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What’s the deal with these ham sandwiches and Taylor Swift’s vagina?

Wow, uh...

 

Jay Hathaway

Internet Culture

Posted on Jul 6, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 12:08 pm CDT

On a summer Wednesday when the big news included the release of an important report on the Iraq War and the police shooting of a black man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Twitter was abuzz with discussion of … ham sandwiches and Taylor Swift’s vagina. Huh, what? 

https://twitter.com/2dAmMuslim/status/750797751563145216

If you don’t know “what all the talk about ham sandwiches and vagoos is about,” allow me to explain.

It all started when a white supremacist troll, “Jennifer Mayers,” celebrated the police killing of Alton Sterling, 37, in a convenience store parking lot. Mayers had “gone viral” a few weeks before with a blog post celebrating Christy Sheats, the pro-gun mom who killed her two daughters in June.

Mayers assumed, although this hasn’t been reported anywhere, that Sheats shot her daughters for “race mixing” with black men and that Sheats was justified. So that’s the type of troll we’re dealing with here.

Combing through the troll’s timeline, someone unearthed this gem:

https://twitter.com/southern_mayers/status/743257961351385088

Whoa. This singularly awful tweet manages to combine a bizarre display of slut-shaming and profound ignorance of the female anatomy. Good internet posters immediately went to work on the sad ham-labia: 

(Sorry, this embed was not found.)

https://twitter.com/rigamarock/status/750788346155241476


https://twitter.com/adultblackmale/status/750769096464019457


I very much want to believe that “Jennifer Mayers,” with a timeline full of over-the-top racism and cartoonish white supremacy, is a vile parody account and not just another Donald Trump supporter on Twitter. I don’t want these tweets to be sincere: 

https://twitter.com/southern_mayers/status/750325914278301697

https://twitter.com/southern_mayers/status/750148851101642752

And there’s a good chance they’re not. The only Jennifer Mayers I could find listed in Baton Rouge—with Facebook photos that look nothing like the woman in the @southern_mayers avatar, and whose Facebook posts don’t espouse any racist sentiments—didn’t return a request for comment. The fact that “Mayers” lists her city as Baton Rouge, where Sterling was shot dead by cops Tuesday, is another clue that she could be trolling. 

Either way, this ham sandwich analogy is dumb as hell. Those are ham labia, not a ham vagina, and the association between “vaginal looseness” and promiscuity is largely a myth

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*First Published: Jul 6, 2016, 8:38 pm CDT