Isn’t it wonderful how much everyone cares about female genital mutilation (FGM)? Admittedly, only when women are talking about anything other than FGM, but I suppose it’s a start. Talk about wolf-whistling, for example, and someone will pop up to remind you that this is a very minor concern compared with the possibility of clitoridectomy. Talk about armpit shaving and get ready to be told that, come on, there are real problems out there.

Actually talk about FGM, however – the real, horrifying practice of mutilating young girls – and watch the tumbleweed roll. People do it, it’s unequivocally bad. I’m against it. Next!

FGM is what I call a “dying cat” issue, in honour of Tory election strategist Lynton Crosby’s “dead cat” strategy. As described in Dan Hodges’s new book, One Minute to Ten, “throwing a dead cat on the table” is what Crosby recommends doing when you’re losing an argument. Everyone stops to behold the ex-cat and forgets about the original argument.

Crosby had great success with the strategy when Ed Miliband came out with a popular and plausible idea to crack down on non-doms during the election campaign. The Tories didn’t have an easy rebuttal. So out came the dead cat, in the form of a “gaffe” by defence secretary Michael Fallon, who said that the British public would never trust Ed Miliband because he had stabbed his brother in the back. In the rush to condemn Fallon, Labour completely forgot it was supposed to be talking about non-doms.

Now, a dying cat is not the same as a dead cat. The dead cat is confected flam, whereas the dying cat is an issue that merits our attention. But it’s one that struggles to get noticed on its own. The more serious the issue, the better it works – because in progressive circles, there is nothing more offensive than telling an opponent, “I don’t think you really care about the mutilation of young girls, actually.” Imagine the dowager duchess-like response; the pained sadness that you could impugn their faultless motives.

This tactic is a turbo-charged version of “whataboutery” – the demand that in order to condemn one bad thing, you must at the same time demonstrate evidence that you have condemned all other related bad things to the exact same degree. But it’s more than that. There are now whole subjects that only get widespread attention as a rhetorical shield. Go on, tell me: when was the last time anyone raised the suffering of the Iraqi people with you except as a way to have a go at Tony Blair?

Across social media, dying cats abound. There are legions of Twitterers whose sole contribution to abortion rights activism is piously demanding that the phrase “pregnant women” is replaced with “pregnant people”. The Paris attacks provided an opportunity for several moribund moggies to be thrown on the table of public discourse. “Why doesn’t anyone care about the bombing in Beirut?” wondered people whose previous thoughts on Beirut had been confined to the band. (The journalist Jamiles Lartey called these people “tragedy hipsters”, as in “Bro – I care about suffering and death that you’ve never even heard of.”) Mysteriously, the later massacre in Mali, the ongoing conflict in the Central African Republic, and Tuesday’s explosion on a bus in Tunisia did not rouse the Beirutists to fire up the Hashtagmobile.

The biggest dying cat of all is International Men’s Day, which seems only to exist so people can have arguments about how feminists aren’t paying enough attention to it. State the simple fact that men’s issues exist – suicide rates, mental health, paternity leave, violent masculinity, the intense hatred some people feel for gay men’s sexuality – and you’re on a one-way train to Nobodycaresville. But imply that there is an International Feminist Conspiracy to ban all discussions of these subjects, and hey presto! You’ve got yourself a forum full of men in fedoras nodding in fervent agreement.

The dying cat strategy is not just irritating; it is actively harmful. It bogs down every potential advance, and poisons any attempt at solidarity. In his thought-provoking essay The Toxoplasma of Rage, the American blogger Scott Alexander asked why Peta gets more attention than more sensible animal charities, and why Rolling Stone’s flimsy patchily sourced account of an alleged rape on a college campus became a cause celebre rather than the many, many cast-iron cases that exist.

He also asked why riots over racist police brutality in the US took as their rallying call the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, rather than the choking of Eric Garner. Brown was shot after stealing cigarillos from a corner shop and following an altercation that involved a struggle over the police officer’s gun. By contrast, Eric Garner, an asthmatic, died after his face was pushed into the pavement by a police officer for about 15 seconds, with the entire incident captured on video. Yet Garner’s death – where the evidence was much more clear cut – only received widespread attention after the Ferguson controversy erupted.

“I propose that the Michael Brown case went viral – rather than the Eric Garner case or any of the hundreds of others – because it was controversial,” wrote Alexander. “A bunch of people said it was an outrage. A bunch of other people said Brown totally started it, and the officer involved was a victim of a liberal media that was hungry to paint his desperate self-defence as racist, and so the people calling it an outrage were themselves an outrage.”

In other words, the debate turned into a vivid, polarising row, crowding out discussion of the practical measures, such as police wearing body cameras, that could prevent such an incident happening again. A dying cat had been thrown on to the table. Alexander concluded – and I agree – that such tactics mean “everyone is irresistibly incentivised to ignore the things that unite us, in favour of forever picking at the things that divide us in exactly the way that is most likely to make them more divisive”. Controversy spreads like a virus, but real change happens when activists carefully nurture a cause.

We prove our commitment to fighting important issues such as FGM, or high male suicide rates, by treating them with respect, and refusing to use them as rhetorical devices when other discussions are happening. Yes, it means giving up the sugar rush of controversy; but instead, we might get progress.