Misogynist Meme Culture and Its Positioning of Women

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 session is Maja Brandt Andreasen, whose focus is on Internet humour that normalises sexual violence in response to the #metoo movement. Humour is often dismissed as harmless (Maja describes this as the ‘just a joke’ discourse), and feminist reactions to such offensive content are attacked as undermining humorous discourse.

Maja collected memes from 9gag, Imgur, and Reddit that responded to #metoo and related controversies, and found that memes had a strong androcentric perspective that represented men’s views; women usually appeared in the background and in relation to men. Men spoke, and women were spoken about; this is a clear reaction to the women’s voices that were at the centre of the #metoo movement. Such memes reconceptualise sexual violence as ‘just sex’, and portrays men as naturally sexually aggressive, ultimately also normalising rape. It discursively divides women based on their attractiveness and thus their implied likelihood of being raped.

These memes also engage in victim-blaming, questioning the credibility of the actresses involved in the #metoo accusations and blaming them for putting themselves in a position where they could be sexually abused. Visibility and voice are constructed as incompatible with credible victimhood. This delegitimises certain reactions to sexual violence by only allowing certain reactions to it. These memes explain sexual violence from male perspectives, delegitimises and blames the victims.