Like many who find themselves the subject of viral online scrutiny, Baby didn’t even know what Reddit was when an image of her appearing in a porn video became one of the platform’s most popular posts. Thankfully, the image was low quality and her face was blurred, but everything else — her long torso, gray-brown fur and four black paws — undoubtedly belonged to the five-year-old feline.
But who is Baby the cat? And why was she wandering in the background of a porn video?
The mystery began on a Saturday morning, at roughly 7 a.m., with a post titled, “This Cat’s Face Has Been Blurred in This Porn Video, Just in Case You Recognise It in Real Life.” Within hours, the post racked up nearly 100,000 upvotes, and Baby’s blurred face threw one of Reddit’s largest communities, r/funny, into conspiracy. The subreddit’s 39 million users clamored for someone to post a link to the source of the video, while some cracked jokes at Baby’s expense. “He’s in the Catness Protection Program,” one subscriber wrote. “He couldn’t sign the release form,” another quipped.
Meanwhile, because the subreddit’s moderators deleted any link to the video in an attempt to preserve the community’s staunch rules surrounding safe-for-work content, many redditors grew suspicious. “How has this post reached the front page and not one comment links to the sauce [source],” they clamored. “It’s probably fake,” others responded. “Pretty easy to just photoshop a blurred-face cat into a screenshot.”
A select few users remained undeterred, however, and took their investigation to the one place they might get some answers: r/TipOfMyPenis, a subreddit dedicated to “finding that video/set/guy/girl you saw one time, or posting a video/set/girl/guy to find their name/site/sauce/moar.”
“A cat with a blurred face is definitely not something that gets posted in [r/TipOfMyPenis] often,” says Jay, a pseudonymous 24-year-old and active user of the subreddit. “But it was getting heaps of upvotes anyway, so there must have been a lot of people who wanted to see the video with the blurred cat.”
With little hesitation, Jay entered his mind palace, dead set on tracking down the porn in question. “I was pretty sure I recognized the house first,” he tells me. “That brown door with the panels and the white patterned floor were familiar, so then I tried to remember if I associated that setting with any particular actors.” After over an hour of sifting through his browser history and whittling down the potential candidates, Jay finally got a hit. “It’s a Team Skeet video starring Summer Col and Allen Swift, titled ‘Here’s the Deal,’” he explains. “I had the house right, then I saw Summer in the black romper and then I just had to find the right timestamp.”
But it was already too late. Another r/TipOfMyPenis user beat him to it, leaving Jay with only the self-satisfaction of sharpening his pornographic memory. “There’s always another post,” he says, “but this one with the cat was definitely a challenge.”
As for Baby, she belongs to Swift. “Born in 2017, Baby was found in the bushes as an abandoned new-born somewhere in the sticks of Indiana,” explains Swift, who didn’t clarify why Baby required such anonymity in the video. “My friend was the one who rescued her, and after she moved to California, Baby became very comfortable and used to my large home — so she stays with me now.”
According to Swift, when Baby isn’t sunbathing, nibbling on catnip or sitting in boxes on Instagram, her favorite activity is following him around the house — hence the reason we’re here today. “She tries to hang out nonstop, so she follows me everywhere I go,” he explains. “And that becomes an issue, as I’m the male talent in all my scenes.”
In other words, nobody puts Baby in a corner. “When she wants love, she will force her head into your mouth for kisses. Even if you’re working on the computer, both hands must be petting her,” Swift tells me. “Similarly, every night since she came into my life, she’s either slept right next to me or on top of me.”
And so, while Baby might be one of the biggest viral stars on Reddit in recent memory, Swift says that her fame hasn’t made her any less of a “clinger.”
Quinn Myers
Quinn Myers is a staff writer at MEL. He reports on internet culture, technology, health, masculinity and the communities that flourish within.
