How AI cat memes saved me from toxic gym bro culture

The Christmas before last a family member asked me to speak to their son. He’d become obsessed with going to the gym and getting a six pack. Why? Because that’s how you get girls, he told me. He was 11.

Sharing a room with him that year, I saw first-hand how innocent Minecraft videos on YouTube auto-played straight into toxic fitness content targeting young men. The videos often featured over-animated heaps of muscle promising viewers everything from the body of their dreams to becoming a fully-fledged “alpha male”, in Andrew Tate’s reprehensible extreme.

The fact that viewers so young are being conveyor-belted into this sort of content is one of the factors behind the rising crisis around self-image and unrealistic body standards. Over half of British men show signs of body dysmorphia, a recent report found, while another study estimated that use of image and performance-enhancing drugs in the UK has increased tenfold over the last ten years. Among adolescent and young adults, greater social media usage has, in particular, been associated with symptoms of muscle dysmorphia. But what can be done? I recently came across something that might be providing an unlikely solution (at least for me): a specific brand of AI cat memes.

The format runs something this: an AI-generated image of an anthropomorphised cat undergoes some sort of emotional trauma that is resolved through hitting the gym and becoming a hyper-muscular giga-cat, invariably told – slideshow-style – to a cat-voiced cover of Sia’s “Unstoppable” (fittingly titled “Unstopmeomeo”). A clear satire on the pervasiveness of gym bro content, these videos accrue well over a million likes on Instagram and receive comments like “Meowtivation”, “The moral of the story is: meow meow”, or, simply, “Meow meow”.

A friend and I became absolutely obsessed with the videos, captivated by their peculiar blend of kitty-chen sink drama, cute accelerationism and gym bro discourse. In stark contrast to the content my 11-year old cousin was consuming, these videos appeared to revel in their fantasy, their AI-generated cat-donises clearly signposting unrealistic body standards and poking fun at the uber-masculine gym bro content on which they are based. One video even portrays our loveable cat hero squaring up with a shark underwater to protect its litter of kittens.

One of the ways that ‘gym bro discourse’ harms young men is by promoting a vicious brand of toxic masculinity that advocates “physical superiority to adhere to internalised patriarchal standards,” Martyn Ewoma writes. When I was hospitalised for anorexia at 14, compulsive exercise was a huge component, and it took me the best part of a decade to even step inside a gym. When I did, it was immensely anxiety-inducing. The environment was full of mirrors that forced me to scrutinise my body, while grunting, muscular men provoked a socially-programmed sense of inferiority within me. In the same way that social media had told young men that they had to be muscular to be manly, it told me that I wasn’t because I wasn’t.

And it’s not just me. I have seen first-hand how body dysmorphia is rife among gym-goers. Many of my male friends go to the gym, and conversation often trails off into complaints about our size or shape. However, unlike fitness content creators who push the idea that you can never be big enough, among our friends, these insecurities were inevitably met with words of affirmation and, most importantly, reason by the rest of the group. These interactions allowed me to experience an alternative ‘gym bro’ culture, one based on mutual acknowledgement of our insecurities and a hyper-awareness of the dangers of social media. It is this same experience that seemed to be captured in the AI cat memes we’d shared between us.

“For those who ‘get’ a meme, there is a pleasure of being recognised, of being a part of an in-group,” explains Dr Akane Kanai, a lecturer at Monash University, Australia who specialises in practices of self-representation online. This notion of ‘getting’ a meme takes the form of ‘spectatorial girlfriendship’, a term Dr Kanai coined to capture how understanding digital content rests on shared social experiences. “In girlfriend culture, relatable content is about reassuring that you and your audience are ‘normal,’” she says. “It’s often based on revealing some kind of small, specific but generic, failure to achieve a middle-class feminine norm, communicated through self-deprecating humour – for example, failing to wake up at 5am to do yoga.”

This concept captures in an inverted sense how those cat memes resonated with me and my pals’ inability to conform to the hyper-masculine norms we were exposed to online. “I love the idea of using spectatorial girlfriendship as a way of re-signifying what is toxic and extreme. When you unexpectedly use its playfulness to make fun of a masculine obsession with living up to a harmful body norm, it takes it in a whole new direction,” Dr Kanai agrees. “I think there’s a lot to be said for how cuteness can subvert, and also make otherwise thorny and overwhelming issues easier to broach.”

In many ways, Dr Kanai struck the nail on the head here. Most guys who work out are painfully aware of the standard ‘gym bro’ narrative – a topless guy with nigh-on impossible body places exaggerated importance on physical appearance – so to see this format satirised in such a silly way helped open up a conversation with my friends and, through their infectious shareability, add a sense of community to our failure to conform to these unrealistic standards. In this way, through their satire of harmful body norms, these unassuming AI cat memes can be helpful in re-conceptualising what we see as normal to begin with.

As the stats around male body dysmorphia and research from the UK Anti-Doping agency piles up, the harms of hyper-masculine ‘gym bro’ content is becoming increasingly clear. Moving beyond these representations, we need content that clearly signposts their fantasy, that privileges the insecurities at their core, and that satirises the hubris within it all. We need… AI cat memes. Meow.