Heated debate on gender of Garfield the cat
AVI SELK AND MICHAEL CAVNA
Garfield is lazy. Garfield is a cat. Garfield likes lasagna.
Is there really much more to say about Garfield? The character is not complicated. Since the comic debuted in 1978, Garfield’s core qualities have shifted less than the mostly immobile cat himself.
But this is 2017 — a time of Internet wars, social conundrums and competing evidence about Garfield’s gender identity.
Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a 60-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute, not the next.
The debate spilled into the broader Internet, where a Heat Street writer complained of “cultural Marxists” bent on “turning one of pop culture’s most iconic men into a gender-fluid abomination.”
It all started with a comment Garfield’s creator, Jim Davis, made two years ago in an interview with Mental Floss — titled innocuously: 20 Things You Might Not Know About Garfield.
“Garfield is very universal,” Davis said. “By virtue of being a cat, really, he’s not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old.”
The remark caused no fuss. At first. Until last week, when the satirist Virgil Texas dug up the quote and used it to make a bold claim and bold move: “FACT: Garfield has no gender. This. Is. Canon. I have updated the Garfield Wikipedia entry to reflect this fact.”
A brief note about Virgil Texas: He’s been known to troll before. The writer once co-created a fictional pundit named Carl “The Dig” Diggler to parody the media and annoy Nate Silver.
Almost instantly, the universe of Garfield fans clawed in. A Wikipedia editor reverted Garfield’s gender back to male less than an hour after Texas’ change. One minute later, someone in the Philippines made Garfield genderless again.
And so on. Behind the scenes, Wikipedia users debated how to resolve the raging “edit war.”
“Every character (including Garfield himself !), constantly refers to Garfield unambiguously as male, and always using male pronouns,” one editor wrote — listing nearly three dozen comic strips in nearly four decades to prove the point. Some took it all as a joke. Garfield’s gender swapped 20 times over two-and-a-half days, before an administrator was forced to step in. Garfield was finally, officially listed as male on Wikipedia.