I’m going to talk about a meme. That makes me imagine my father glaring in disgust at the word and grinding his teeth, like Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love does at the word “weekend”. Or Zadie Smith, her fine intellect, sharp as a Japanese blade, undulled by scrolling (I think about her and her social media ban often). Zadie Smith does not need to know about memes.
I know about memes, because while Zadie Smith was creating enduring art, I was blunting the cheap plastic-handled knife of my brain in the dishwasher of Twitter. I imagine its crenellations and folds softened into a grey blur from prolonged bathing in social media’s grim minestrone of outrage, dancing cockatoos, raw sewage footage and the kind of tragedy that should require us to step away and take time to grieve. 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 stuff that sucked me in – compensate for no longer being able to concentrate for more than 90 seconds. There was a video of a cow visiting a Spar in Austria today, I enjoyed that.
Memes are part of it. They seem like a degraded form of culture, viewed from outside the dopamine mines. And sure: they are not Donne sonnets. But when they work, they offer a new vocabulary for an emotion or an experience; for something that you know, but have not pinned down or articulated. Good ones create a fizzingly joyful moment of creativity, of people bouncing off each other; a “Yes, and”. Mostly they blossom and fade as fast as those 24-hour cactus flowers, but the best effect a lasting shift 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 in a bored young woman’s ear. The picture is usually repurposed with the man shouting, well, whatever the boring and mansplainy opinion du jour happens to be. However, a gender-switched version has emerged, where a different young woman shouts with wild, sweaty enthusiasm in the ear of a bored, intimidated-looking young man in a nightclub. Recently, people – women – have been using this picture to convey the things they most want the world to know. It would take too long to reproduce a whole one: the point is they are long, complex and esoteric. But there are versions explaining the last episode of Lost, retinol, negative reinforcement training in falconry, and the devaluing of fibre arts through their designation as “craft”.
“The internet is tired of it,” an article on the meme has already declared. I’m not. I’m becoming a shouting girl connoisseur, carefully curating a gallery of my favourite versions. This has never happened with a meme before, so I’ve been trying to tease out what I love (yes, dissecting a meme is a fool’s errand, but it’s this or watching that cow again). Partly it’s how neatly and precisely it subverts the original. It’s the anti-mansplaining: asserting the right to womansplain. You just don’t see what it depicts very often: a woman expressing her thoughts and opinions not just freely but loudly, confidently, perhaps even annoyingly. It’s wish fulfilment because, factually, this does not happen: research (as well as lived experience) shows men talk more and women rarely interrupt them in groups, but are often interrupted.
Then, the imagined shouting is about enthusiasm and expertise, which is such a winning combination. Passion has become a word you find on estate agents’ websites or your cereal bar, next to a cartoon of the founders (“we have a passion for nuts!”) But a glimpse of the real thing is galvanisingly wonderful. Even though it’s just a silly internet game, it makes me wonder what I know and care enough about to yell into a man’s ear. Actually, it makes me want to quit Twitter and learn something worth screaming about.
But above all, it’s the way words and picture combine: 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’s confident, expansive; impish even? That feels powerful at a time when girls are excluded from school in Afghanistan and Iran is cracking down on how women dress; when women in the States are having their reproductive systems, desires and needs mansplained to them, with devastating and even fatal consequences. When, everywhere, women are scared to take up space. No wonder we want to share this meme, and make our own.
This is why I stick around Twitter: for the rare stuff like this, that’s even better than a Spar cow. “Begging you guys to stop it with the screaming girl meme,” one man posted, tetchily – and sorry sir, but no. In this delicious internet fantasy if nowhere else, we get to assert our expertise and pursue our passions. We get to take up space with them, and yes, scream them in your ear.
Follow Emma on Twitter @BelgianWaffling
