One thing that has received little attention is, given the need to create animal-girls as a recurring element in contemporary popular culture, why most of these animal-girls are cat-girls, and also why this need for the transformation of the human figure was felt in the first place. One characteristic that immediately stands out in the cat, and which greatly helps us understand this innovation, is the fact that the feline possesses large and expressive eyes just like the female characters conceived in anime style. The size of the eyes also suggests, at the same time, a certain docility and, paradoxically, a degree of cleverness and malice, a mixture that is seductive and interesting and which constitutes precisely the distinctive trait of the domestic cat figure and its appeal to us. Add to this the large, furry ears, which inspire in us the notion that the creature depicted was endowed with great perceptive capacity, auditorily speaking – and therefore, by contiguity, great intelligence –, as well as the bushy tail, which indicates exceptional balance and agility (in addition to, optionally, the whiskers below the snout or nose, which in nature are a kind of sensory organ), and we have the complete portrait of a figure that embodies an ideal of domesticated duplicity and sagacity. There is also an implicit comparison: women are like cats. But, in real life, are women really like cats? Patently not. The comparison only highlights certain characteristics, as perceived by a predominantly male audience, typical of women in general and transforms them into a pacified manifestation of an ideal, now free from its subjectively negative aspects but still feminine and appealing.
The narrative roles played by these characters also reveal a subordinate and attenuated character resulting from their psychological typification. Incapable of being protagonists of grand narratives, they instead become loyal supporting characters or protagonists of saccharine and benign stories.
The emergence of the cat-girl as a recurring type in popular culture is a "compulsory", programmatic and deliberate erasure of everything that women have to offer in terms of resistance to men. It is, so to speak, an alienation carried out on an ideal plane, rather than a material one – but it is also a double alienation insofar as it alienates not only the explicit object of alienation but also, potentially, the subject who participates in it. As a mere symbol, the figure of the cat-girl is entirely harmless; but when associated with the material conditions of alienation, which stem from a deeper substratum, it possibly transforms into an entity whose signification resides not in the characteristics of a harmless ludic-artistic type, but in the more subterranean elements of psychology that, unnoticed by those less exposed to be victimized by this process of alienation (although also present in them), become increasingly clear and manifest in those most at risk of succumbing to alienation.
It is no coincidence that cat-girls have the internet as their backdrop, an environment of maximum exposure of alienation. Sometimes appearing to be a lawless land, the internet becomes, for that very reason, an attraction for all impulses contrary to the law and, therefore, a place where alienation is openly displayed. But the reaction to alienation, which is present on the internet, does not overcome alienation itself – rather, it intensifies alienation insofar as it uncritically seeks to reproduce and redistribute the crisis (division) of alienation as an escape valve on the ideal plane for the tensions and contradictions of the material world. Thus, through the mechanisms of culture itself, alienated subjects, interacting with each other, accentuate their own alienation. The internet then appears as a promoter of alienation and creator of a true culture of alienation.
This culture, which, as can be seen in the deepest parts of the internet (e.g., 4chan), is marked by the infliction of alienation, is itself alienated insofar as promoting the alienation of another human being from their human characteristics is to alienate oneself from what is human in both the subject and the object participating in the alienation process. Undoubtedly, throughout this process of alienation taken to the extreme, in which, as in /pol/, the anger of the frustrated middle classes is unleashed to spread insults against women, foreign workers and minorities of various kinds, the distinctive notes of the deepest psychology, the pre-logical part of the soul that the ancients called impulsive or appetitive, become apparent. Indeed, the cat-girl is also an entity that was created precisely to appeal to this part of our soul, and probably most of the internet and internet culture revolve around satisfying the desires of this part of our soul, so that all (or almost all) of its cultural and artistic developments are subject to the volatility and instability of basic appetites, confused demands and unconscious or malformed desires. The manipulation of the obtuse masses through the voluptuousness of the sensations offered, the seed of fascism, accordingly emerges as a possibility and a prospect that has been warned against many times, but rarely taken seriously.
But the internet, precisely because it is this space for the manifestation and satisfaction of basic appetites, is also perhaps logically impenetrable and mutable in excess for it to be easily manipulated. It is impossible to know what will be successful tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, although one can have an idea, and we are often surprised by a new fashion or trend that seems inexplicable and to have arisen from nowhere. The reason for this is that, contrary to what ancient philosophers advocated, the internet is a device that seems to operate a peculiar psychological transformation in people: it subordinates the rational and naturally dominant part of the soul to its subaltern appetitive and impulsive parts insofar as it performs the function of recreation, relief and escapism. In the real world, therefore (especially in the world of work), reason and discipline; on the internet, permissiveness and indulgence. As long as things continue this way, the virtual world will never realize its full potential.
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