The Problem with Satire on the Internet
I recently posted a meme to my Facebook group Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin that contrasted an image of Cary Grant looking dapper ostensibly from 1917 with one of Mary Elizabeth Winstead from the movie Scott Pilgrim Versus the World looking gorgeous and quirky and purple-haired from 2017.
Even by the incredibly lenient standards of memes, it seemed incredibly stupid and disingenuous. For starters, Cary Grant was born in 1904 but is clearly a man in his thirties or forties in the picture shown. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, meanwhile, came out in 2010 and it is highly doubtful that someone like Ramona Flowers wouldn’t change her style in the ensuing years.
This meme struck me as a particularly stupid variation on a ubiquitous boomer template that compares and contrast an image of a man or a woman looking attractive, put together and elegant sometime in the distant past alongside an image of an unattractive, androgynous contemporary figure in unflattering or ill-fitting clothes with purple or green hair or a man-bun.
Sometimes these memes are accompanied by words. Sometimes they rely entirely upon pictures to convey meaning and commentary.
The implication in either case is that in the perfect distant past, when everything was fair and everyone was happy because of the miraculous magic of strict gender roles, people dressed immaculately and society was orderly and prosperous as a result.
Then feminism and the LGTBQ movement came along and screwed everything up and now men wear cut-offs or dresses and women have purple hair or wear tank tops. We are teetering on the brink of total collapse as a result.
Most of the people who commented on the meme agreed that it was incredibly stupid and ridiculous and the kind of oblivious online idiocy it is fun to mock but, as is generally the case, someone commented that it was clearly satirical.
I’ve written blog posts about the importance of doing due diligence after getting angered by a meme to find out whether or not the online detritus pissing you off is satirical in nature or sincere.
Yet when I saw this dumb meme I glibly assumed it was non-satirical until I took a step back and really thought about it. Then I came to realize that the meme that annoyed me so much that I had to hate-share it was almost assuredly satirical in nature.
It wasn’t one of those idiotic posts that try to make a point about society by juxtaposing an image of an impossibly glamorous movie star from one hundred years ago with a picture of Sam Smith wearing short shorts but rather an incisive parody of that maddeningly ubiquitous trope.
That’s the tricky thing about satire. When done well satire can look indistinguishable from what it’s satirizing. That’s true of the meme I shared. Misogynistic, nostalgia-poisoned meme-makers pining for an impossible long-ago paradise when men all wore impeccably tailored three piece suits and women ballgowns everywhere they went are so transparently wrong and misguided that it can be tough to delineate between their stupidity and posts making fun of their stupidity by exaggerating it to comic effect.
Memes that try to make a point about the deteriorating standards of society and the terrible damage the weakening of strict gender roles and stereotypes have ostensibly wrought are inherently stupid and silly. This meme makes them absurd by inexplicably juxtaposing a well-dressed man from the past with a beautiful contemporary woman with died hair.
That’s the trick thing about trying to identify satire online. So much online discourse is so perversely, surreally devoid of self-consciousness and self-awareness that it hovers forever on the knife’s edge of self-parody.
Take Nick Adams. I’ve written a lot about him in this blog. It seems pretty obvious to me at this point that his whole Alpha Male persona is a bit and a shtick. He found something that attracted a lot of attention on the left and the right and doubled down on it for the sake of fame and fortune but the MAGA crowd is already so ridiculously over the top and urself-aware that it’s also fairly easy to assume that on some level at least he’s sincere as well.
The tricky thing about memes is that they’re de-contextualized. We generally have no idea where they come from, except for those branded “Turning Point USA” ones so our first instinct is to assume that they must be straightforward no matter how stupid or self-evidently wrong they might be. Incidentally I found the meme with Cary Grant and Ramona Flowers in the Reddit sub Terrible Facebook Memes so it makes sense that I initially processed it as a terrible Facebook meme.
It looks like I need to follow my own advice. Perhaps I should stop assuming that stupid memes are real and begin assuming that they’re ALL satirical and fake until I learn otherwise.
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