Remember that “not like other girls” meme that compared feminists and tradwives? That meme structure was very common a few years ago, and the format was all over the internet, as two women criticizing each other’s music tastes, or calling them “fake gamer girls” or slut-shaming, or… well, it’s mostly just based on slut-shaming. Reclamation can be powerful - and can work. Some may argue it’s possible to “reclaim” this image by taking it out of an alt-right context and placing it into a liberal, leftist, or queer context, we can perhaps take back some of that power and make a few Nazis mad along the way.īelieve me, I’m more than up for making some Nazis mad. Well, maybe it seems trivial, but it’s a bit concerning that more and more people are letting memes with alt-right origins enter the mainstream. It’s just a meme, so it’s not hurting anyone, right? Okay, but my friend making a joke about how they love iced coffee isn’t a Nazi. These images are easy to push off as “just a joke,” which is what allows white supremacist rhetoric to stay safely hidden there’s always plausible deniability when the tools you use look cartoonish and exaggerated.
![4chan anti gay memes 4chan anti gay memes](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2019-08/15/19/asset/2050b1ad9a37/sub-buzz-600-1565898708-1.png)
“White-nationalist and alt-right groups use jokes and memes as a way to normalize bigotry while still maintaining plausible deniability, and it works very well as a recruitment strategy for young people,” Lindsay Schubiner, program director at the Western States Center, told The Washington Post. The original tradwife meme thread is filled with racist, misogynist, and antisemitic comments it takes reading through about five of them to find someone blaming the “Jewish media” for their problems.Īccording to a report done by the Data & Society Research Institute, “Far-right movements exploit young men’s rebellion and dislike of ‘political correctness’ to spread white supremacist thought, Islamophobia, and misogyny through irony and knowledge of internet culture.” Boards like “politically incorrect,” better known as /pol/, are filled with memes like tradwife girl - images that mask violent Nazi ideas, but are passed around as ironic and edgy. 4chan, in particular, has a long history of alt-right, neo-Nazi activity - often expressed through meme formats. This meme, known as “ tradwife girl ,” originated on 4chan’s politics board, titled “politically incorrect” in 2019, as a variant of similar characters like “Nordic gamer,” an Aryan man usually compared to a Mediterranean, often Jewish-coded man.
![4chan anti gay memes 4chan anti gay memes](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/462/873/fdd.jpg)
Circling the tradwife are traits implied to be better than those of the feminist caricature, like how she “has knowledge about her European roots” and “loves her family, race, country, in that order.” In one meme, she is positioned side by side with a caricature of a “liberated feminist” - the feminist being the one mocked, and the tradwife being celebrated.
![4chan anti gay memes 4chan anti gay memes](https://www.heyalma.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/icedcoffee.png)
The blue-eyed, blonde-haired girl is supposed to represent a “tradwife,” or traditional wife: a group of real conservative women who celebrate holding traditionally feminine roles, following their husbands, and being white.