Revisiting "Cathy"

I have always considered the daily comic strip Cathy to be the worst possible form of antifeminism. Bathing suits make you look fat, amirite? HA HA HA.

As a kid, I always read Cathy in the paper, giving it far more scrutiny than the other comics. It had a female main character, which made it more interesting to me (a female). And it didn't seem to hate its female main character the way a lot of the other comic strips at the time hated theirs (Beetle Bailey, Andy Capp, Hagar the Horrible, et al). I studied Cathy the way all kids study things that promise to give them a glimpse of what their lives will be like as an adult. And in the case of Cathy, the news was not promising. As a kid, I was pretty sure I would turn into Cathy one day. (Spoiler alert: I totally did.)

Even at eight or nine years old, I recognized and identified with Cathy's constant thrum of anxiety. Cathy is anxious about every aspect of her life: her body, her relationships, her job, her income. I had plenty of anxiety issues, myself. I found it mysterious that Cathy had just as much anxiety as I did, but about totally different subjects.

A recent article in The Believer has given me cause to pause and rethink Cathy, which is truly an amazing feat. There is some discussion about whether or not Cathy was meant as meta-humor, and I think a case can be made here. Sure, Cathy is dumb for obsessing over the size of her thighs (a policed social construct of the patriarchy). But is it her failure, or feminism's? And what of our own obsessions about body image?

The most dismal thing about Cathy is that she failed to envision a better life for herself, much less to try and implement it. In other words, Cathy is voluntarily trapped in a prison of society's devising. But then again, can't most of us say the same thing about ourselves?

Ack.

Image courtesy Flickr/Joe Shlabotnik