Was This a Real Question, or is it just Internalized Misogyny?

Here's the breakdown on what happened in this post

Yesterday in the Burned Haystack® community we were making fun of this man’s reaction to a woman’s dating app profile:

I only approved the post for comedy, and we did have tons of fun mocking it because Eric’s statement is so ridiculous. Rhetorically, it reveals a few things:

1. Eric can write a non sequitur.

2. Eric believes that cat ownership is somehow related to attractiveness.

3. Eric believes it’s within his scope of authority to comment upon this (made up) relationship between cat ownership and attractiveness.

All of these factors are immediate block-to-burn metrics in BH method, so this post was truly just meant for entertainment and humor.

But then when I woke up this morning there were moderation alerts on this woman’s comment:

Let’s analyze this and discuss why it’s such a glaring example of internalized misogyny. If you want to learn more about what internalized misogyny is, please see this article.

Here are the reasons this woman’s comment qualifies:

• Instead of placing the responsibility for bad behavior where it belongs, with the man behaving badly, she blames the woman who is the target of his bad behavior.

• It suggests that women should manage men’s emotions even in advance of meeting them, and that this is the key to not suffering abuse. This, too, is an egregious misplacement of responsibility.

• It accuses the woman who received this comment of being “mad”—the dreaded Angry Woman. The woman who shared this comment wasn’t mad at all; she was cracking up with the rest of us.

From a purely logical perspective, the critiquing woman’s argument—that “leading with cats” is “inviting thoughts and feedback” [negative in this case] is an odd critique:

All information contained in a dating app profile is inviting thoughts and feedback; that’s literally the point. It would be different if the woman in the profile had said, “I LOVE CATS THEY’RE BETTER THAN ALL MEN!” or even “Cat Ladies Rule, and Donald Trump is the devil!”

But what we’re actually looking at here is a completely neutral sentence: “I have 3 cats.”

If the profile had said, “I have 3 children,” or “I have a yellow car,” or “I live in the Midwest,” would anyone have said, “Why would you lead with that, you’re inviting thoughts!”

Of course not. The reason for that question is that (at least in contemporary America) cats have become “coded” for “Single, independent, progressive woman,” which is the most threatening thing to conservative men (and also hilarious, if you think about it). The whole construct has generated an amazing amount of social media humor (article continues after memes):

Here’s the takeaway: Is it odd that a lot of angry and insane men have mapped their fears and insecurities onto a small furry mammal? Yes, it’s super odd. However, it’s also CLEAR, which makes it an excellent B2B metric for ruling out misogynistic men and calling out internalized misogyny coming from women (the particular effect we’re seeing here is a woman serving as the mouthpiece of the patriarchy—this is probably subconscious on her part).

In conclusion: Cats rule, and Fuck the Patriarchy. 😻🔥