There I was, doom-scrolling social media at half past midnight a short while back, when this piece of AI slop floated through my feed:
I asked Google Gemini to gender-swap the image and the message, which it did without complaint:
Sorta lands a little different, doesn’t it?
There are a couple of things going on here that I find interesting. The first is that the attitude in the top meme is incredibly, bizarrely popular in certain corners of the Internetverse right now. Basically, the memes are all variants on “yeah, I’m a toxic or angry or manipulative woman, but that’s okay, you should put up with it in order to get the benefit of being with me.”
That’s not a new idea—there’s a common meme of Maralyn Monroe with a caption “if you can’t handle me at my worst, you don’t deserve me at my best” that’s been circulating since the age of dialup Internet—but it’s weirdly popular in some corners right now. Which brings up the second point:
When you flip the script, it’s obvious how toxic this idea is.
We don’t see it when it’s a woman because we (by which I mean soceety as a whole) don’t take violence by women, especially violence by women to men, seriously. We instinctively recognize the danger of marying an angry man, but marrying an angry woman? Aww, she’s so cute when she’s mad! The greatest worry about marrying a woman is not that she’ll abuse you, it’s that you won’t know what’s on her mind every moment of the day. But hey, marry an angry woman, problem solved, she’ll tell you!
As someone who escaped an angry and controlling women, if I could express in words how deeply fucked up this is, your screen would explode. I could write an entire book unpacking how deeply problematic this is. And the fact that so many people can’t see why it’s problematic is one of those problems.
In a world where I had more time, I’d create a social media account where I just posted inversions of these memes to see what happened.
Back in the 80’s Warren Farrel wrote a book “Why Men are They Way They are.”
He descibed how men and women are “conditioned” in vaious ways to unconciously accept certain behaviors. One trick he used to point out the conditioning was as you descibed swapping the gender in a joke or what we now see as a meme – and seeing if it has the same impact.
I read the same book. Farrell is one of the three authors who changed my thinking.
If you’re a white cis femme-presenting woman, you are actually rewarded for manipulating others. I have personally experienced this. I have doctor-diagnosed dependent personality disorder and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder. I have gotten away with not learning basic adult stuff, for starters. I can get people to help me with stuff simply by catching their eye.
There was a comic book shop in Spokane (ca. 1977) that was run by a man of Asian descent. From whatever conversation he was having with another customer, I overheard him say, “I like Mexican women; they have more spirit.” Perhaps that is the same idea as the “angry woman”?
Related: pretty-privilege. Mostly for women, but sometimes really beautiful men can get away with absurdly terrible behavior too and get excused for it because they look hot.
I’m sure what you say is correct. Good-looking people, just having very good looks, no doubt get away (or CAN get away ) with a LOT. But, it’s a problem not to recognize that people who LET people get away with disrespect and ignorant behavior aren’t part of the problem and since females have been socialized to tolerate things we shouldn’t and males have been socialized to expect things they shouldn’t, this pattern will, no doubt, take awhile to change. And it’s a very strong argument that both genders need to read smart feminist writers. I’m sure glad they were around when I was young. They helped me change my life for the better, and I’m sure my partner of 35 years would say the same. He came into a relationship with a woman with four kids. (I was Catholic in my prior life (:
Believe it or not, there are men who like and aren’t threatened by smart, strong-spirited women, I’m with one now 35 yrs and we’re both best friends and love each other a lot. Being strong-spirited can mean smart and strong, which is healthy for females. Feminisim encourages this. Men, who aren’t threatened by this should appreciate it because women like this tend to be more trustworthy. And strength doesn’t mean inflexible either. It means being able to disagree without being disagreeable, unless you’re dealing with a rigid-minded a-hole. Then, you shouldn’t even stay in the same room as that.