I will talk about a meme. This makes me imagine my father scowling at the word and gnashing his teeth, the way Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love does at the word “weekend.” Or Zadie Smith, her fine wit, sharp as a Japanese blade, undiminished by commuting (I think of her and her social media ban often). Zadie Smith doesn’t need to know about memes.
I know memes, because while Zadie Smith was creating lasting art, I was dulling the cheap plastic-handled knife of my brain in the Twitter dishwasher. I imagine her creases and folds softened into a gray blur for our prolonged bath in the dreary mine of social media outrage, dancing cockatoos, images of raw sewage and the kind of tragedy that should require us to step back and take time to mourn. But no, here are some dogs going down a slide! One day I’ll break free, but until then, little sparks of intellectual stimulation, connection, or fun—the things that hooked me—make up for the fact that I can’t concentrate for more than 90 seconds. Today there was a video of a cow visiting a Spar in Austria, I really liked it.
Memes are part of it. It looks like a degraded form of culture, seen from outside the dopamine mines. And sure: they are not Donne’s sonnets. But when they work, they offer a new vocabulary for an emotion or an experience; for something you know, but haven’t pinned down or articulated. The good ones create a moment of splendidly joyful creativity, of people bouncing off each other; a “Yes, and”. Most bloom and fade just as quickly as these 24-hour cactus flowers, but the best effect is a lasting change in the way you see something.
I’ll clumsily describe this meme, which will be the perfect illustration of why they work, when words alone don’t. There is a famous one of a young man in a nightclub, shouting into the ear of a bored young woman. The image is usually repurposed with the man shouting, well, whatever the boring, unpleasant opinion of the day is. However, a gender-swapped version has emerged, where a different young woman screams with wild, sweaty enthusiasm into the ear of a bored-looking, intimidated young man in a nightclub. Recently, people, women, have been using this image to convey the things they most want the world to know. It would take too much time to reproduce an entire one – the point is that they are long, complex and esoteric. But there are versions that explain the last episode of Lost, retinol, negative reinforcement training in falconry, and the devaluing of the fiber arts through their designation as “crafts.”
“The internet is tired of this,” an article about the meme has already declared. I am not. I’m becoming an understood girl who screams, carefully curating a gallery of my favorite versions. This has never happened to a meme before, so I’ve been trying to figure out what I like (yes, dissecting a meme is a fool’s errand, but it’s either that or seeing that cow again). In part, it’s how neatly and precisely it subverts the original. It’s anti-mansplaining: claiming the right of women to splain. You don’t see what she represents very often: a woman who expresses her thoughts and opinions not just freely, but loudly, confidently, maybe even annoyingly. It’s wishful thinking because, in fact, that doesn’t happen: research (as well as lived experience) shows that men talk more and that women rarely interrupt them in groups, but they often do.
Then the imagined shouts are about enthusiasm and experience, which is such a winning combination. Passion has become a word you find on real estate websites or on your cereal bar, next to a caricature of the founders (“we have a passion for nuts!”), but a vision of the reality is surprisingly wonderful. Even though it’s just a silly internet game, it makes me wonder what I know and care enough to scream in a man’s ear. It actually makes me want to quit Twitter and learn something worth shouting about.
But above all, it’s the way words and images are combined: that’s why it’s a meme, not a lecture. The joy also comes from the unapologetic way the girl in the picture fills the frame. She is confident, expansive; even evil? This seems powerful at a time when girls are excluded from school in Afghanistan and Iran is cracking down on the way women dress; when the women of the States are declared their reproductive systems, desires and needs, with devastating and even fatal consequences. When, everywhere, women are afraid to take up space. No wonder we want to share this meme and make it our own.
This is why I stick to Twitter: for rare things like this, this is even better than a Spar cow. “I’m asking you to stop with the screaming girl meme,” one man posted, sheepishly, and I’m sorry sir, but no. In this delicious internet fantasy, if nowhere else, we can assert our expertise and pursue our passions. We take up space with them, and yes, shout in their ear.
Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling