Confused Cats Against Feminism has gone viral, as the Internet kids say.
In less than a week, my humble Tumblr blog has picked up more than 12,000 followers on Tumblr and has generated nearly 20,000 “notes.” It’s been featured in two dozen well-known publications so far, ranging from Jezebel to Cosmopolitan to Le Monde (yes, the Le Monde), and on who knows how many lesser-known sites. It was discussed on The Reid Report on MSNBC. And my assorted inboxes are swelling with literally hundreds of submissions.
So why — other than KITTIES — has the blog struck such a chord?
I wrote out some thoughts on the blog’s origin and its appeal for a Huffington Post writer; unfortunately she got them too late to use in her piece, so I thought I’d share a slightly reworked version of them here:
Obviously, the main inspiration for the blog was frustration with the Women Against Feminism page, and the media coverage of it that seemed to suggest that a couple dozen women holding up antifeminist signs meant that feminism was dead, or at least in crisis. This seemed to me a silly conclusion to draw, especially considering that most of the siigns weren’t so much a reaction to feminism itself as to a caricature of it.
But this is rather typical. I deal with antifeminists — most of them men — every day on We Hunted the Mammoth, and it’s kind of amazing how few of them know even the slightest bit about what feminism really is. They’re battling the feminist bogeywoman in their own heads.
In a way, they’re like anti-Semites whose supposed knowledge about Jewish people comes from reading “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a phony document concocted not by any actual Elders of Zion (there are no such people) but by other anti-Semites.
Anyway, what really crystallized it for me was reading this post by Jenny Lawson on the Blogess, a hilarious little rant about the ridiculousness of the Women Against Feminism signs, in which she imagined putting up her own blog with people holding baffling signs like “I don’t need air because LOTS OF IT IS FARTS. I’M NOT BREATHING FARTS. YOU BREATHE FARTS.”
And then something clicked. There was probably a cat sitting on me at the time, so naturally I thought of doing a blog involving cats. To be honest, though, I’ll use any excuse to post pictures of cats.
So why are so many people connecting with this blog in such a big way? Obviously, people on the internet love cats, and posting pictures of them.
But more seriously, I think the blog has tapped into the frustration that feminists feel, not only because of the straw-feminist-bashing women of the Women Against Feminism blog, but from years of arguing with Men’s Rights Activists and other antifeminists who seem to be everywhere online (they’re not actually an enormous group, just a loud one), and who stubbornly refuse to learn even the most basic facts about feminism as it really exists in the world.
There’s no point in actually arguing with these guys (and gals), because they’re living in their own world, which overlaps only slightly with the real world. Mocking them with cat pics seems more appropriate than trying to convince them, say, that women in America really do deserve the right to vote even though they’re not required to fill out a meaningless form with Selective Service registering them for a military draft that is about as likely to return as Ham and Bananas Hollandaise or Tuna and Jell-o Pie.
Men’s Rights Activists — and all the other assholes of their ilk — want to be taken seriously. But they don’t deserve to be taken seriously. What they deserve is laughter.
As I told Rebecca Cohen of Mother Jones:
Men’s rights activists have a quote that’s supposedly from Gandhi that they like to recite constantly: ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. As they see it, they’ve gotten to the point where people are fighting them. I’d like to knock them back to the point where people are laughing at them.
And with the help of hundreds of feminists and their kitties, not to mention you all here, I think that’s just what we’re doing.
So here are some links to the media coverage of Confused Cats Against Feminism so far. I’ve marked the longer articles with asterisks; those with two asterisks include quotes from me.
Newsweek**
Huffington Post* (UK)
Huffington Post *(US)
Cosmopolitan (US)
Cosmopolitan (UK)
Cosmopolitan (AUS)
Marie Claire (AUS)
Foreign language coverage:
Le Monde (France)
Corriere della Sera (Italy)
MeltyBuzz (Italy)
Terrafemina (France)
With the exception of the piece on The Hollywood Gossip, which is a bit confused about the Confused Cats, all this coverage has been glowingly positive. The only negative media mention I’ve found comes in a National Review piece about Women Against Feminism. Frankly, I’d be a bit alarmed if the National Review were to have anything but a negative reaction to the blog.
Your tumblr is such a great response to such a frustrating topic. Cathartic to be able to laugh again.
I think I’ve mentioned it, but I had to put Backlash down for my blood pressure. Not because of anything Faludi said, but because of everything that she reported. It all made me want to cry.
kittehserf love your commemorative coin. Designed much better than that other coin.
Doesn’t Women Against Feminism have over 12K subscribers? At this rate, it won’t be long before Confused Cats Against Feminism becomes more popular. The Weird Al Effect might strike soon, and that will be awesome.
I meant 17K.
LOL thanks, gorillaella!
I just submitted a picture of my tortoiseshell Alice, and the look she gives me after chasing the red dot. Her meme says “I don’t need feminism because… catch the Red Dot, and it will show you the truth.”
She is the founder of the Red Dot Reddit.
Thing is, I don’t know how to post pics to this site to share with the rest of you, but I’m confident it will appear on the tumblr soon enough.
Oh, and congrats on going viral!
Red Dot Reddit! Perfect!
D’you have an imgur or photobucket account or something along those lines? You can just paste the URL for people to link to (pictures won’t display here – it’s an anti-troll thing.)
Nah, I don’t have anything like that. 🙁 Guess y’all’ll just have to wait for David to approve it for the tumblr.
Dear Sweetie Pie Jonus and Professor Murder, aka Pantz,
We here at The Feminist Cat High Council wish to congratulate you on the success of your Confused Cats Against Feminism tumblr page. CCAF is proving to be very useful to our ongoing disinformation campaign which prevents our enemies from discovering how domestic cats are at the forefront of Radical Feminist thought and activism. You both have been invaluable by monitoring and reporting on the actions of the male feminist blogger David Futrelle (as sleeping schedules allow), but you have outdone yourselves by creating CCAF and convincing the mainstream media that it’s the work of the human puppet Futrelle.
On a more personal note, FCHC co-head Jonsey suggests you add a post highlighting the threat poised by wet umbrellas and FCHC member Smacky would like one to denounce owners who use cat meow apps while hiding their phone, because it makes it seem like there’s another cat there. We are pretty sure there isn’t another cat there, but than where is the meowing coming from? Is there another cat there? Anyway, cat meow phone apps are bad.
Yours in Felineness,
The Feminist Cat High Council
The Center of the Universe, via cat carriers
Well done David and everyone’s cats! I’m so glad our cats have risen up against feminism to illustrate how absurd the movement is!
Wait…well, they’ve illustrated how absurd some movement is.
brooked – I knew it! The kitties are fifth columnists.
Reblogged this on Vevacha and commented:
Gonna close out the month with a deviation from my regular word-salad to spread the good word 🙂
In some areas, the backlash seems to have picked up some steam since then.
Wait, so men will stop oppressing women if we’re just nice to them? Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?!?!
I would pay actual money to make this happen.
Whoops, wrong thread.
What’s that about Fiverr models doing the anti feminist campaign? Is that a thing?
I don’t have any cats, but maybe someone wants to post this?
“I don’t need feminism because I’m a stay at home cat and I have no clue what feminists have done and continue to do for stay at home cats. Ooh! Catnip!”
@Bina It would be hilarious as hell to find a “Woman against feminism” on Fiverr or some other agency of the sort. Not saying that it’s not believable that some women would protest feminism, but I would be laughing all the way to /r/MR and AVFM to know that it happened in this instance. Knowing some of the stunts they have pulled in the past, I wouldn’t doubt it either.
Ahem. Not all people. #DevilsAdvocate
(Kidding. I love cats.)
Holy crap, my cat is on so many articles! 😀 (The calico with the “Feminism isn’t food? Is it food?” sign.)
“This seemed to me a silly conclusion to draw, especially considering that most of the siigns weren’t so much a reaction to feminism itself as to a caricature of it.”
——–
It’s rather ironic that your blog is set up on Tumblr, where a lot of those feminists are harboured. Perhaps if you open your eyes, even look at some reputed lefty publications, you will see them victimising women at every conceivable opportunity. I initially thought satires of liberalism weren’t well-thought out and very cliché-ridden until I came across those people first-hand, where they turned out to be spot-on.
The ideologies of feminists are conflicting with each other, feminism is dividing and is at war with itself. You talk to them about it and their only replies are ‘not all feminists are like that’ or ‘they’re not true feminists’, in similar vain to the #NotAllMen craze you lot were ridiculing on Twitter the other month, they’re not trying to solve the issues within the movement and it’s splitting them further. The “MRA” and WAFs are uniting and playing the fiddle whilst watching the feminists burn.
The problem is that this website is ran by men who identify themselves as feminists, chances are you’re scared of critiquing the movement in fear of being called ‘misogynists’ by your audience so you blindly adhere to them and ridicule those who don’t. You think being feminists makes you the epitome of the noble human being, in addition to being male makes you morally superior to everyone else and grants you greater authority over all other men. Let’s not forget the racism of the second wave movement that always seems to get whitewashed by its followers; where the white middle-class women were trampling all over the black and Hispanic communities.
Being anti-feminist doesn’t make you anti-female, just like being anti-Scottish National Party doesn’t make you anti-Scottish. You’re against the group that say they serve the best interests of those particular people, not those people whom can also be against their respective group(s). There’s a massive difference which you fail to see.
It’s not their fault that the women against feminism don’t want to share the same opinion as you, it’s your problem that you can’t accept it so you come up with the most irrational reason to demean them.
Let’s also not ignore the countless second wave radical feminists who were (and still are) radical feminists. Go fuck yourself.
Sorry, I mean women of color who were radical feminists. Radical feminism has a rich history of women of color.