Many Mamamia readers would remember the fabulous Ryan Gosling ‘Hey Girl’ memes.
If you’re not familiar, here’s a quick update: The cult of Ryan Gosling hit epic proportions when the ‘Hey Girl’ memes took off last year.
The inspiration for the meme was – if Ryan Gosling was your boyfriend, what would he say to you. Take a look:
The trend then took on an (awesome) feminist bent, with memes appearing that had Ryan saying things like “Hey Girl. Of course, no means no” and “Hey Girl, we don’t call our sisters ‘bitches'” and even “Hey Girl, I can’t believe that guy is using standpoint theory to frame The Avengers as a marginalised group”.
And now it is President Barack Obama’s chance to get some feminist meme action. After Todd Akin’s outrageous and absurd views on rape were aired, Obama called a press conference and reminded the world that:
Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we are talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.
So what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women.
So Nerve jumped on board and complied a gallery of Obama’s best feminist quotes – all in the Ryan Gosling meme style.
And the results are pretty ace:
Top Comments
I especially love the one about women not being an interest group, but half the country! I mean, I know there are reasons to get organised and fight for rights women are still systematically denied, but I believe his point here is to highlight just how short-sighted all such denials always have been... to ignore half the population for no valid reason...
For the rather short sighted people below saying that because Australia now has a female PM, Governer General, Attorney General that suddenly men's interests aren't recognised or women now have equal power, you're forgetting that all the rules, laws, and societal expectations in Aust were created by white middle class men for white middle class men. Other group's interest (gays, women, non-white, etc) were excluded. Over the years this has been being changed slowly to even things up - but that has meant changing the assumed norms - which were set by men. So no, white middle class men are not victimised or marginalised, because the world was made to suit them, and now we're trying to make it suit other people too. By no means do I think that men should be brought down a peg or anything like that, I just ask that you please get some perspective.