By David Futrelle
You may have noticed a strange explosion of highly surreal memes hitting your Twitter home page of late. Blame the Artificial Intelligence-powered meme generator that you can find here, which will happily generate as many weird and baffling memes as you could ever want.
Now, the meme generator is a fairly basic thing, in principle: it takes in hundreds (thousands?) of human-generated memes in a variety of formats before pooping out something it doesn’t understand, but that we humans might.
Given that the AI-meme-generator literally doesn’t know what it’s saying, most of the memes it puts out tend to be a bit puzzling:
And sometimes it doesn’t seem to understand the meme format at all:
But alongside the surreal memes, the AI-meme-generator somehow manages to spit out others that make perfect (or at least only slightly imperfect) sense. I’ve been fiddling around with it for awhile and have been surprised and intrigued by these memes, which seem very much like the memes an actual human might produce on their own.
Indeed, these memes make a lot more sense than many if not most of the Men’s Rights memes I’ve run across (and written about) over the years — despite the fact that the MRA memes were generated by actual human beings who, at least in theory, should know what they’re saying.
Let’s look at examples from both genres — contrasting some of my, er, favorite MRA memes with memes the AI-meme-generator made for me.
Let’s start with this authentic MRA meme:
Apparently the thought process behind this, er, hilarity is: “Women are stupid! And rape is funny! Sharks!”
This AI-generated meme makes a lot more sense:
I mean, who doesn’t enjoy a nice hot dog once in a while?
Here’s an MRA meme taking aim at women in the military:
Contrast that with this cheerful and wholesome AI-generated meme:
Again, the AI hits the nail on the head. Everyone loves to see people talking about their cool stuff.
Here’s a dark and bewildering MRA meme:
I suppose the message here is supposed to be “even if she says she’s not a feminist, she might secretly be one, and falsely accuse you of rape.” But I’m not sure anyone not steeped in MRA-talk could discern that.
Also, why is “radical/white” in ironic quotes?
By contrast, this next AI-generated meme, while admittedly rude and perhaps a bit sexist, is as clear as a (school) bell.
This MRA meme may leave you scratching at your head as you try to puzzle out its strange “logic.”
This AI meme, by contrast, makes so much sense it hurts.
In the world we live in today, who has the patience to wait until you get home to get sloshed?
So why are MRA memes so illogical and incomprehensible? Part of the problem is that reality is not on their side, and so many of their memes only make sense if you’re already living in the imaginary world of the Men’s Rights movement, where black is white and mean, bitchy women rule over all. I know enough about this world from the many years I’ve spent doing this blog that I can usually make some sort of sense of most of their memes, but I still struggle with some of them. It doesn’t help much that many MRAs are bitter bastards choking on their own aggrieved entitlement; their attempts at jokes are undercut by their meanness and their barely developed sense of humor.
The AI may not have a sense of humor, but it’s also unencumbered by all this baggage, so when it pops out with something that’s funny, it’s genuinely funny.
Congratulations, MRA; it’s official now: You’ve failed the Turing test.
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To be fair, his beliefs seem to be entirely summed up by “man good, woman bad” and that doesn’t sound as good out loud as it no doubt does in his head. If that were my belief system, I would also probably dodge questions about it.
I had a perfectly good comment about how women put in so much more effort into their appearance than men, which doesn’t seem to fit with MansVoice’s ideas about hypergamy, and he totally ignored it. He’s definitely cherry-picking what he answers and hoping that he can distract us with mild poo-flinging. He’s desperately trying to prove that he’s smart by calling us dumb, which most of us realize is a losing tactic early on.
@ Londsayirene
Yeah; also he ignored the papers showing women are more likely to marry ‘down’ than up; both in terms of status and looks. And they were peer reviewed ones.
You’d think someone so scientifically minded would have something to say about that.
@MansVoice: we keep saying ‘flounce’ because you feel the need to be all, “well I have this fabulous life and JOB which obviously none of the rest of you have that I have to get back to because I’m so important and you’re not” whenever the conversation isn’t going well for you.
Notice how none of the rest of us are doing that? Hint: it’s not because we don’t leave to do other things.
@LindsayIrene
Negging is never a winning tactic – it’s basically an ad hominem – but as we all know it’s super common with terrible men who take their inspiration from other terrible men.
@Alan Robertshaw
But Heartiste is the most brilliant mind to ever walk the planet! What good are peer reviewed studies when matched against the agenda-inspired ass-pulled assumptions of Heartiste???
@Alan
You’d think someone who is employed in a country with more than one time zone would understand that not everybody works the same hours he does. Unless of course he only works with local people, which admittedly is something I’m not used to: I’ve been working with people all across this country for the last ~20 years of my healthcare career. Company policy usually specified that you include the time zone in all communications, because while HQ was in Central, the workforce was international, and so were our customers. Some of the customers weren’t used to that, so we all got pretty good at saying, “Okay, and is that 2 PM Eastern/Central/Mountain/Pacific/etc.?” just to make sure everybody knew when the weekly meeting was going to happen.
First of all, I can’t respond to everything right away. I know me saying this annoys some of you, but it is true: I have other things to do, unlike, apparently, most of you. I’ll try to get around to some of the claims w/r/t Hypergamy soon.
Which doesn’t make sense. Actuaries, of all people, need to have an advanced understanding of math and statistics. They shouldn’t be easily fooled by junk science.
Perhaps you might consider that I know what I’m talking about, and you don’t?
In all seriousness: it is obviously true that this little survey is not dispositive, and it certainly doesn’t reach the standards of (say) peer-reviewed studies. But that doesn’t mean it’s not suggestive – and in conjunction with various other evidence it points toward a general picture that it emerging about the dynamics of online dating. I would welcome a more rigorous examination of the evidence, but AFAIK we don’t have that as of now.
Hint: it’s not because we don’t leave to do other things.
Actually, I sort of think that’s exactly what it means.
Yeah, but that’s only because you’re stupid.
So is there still candy left in this new guy?
I have to know, since you are such a smartie-smart-smart and I am a mere low-IQ crone: Why do you consider “Hypergamy” to be a proper noun? I just… I just really want to know, dude. You’re so consistent with this particular unusual capitalization choice, and I cannot be satisfied until I understand.
Edit:
I do not mean to shame anyone who uses non-standard capitalization because the rules we have are arbitrary and not inconsistent across cultures and not taught to everyone the same way, particularly to people who learned English as a second language. He’s just choosing to always capitalize this one word, and it feels very deliberate, and there has to be a significance to it, right?? I must know.
Anyone who is checking WHTM a lot because you’re out of work at the moment, there’s nothing wrong with you, and MV’s attempt to shame people for struggling right now is just a demonstration of his own insecurities.
@Schnookums Von Fancypants, Naughty Basic Horse
Yes, but it’s all Sweet Tarts.
Since the troll has become even more boring than before, with most posts just consisting of “No U!” let’s keep that dream talk going!
Weirdest, most vivid dream I had had me waking up in bed, but my bed was in the middle of a large, dark cavern. Standing around the bed in a circle, at some distance, were Nazgul-like figures in hooded black cloaks. They slowly began to close in, tightening the circle, as as they di I heard their voices:
“Duke, Duke, Duke, Duke of Earl…”
I’m sure a Freudian would have a field day with that one.
It’s not even Sweet Tarts. I think we’re down to the Circus Peanuts.
@PoM
No other journal’s impact factor even compares to the Journal of Heartiste’s Rectum! /s
@LindsayIrene:
Well, THERE’S some Halloween disappointment come back to haunt me.
What it suggests is that women on Tinder who are attracted to a conventionally-attractive male photo are shockers attracted to conventionally-attractive male photos! I mean, did we see this one coming? How could anyone!
The problem with your “study” is that it is not a randomized sample of all women, or even all women on Tinder, but a self-selected group who were actually, factually, attracted to a photo. To discover that women who find photos attractive admit to finding photos attractive is the kind of ground-breaking research that Heartiste is famous for, admittedly.
What about the women who didn’t find that photo attractive? We have no data on them, whatsoever. Your “study” didn’t even attempt to touch them. What about women who found the photo attractive but were turned off by some other aspect of the profile? Again, no data and no attempt whatsoever to collect data. What about gay women? NO DATA AND NO ATTEMPT TO GATHER DATA. Do you see a pattern? No? Not yet? No pattern yet?
You have entire populations that were not sampled. Your “study” is worthless as a statement about all women, all women on Tinder, or any other group with a description that begins with “all women.”
This is just the sampling problem. This isn’t even your only problem. It’s just the most significant data-collection one. You also have, even more seriously, a problem with conducting human research on humans who haven’t consented to being researched. That is a massive, overwhelming, glaring omission that says that the “researcher” in this case is a twatwaffle who wouldn’t know social science from his own ass. You don’t conduct research on people who don’t know that they are part of research. This is honestly basic 101 stuff.
There is, finally, a problem with relying on self-reported behavior, which pales in comparison with the other issues.
I did consider that, and tested it as a hypothesis, and dismissed it with >95% probability. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t even know enough to know what you don’t know. Your ignorance of how social science is conducted is a gulf the size of the Atlantic. You are Dunning-Kruger in action.
re: Dream talk
I dream a lot about people breaking into my house, which is frankly terrifying and I wish the vivid dreams would stop. But! One day, I had a different dream.
I dreamed I went back in time to my junior year in high school, knowing everything I know now with a chance to do it all over again. This dream haunted me for weeks. I thought about all the changes to my life that I would have made, to avoid missteps. Who knows what kind of different missteps I would have made instead? But, most crucially, I knew how the stock market was destined to perform for the next 30 years, which struck me as a more critical piece of knowledge than any trivia about my personal life.
@MansVoice
I’m exceedingly sure that’s not what anyone takes issue with. But from where I’m sitting, you came into a previous thread, said all women were indecent and that beauty is an objective standard, and something about hypergamy, after which you went on and on and on about hypergamy, and didn’t even try to deal with the points people made of the “decency” of women and the objectivity of beauty.
Then you came here, made other ridiculous statements and said you wouldn’t be discussing hypergamy anymore, because other people here are just too gosh-darn “not intellectually or emotionally equipped for difficult conversations”, only now you are suddenly open to discuss hypergamy again?
At no point in all of this have I ever bemoaned the fact that you haven’t answered me, or immediately answered every question that is put to you. But I do take issue with the fact that you ignore roughly two thirds, if not more, of what goes around in the threads you participate in and then complain that the discussion is not up to your standards.
Also, what are you doing here on a weekday? Is it okay now to comment during universal work hours?
You know, I can’t wait for our troll to skip merrily out of this thread so that he can pretend he didn’t see my post about his stupid, stupid, stupid article.
@Policy of Madness
The best part is that if he does return in a later thread, he’ll be all “I see you still haven’t dealt with the issue of that awesome article I kept linking to, what is up with that?” I just hope I’ll be intellectually and emotionally equipped enough when it happens.
re: dreams
I haven’t really had any particularly wild dreams during the pandemic. But I have had a couple of delightful dreams where I was at a library and could borrow whatever books I liked. I went to look at children’s fantasy, found that the series I was looking at was not shelved correctly and started re-arranging them. The only downside of this is that it made me relaise how much I miss going to libraries.
I enjoyed that post, BTW. Love a good, tidy demo job.
Well, it sure suggests that a lot of men are really pissed off that women are no longer in a position where they’re forced to marry to survive and as a result we can have standards and choose to be single rather than settle for someone who doesn’t meet them.
Although A Man’s Whine is focused on the injustice of women having standards about looks, men get just as mad at any expectation women have. They don’t like if we expect to be treated with respect. They don’t like if we want a man who is willing and able to do his share of household chores. Or if we want a man to not spend 20 hours a day playing video games. And on and on.
Urgh. Last night I had another stupid vag-blocking dream. In it, I was having a great time with my current boyfriend, but when the clothes came off, he started getting younger and younger and turned into a little kid. Like, OMG whyyyy. ?
No, it wasn’t experienced as a nightmare, or at least not in the traumatizing sense, just a “life is frustrating and dumb” sort of thing.
@WWTH
I’d go a step further and say that men get far angrier. When was the last time women created a forum to complain about how awful all men are for not having basic hygiene or doing chores? Women also don’t regularly murder or rape male partners for not living up to standards, either.
@Naglfar
While everything you’ve said is true, I don’t think that’s what WWTH meant. I think WWTH meant that men get just as mad when women have any expectations at all, not just expectations about looks. Not that they get just as mad as women do. The degree to which women get angry wasn’t in WWTH’s metric at all.
Cf also those toffees in Quality Street and/or the plain liquorice ones in Liquorice Allsorts.
@ Vicky P
Heh, I would have to ‘take the mote out of (mine) own eye’ before commenting on that one.
I was expressing my disappointment last week that a webinar didn’t take place; even though I’d logged on ten minutes before the stated time as requested.
“Who was doing it?”
“The Chinese University of Hong Kong”
“I think we’ve spotted the problem”.