What Does Feminism Meme To You?

Reimagined by feminists, the Internet meme is no longer just a funny gif that captures “That Feeling When”, but a tool that also packs a punch when it comes to battling the patriarchy.

- Min Chen

In the beginning was a tweet. When Nicole Tersigni was thumbing through Twitter last May, she encountered a man explaining a woman’s joke back to her — typical mansplaining that, unfortunately, was nothing the comedy writer hadn’t experienced herself. Except this time, instead of getting mad or frustrated, she got funny. To express what it felt like to be a woman online, she first ran a search for “woman surrounded by men” on Google Images, stumbling upon a 17th-century oil by German painter Jobst Harrich that depicts a clutch of old men crowding around a woman with a single breast exposed. “The humour of her standing in the middle of them all, holding her bare breast, was impossible to scroll past,” she tells me.

Tersigni’s own wit would then hone that humour into a fine point. “Maybe, if I take my tit out,” she captioned the image on Twitter, “they will stop explaining my own joke back to me.” It was razor-sharp satire, cracking commentary on women’s lived experience and, of course, starting a damn good meme.

She continued pairing these classic works of art with classic examples of mansplaining in a Twitter thread that hit upwards of 20,000 retweets. Turns out, the classical canon is not short on images of women surrounded — nay, overwhelmed — by men. And surprisingly, or not, women today can still relate.