About once a year, a perfect, dumb tweet comes along—a tweet so mind-boggling bad in form and content that it demands to be mocked. No one needs to coordinate the meme-ification of the Bad Tweet, it just happens, as if the masses have scented its Bad Tweet Pheromones and closed in to feast on it. This year’s Bad Tweet comes from conservative blogger Matt Walsh, who is obsessed with outdated gender roles:
Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says pic.twitter.com/oX85v67FaY
— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) August 28, 2017
Walsh apparently saw this AP photo of a man, woman, and child in the floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey when it was tweeted by another conservative account, with the caption “toxic masculinity and privilege.” The joke here is supposed to be that anyone who mentions “toxic masculinity” or “privilege” believes all white men are terrible, even the ones who apparently rescue people from floods. (Almost no one actually believes this.)
Toxic masculinity and privilege. pic.twitter.com/EE9xVit4d4
— Renna (@RennaW) August 27, 2017
Walsh retweeted it before posting his own bad take, in which he added a tangent about gender studies to a photo of a disaster relief effort. Does it matter that the person doing the carrying here is a man, or that the people being carried are a woman and child? No, except to the extent that Walsh sees this as a tableau of his ideal hierarchy of the sexes.
Like the time conservative commentator and poor hand-to-hand fighter Steven Crowder tweeted about “the ideal “make” body,” Twitter couldn’t let this go. People immediately began borrowing Walsh’s regressive caption and applying it to different images.
Don’t let your gender studies professor tell you there’s anything wrong with the gender roles we’ve had for thousands of years, like a rat riding a cat riding a dog.
https://twitter.com/GMPaiella/status/902528445141458949
Or three dogs wearing one big coat:
https://twitter.com/nrasidi/status/902553121603366912
Oh, are Scotch eggs suddenly politically incorrect now, too?
Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says pic.twitter.com/ee65CqSNIu
— spooquiche (@unrepentantmess) August 29, 2017
Look, if you don’t believe that a woman’s place is behind Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a baby’s place is inside Arnold Schwarzenegger, can you even call yourself a Christian?
https://twitter.com/napgenius/status/902555872420696065
There are at least a dozen more of these. People were really tickled by the Bad Tweet.
Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says pic.twitter.com/n8EmN2pcQ6
— brad (@bshoup) August 29, 2017
Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says pic.twitter.com/pTb9XbAzYz
— Hassan ✊🏽 (@habdelra) August 29, 2017
Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says pic.twitter.com/klljXi8RAJ
— Andrew Z¡gler (@andrewzigler) August 29, 2017
https://twitter.com/guyneiljames/status/902562813872406528
Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says pic.twitter.com/WevntyqGPe
— Hend Amry (@LibyaLiberty) August 29, 2017
Gender studies professors’ heads are surely exploding all across America today, although not for the reasons Walsh might think.