Rachel P. asks: “Why have videos of ‘cat fights’ become so popular on the Internet?”
Ask Red says: At first I thought you were referring to clips from “America’s Funniest Animals” until I conducted a little research. Mee-ow. According to one report, there are more than 265,000 clips on YouTube of chicks duking it out. Some are staged while others look like real cage matches. While I myself abhor fighting (UFC is garbage I’d never watch), the allure of a cat fight is twofold: voyeurism and comedy. Regarding the former, when females square off a guy starts thinking there’s a chance that clothing will be torn and skin revealed. On the latter, some of the fist-tossing techniques girls employ make them look like pigeons with broken wings. This chick-on-chick tussling has long been popular in some form or another. Way back in the peace and love days of the 1960s Roller Derby was standard after-church TV fare. One of the most watched episodes of “Dynasty” in the 1980s was when Linda Evans and Joan Collins clawed away at each other in a pond. That was also the decade that saw women mud wrestling reach new heights. Chick boxing came of age in the 1990s and now we have these freelancers exchanging knuckles on YouTube. Heck, J-Woww defended Snookie’s honor on “Jersey Shore” last week by dotting the eyes of someone who dissed her. I can’t explain in full the popularity of this recent phenomenon but, considering there are a quarter million videos out there featuring it, I’ve got a lot of research ahead of me. Purrrrr.
Night Shift says: Like 90 percent of everything it’s about sex. A lot of guys like to imagine that the girls are fighting over him or will fall in a sweaty heap on the floor and start making out. They also figure that a chick who will go toe-to-toe with another girl in public will also be no dead fish in the sack. In a guy’s adrenalin-steeped eyes even an average looking girl can become a knock-out.
BarWench says: Websites like YouTube survive off the thousands of talentless people seeking instant celebrity through user-uploaded videos. Look at Tay Zonday (Chocolate Rain), Kimbo Slice, that guy who sobbingly defended Britney Spears in front of a webcam under his bed sheets -- all these people achieved overnight fame for exploiting the normal, everyday oddities of regular people. And what is more normal and everyday than caddy bitches wanting to slap each other's spray tan off? It's a simple formula the websurfing community has created: show people what happens outside their comfy living rooms so they don't have to get off the couch and miss the latest reality show (which coincidently is also broadcasting the mundane lives of others). Why go uptown searching the bars for cat fights when the Internet provides instant gratification?