Week 4

 

Week 4- Media Events, Memes, and Humor

 

     This week's memes chosen center around the media spectacle concerning Stormy Daniels and her alleged encounter with Donald Trump. After going public with the events that transpired and a subsequent Non-Disclosure Agreement was made public by The Wall Street Journal in January of 2018, Stephanie Clifford (Daniels) sued Trump and his then-lawyer Michael Cohen arguing that the NDA was invalid, as Trump never signed it. The memes chosen highlight various aspects of the following media coverage of Clifford throughout her dispute with the President and his legal team. 

   

     The first meme is a screenshot one of the speeches from Clifford and her team during this dispute, as she speaks into the various microphones placed by multiple media outlets on the podium. This meme not only highlights the stigma against those in the sex-worker industry, but the general ideology regarding women in a male-dominated society as a whole. Clifford, caught mid-speech with her mouth open in the photograph from which this meme was remixed, is immediately equated to her performing oral sex on a man because of our general inability to separate her profession from personal life. If any other woman were captured in the same hegemonic ideology regarding man versus woman. In this photograph,  the lack of contextualization regarding her presence in front of a large crowd arguing for justice is diminished, and her stereotypical place as an individual solely present for the sexual gratification of a man is amplified.

   The second meme, a screen grab of a Saturday Night Live skit, follows a similar format. Rather than focusing on the issues that Clifford is fighting for, the meme chosen centers around her career and focuses on the scene where she slides her chair, legs in the air, toward Seth Meyers. In addition to focusing solely on the societal ideals regarding her career, the meme reinforces another gender-specific harmful stereotype: the woman as dirty and sexually-promiscuous. The general social idea shared here is that the woman is opening her legs, so it must have a sexual connotation and certain smell; on the other hand, when a man does that, the "man-spreading" is generally fine.

   Lastly, this meme seems to be made from the individuals supporting Clifford in her legal disputes. Instead of placing stereotypical social ideals on Clifford, the meme subverts these strong stereotypes to place them on the man photographed. As Shifman (2014) notes, flawed masculinity is a strong characteristic that can lead to memetic success. Placing Trump with the qualities that are generally placed on woman can garner the perception of humor, surprise, or positivity an individual strives for in positing online, so those online may be more prone to sharing memes of this nature, poking fun at a man who is not stereotypically strong.

   While all three of these memes exhibit Shifman's (2014) concept of superiority in humor, the firs two regarding Clifford and her behavior highlight the most damaging, socially-stereotypical ideas regarding gender. The conscious choosing of visual and its combination with text are enough to engage in "oneupmanship" between the male-female dichotomy in American society (p. 81). Whether or not a man is included in the picture, such as the absence of one in the first meme, the combination of the image and text generally follows a form of stereotypical ideology dependent on the creator and his or her inherent ideals and biases on various cultural groups, including gender. Because of this ever-present social ideal regarding men and women, another form of humor should be included in her work. While harmful, a form of stereotyping should be included as its present in a wide variety of memes, including those on Stormy Daniels and the Overly-Attached Girlfriend, seen in my previous blog posts. Stereotyping and objectification of the woman is commonly seen because men are unable to put themselves in a non-dominant position in society, including visually. Men avoid objectification in visual culture as a whole, so women must take his place (Mulvey, 1989).

Mulvey, L. (1989). Visual and other pleasures. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.