If you wear a face mask to protect yourself from the coronavirus, you might as well be a gagged and wearing a blindfold. At least, that’s the logic behind a conservative meme equating anyone wearing a face mask to women sexually submitting to dominant BDSM players.
On Twitter, critics find the image hysterical for essentially “threatening” the viewer with a good time.
On Wednesday, Twitter account Cursed Conspiraboomer Images shared the kinky COVID-19 meme to nearly 100,000 followers and picked up over 500 retweets, more than 450 quote tweets, and 7,000 likes in just 12 hours. Most comments made fun of the meme’s horny implications, but one tweet in particular set the bar for the rest of the day: Five minutes after Cursed Conspiraboomber Images’ post, author and video producer Lindsay Ellis shared the tweet and commented “don’t threaten me with a good time.”
Similar comments blew up across social media, effectively cementing the fact that, yes, the right has once again threatened the left with kink.
The coronavirus-themed meme shared by Cursed Conspiraboomer Images seems to originate from a conservative account on Instagram called @Weaponizing_Truth. The image was posted to the account in April and recalls other memes that claimed face masks are part of a government conspiracy to implement Sharia, or Islamic, law.
However, Cursed Conspiraboomber’s viral tweet is just one part of a much larger pattern of right-wingers infatuated with fearmongering over things that actually don’t sound that bad, especially sex. In November, a self-described “socialism survivor” argued straight sex that lasts beyond two minutes is “perversion, degeneracy, and socialism,” eliciting cries that the right was threatening women with a good time. In June, a popular Trump meme went viral after it suggested antifa men enjoy receiving anal sex from women. Many left-leaning Twitter users agreed that pegging is great. The situations boil down to anxieties around sexual pleasure, transgressive sex (i.e., kink), queer bodies, trans people, or a mixture of all four.
“Uh… they look at any woman in a medical mask and start picturing BDSM sexual fantasies…?” one Twitter user commented under Ellis’ post. “I feel like that’s an issue they need to work out themselves, not us.”
“Don’t threaten me with a good time” can have a horny connotation, but the meme itself isn’t always sexual. One viral meme, seemingly from Facebook, implies the average “godless left-wing millennial” wakes up at 5pm, prays to Karl Marx (“the giver of free stuff and direct ancestor of bernie sanders”), and firebombs a Chick-fil-A. Many agreed that this sounded like a good time.
Other times, the right threatens the left with the very things they’re asking for. When police threatened to abandon their jobs, the left cheered on the idea. In late August, Bette Midler goaded Senator Tim Scott (R-S.C.) for saying Joe Biden wants a “socialist utopia,” which Midler found to be a pretty nice idea. And earlier this week, sci-fi author John Scalzi said the Ohio Republican Party was “threatening [him] with a good time” after sending him an ad warning him of “open borders” and the “green new deal” under a supposed Biden administration.
Scalzi’s followers reminded him that there’s a long history of the right threatening Americans with a good time: In 2016, the founder of Latinos for Trump warned that without Trump, America would see “taco trucks on every corner.”
“Are you still getting a taco truck on every corner?” one fan asked Scalzi. “Or is that too far left these days?”
Sexual fearmongering blunders make for great memes, but conservatives’ anger over demands for sexual freedom and basic human rights speak to larger cultural gaps between the left and the right. Still, among conspiracy theories from QAnon to fake coronavirus plots, not to mention the claims the president himself makes, equating a surgical mask with BDSM garb fits right in.
The takeaway? Everyone should wear a mask. It’s guaranteed to cause a good time.