page_title: Catfight
section_title: Usage in popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Catfight / Usage in popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: Two women wrestling
context_page_description: Catfight is a term for an altercation between two females, often characterized as involving scratching, slapping, punching, biting, 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.
context_section_description: 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."
   “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?” 
  According to Evans, the Dynasty director's blueprint for the first fight was an “outrageous catfight” that 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 and 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. 
caption: In the post-war years, photographers began marketing pictures of women in catfights.
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