Memeable Women

by Bella Garcia

On the first day, UCLA made the Internet. On the second, humans — bare and unbecoming — made memes. Humor has always been a part of the human experience. The oldest joke ever recorded was found amongst the Sumerians in 1900 BCE:

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap. It seems, too, that women have always been a part of comedy, for better or worse. Centuries later, I started a meme page in middle school to prove to all the snot-nosed, AXE-wearing thirteen-year-old boys that women are funny. It didn’t take too long for me to realize that the patriarchy isn’t a meritocracy.

Memes are an evolved behavior. Across numerous cultures and societies, we’ve communicated gags that can turn obsolete or iconic in seconds. In the Darwinian sense, memes are a replicating unit — a concept, an idea in the form of a word, gesture, or riff. They are subject to an evolutionary process in which we observe, imitate, and replicate one another’s behaviors on the basis of popularity, reputation, or expectation. And like every form of communication, memes are imbued with socio-cultural contexts, having the ability to communicate a plethora of perspectives on gender, race, sexuality, politics, and religion in pixelated unity. Memes thus have the potential to subvert traditional beliefs or sustain them.

For women, the Internet and meme culture has been a rocky landscape to roam. Women in memes roughly began with “Derpette” who sometimes featured in rage comics — poorly drawn MS paint stick figures popular in the early 2010s. Derpette, blonde and white, was often used as an object of attraction for the male characters or as the intellectually inferior butt of a joke. Then, “overly attached girlfriend” rose to popularity, depicting a young white girl staring at her camera with a wide grin. The image was accompanied by the description of behaviors that characterized her as a needy, quirky, and borderline abusive girlfriend.

There is a virtual obsession with unlikeable women that embodies remnants of early American homes where women were diagnosed with hysteria when they cried too loud and then prescribed lithium to become Stepford-Esque mothers and wives. In modern-day fashion, women are alienated from their own pain and rage. The 24-bit image turns an experience of loss and despair into a motif meant to symbolize a hilarious reaction — a reaction that is no longer their own, but theatrical. Women, to the Internet, you are a dramatic performance. Not a character to be understood, but a spectacle. The internet’s obsession with depicting unlikeable women does not end with being a blonde stereotype or needy girlfriend. A robust category of women expressing negative emotions has permeated much of Twitter and Instagram memes. The most obvious begins with a picture of Kim Kardashian crying.

On an episode of “Kim & Kourtney Take New York,” Kim cries as she speaks of her then-marriage to Kris Humphries whom she lost feelings for. As with most memes, the context was eradicated from the viral image. It was used as a template where users could add their own text or to express a user’s reaction. Similarly, infamous Internet figure Trisha Paytas recorded several nervous breakdowns that were later posted to her YouTube Channel. One after a breakup with Sean van der Wilt, the other after a breakup with Jason Nash. Snapshots of them crying, and even choking herself quickly circulated the In-

ternet and became yet another reaction image used to demonstrate dramatic reactions to seemingly inconsequential experiences.

“The Real Housewives’” Taylor Armstrong is a part of another infamous meme in which a snapshot of her yelling and pointing at a costar was paired with the image of a cat at a dinner table. These images went viral — the context thrown into the shadows. At a wine tasting, Armstrong and Camille Grammer were locked into an escalating, drunken feud. Grammer had revealed that Armstrong was in an abusive relationship a few episodes prior. Speaking on the meme now, Armstrong said, “During the screaming scene, I was truly terrified for my life and my safety. When I look back now, that life seems like someone else’s.”

This pairing of rage with a cat degrades feminine expression. Armstrong’s discomfort is posed as hysteria – a painting of mouth agape and eyebrows furrowed as the out-of-control woman. As a viewer, we want to identify with the cat’s mild glare. In a memetic context, his cool indifference suggests our preferred reaction to Armstrong when she represents your mom yelling at you, an unpopular opinion, or a ridiculous statement. An image that once showed a vulnerable reaction to abuse evolved into a static expression of an overripe temper.

Men’s negative emotions are rarely depicted in such a manner. They are autonomous in being their own comedian. While memes often happen upon women, men are the architect of their memeification. If it is out of their hands, it is within positive connotations that recognize the figure as a whole. Twitch streamers such as Markiplier, penguinz0, and Jerma regularly become memes in audios and clips that often go viral on TikTok and Twitter. Responses and adaptations of these bits tend to reify these men as relatable, funny, and charming. The meme distributors of these streamers are usually regular watchers — primarily male and white users.

For the most part, the meme landscape has operated through whiteness and masculinity. The beginnings of memes such as rage comics originated from 4chan, a platform that has since been a space for white male users. It wasn’t until people of color began to take up more space in mainstream entertainment and performance that their presence was even included in the cultural hub.

Nicki Minaj, Doja Cat, Cardi B, and Keke Palmer are examples of Black women exhausted from carrying the humor of Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok on their backs. Whether it’s the recorded Instagram lives of Nicki Minaj, soundbites of Cardi B and Keke Palmer, or Doja Cat’s general surrealist wit, it is no surprise that their content spreads like wildfire. Nonetheless, these virtual moments titular to meme culture often require the acquisition of language, humor, and behaviors outside of the creator’s community for the sake of performance. Many have termed this process as “digital Blackface.” The term was first popularized by feminist scholar Laur M. Jackson in her essay “Memes and Misogynoir,” which defined digital Blackface as the “practice of white and nonBlack people making anonymous claims to a Black identity through contemporary technological mediums such as social media.”

In a subconscious need to see Black women perform, their words, actions, and mannerisms are transformed into caricatures. In minstrelsy fashion, many Twitter users imitated a phrase from Nicki Minaj’s Instagram live in which she exclaimed, “Um, chile? Anyway, so –.” Chile is “child” in African American Vernacular English or AAVE, but non-Black users went on to use it as a general exclamation. One anonymous Twitter user even noted, “chile isn’t aave it’s a nikki minaj meme.” Despite Black women’s pervasive presence on the Internet, recognition comes from what performance they’ve been able to give, not what they’re owed. As social media users continue to strip AAVE from its heritage and importance, white women sell the memes of their faces as $500k NFTs.

Nonetheless, much of the transmission of Black women’s behavior happens on a micro-level. AAVE is often passed between the average social media users. In an attempt to align themselves with the popularity of the language, non-Black users will imitate — rather unsuccessfully — popular AAVE terms

and phrases. There are entire Twitter accounts dedicated to the misuse of AAVE by nonBlack users. The Twitter account @aavegonewrong documents various users and companies appropriating AAVE, where you can find such instances like:

“Tryna be like this, just in our bag & genuinely growing together while being each others biggest flex. Some fuck everyone else type shit.”

“The wig is skinny sis you lit rally snapped the tea n tha’s on PERIODT.”

“Hope ya’ll are getting real horny for my record cuz I spent all morning listening to some final ass mixes and honey this record is a thicc queen. I can’t wait to give it to ya.”

Just as many various users saw “chile” as a Nicki Minaj meme, most users appropriating AAVE do not credit where the phrases originally came from. AAVE is a language that existed long before social media and has its own set of rules that guide communication. Many nonBlack users ignore this fact and write fairly unintelligible and cringe tweets. These users seem to drain the legitimacy out of AAVE, leaving many Black women to reap the consequences of being seen as illegitimate communicators. While non-Black users have the privilege of just using AAVE as a social media tool, many Black people must learn how to codeswitch and assimilate into environments where AAVE may be deemed inappropriate despite it being no less admissible than standard English.

Unfortunately, the exploitation of Black culture permeates much of social media. On TikTok, many non-Black users copy curated dances from Black women to rise in popularity without so much as accrediting the original creator. It was several months after the renegade became one of the most viral dance moves on TikTok that the dance’s creator, 14-yearold Jalaiah Harmon, was recognized. For the time being, non-Black users such as Charlie D’amelio and Addison Rae appropriated the dance and gained most of the attention and capital.

In protest of this creative exploitation, when Megan Thee Stallion’s song “Thot Shit” was released, many Black women decidedly refused to choreograph a dance to the audio. As a result, there was no dance trend.

Memeable women are pushed and pulled between the throes of a culture that loves what they give but hates what they are. We were picked apart for being vain, vapid, and emotional. Anonymous users joined in solidarity to laugh at these attributes that have been weaponized against women for centuries. Agency awarded to women alongside their increasing presence in entertainment and social media has not ensured they’d be seen as creators in their own right. Images depicting vulnerability through intimate experience simply came to reify ‘the hysterical woman’ — a longstanding stereotype that has trivializes the femme emotional experience and remove women from their own humanity. Furthermore, while many Black women have become the drivers of various trends, their significant contributions to meme culture are reduced to forms of capital for white users who fail to recognize the original creators and the cultural context they’re appropriating.

While our sociocultural systems seem to insist on maintaining the power dynamics within misogyny and misogynoir, I have always known women to laugh and joke even in dark times. It is our choice whether or not we want to laugh with them — or at them.