Explaining the Mansplaining Statue Picture that Took Over the Internet

I’ve loved my last six months of interviewing feminist comedians and creative types for my monthly WEIRD SISTER “Funny Feminism” column, but have recently started to feel like I needed to take a break from the traditional profile or interview style I had grown accustomed to. I was wondering when I would feel inclined to just write exactly how I felt about feminism and comedy. Lucky for me, fate gave me this opportunity when an image I posted on Twitter went viral over the last few days.

As I type this, my original Tweet has been reposted and liked 1,948 times and feminist-journalist-superstar Ann Friedman’s almost-immediate repost of my Tweet has been shared and liked 6,678 times. In the last 24 hours, The New York Times via Women In the World, The Huffington Post, Hello Giggles, The Daily Dot, Boing Boing, Bustle, Someecards and The Daily Edge have all published pieces on the phenomena of this Tweet I called, “Mansplaining: The Statue.” The Writing Center at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia turned the Tweet’s image into a meme. The Tweet has been translated and reposted in various languages. People have started posting photos of themselves with the statues. Art critic Jerry Saltz appropriated the Tweet as his own joke on Twitter, which was then reposted by writer Rebecca Solnit whose essay (and later book by the same name), “Men Explain Things To Me” is often cited as the concept for the term “mansplaining.”

Last week was probably the busiest week that I’ve had in months and it wasn’t until Friday when I was barely able to crawl home from work completely exhausted that I was able to take a look at the mansplaining statue photograph that my friend Ash had sent to a mutual friend and me mid-week. I sat on my couch alone, eating a slice of pizza and I quickly devoured the image the way I devoured my food. In one gulp around 5pm, I posted the image to my Instagram account, which is “protected” and therefore only accessible to a limited audience.

The first comment on the photo came from a female filmmaker friend of mine who simply said, “Ugh.” She wasn’t laughing over my “Mansplaining: The Statue” image as it perhaps hit too close to home. Filmmaking is a field where I have experienced mansplaining hard and I’m sure she has too. The rest of the comments were abbreviations indicating various types of laughter.

I took my next gulp via Facebook around 5:30pm through another “protected” post. This time, writer Ann Friedman shared my posting, and I decided to make the image and caption public so our non-mutual friends could actually see it.

My final gulp was via Twitter around 6pm—my only public social media outlet, which I’ve waivered back and forth on regarding its privacy settings throughout the years. Within a couple of hours, the Tweet went viral thanks to Friedman’s reposting.

By 7pm, I was texting Ash to let her know that hundreds of people had seen her photo. At 8:30pm, I was telling her that she had inadvertently “broken the internet.” At 11pm, I told her “this was insane.” Her only response was laughter.

On Monday, I let Ash know her image was a meme and she laughed again. On Tuesday, I let Ash know that New York Magazine’s Jerry Saltz had claimed the image as his own and that “things were officially out of hand.” Her response was more laughter, followed by saying, “Saltz, you devil.”

It was at this point that someone from the media wanted to interview Ash and me about the Tweet going viral. Ash, who if you haven’t guessed isn’t on any social media sites, was surprised, but said she definitely wanted to participate in being interviewed.

The New York Times-associated Women In the World interviewer did not tell us that he would also be interviewing the male artist who created what we dubbed “Mansplaining: The Statue.” Oh the questions I would have liked to have passed along to the artist had I known there was a chance to do so via his phone interview. It feels worth mentioning that Ash and I were interviewed via email.

I also think it’s worth noting that in this piece, the writer essentially mansplains the image of the statue for readers. He describes the image as “a man with his leg propped up on a bench while talking to a woman seated with her legs crossed at the other end of the bench and an open book resting on her lap.” I might at least describe this as an image of a woman, say, reading or a woman taking a break from reading or even a woman being interrupted while reading.

One item that didn’t make it into the piece, which seems relevant, is that Ash and I met while both attending the high school operated by the University of the Incarnate Word, where the statue resides. In the interview, I half-joked about the possibility of fallout from our former school.

In the interview, I said, “I actually text messaged it (the image) to a friend before I posted it on Twitter—a friend whose both a feminist and standup comic and she joked that she wanted the image to go viral,” which feels differently to me than, “Like any good comic, she tested the material first. de la Cruz texted the photo to a friend and fellow feminist and standup comedian who approved and said she wanted to see the photo go viral.” The experience was a lot more natural than the piece suggests.

I have been Tweeting since Twitter first existed. I have over 11,000 Tweets, most of which are my attempts at being funny, but I’ve received little indication that what I’m saying is making anyone laugh. Whenever I’m performing on stage, I get the most laughs from the unscripted moments—the moments where I’m not even sure exactly what just happened so I probably won’t be able to replicate it again. Similarly to my experiences on-stage, I don’t really know why this particular Tweet, why this particular joke, was so funny at this particular moment. I didn’t think I was being any funnier than usual, but I guess that’s the magic of good humor: timing.

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Regarding the sculpture in question carrying any sexist undertones or symbolism—it doesn’t take a sociologist to know that body language can say just as much as words do. Body language can reinforce gender roles and stereotypes and assert dominance just as much as it can passivity. Likewise, artistic composition carries forth those same principals, whether they be conscious or unconscious in the artist/author’s intent.

When asked if I was “cool” with Jerry Saltz “not crediting” Ash or me in his Tweet, my response was, “I’m cool with it because I assumed he was making a joke about male entitlement.” I also said that I felt very lucky Ann Friedman retweeted my original Tweet. It’s clear Friedman is so supportive of other female writers, particularly of other funny feminist writers. Her post and Saltz’s posts say a lot about the culture of male and female critics on the Internet.

My implication here is that one gives credit and the other takes. While I realize that this is in fact a generalization I am making about gender and criticism, Friedman’s and Saltz’s approaches highlighted something I do believe is a problem with the linking of criticism, gender, ownership, and validity. As a filmmaker and lover of cinema, I am always checking in with myself in regards to whether I love something because I actually love it or because a history’s worth of male film critics have told me the work is worth loving.

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The most exciting element of this Tweet going viral remains that it highlights the importance of women’s conversations with each other. Essentially, this Tweet was a text message shared between a couple of longtime friends. The fact that the world wanted to jump in on the cultural joke and have a larger dialogue with each other about gender, art, feminism, public space, body language, humor, and more feels like a total gift I am thankful for.