Agreeableness And The Garfield Gender Controversy of 2017
Let’s talk about Garfield.
He’s a cat. He likes lasagna and yet, he does not like Mondays. He is lazy.
We’re basically done talking about Garfield. Garfield is, intentionally, a simple character. Kids who are reading the funnies before going to school can understand Garfield, and they don’t really need to update their understanding as they grow older. The world may be complicated, but Garfield isn’t.
Garfield is also uncontroversial, and that’s what I really want to talk about. The basic observation of human life underlying Garfield is that cats like to sleep and eat, a trait also shared by many people. It would be hard to come up with an observation more agreeable to more people. Yes, the world can say, as one. Things that require effort are often less pleasant than metabolic functions.
The world of Garfield is a world designed from the ground up to avoid any chance of anyone getting mad. The basic comedy ranges from “Garfield, the character whose basic nature is laziness, is lazy” to “Odie, the character whose basic nature is unintelligence, is unintelligent”. It’s all relatable, committed to observations we’ve all agreed are true and also agreed are funny. Pizza is more fun than dieting. Work is obnoxious. Cats don’t usually smoke pipes.
And of course, at the center of it, is the safest and least controversial form of comedy of all: self deprecation. The strip’s sheer dedication to making fun of Jon Arbuckle for being a loser who no one respects would be kind of disturbing if Jon Arbuckle weren’t Jim Davis. Jon is, after all, a cartoonist. Did you know that? It’s technically in the strip!
In a way, it’s another layer of safety for the strip: if you don’t like something in the strip, well, Jim Davis has already warned you he’s a bit of a dork. If we shadows have offended, think but this is and all is mended: even my cat dunks on me.
But above all, the strip is uncontroversial by a process of elimination. If there is a topic that could cause controversy, Garfield simply doesn’t address it. The world of Garfield does not have war. Jon Arbuckle has a job, but poverty will never be a serious issue for him. In Davis’ own words “[P]eople go to comics to have a laugh and have a break… away from the real news and real world that are often depressing” (interview, The New Indian Express). Garfield avoids anything that people might want a break from, and conflict is arguably the most tiring thing of all.
And that’s fine, right? That is what people go to the comics for, isn’t it? That’s fine, right?
Right?
Yes, it is. I think. No, of course it is. No one wants to be surrounded in controversy all the time, certainly not me. But I do want to talk about that project of agreeableness, because I think it’s something that people treat as simple when in fact, it isn’t.
One thing it certainly isn’t is easy.
You can tell it’s not easy from the fact that Garfield, which is professionally dedicated to it, does not always succeed. On Veteran’s Day 2010, Garfield famously ran this strip.
Obviously, no political commentary was intended here. Jim Davis wrote the strip a full year before it ran and didn’t pay attention to where in the queue he’d placed it. It’s all a simple, yet hilarious, mistake.
But that’s kind of interesting, isn’t it? It’s interesting that it takes care to avoid controversy. It’s not enough to simply not intend to say something that will offend someone. You have to constantly think ahead about how you could be interpreted, about all the things you don’t intend, and then you have to write around them. Sure, maybe this particular mistake seems easy to avoid, but is it so easy to avoid every possible mistake, every possible way of slipping into saying something that could be upsetting?
If Jim Davis couldn’t keep it up, can anyone?
But that’s not the Garfield controversy I want to talk about. I want to jump 7 years into the future and talk about the Garfield gender controversy.
And yes. It’s very silly.
But first we’ll have to make a pit stop in 2014. Jim Davis is being interviewed by Mental Floss and he really puts his foot in it with this incredibly hot take:
“Dealing with eating and sleeping, being a cat, Garfield is very universal. By virtue of being a cat, really, he’s not really male or female or any particular race or nationality, young or old. It gives me a lot more latitude for the humor for the situations.”
Do you feel the winds of controversy rising? Are you scandalized yourself? No? Well, just wait.
In 2017, Virgil Texas, from the podcast Chapo Trap House posts that clip from that interview with the caption “FACT: Garfield has no gender. This. Is. Canon.” He then posts a picture showing that he has updated the Wikipedia for Garfield to change his gender to “None”.
Now, do you see it? The barbarians are at the gate. Western civilization as you know it is in danger and who will save it?
Well, a few people actually. Wikipedia quickly found itself in an edit war, with Garfield’s gender being swapped back and forth twenty times over two and half days. Users presented various strips as evidence. Other users argued with that evidence. People got angry.
Currently, Garfield’s gender is listed as male with four different citations to specific Garfield strips. The four separate citations remind me somewhat of Ozymandias’ statue, sneering at the bare and desolate sands.
So that’s the 2017 Garfield gender controversy. Is it stupid? Yeah, obviously. It’s a frustrating situation where no one involved was engaging honestly, and so it’s hard to know exactly what to make of any of it.
Whenever anyone asked him, Virgil Texas said that he was taking this totally seriously and genuinely wanted to respect Jim Davis’ intention to portray Garfield as non-binary. But, come on. Does anyone buy that? Virgil Texas’ whole thing is being a provocateur for the left. He likes doing things that make people on the right angry. And to be honest? Why not? The right certainly has more than its fair share of people who build whole identities around the people they think they make angry. Why shouldn’t the left have some too?
And as for the people who did get angry at this, were they just angry because Virgil Texas was playing fast and loose with the canon of Garfield? No, of course not. No one cares about the canon of Garfield. When the Heat street blog accused “cultural marxists” of “turning one of pop culture’s most iconic men into a gender fluid abomination”, you’d have to be willfully blind to not get what they’re really mad at. They’re mad at non-binary and trans people for existing. They find that abominable.
Okay, so the battle lines are set. On the one side, we’ve got people who know that’s not what the interview meant but think it’s funny to pretend it was. On the other hand, we have people who don’t think that’s funny at all because they don’t like non-binary people or representation of them. And yeah, probably there are a few people who just want everyone to stop being so silly and have the Wikipedia article say what’s obviously correct.
But there is a real disagreement here. People aren’t arguing about it directly, but there is a reason that they have such different reactions. Everyone knows Garfield isn’t non-binary. Everyone knows Garfield isn’t non-binary. The difference is, some of them think it would be okay, or even sorta nice, for Garfield to be non-binary, and some of them really don’t.
That’s a much more serious question. If you think that it would be, if anything, sorta cool for Garfield to be non-binary, you have a basically normal attitude towards being non-binary. If you think it would be a disaster, you clearly have a lot of weird moral ideas. And there are a lot of people like that.
People who dislike the idea of representing non-binary people always paint it as forced and political. It is natural for all characters to be either male or female, even talking cats, and anyone who violates that must be motivated by some political force. But of course, non-binary people are a part of the world. There’s no need for politics to want to represent them in art, or to simply want to explore outside of binary gender. Wanting to limit that exploration, however, is always political, and a far uglier politics than inclusion.
At the end of this, Jim Davis made a statement: Garfield is male. And sure, he is. But also, I can’t help finding that a little sad. In 2014, Davis got excited about the possibilities Garfield being a cat gave him. In 2017, he had to put out a statement making it clear he hadn’t explored them.
This is what Jim Davis discovered: exclusion isn’t enough. To actually use the freedom he saw, to make Garfield’s gender really be “none”, would violate rules of binary gender that a lot of people are very eager to defend. For once, Davis had to avoid controversy by inclusion; he had to include the rules of binary gender .
We think that we can be agreeable by not committing to anything. But we can’t. There are ideas that are so accepted, so seemingly natural, that not to commit to them is controversy. Being agreeable requires taking stands as well as not taking them. It comes with its own ideas, and sometimes, those ideas can be ugly.
Here’s the thing. Everyone knows Garfield isn’t non-binary. And we all know why that is too. Because Garfield is still a space of exclusion. Because Davis can’t exclude gender, he has to do something uglier: he has to exclude the people who are upset or hurt by gender. The thing itself is left, by default, but without the people it inherently excludes. Sure, transphobes are gone too, but that just makes Garfield a vision of freedom unused: a world where one could be trans or non-binary, but no one ever is, because that would be a statement.
This is the unpleasant side to being uncontroversial. An agreeable space is not the same as a welcoming space. Sometimes, to be welcoming, we have to stand up to people who would like to see others excluded and ignored. An agreeable space is great for people who already agreed on. But for the rest of us, a welcoming space is one that welcomes us, not one that ignores us.
To be clear, Garfield isn’t canceled. This isn’t about Garfield. I could not care less if Garfield introduces a trans character or if it never does. Both are fine. The point is not Garfield; it’s how Garfield got to this place. Garfield is the example I want to use to show you that being agreeable has its limits. It’s a good social skill to have. But it’s equally important to know when someone does not deserve being agreed with. We can enjoy taking a break from controversy, but it has to be a break. If we haven’t faced controversy, we won’t know how to create a space that’s welcoming rather than simply meek.