Catfight

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 shirt-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. 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 argue that in its purest form, the word refers to two women, one blonde and the other a brunette, fighting each other. However, the term is not exclusively used to indicate a fight between women, and many formal definitions do not invoke gender.
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.
Catfights are often described as titillating for heterosexual men. 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.
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.
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. 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. Wanting the ratings to go even higher, Douglas S. Cramer, Dynasty's 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."
The Dynasty director's blueprint for the first fight was, according to Evans, an "outrageous catfight" 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%.
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 Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle as an example.
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.
Prior to that encounter, Smythe fights actress Sally Kemp in the role of an Amazon housemistress named Treece. The confrontation was interrupted by Treece's children who were clearly distraught at the site of their mother fighting another woman.
Catfight is also the collective term for a fetish-like inclination, which has its erotic attraction in the competitive as well as the playful test of strength between women. This inclination is primarily voyeuristic and includes among other sports wrestling, arm wrestling and boxing.
The porn industry portrays intimate wrestling matches which sometimes lead to orgasmic entanglements and open tribadism. In some cases, sexual arousal and climax are the mutual goals of a female wrestling match. The main rule of such a "sex fight" is usually: Whoever has an orgasm first, loses. Nonetheless, multiple orgasms are possible. Therefore, tribadic scenes and erotic fights cannot always be distinguished. So-called sexfights, pussyfights or tribfights form separate categories among commercially produced videos.
From the 1990s to the mid-2000s, Napali Video and California Wildcats were groundbreaking for the production and publication of such videos in the Anglo-American region. Depending on the film, the depicted focus was on different types of duels, including wrestling, boxing, sexfighting or titfighting, the aggressive squeezing or rubbing of the breasts. However, clearly lesbian acts were almost always part of the scenes presented. Actresses for Napali Video and California Wildcats included Puma Swede, Vanessa Blue, Kim Chambers, Penny Flame and Jessica Jaymes. In particular, Tanya Danielle and Devon Michaels repeatedly appeared together in multiple videos, which gave the impression of an actual rivalry and both actresses became icons of the scene.
Eventually, the first European productions appeared around the same time. The Austrian production company Danube Women Wrestling (DWW), which had previously primarily specialized in erotic wrestling matches, also marketed sexfighting videos until 2011 under the "Tribgirls" label. The wrestlers were initially mainly of Hungarian and later Czech nationality. The production of videos was continued from 2012 on by Fighting-Dolls.com and Trib-Dolls.com from Brno, who followed in the footsteps of DWW and Tribgirls. However, some of the women switched to the Foxy Combat studio, which is operated by former DWW wrestler Hana Klima since 2007 and which has also been producing videos of erotic wrestling and sexfighting ever since. Foxy Combat is also based in Brno, which means that two competing production companies are based in the second largest city in the Czech Republic. Meanwhile, commercially produced videos of lesbian sexfights are no longer uncommon and come from the United States as well as Europe and East Asia.