Kermit the Frog has announced that, despite yesterday’s rumors, a pig puppet named Denise is actually not his new girlfriend.
Unfortunately, his announcement didn’t come soon enough — people had already started freaking out about how sick and anti-feminist it was that Denise was thinner and younger than his ex Miss Piggy.
“Well, apparently Kermit can’t get enough of women like his ex – as long as they’re younger and thinner than her and less successful than him (but still work at ABC, so he can rub her in Miss Piggy’s face),” Megan Carpentier, the U.S. opinion editor for The Guardian, wrote in a piece titled “Kermit the Frog’s New Girlfriend Is Younger, Thinner — and Blander.”
Carpentier explained that while “Miss Piggy is a beloved feminist icon,” Denise is a representation of the “audience of the 1980s,” one “filled with fear of powerful women” who “understand and supported men’s urge to date their exes’ younger, dumber Plasticine lookalikes.”
And it wasn’t just Carpentier. People on Twitter were also pretty furious. For example:
https://twitter.com/TabDeGeneres/status/638906075165630464
and
https://twitter.com/scamille_crosby/status/638819999361036288
and
On the real,this is the difference between PBS and major networks. Miss Piggy could be a pig of Size, in Hollywood, Denise the pig is skinny
— ProfB (@AntheaButler) September 1, 2015
and even this comment: “F***ing skinny slurry where. Die Denise die!”
It’s not clear whether some of this rage has subsided now that the fictional frog has clarified that “no one woman — pig or otherwise” is his “official ‘new girlfriend’” and that he and Denise “are simply close friends.” Perhaps it hasn’t. After all, this is a very, very serious problem.