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!
My worst pain was getting a cortison injection into my already disgustingly swollen achilles tendon. Ughhhh. Never again.
@ paradoxical
I know, I just don’t understand cause the alternative still makes me a bitch, apparently. I can’t win with these types.
@ dalillama
To be fair, her first pregnancy ended up being a med-free birth because of some complications. And she williningly went through two more pregnancies whereas the stones prompted her to drastically change her diet and never go through that again.
@ skiriki
My most recent ex had gallstones and did go through a considerable amount of pain, but he never passed any. They were so bad that they just removed his gallbladder.
I have been fortunate enough to not undergo any of these things so far (birth, being shot, or stones of the kidney or gall variety).
Alan Robertshaw:
I hope not! 😀
Anyway, I don’t know if it is placebo or what, but gallstones tend to subside for me if I drink ice cold water as soon as I feel the first pangs of pain. Sometimes veeeery careful massage underneath the ribcage, lightly pushing upward post-water speeds the process of going away.
Just something to try if you happen to have a surprise-attack by that organ.
I had a surprise attack by my gall bladder one time!
Out of the blue it hit me with pain sharp enough to put me writhing on the floor! I ended up getting rushed to the hospital, given three kinds of painkillers, administered an excruciating ultrasound for like an hour, and then an emergency gallbladderectomy! The darn thing was not very cordial, I tell you what.
I read that in Hank Hill’s voice. 🙂
I think the worst pain I’ve seen someone in was from his gallbladder. Close second was a tumor pressing on his spine.
So if I’ve learned anything from this thread, it’s to never get a kidney stone or gallstone. I hope that doesn’t mean I have to cut down on my tea intake (I’m obsessed with tea; it’s so good; but I also drink all of the water, so maybe I’m okay?)…
Oh yeah… and MRAs are shit, but we knew that already…
Well, that’s the point. They want to create a situation where you’re always at fault 100% of the time, so they get off scot free 100% of the time. If you always lose, they always win in their little shitty reality.
Because, to them, all social interaction is a zero sum game, and really, at this point, I’d say your only path to victory is to not play. Which, of course, will still make you a bitch, but you’ll be a bitch who doesn’t have to put up with that dude’s nonsense.
@PI
Yeah, that was my takeaway from my dealings with various exponents of the patriarchy a long time ago: Don’t play their game.
And let me be possibly the last person (this time around) to wish you a Happy Birthday! I hope that it was fun.
Cortisone injections were my worst pain, too. But I rather think I’m in the minor leagues here.
… I thought many couples split the bill these days :/
Also
>obligatory wage gap meme
Seriously antifems, just watch the vlogbrothers video on the subject and suspend your quasi-Ancap worldview for a few minutes to see the social processes at play.
I suffered third and fourth degree burns to 25% of my body, I’ve never given birth but the 2 1/2 hour wait for morphine was hell. Thankfully most of my scarring isn’t noticable unless I wear a short sleeved shirt, allowing me to avoid stupid comments for 6 months put of the year.
Dad said his kidney stone was bad but not as bad as his colon rupturing after surgery (colon cancer), which had him hallucinating and flashing back to his time in Cyprus.
Selfishness ?
Ah, yes, sorry, i have forgotten that MRA stand for Men Really Altruists. My bad. So altruist that they always
yelltell their invaluable advice/opinion on any subject, not only to those who want to hear it, but also to those who do not want. Altruism at its best.@Robert @Alan –
I’ve done that before with acute pain and extreme cold, figured it outback when I was 18 during Basic in the Winter.
You just kind of try to look at the pain that’s happening to your body as something seperate from your conciousness. The first times, I found I helpful to examine the nuances of the pain, untangle its aspects and view each as a group of sensations. Then, it was fairly easy to either stay with that (the emotional weight being replaced by curiosity) or dismiss them into being something in the background to be called up when needed (as in: Checking in – toes still intact? Yes? Back you go…”).
I didn’t know it had a name.
I mean, I didn’t think that it was my invention or anything. I’d just regarded it as a sort of offshoot of mindfulness meditation or something.
That being said, I’ve never done it in an “active” situation. So far for me, it’s been something that I could do in cases during which I could put a large part of my brain on autopilot (marching, being “on watch” in a completely non-threatening in the cold, etc).
I tried during childbirth and failed spectacularly. It sort of worked during the great middle swath of labor when you’re pretty much just waiting on contractions to do their thing, but the last part’s always been a big Nope.
ETA – The closest I’ve gotten was going through some exercises with a malfunctioning/nonfunctional gas mask. If I’d signaled that I had to stop, I would have had to do the whole thing over again. I couldn’t stop my physical reactions, but my respiratory system burning and coughing became a dull aside to the tasks that I had to complete.
@ mockingbird
That’s just what the Marines call it; I don’t know if it has a proper ‘psychological’ name. Scildfreja might know, she’s good at this stuff.
(I’ve just realised the nautical connection!)
I find it really easy for general pain and unpleasantness. I use it during HIIT horrible exercise for instance, but during the stone I couldn’t even begin to try it; it seems you need a certain level of control and concentration to make it work, and that just wasn’t happening.
It’s also handy for sleeping in uncomfortable places. It’s almost like an out of body experience. Leave your physical self on the lumpy gravel and float above in comfort.
Sounds like pain dissociation, or pain asymbolia (though the latter usually refers to dissociation due to some sort of brain lesion).
Pain is one of those things that’s still rather mysterious on a fundamental level, like many things with the brain. “It’s all in your head” applies here to a degree. I’d suggest that there’s a forebrain region that has inhibitory neurons backwards-tracing to the midbrain (through the acc perhaps?) capable of suppressing some of the pain response. It may also just be plain old synapse fatigue, or activation of the dopamine path to reduce the production of stress hormones, starving pain reception synapses of their needed transmitters? Lots of things that could be causing that. Above my pay grade, but a very interesting question!
@katz
Definitely. It’s always impossible to imagine a new level of pain until you’ve experienced it. Speaking for myself, I’ve had cortisone injections in my fingers before. Those were painful, but the one in my achilles was on a completely different level altogether.
If there’s something good I can say about both gallstones and kidney stones, it is that the pain goes away at flip of a switch when the obstruction moves out/away.
The resulting “not-pain” is a bliss. It is a legit thing, “not-pain”, and a lot of us live in not-pain every day and don’t realize it, until that sort of pain happens.
My gallbladder pain was bad, but it was a dull sort of pain, so I could manage during the two days I had to wait for surgery.
I think my worst pain was when I had subdermal MRSA, but I got morphine for it so at least I wasn’t really “there” for it.
For me, sharp pain is much worse than dull pain. I can “tune out” with dull pain (and I often do, to the point where I consciously go, “Oh! That’s why I’m so grumpy, I’m in pain!”) but sharp pain just demands attention. After the MRSA surgery, there was a LOT of sharp pain for the next few months, and even now the scar is more sensitive to pain than the rest of my fingers/hands. (It was on my right index finger, and I’m very very thankful for modern medicine; otherwise I’d be dead or missing most of my index finger.)
Side note: I do NOT recommend subdermal MRSA. I’d never seen the streaks of infection before, and I hope I never do again. First time they went up to my elbow; second time, up to my shoulder.
Skkiriki: YES. Not-pain is just amazing! I wish I had it more often, but chronic pain is not very accommodating.
Her Grace Phryne Purriosa Fisher:
I still got my gall-slosher inside me, full of stones. :/ It has been quiet for a while, though. *knocks on wood*
Unfortunately, it doesn’t do dull pain. It is more like “someone punched air out of you and is now compressing your chest, while there’s an Alien Chestburster inside of you trying to gnaw its way out”.
Paradoxically, my kidney stones can be traced back to “eat more healthily, eat more greens“. Ooops. Looks like it wasn’t such a good idea, since I also have a problem with lactose… and milk is not a regular feature in my daily meals.
Mine was so full the stones were spilling out. At least, that’s the story I got from my husband, since they didn’t save it for me.
I initially thought I was having a heart attack, so I guess that’s not so dull of a pain. But my post-surgery pain was really bad, because it was the off-week for my husband getting paid, and while they’d cover the antibiotics, pain meds were right out (because I’d do something with a weekend’s worth of pain meds?), and my body did NOT like the drainage tube. As soon as that was out on Monday, though? I was great. It was nice to be able to sleep again.
I am thankful that laproscopic surgery is a thing, though. I have two fairly small scars, one on my belly button and one just below my sternum. My mother had a fairly large scar from her gallbladder surgery, which I can only imagine took much longer to heal.
If I end up in surgery one of these days, I will darn insist that they give me the contents of that gallbladder and I’ll turn it into some sort of artwork or so.
I sometimes wake up and will lie there trying to figure out what woke me up and realize, “oh, my knees are sore.” I’m not sure how I’m in so much pain it wakes me up but I can still tune it out, but that’s what happens.
I don’t think they’re allowed to do that anymore, Skiriki. (Sorry for the typo in my previous comment.) Medical waste and all that. I wanted printouts of the ultrasound and they wouldn’t even do that. 🙁
I do the same thing, kupo. Right now I’m distracted by my throat (stupid cold/allergy combo) but if I think about it, I can tell that my right shoulder is also bothering me. There’s probably more, but it gets turned into “background pain” for me, as I’m regularly at a 3 or 4 on the pain scale.
@ skiriki
The doctor told me that if I wanted my kidney stone I could take a tea strainer into the bathroom with me. (I didn’t bother)