How (not) to make jokes about women.

This picture of me will be relevant later. I look okay, though, right?

[Note: this is not new, but it’s new to me, so I’m writing about it as if it were new to everyone.]

A little over a year ago, 4Chan, the sort of Reddit Lite image-sharing forum site where teenage boys go to feel something – anything – birthed a “hilarious” meme called “2/10: Would Not Bang.” It’s a spinoff of the 2010 “Butthurt Dweller” meme, which in itself subscribes to that brand of humor that strives for irony but trips over its own offensiveness: the acne-ridden, glasses-wearing, greasy-ponytail-sporting face of the meme makes judgmental comments about other people, even though he’s not such a hot item himself.

The joke is in the irony, of course, because what right does some video-game-playing nerd who lives with his parents have to comment on anyone else? Just as much of a right as anyone else, arguably, but there’s potential for a genuine laugh in the contrast between “Complains about being bullied in school / Calls everyone a faggot online” or “Complains that girls only like attractive guys / Likes girls because they are hot.” That’s incisive, and it’s based in truth – there really are people like that, and I tend to be okay with making fun of people who make fun of other people. (Note that I don’t apply this eye-for-an-eye philosophy in other areas of my life.)

“Butthurt Dweller” isn’t a name I totally love, though, because in simple terms: butthurt → reference to anal sex + male character → insinuations of homosexuality + intention to be humorous → gay people are funny because ew = homophobia. So BD, as we’ll call him, is often paired up with captions specifically leveling ridiculous criticisms of women, like “Girl I stalk is holding hands with some guy / WHORE.” That’s hilarious, because it’s a clearly unfair accusation borne out of the character’s bitterness rather than reality. However, there’s a difference between jokes that establish BD as a jerk then play off that, and jokes that assume BD’s worth is tied up in his attractiveness. He looks like this:

…and that joke only works because the viewer agrees that this is a wildly unattractive guy who would never have a shot with any woman, period. That’s pretty shallow.

The “2/10: Wouldn’t Bang” meme arose from this shared agreement between meme-maker and audience that BD doesn’t get girls, so it’s super ironic of him to be so critical of women when, again, he looks like this:

So 4Chan users ran with the joke, creating “2/10: Would Not Bang” as a sort of competition to see who could come up with the most ridiculously unfounded criticisms of beautiful women, starting with comments Photoshopped over an image of actress/model/WWE fighter/George Clooney’s girlfriend Stacy Keibler in her underwear: her eyebrow arch is too extreme, her bra and panties don’t match, her bracelet isn’t authentic quartz, the curtains are wrinkled, 2/10: WOULD NOT BANG. This, I submit to the jury, is good comedy. What isn’t so funny are the memes that came after it:

Did you catch that? “Fat ass pinky” is funny; “rope should be around neck” is horrifying. Implying that a woman should commit suicide is never funny, and even less so here because it’s so out of the blue: why, exactly, should that rope be around her neck? Because she’s, ha ha, not pretty enough? That’s sick, and whoever “would not bang” this woman is definitely not someone I would bang, or let my friends bang.

An image of Angelina Jolie, voted Most Beautiful Woman in the World (probably by a bunch of heterosexual men) like, a million times, is great fodder for this meme:

“Ears too high for head,” “nose bridge too straight edged,” and “hideous mole” (pointing to maybe a two-pixel blemish) are all outlandish comments to make about Angelina Jolie. This meme succeeds, but it’s one of the few that does so without taking a sharp turn away from humor into perpetuating legitimately offensive comments about these women’s appearances:

The first example is straight-up rude. “Forehead cut off” is worth a laugh because duh, how irrelevant to someone’s appearance, but “big ears,” “big man shoulders,” and “boobs too small” are likely contenders for things that girl has actually thought about herself, looking in the mirror on a particularly rough day. Irony succeeds when it presents a view that contrasts sharply with someone’s expectations, like if a picture of Dolly Parton were captioned “boobs too small, would not bang,” but this fails to do that.

The second example, which not only repeats the not-so-funny “Jew nose” joke while introducing the term “gypsy,” which is a racial slur, also completely misses the point. The girl’s cleavage really isn’t presented from the best angle there, so calling it “Grand Canyon cleavage” is just doubling down on an actual, if infinitesimally minimal, flaw in her picture. “Roger Rabbit teeth” doesn’t make sense: her teeth aren’t big enough to merit derogatory comments, but they’re not so small to make that criticism truly outlandish, either. “Rings from extensive goggle usage”…well, that’s just not funny, try again.

According to an article by Slacktory, a self-identifying “comedic blog about the pop culture of the internet,” Would Not Bang is the funniest thing going (or at least it was in 2012; again, sorry for my much-belated outrage). According to me, a self-identifying woman with 21+ years’ worth of experience as a punch line for jokes about making sandwiches and being a bad driver, it’s more inadvertently misogynistic garbage masquerading as satire that buries any actual comedic value under a dump truck’s worth of humor that laughs at women, not with them. Sure, there are a few examples of men being subjected to the Would Not Bang treatment, but the Slacktory gallery at least didn't bother to include any. At any rate, this is just one example of the myriad ways our society normalizes putting women on display like museum exhibits; while it might be flattering to treat someone like art, it also makes them an object, potentially one that can be bought and sold. People aren’t paintings, and they’re worth more than face value.

Some of the meme creators used pictures of celebrities; others used pictures that, worryingly, look to be pulled off a Facebook page, not necessarily with the subject’s consent. I can’t do anything about that, but what I can do is present my version of the 2/10: Would Not Bang meme with myself as both joke-maker and joke-taker, using a picture that I thought I looked at least good enough in to send to my boyfriend (although the kissyface IS a joke). Female-authored comedy right here, everyone:

Hideous.