Modern Problems

I suppose it's one of those issues that we have to argue about now that it's 2017.

Garfield’s a boy … right? How a cartoon cat’s gender identity launched a Wikipedia war.

Garfield is lazy; Garfield is a cat; Garfield likes lasagna.

Is there really much more to say about Garfield? The character is not complicated. Since the comic debuted in 1978, Garfield’s core qualities have shifted less than the mostly immobile cat himself.

But this is 2017 — a time of Internet wars, social conundrums and claims to competing evidence about Garfield’s gender identity.

Wikipedia had to put Garfield’s page on lockdown last week after a 60-hour editing war in which the character’s listed gender vacillated back and forth indeterminately like a cartoon version of Schrödinger’s cat: male one minute; not the next.

“He may have been a boy in 1981, but he’s not now,” one editor argued.

The debate has spilled into the broader Internet, where a Heat Street writer complained of “cultural marxists” bent on “turning one of pop culture’s most iconic men into a gender fluid abomination.”~snip~