In today’s slightly delayed Memeday post, we’re going to be looking at the “selfish feminist” meme, a variation of the good old “hypocritical feminist” meme that’s based on the notion that selfish, spoiled women adopt feminism in order to score equal pay without equal work — and in the greatest crime against humanity ever known — without ever having to pay for dinner.
Once in a long while, the mememaker will throw in a literary reference, like this one namechecking the heroine from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.
But mostly the dudes making these memes seem to be peeved that (allegedly) feminist women are (allegedly) making them pay for dinner without “putting out” afterwards.
For some reason, the makers of these “selfish feminist” memes often put their words into the mouths of real and recognizable women who would never actually say such a thing.
Sometimes they use pictures of favorite feminist targets like Anita Sarkeesian …
… and Rebecca Watson:
Other times they use feminist celebrities, like comedian Janeane Garofolo
And actress/activist Ashley Judd:
Actually, they seem just a teensy bit obsessed with Ashley Judd and her alleged refusal to ever pay for dinner:
Apparently, the deviously feminist Ashley Judd also manages to avoid paying for her fancy purses as well.
Yeah, Ashley Judd has a net worth of $22 million, at least according to Celebrity Net Worth. I’m pretty sure she pays for her own handbags.
Not only that, but the allegedly selfish Judd — and yes, at least some of the angry mememakers know that the woman in the meme is Ashley Judd and not just some random angry lady feminist — now devotes much of her life not to acquiring handbags but to humanitarian work. Here’s how Wikipedia sums it up:
Ashley Judd’s humanitarian work has revolved around AIDS. Judd has travelled with YouthAIDSto places affected by illness and poverty such as Cambodia, Kenya, Rwanda, and many others.
Inspired by her travels, which allowed her to witness the life of the poor and uneducated, she has since become an advocate for preventing poverty and promoting awareness internationally. She has met with political and religious leaders, heads of states, diplomats, and leaders on behalf of the deprived to convey the message to those who have the power to bring about political and social change. Judd has also narrated three documentaries for YouthAIDS which aired internationally on the Discovery Channel, in National Geographic, and on VH1.
In 2011, she joined the Leadership Council of the International Center for Research on Women(ICRW).
Other organizations Judd has been involved with include Women for Women International and Equality Now, along with other non-governmental organizations that direct attention to social, educational, health, economic, cultural and financial funding of the unfortunate.
So, yeah, she’s actually paid for a lot of people’s dinners.
Tomorrow: The worst “selfish feminist” meme of them all!
That second one pisses me off.
Patriarchy brings me down first of all because if a client comes into my beauty school and I take care of him and he flirts with me, I’m at a huge risk if I say no or yes to him.
Excuse my nonsense. I’m grieving and having a bad day.
I don’t date. Saves me money and hassle and saves her money, hassle, and disappointment. So it all works.
<3 Aubrey.
@Alan:
Yeah, funny enough(? as funny as kidney stones can be, I suppose, especially when you’re getting them before your mid-20s) once the stone had finished moving through my ureter I barely even noticed it after that. Admittedly, part of that could be because I’d been in the hospital for a few hours by that point and they’d stuck me up with morphine, but I honestly don’t even know when the thing finally left my body.
@ dslucia
It’s not necessarily an age or health thing. The doctor hypothesised that it was my constant drinking of Berrocca Boost (a multi vitamin drink) and low fat diet that caused mine. Essentially fat soluble vitamins can crystalise if you take too many.
“Stick to beer” is one of the best bits of medical advice I’ve had. 🙂
FEEEEEEMAAAAAAAAALES
@Ouraboros13
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZvAQ7gxxMI
Pop quiz kids, let’s see how well you can put these quotes to these three individuals.
The paying for dinner complaint tends to irk me the most, as stupid and trivial as it may seem. I’m very uncomfortable with someone I don’t know well spending money on me.
In all my dating, the closest I’ve come to letting someone buy me dinner is being cool with it when they say they insist as long as they let me get the drinks, and one time when a guy very amusingly convinced the person ringing us up at a frozen yogurt place to not accept my money. I’ve also never accepted the offer of a drink, even all the times it’s been offered to myself and a friend and they do accept it.
I’ve had two people in my past (father and an ex boyfriend) that lived as though anything given was owed back, and it deeply affected me. I don’t like accepting things from people that I don’t know well enough to be considered a vital part of my life, and I don’t offer anything myself expecting a return. The thought of living with that mentality disgusts me.
I will never not be offended when this complaint is thrown at a woman just because she’s a woman and they assume it’s the case. Even if they do appreciate when someone buys them dinner, people like the ones that made the memes are the reason it makes me so very uncomfortable.
@ Alan – One of my best friends had stones while she was pregnant. A close (male) friend of our had stones about a year later and she just hugged him and said, “this is they closest you’ll ever come to giving birth and I am SO fucking sorry.”
I’ve always paid for my own dinner/drinks/whatever because of this shit. If I couldn’t afford to go to a restaurant, I’d suggest doing something that didn’t require a lot of money.
So, this is these guys’ dream, right? A woman who pays for her own dinner. You’d think they’d be happy right?
Wrong.
One time I agreed to meet a guy for dinner. He offered to pick me up but I declined. I had only just met him and didn’t know if it was safe for him to know where I lived yet. When the restaurant bill came, I paid for what I had ordered. The guy got pissed. He was angry because I wouldn’t let him pick me up, which showed I didn’t trust him, and now I was rejecting his romantic gesture by paying for my own dinner. And why the fuck did I even agree to go out with him?
So yeah. This paying for dinner bullshit is like any of their other complaints – full of shit.
@Ouraboros:
Shorter that video: Women are smarter than me, therefore less racist/nationalist/duty-bound to buy my racist/nationalist shit, therefore I’m not gettin’ any. MISANDRY!!!
(Honestly, I don’t need to sit through 20 minutes of disjointed ranting to know where THAT is going…)
@Lady_Zombie
I’ve never had a guy get mad that I wouldn’t let them pay for me on a date, but I’ve had guys get mad that I wouldn’t let them buy me a drink when I was out at a bar. It’s really frustrating because when I decline I try to be as polite as possible, and also don’t usually shut them completely out. Like, I’ll still talk to you, I just don’t want your offered drink. What’s wrong with that? I don’t understand.
8/12. Breivik and BPS were the easiest to figure out (BPS from the spellings, Breivik from the windiness). I figured that anything about how women prefer to fuck bad guys was probably Elliot Rodger.
But yeah…they do all sing from the same hymnal, don’t they?
Simple. You’re not giving them something to hold over your head so they can coerce you into a bunch of shit you don’t want later down the line.
Woman: “I don’t want to have sex with you/go home with you/get in your car/do anything with you.”
Man: “But I bought you dinner/drinks/something else! Why are you being so selfish after I was so nice to you?!”
It’s just a way for them to try and tip the power balance in their favor, because most girls aren’t raised to firmly put their foot down when a man corners them.
And men are taught that if they buy a woman stuff like dinner, drinks, what have you, wether she asked for said thing or not, she “owes” them something.
You don’t have to, Bina. He’s basically scared of women having sex with scary Muslim immigrants. His major points are really dumb and I can easily debunk most if not all of them. Even his sources gave me material to debunk him:
1) French women in WWII were accused of sleeping with Nazis for any degree of flimsy evidence. If a woman just happened to get an abortion shortly after France was liberated from Nazi occupation, then she was suspected with sleeping with a Nazi. And unless Black Pigeon can show me how the number of French women who did indeed sleep with Nazis is the majority of French women, then his little theory goes down the toilet.
2) The number of women who were had orgasms while raped was a whopping 4-5%. Clearly women are biologically designed to be taken by men. Also, men who are raped also get aroused. Guess men were biologically designed to be taken by women.
3) Sweden has such a high number of rapes is because their definition of rape is broader since Swedish women are more aware of what makes something sexual assault or rape and what doesn’t. A woman who reports being raped 300 times throughout her years of marriage to the police, will have each of her 300 rapes marked as a separate rape. Black Pigeon forgets this detail, so he implies that hoards of Muslim immigrants are raping Swedish women.
4) Unwin’s Sex and Culture makes a grandiose claim, at least according to Black Pigeon’s interpretation. Black Pigeon says that women being given more rights makes civilizations collapse, and he assumes this claim is validated by history. Problem is it isn’t, which is probably why he cites no specific examples. Please show me where women’s enfranchisement was in Ancient Rome or Ancient Assyria, and show me how women’s enfranchisement made Ancient Egypt, Ancient Babylon, or the Ancient Incas die out. I’d really like a detailed response.
@Zombie
http://cdn3.gurl.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/bff-bae-change-who-are-you.gif
Why are you required to trust him? Or obligated? Disposed even? What, did he save your life? Cosign on a house with you? Raise you for 18 years? What about him did he think warranted any amount your trust? How is this a thing? Did he expect you to ride with him literally everywhere, Saudi style? Forever? Cos otherwise, how will he know you trust him?
Sorry, I’ve just never heard that one before. I’m actually… kinda impressed by this dude’s commitment to creative fuckery
Nora is a feminist?! WOWIE!!
I do not understand this. I don’t. Now, admittedly I’ve got into the habit of letting my boyfriends pussy for me, but we’ve been dating three and five years respectively and both of them work, whereas I’m disabled and unemployed and barely scraping by. It took me years to accept letting people buy me even a drink because I was so worried about seeming selfish or grabby – not just people I was dating, either, my family and friends too. I remember one time a guy tried to buy me a drink in a club and I insisted he wait while I went to the ATM to pay him back. For YEARS after I started dating boyfriend #1 we had an ongoing competition in which I’d try to hide money on his person to pay him back when he bought me things, and he’d sneak it back in my pocket when I wasn’t looking. The number of times I was an hour into a two hour journey home and found twenty pounds shoved into a pocket or a boot or hidden in my book…
tIt took a long time for me to let myself be helped – I used to go out for dinner with my cousin a lot, and eventually she snapped and said “dude, I have a full-time job. When you’re making more than me you can buy me dinner.” I’m still not great about it but when people buy me dinner it’s because they insist, not because I ask. And the same is true of pretty much every woman I know, because we’re all petrified of being grabby, so we can’t accept even necessary help because we get this kind of toxic bullshit all the time.
Pay. Not pussy. Sigh.
That’s the best auto correct fiasco ever.
@TheDreadVampy – I loved your comment as a whole anyway, but the typo was hilarious. Thanks 🙂
ninja’d by WWTH (yet again)
My phone is a great comedian 😀
@TheDreadVampy
I just figured that “pussy” was a verb nowadays and that I was the last to know. I rely on my friends to keep me current, so I figured that if I had two boyfriends at least one of them would have gotten me hip to the current usage. Then I’d pussy like a boss.
It took me about 18 months before I’d let my boyfriend carry a bag of groceries for me.
I still won’t let him open a tight jar for me unless I’ve exhausted all my options (hot water, rubber band around the lid, or the best one–hitting the edge of the lid against a counter). That’s happened about three times in 14 years.
@OoglyBoggles, I saw Libertarian Socialist Rant’s video. I agree with him for the most part. It really does distress me how fascist views are so well-received on YouTube. It could be because of the whole alt right movement that started around 2004 and has picked up on YouTube since the 2008 global crisis. But anyway it’s true how so many of the edgy social commentators are utterly banal. For them it’s all about appearing edgy and getting approval for an image, not actually being edgy, which is completely old and overrated anyway.