MGTOWs love making memes with this famous photo of Leonardo DiCaprio, sporting a slightly smug smile, raising a glass of champagne to toast, well, whatever it was he was toasting. In this picture, Leo seems to represent their platonic ideal of the MGTOW attitude, exuding the self-confidence they wish they had.
So they love to pretend that Leo is speaking for them.
You get the idea.
There’s just one little problem with the MGTOW appropriation of this meme: this is a still from the most recent film version of The Great Gatsby, in which Leo played none other than Jay Gatsby.
I can only assume that the MGTOWs using this meme never read the book or saw the film(s), because Jay Gatsby isn’t exactly a man going his own way in any sense of the term; he’s a man brought low by his obsession with a woman who just happens to be married to another dude. I’m hesitant to divulge any big spoilers, but at the end of the book, let’s just say he isn’t in a position to toast anyone or anything.
Or maybe this isn’t a self-own after all. Gatsby is consumed by his obsession with one woman; MGTOWs, for all their talk of going their own way, are consumed by their obsession with women in general.
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These memes are also plagued with the problem most MGTOW memes have: they’re not very funny, with any humor present being inadvertent and due to the self-owning quality or weirdness of the memes themselves.
I especially find the ones that say “MGTOW” in big letters to be funny, because it reads to me like the other text is addressed to a fellow MGTOW rather than at women.
Are these made the mgtow who are children and haven’t reached sophomore year so they haven’t read the great gatsby yet?
And so they beat on*, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
*More like “off”, in their case
I’d be legit surprised if most MGTOWs read anything more sophisticated than “Dick and Jane”.
It’s pretty on brand for manospherians to struggle with basic analysis of books and movies. See also the red pill and their love of Tyler Durden.
I past my classes for this semester, one more to go and i can graduate
Also perfect in that Gatsby is completely oblivious of Daisy the actual person, because he is obsessed with Daisy the trophy who will prove he has finally made it. Of course the MGTOW should be represented by a desperately insecure character who wastes his talents desperately trying to impress other people to aquire an alpha status that isn’t actually worth anything!
“The Not Even Mediocre Gatsby”
Congratulations, Lainy!
And I can only assume that MGTOW know nothing about life on planet Earth.
I dunno. Memes are taken out of their original context; that is part of what makes them what they are. I started feeling icky about that “woman vs salad cat” meme after learning that the crying/raging woman was at the time of the original scene in an abusive relationship, and upset at someone who betrayed her (something like that, I can look up the full context). But that doesn’t mean that people who use this meme when it points out stuff like funny graphic design are careless about DV. It means that memes are memes. They’re a piece of pop culture removed from its original context and given new meaning.
[This also means that I’m not actually annoyed by people using Plato’s Cave as an example of perception being limited or of “what if our world is not really real and there’s, like, a realler world out there and we just gotta find out the truth” – just like I’m not actually annoyed about the popular use of the word “apocalypse” to mean the eschaton, the Endtimes, rather than the original meaning of “vision”. I’m just an excitable nerd sometimes and can go on the well-actually-ing for a while because isn’t it cool? Anyway, where was I?]
Those MGTOW memes are stupid not because of the Great Gatsby, they’re stupid because of their simplistic misogynistic messages, and because they are wrong.
@Lainy; congratulations! You can do this!
@Penny PSmith – FTR, Taylor Armstrong (the woman in the meme) doesn’t seem too upset by that moment turning into a meme. She’s found some joy in it, got an award for it (Best Meme of the Year), and just seems more confused as to why she’s yelling at poor Smudge than anything else.
@ Lainy
Congratulations!!!
@ Penny
I like to say “Behold! The apocalypse” when I open the curtains.
@Penny Psmith – That’s true. Even without Gatsby, the memes are a hot mess. The photo says “witty bon mot at sophisticated party”, the caption says “I have never interacted with other human beings”.
They’re very careless people.
/EnglishMajorMoment
I’ve never watched the movie, but when I see that image, I don’t see someone genuinely toasting someone. This looks to me like the kind of thing you might do after winning in poker and taking all the other guy’s money: “Cheers, sucker!”
@Lainy
Well done! Just one more hill – you’ve got this shit handled. 🙂
@Lainy
Glad to hear you passed. Best of luck with your final semester.
What I’m finding disturbing is that meme of treating women like whores, as if sex workers automatically deserved rough treatment ,but them we live in a hypocritical society where people are constantly being socialized to pursue sex, but if a woman actually does it (and for money no less), she gets violence, threats of violence, and shaming.
I think whats bothering me is the idea that violence towards sex workers is such a given,and so unquestioned, that it should be meted out to any women who behave in a similar manner. Movies, and books and show after show after show have normalized this idea that sex workers deserve violence.
@Lainy
Congrats!
@Penny Psmith
Hey, I took like two whole philosophy classes more than ten years ago. You’re lucky I remember Plato’s Cave at all. ;D
@Victorious Parasol
Yes. I like to say that, but always have to add the caveat that I mean less bumbling and more don’t care about stuff.
Lakitha wrote:
Thanks for pointing out the violence aspect – I almost forgot it. I’m familiar enough with the traditional normalization of shaming and objectifying of sex workers (and to lesser extent other sexually active women). The violence that accompanies these attitudes always takes me off guard.
I remember reading that that movie inspired a fashion for Gatsby-themed weddings.
That’s an impressive misreading of the text, but the miggies manage to outdo it.
Mogwitch – you make a good point. Gatsby is obsessed with the Daisy he met years earlier, and is so focused on his internalized image of her that he’s almost blind to who she actually is. From my memory of the book, she’s so shallow as to be entirely surface.
Bonus: Kate Beaton did a series of Gatsby strips for ‘Hark, a Vagrant’ that are worth checking out.
Speaking of manly men, just been reading this. It’s a study by the University of Hawaii. It’s an animal rights thing, but may overlap with interests here.
In summary, the uni set up a series of experiments with groups of men.
Some of the group were faced with threats to their masculinity. All the men were then offered certain food choices, by way of pizza. The non challenged men just ate as they had done previously i.e. a mix of meat and non meat pizzas. But the threatened men all opted to eat only meat. Specifically the more manly meats like steak.
https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/100470/Pohlmann_Attila_r.pdf
The uni then analysed the men’s anxiety levels by reference to things like cortisol level.
What interests me is that, merely choosing to eat meat didn’t actually reduce the threatened men’s anxiety. That only went down when they could be publicly seen to do so.
“The mere act of eating does not reduce the stress of masculine identity threat; meat must be ordered“
So it seems there’s an actual scientific basis behind the whole ‘soyboy’ thing as a form of virtue signalling; in the original technical sense i.e. threatened men need to publicly identify themselves as meat eaters.
@Robert
I guess they didn’t watch to the end of the film.
I saw that movie a couple years back and thought it was okay, but nothing special. To be fair, I didn’t really enjoy the book much either, but at least I understood the point better than MGTOWs or people holding Gatsby-themed weddings.
@Alan Robertshaw
That reminds me of an anecdote about how singer James Blunt apparently felt threatened by the women in his classes so he went on an all meat diet until he got scurvy.
This seems like a potential explanation for Jordan Peterson. He claims to eat exclusively beef, but likely doesn’t do so in private.