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.”
