The Christmas before last a member of the family asked me to talk to their son. He’d turn into obsessive about going to the gym and getting a six pack. Why? Because that’s the way you get girls, he told me. He was 11.

Sharing a room with him that 12 months, 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 every little thing from the body of their dreams to becoming a fully-fledged “alpha male”, in Andrew Tate’s reprehensible extreme.

The indisputable fact that viewers so young are being conveyor-belted into this type of content is certainly one of the aspects 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 within the UK has increased tenfold during the last ten years. Amongst adolescent and young adults, greater social media usage has, particularly, been associated with symptoms of muscle dysmorphia. But what may be done? I recently got here across something that is likely to be providing an unlikely solution (no less than for me): a particular brand of AI cat memes.

The format runs something this: an AI-generated image of an anthropomorphised cat undergoes some type of emotional trauma that’s 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 transparent satire on the pervasiveness of gym bro content, these videos accrue well over one 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 obsessive about the videos, captivated by their peculiar mix 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 experience their fantasy, their AI-generated cat-donises clearly signposting unrealistic body standards and poking fun on the uber-masculine gym bro content on which they’re based. One video even portrays our loveable cat hero squaring up with a shark underwater to guard its litter of kittens.

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

And it’s not only me. I even have seen first-hand how body dysmorphia is rife amongst gym-goers. A lot of my male friends go to the gym, and conversation often trails off into complaints about our size or shape. Nonetheless, unlike fitness content creators who push the thought which you can never be sufficiently big, amongst our friends, these insecurities were inevitably met with words of affirmation and, most significantly, reason by the remainder of the group. These interactions allowed me to experience an alternate ‘gym bro’ culture, one based on mutual acknowledgement of our insecurities and a hyper-awareness of the risks of social media. It is that this same experience that gave the impression to be captured within the AI cat memes we’d shared between us.

“For many who ‘get’ a meme, there may be a pleasure of being recognised, of being an element 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 shape 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 simply and your audience are ‘normal,’” she says. “It’s often based on revealing some type of small, specific but generic, failure to realize a middle-class feminine norm, communicated through self-deprecating humour – for instance, failing to get up at 5am to do yoga.”

This idea captures in an inverted sense how those cat memes resonated with me and my pals’ inability to evolve to the hyper-masculine norms we were exposed to online. “I like the thought of using spectatorial girlfriendship as a way of re-signifying what’s toxic and extreme. Once you unexpectedly use its playfulness to make fun of a masculine obsession with living as much as a harmful body norm, it takes it in a complete latest direction,” Dr Kanai agrees. “I feel there’s so much to be said for the way cuteness can subvert, and in addition make otherwise thorny and overwhelming issues easier to broach.”

In some ways, Dr Kanai struck the nail on the pinnacle here. Most guys who work out are painfully aware of the usual ‘gym bro’ narrative – a topless guy with nigh-on unimaginable 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 way of community to our failure to evolve to those unrealistic standards. In this manner, through their satire of harmful body norms, these unassuming AI cat memes may be helpful in re-conceptualising what we see as normal to start with.

Because 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 want content that clearly signposts their fantasy, that privileges the insecurities at their core, and that satirises the hubris inside all of it. We’d like… AI cat memes. Meow.