This week Cathy Guisewite, creator of the Cathy comic strip, announced she's ending the strip after 34 years. Thirty four long, lonnnnnnnng years.Hallelujah. At last our long national nightmare is almost over.
I've never understood the appeal of the Cathy strip. I know, I'm not the intended audience and I'm not supposed to get it. But I don't understand why women like it. It's packed full of the most tired and stale female cliches there are: Cathy thinks she's fat, she can't find a man (early on anyway), she has a closet full of clothes but nothing to wear, she can't find a bathing suit that fits, and on and on.
Maybe women look at Cathy and think, "Oh, that's so true! She's just like me." I would think they'd just find it insulting.
If you don't think Cathy is cliched and insulting to women, then imagine if a man wrote the strip. He'd have been tarred and feathered or worse before the end of the strip's first week. But because a woman writes it, I guess that makes using cliches that were old in the 1940s OK.
Yeah, I'm a woman and I don't like Cathy. I don't understand it either.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the insight, Belle Dee. It makes me wonder: If men hate "Cathy," and women don't like it either, then who's been reading it all these years?
ReplyDelete