Catfight (also girl fight) is a term for an altercation between two women, often characterized as involving scratching, shoving, slapping, choking, punching, kicking, wrestling, biting, spitting, hair-pulling, and clothing-shredding. It can also be used to describe women insulting each other verbally or engaged in an intense competition for men, power, or occupational success.James, Caryn (March 2, 2016) "Why We Just Love a Good Catfight" The Wall Street Journal (pp. A11–A12 The catfight has been a staple of American news media and popular culture since the 1940s, and use of the term is often considered derogatory or belittling. Some observers (e.g., Susan J. Douglas) argue that in its purest form, the word refers to two women, one blonde and the other a brunette (blonde versus brunette rivalry), fighting each other.Douglas, Susan J. (1994). Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With the Mass Media. New York: Times Books. pp. 221. However, the term is not exclusively used to indicate a fight between women, and many formal definitions do not invoke gender.Farlex Free Online Dictionary
Etymology The term catfight was recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as the title and subject of an 1824 mock heroic poem by Ebenezer Mack. In the United States, it was first recorded as being used to describe a fight between women in an 1854 book written by Benjamin G. Ferris who wrote about Mormon women fighting over their shared husband. Their houses, according to Ferris, were designed to keep women "as much as possible, apart, and prevent those terrible catfights which sometimes occur, with all the accompaniments of billingsgate [vulgar and coarse language], torn caps, and broken broomsticks." The word cat was originally a contemptuous term for either sex, but eventually came to refer to a woman considered loose or sexually promiscuous, or one regarded as spiteful, backbiting, and malicious.
Responses Male Women fighting each other, particularly over a man, is a long-held heterosexual male fantasy. Portrayals of catfights in cartoons, movies and advertising often display participants as attractive, with "supermodel physiques", dishevelled and missing articles of clothing, and catfights are often described by media aimed primarily at men as sexy.
Female Women have often been critical of the term catfight, particularly when it is used in ways that may seem to inappropriately sexualize, neutralize, or trivialize disagreements among women on serious topics.
Feminist historians say use of the term catfight to label female opponents goes back to 1940, when American newspapers characterized as a catfight a dispute between Clare Boothe Luce and journalist Dorothy Thompson over which candidate to support in the 1940 presidential campaign. One newspaper called it "a confrontation between two blonde Valkryies", and journalist Walter Winchell, upon running into Luce and Thompson at a nightclub, reportedly urged them not to fight, saying, "Ladies, ladies, remember there are gentlemen present."
In the 1970s, the American news media began to use the term catfight to describe women's disagreements about issues related to women's rights, such as the Equal Rights Amendment.
A University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business survey found that both female and male observers judged female vs. female conflicts to have more negative impacts on the workplace environment than conflicts that involved men."Catfight? Workplace Conflicts Between Women Get Bad Rap".
Usage in popular culture
Catfights first began appearing in American popular culture in the 1950s when postwar pioneers of pornography such as Irving Klaw produced film clips of women engaged in catfighting and wrestling. Klaw used many models and actresses in his works, including Bettie Page.Yeager, Bunny. Betty Page Confidential (1994) New York: St. Martin's Press. Pages 26-29. The popularity of watching women fight increased in the postwar years and eventually moved into the mainstream of society. In the 1960s, catfights became popular in B movies such as Russ Meyer's Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and the 1969 animated Boris Karloff movie Mad Monster Party?. In the 1970s and 1980s, catfights began to make appearances in women in prison films, in roller derby, and in nighttime soap operas such as Dallas and Dynasty.
Dynasty starred John Forsythe as an oil tycoon and patriarch of a wealthy family that lived in Denver. The show co-starred blonde Linda Evans and brunette Joan Collins. The two women had a number of fights, both verbal and physical, during the show's 9-year run on ABC. Designed to compete with Dallas, a highly popular evening drama on CBS, Dynasty's first-year ratings were unremarkable. For the second season, the producers introduced the dark-haired Collins as a foil to the blonde Evans and hoped that her "bitchy persona" would enhance the show's ratings, which it did.Collins, Joan (1999) Second Act: An Autobiography. New York: St. Martin's Press, pages 192-193 Wanting the ratings to go even higher, Douglas S. Cramer, Dynasty producer suggested that the two women have a "knockdown, drag out fight". Cramer, in a 2008 interview, claimed that everybody loved the catfights except Joan Collins because "Linda was so much stronger than she was." In a 2023 interview, Collins confirmed that she hated the catfights because "... they were so stupid."
Dynasty upped the ante ... On one side was the blonde stay at home Krystal Carrington ... in the other corner was the most delicious bitch ever seen on television, the dark haired, scheming, career vixen, Alexis Carrington Colby ... Krystal just wanted to make her husband happy; Alexis wanted to control the world. How could you not love a catfight between these two?Douglas, Susan J. (1994) Where the Girls Are: Growing Up Female With The Mass Media. New York: Random House, pages 241-242
The Dynasty director's blueprint for the first fight was, according to Evans, an "outrageous catfight"Evans, Linda (2011) Recipes for Life: My Memories. New York: Vanguard Press, page 74. she had almost a decade earlier with Stefanie Powers in the detective series McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver. The fight occurs during an argument they are having in Evans' apartment when Powers, on her way out, grabs a bottle of seltzer water and sprays down Evans. Before she reaches the door, Evans grabs Powers and the two women engage in spirited catfight, wrecking the apartment in the process. During the fight, Powers' blouse is partially torn off, exposing her black bra, a surprising level of undress for network television in that era. Evans eventually overpowers her brunette opponent and is holding her head down in a water-filled aquarium when Weaver walks in, which ends the fight.
Catfights, both real and staged, are a staple of daytime television talk shows and reality television shows such as The Jerry Springer Show, The Bachelor, For Love or Money, and The Real Housewives series, where women are frequently presented as being in continual competition with each other for love and professional success. In 2009, ABC-TV promoted The Bachelor with the voiceover narration "Let the catfights begin", and reality television shows have frequently overlaid sound effects of hissing cats onto scenes featuring women arguing or competing with each other.
In 2002, an SABMiller television commercial called "Catfight" featured two young beautiful women drinking a beer in an outside cafe. Their polite conversation quickly turned into an argument about whether Miller Lite beer's best aspect was its taste or the fact that it was less filling than other beers. The argument led to a fight where one of the girls knocked the other into an adjacent pool. The women quickly lost most of their clothes and continued the fight clad in only in their underwear. Before the fight came to a conclusion, the scene faded out and the viewers saw that it was a fantasy dreamed up by two men in a bar discussing what would make a great commercial. The scene would later cut to the girls, stripped down to their underwear, wrestling in a mud pit. An "uncensored" version was also filmed that included an alternate ending where the mud-covered girls kiss. Predictably, one critic noted, the fight was between a blonde and a brunette. The campaign generated considerable controversy, but sales of Miller Lite subsequently declined by 3%.
More than any other aspect of the catfight in today's culture, the catfight's sexually arousing potential is exploited for numerous purposes. The phenomenon of catfighting as erotic entertainment for straight men is widely documented throughout the Internet, television, film, and even pornography. On numerous websites ... web users are overwhelmingly presented with catfighting as highly sexual, even pornographic. So many websites act as sources of catfights as pornography that it would be hard to believe the catfight can be interpreted in any other way. Venturing onto ... these pages will lead a viewer to an abundance of videos and images of objectified women fighting with each other by pulling hair, scratching, and even biting each other. The interpretation of the catfight as sexy and gratifying for men is hardly uncommon on the Internet.—Rachel Reinke: "Catfight: A Feminist Analysis"
A 2019 article in The New York Times titled "Me-OW! It's the End of the Catfight", pointed how the term has been slowly falling out of favor in light of the #MeToo movement, "calling any conflict between women a catfight is understood to be sexist, and enthusiasm has generally dampened for women fighting". Notwithstanding, the author pointed out, remnants remained and cited the tabloid-created feud between Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex as an example.
In the film and television industry The entertainment industry has produced many works that include catfights. Below is a selection of notable films and television episodes, many of them featuring major movie stars engaged in fighting. OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies. Academy Award winning director Michel Hazanavicius directed this 2007 French spy spoof that featured a clothes shredding catfight between Bérénice Bejo and Aure Atika. Instead of breaking up the fight, Jean Dujardin, in the role of OSS Agent 117, watches with glee as the two barefoot brunettes battle each other. 2 Days in the Valley. Teri Hatcher and Charlize Theron star in what the Los Angeles Times referred to as the "spandex cat fight of the year".Matthews, Jack (September 27, 1996) "Comedy Vies With Violence in Valley" Los Angeles Times, page 14 According to director John Herzfeld the two women, who refused to use stunt doubles, were hitting each other so hard that at one point the filming was stopped after Hatcher connected to Theron's chin so that the resulting bruise could be hidden by make-up.Rea, Steven (September 29, 1996) "2 women fighting? He knew it would be good" The Philadelphia Inquirer, page F7 After filming, when Hatcher was asked about the "catfight", she responded "It was actually a brawl—not a catfight because technically a 'catfight' is hair pulling and there was none of that."Larsen, Dave (September 27, 1996, "2 Days in the Valley a hit with cast" The Atlanta Constitution, page P8 Back from Eternity. A 1956 remake of Five Came Back starring Phyllis Kirk and Anita Ekberg. Jealous over her apparent attraction to a pilot played by Keith Andes, Kirk starts a fight with Ekberg in a stream while washing clothes. Shooting the scene on a sound set required the creation of a stream with running water and foam rubber rocks to avoid injury to Kirk and Ekberg.
Barfly. Faye Dunaway has a kicking, hair-pulling battle with Alice Krige in a Los Angeles bar, described by the Washington Post review of the movie as a "cat fight on skid row ... (that is) as preposterous as the script as a whole."