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I totally get the joke, and Pedro can only be a good thing (huge fan, pray daily that he adopts me). But I do understand why some men would find it insulting. What's your thoughts?
this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
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Sorry for the delay, I've only just got the chance to sit down and reply. To your point about incels, how would you feel if someone making a meme saying "all women are gold-diggers". How do you react to incels saying things like women are trashy and only want trashy men and not good guys, or women are weak porcelain dolls and wouldn't survive without men. Would your reaction not be that not all women are like that? That most women aren't like that? This is the same shit, the genders are just reversed. Is it any less true if the rebuttal comes from a woman arguing in good faith vs an extremist TERF? I'm not defending incels, but if they sound the same as someone making a good faith rebuttal, maybe it makes young impressionable men and boys think they might have a point. And if they're right about that, what else might they be right about? This is exactly how people get sucked into cults and far right groups.
I feel your example with guns (while still a generalisation) is different from this kind of meme because it's about appealing to empathy. This meme is not doing that, it's using shame to supposedly get men to reflect and change. I argue it's not very effective, and there are way better ways to do this. You share one example - appeal to empathy. I've seen memes praising men for positive actions they take (e.g. green flag memes).
This kind of discourse is also harmful to transmac individuals. I've unfortunately seen trans men being ostracized from the very communities they relied on for support as soon as they 'pass'. Once they look just like other men, they are seen as a threat and are unwelcome. If this kind of divisive language and approach only impact those doing harm to women, then fine. But it's not and it's doing a bunch of collateral damage in the process.
It's shouldn't be hard to point out positive role models without resorting to belittling people. Most men have strengths (literally) most women don't - let's talk about how they can use those strengths to be a positive force in society. I see way more jokes and memes saying men are trash rather than talk about how they are can be important and positive part of the movement towards equality. Just like the LGBTQIA+ movement would never have made it as far as it did without the help of our allies (and trust me I'm not giving them most of the credit), we're never going to get equality and freedom across genders if we don't work on bringing men as our allies too.
Thanks for the detailed response!
I agree with the need to be welcoming to the men willing to change. I guess I’ve really only got 2 more things I’m sort of musing on.
The first is the role, if any, shame plays in motivating change. This is a tough one for me, both as a trans femme, and witnessing my mother going through the process of accepting me and by extension all trans folk. Shame played a huge, though perhaps unfortunate, part of both those processes. It took large swaths of the rest of my family getting good at name and pronoun shifts for her to finally start putting in effort. It took the shame of being left behind to motivate change. I’m not going to open the can of worms that is discussion of the role shame plays in my own trans experience at this time lol. I don’t have a real answer to anything here, just curious about folks’ thoughts on shame as a motivator.
The second (and longer) musing kind of builds off that, but looks at the linguistic nature of memes. I won’t go find citations right now, but there’s definitely research into how memes can be used to tackle tough issues through humor and irony and exaggeration. I think of it almost like ‘Adventure Time’ or ‘ Steven Universe’ both shows about young impressionable boys being guided into adulthood by a cast of people set on making them a good person. To be clear, they’re kids shows, they have goofy animation, and fart jokes, and just plenty of general stupidity. They use the lack of seriousness of the show to coax in people that are actively being socialized away from healthy masculinity by society, and get them learning to be better people. I think memes can have a similar effect.
Let’s say this meme gets seen by every single cis, straight man. I struggle to believe all of them, let alone a majority, would think Pedro Pascal is truly the only man maintaining women’s faith. So the hyperbole of the meme then gets people thinking about what makes someone make the exaggeration in the first place. What does Pedro Pascal do that has someone praising him like this? This ties back into the shame as a motivator point a bit. Feeling like an out group can be a good reason to learn to empathize with the in group. This happens in bad ways too, look at the invasion of queer nightlife spaces by straight folks. Straight people aren’t learning to empathize with LGBTQ+ folks, they just want to feel a part of the in group because we know how to throw parties.
I’m almost done, but wanted to play with your point about an equivalent meme. I think, in the right space the gold-digger joke could absolutely hit (femcelmemes, and the various 196s are the obvious examples to me, just general queer, femme leaning spaces). I also think a gold digger meme equivalent would lack the positive educational layer this meme has I mentioned before. I feel it amounts to the difference in search results of “why do people love Pedro Pascal?” and “are all women gold diggers?” Those two searches lead to wildly different parts of the internet, one of which is intent of pushing men further into hating women.
It’s super messy. Thank you so much for talking, and I’m still all ears because I do agree on including men in the conversation. I’m mostly curious about how that process should or shouldn’t have a way to filter in men that are willing to change, and willing to acknowledge the harm hierarchical patriarchy has caused, and that includes being able to laugh about it.