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It's all well and good for women to have big dogs, but when a guy is a cat person, eyebrows are raised. Telling another straight man he has six cats "can feel a little like telling him that you still sleep alongside your childhood collection of teddy bears," British author Tom Cox says in his latest book Under the Paw: Confessions of a Cat Man.

Cox is beefing up cats' masculine image with his second World's Toughest Cat Contest on Facebook after starting the contest on his very funny Little Cat Diaries blog. (See our gallery of Cox's Toughest Cats here.) Cat owners, male and female alike, were keen to have their cat named tough. Cox sorted through the hundreds of entries looking for cats with a malevolent stare -- milquetoast felines caught mid-yawn need not apply.

Cox's readers are mainly women, but "there are a few men there who've also come out as cat lovers, which I'm very pleased about," he told PEOPLE Pets. He sometimes writes under the name of one of his cat's, Janet, who–to make matters more confusing--is male. And tough. "Janet has an IQ of 12, and a bit of a happy idiot," Cox says. "He's friendly to strangers, and not at all bloodthirsty, but quick with his fists."

See our hilarious gallery of Tom Cox's Tough Cats!