everyone else, they transform into huge, hungry felines when they're aroused, and pretty much anything gets them feeling frisky.
• Nyara in Heralds of Valdemar was gradually transformed into a sexy cat girl by her sorcerer father, who used her to test changes he then made on himself, though he styled himself after a lynx. Nyara slinks and purrs her words and is ordered to Go Seduce My Archnemesis, but with Heroic Willpower manages to resist his orders and switch sides. In the aftermath of the first book, she runs away into the wilderness not wanting to be controlled or coerced by anyone. Need goes with her and spends several months teaching her and undoing those changes that Nyara really hates, taking her more into regular Cat Girl territory.
• In Sword Art Online, the game Alfheim Online features a race of cat-like fairies called the Cait Sith, with members of the race bearing cat ears and tails. The only significant characters who are members of the race, Silica and Sinon, are attractive girls who are also part of Kirito's Unwanted Harem.
• High School D×D has Koneko Toujou's buxom older sister Kuroka. Both of them are nekomata.
• Eris in Cat Planet Cuties is a stacked alien Cat Girl with no nudity taboo. When the Catian mothership arrives, it's shown that the rest of her species is similarly sexy and has very liberal ideas regarding nudity, casual sex, and polygamy compared to Japan. Also, they get much of their understanding of Japanese culture from Eris reading Kio's magazines.
• Ashiol of Creature Court is a shapeshifter with cats as his Court form - he's beautiful, and he Really Gets Around, even by the standards of the very sex-happy Court.

Live-Action TV

• The enhanced physical abilities of the X5 supersoldiers in Dark Angel come from having some cat DNA in their cocktail, and they're also designed to all be beautiful/handsome. The female X5s experience the feline estrus cycle, going into heat two or three times each year, which proves inconvenient for the series heroine Max in two episodes.
• In the Doctor Who story "Survival", Ace's interactions with the feline Cheetah People are highly erotic and blatantly played as a lesbian sexual awakening.
• Catwoman in Batman (1966) is hot whether she's played by Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, or Eartha Kitt.

Music

• The Cure's "The Love Cats" consists mostly of a whole string of feline metaphors for sex, including semi-orgasmic cat noises.
• The video for the Fall Out Boy song "The Take Over, the Break's Over" features several women dressed as cats dancing seductively.
• As her artist moniker suggests, Doja Cat employs this kind of imagery from time to time, most recently by wearing a cat-face prosthesis at the 2023 Met Gala.
• Cardi B invokes this in the music video for "Twerk" where she dawns tiger-themed body paint.

Mythology and Religion

• This one's Older Than Dirt. Bastet, an Egyptian goddess associated with love and fertility, is usually depicted with the head of a cat (a lioness in earlier depictions, a housecat starting around the Late Period).
• Norse Mythology associated the Love Goddess Freyja with cats.

Theatre

• While the characters themselves are less human in behavior and fall under Nearly Normal Animal, most of the costumes in Cats evoke this, being tight spandex outfits decorated with tabby, calico, or other feline patterns. In addition, most of the female cats wear lipstick and eyeliner. It's especially noteworthy in the "Macavity" number, where two female cats dance seductively while singing it, and in the character of Rum Tum Tugger, who does pelvic thrusts during his song and takes a clear influence from Mick Jagger.
  • It's also all but directly stated that Grizabella may have been this in her youth, as she wears a little black dress and high heels, is more heavily made up than the other cats, is referred to as "the glamour cat", and is implied to have been a prostitute.

Video Games

• Ankha from Animal Crossing is frequently portrayed as this, thanks to Memetic Mutation.
• Yellow Iris from the little-known Capcom side-scroller Battle Circuit is a curvy Cat Girl who wears nothing but a green corset and thick leather belt.
• In Cannon Spike, level boss Cat Lady Beauty is a sexy woman with a cat-ear-like hairdo and a Navel-Deep Neckline, who becomes a giant cat monster when she Turns Red.
• Felicia from Darkstalkers is one of the most notorious video game examples and the Trope Codifier as a whole; a voluptuous Cat Girl who is blatantly naked except for some stripes of white fur that look a bit like a thong bikini.
• Kirze from King's Raid is a Cat hybrid with an Impossible Hourglass Figure, has cat-like mannerisms when you speak to her in the inn and her trascendence animations, and her default outfit is a corset with a transparent short Showgirl Skirt and high boots.
• Pokémon has Meowscarada, the evolved form of Sprigatito and Floragato, which resembles an anthropomorphic feminine looking feline.
• In Sly 2: Band of Thieves, Constable Neyla is a secretly Dirty Cop and surprise Big Bad. She is a tiger who wears a belly-baring tank top and cut-off jeans and uses her sexuality manipulatively, typically via betraying those she gains the trust of. There are also the Arabian belly dancers in Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time.
• One of the monster classes recruitable in Disgaea is the Nekomata class, a race of sexy Felicia-esque catwomen.
• The Kasha boss from Nioh 2 takes the form of a feral but still very easy on the eyes cat girl. The fact that she's very buxom and has revealing clothes help a lot.
• Ms. Fortune from Skullgirls is a Cat Girl with tan skin, a slender athletic figure, and a very revealing outfit consisting of a short top that barely covers her breasts, tight form-fitting short shorts, and torn leggings that don't even cover her thighs. Of course, the fact that she fights by gruesomely dismembering and reattaching her limbs (which also explains her skimpy outfit) slightly offsets this.
• Clawroline from Kirby and the Forgotten Land is an anthropomorphic leopard lady with long eyelashes, purple eyeshadow, chest fluff that resembles a bust, and an extremely exaggerated Impossible Hourglass Figure. In a Kirby game, of all places.

Web Animation

• Planet Dolan: Shima Luan is a pink cat whose buxom form is Lampshaded from time to time.
• RWBY: Blake the cat faunus is noted both in and out of universe to be sexy. Her design is made to be androgynous and form-fitting to be attractive to both sexes and many characters proclaim their attraction to her. She is also the only member of the Team who has a confirmed relationship (albeit a failed one) before the series, and has multiple people interested in her over the course of it, finally becoming an Official Couple with Yang in Volume 9.

Western Animation

• Bugs Bunny Builders: In a kid-friendly variation, Penelope Pussycat is depicted in this show as a flamboyant and confident fashionista who speaks with a French accent.
• In Dogtanian and the Three Muskehounds, a furry children's adaptation of The Three Musketeers, Femme Fatale Milady Dewinter is one of the few cats in an otherwise mostly-canine cast of characters.
• In Around the World with Willy Fog, a furry version of Around the World in Eighty Days by the same people as Dogtanian, Willy's sophisticatedly sexy love interest, Romy, is a cat.
• Heathcliff & the Catillac Cats: Cleo is drawn to appear like a humanoid feline with blonde hair, an hourglass figure, and leg warmers. She's such a babe, that in addition to being hit on by multiple neighborhood cats, a human PR agent took one look at her and had to have her for his catfood company's advertising campaign!
• The Justice League incarnation of Cheetah is arguably her most attractive design, with a voice to match.
• In the "Divorce" episode of the Hungarian series „Kérem a következőt!”, a cat singer performs a song about how sleeping around is better than marriage.
• Flora is this in the 4th season of Winx Club when wearing her Love and Pet pet store uniform.
• Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart: King Snugglemagne is a rare male version of this trope, being a Macho Camp lion with a foppish personality. Mao Mao counts as well, if only for his deep, masculine voice.
• In Miraculous Ladybug, one of the protagonists is Cat Noir, a cat themed superhero. He's extremely good-looking, a professional male model, and a Chick Magnet in both identities.
• Agazza from Roswell Conspiracies: Aliens, Myths and Legends. She's really a Vodo'un, but unlike the others of her kind, she inhabits the body of a sexy humanoid feline alien.
• Catra from She-Ra and the Princesses of Power is more of an Unkempt Beauty, but Scorpia and Adora both openly show they find her attractive, Gimmer via an Imagine Spot is implied to find her extremely attractive, and after getting to know her for a bit, Bow can't stop gushing about how cute she is. In Season 4, Catra adopts a sleeker look, and wears a tight, figure hugging outfit.
• Kitty Katswell from T.U.F.F. Puppy is Dudley Puppy's feline partner who has great acrobatics skills along with a nice figure to boot.

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