“Society needs us? Why should any man give a damn about a society that doesn't value them?” (Comment)
1The statement above stems from a comment under a YouTube video that is part of a popular meme genre known as “Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity” (RMEM) memes. This short-form video-based meme genre and community of meme activists emerged around 2021 through the dispersed yet connected practices of creating, sharing, and consuming memes of similar style and content and quickly rose to popularity on the platform. The highly edited short-form video memes they share are firmly embedded in the milieu and vernacular of online bodybuilding cultures and function as fitness motivational content that encourages (mostly men to) exercise by celebrating male muscularity and athletic prowess.
2What makes these memes fascinating from a critical meme studies perspective is that their motivational allure stems not only from the celebration of male muscular and athletic aesthetics but essentially draws on an implicit story embedded within the memes. A story that emerges through the interplay between the meme creators, the video memes, and the audience. This story speaks of a supposed oppression of men, masculinity, and hegemonic male bodies within contemporary Western societies (or “modernity” in the vernacular of RMEM meme culture), which, according to the opening statement, do not value men. Within the memes, the story of “male oppression” serves as a source of motivation wherein the processes of hardening one’s body are understood as “unapologetically” embracing one’s “inner toxic masculinity” and thus as a form of activism and embodied protest against this supposed oppression.
3These claims of oppression of men, masculinity, and hegemonic male bodies propagated through the story RMEM memes stand in contrast to the largely accepted, critical feminist reading of contemporary Western societies. This reading describes Western societies as inherently androcentric, patriarchal, and racist (Fraser & Jaeggi, 2018; Robinson, 2000) and argues that men, masculinities, and hegemonic male bodies often find themselves in the most privileged and, in many cases, the default position (Butler, 1990; Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) within the language and structure of these societies. As such, the story propagated through RMEM memes can be understood as, at least partially, disinformative, conspiratorial, or propagandistic.
4Yet, the popularity of these memes suggests that despite being disinformative, something about the story and narrative of “male oppression” shaped and shared through RMEM appears to be convincing. This article offers a first and essential step towards understanding this novel type of meme-based disinformation. It focuses on analyzing the construction of these claims through the analytical lens of stories and storytelling (McDowell, 2021), asking how the story of “male oppression” propagated through RMEM memes is created.
“A well-crafted story shares with the most elegant theories the ability to bring a version of the world to light that so transforms the way people see that it seem never to have been otherwise. Under certain conditions, a story can be a more powerful critical force than a theoretical analysis.” (Disch, 1993)
5This article approaches RMEM memes from a feminist and critical disinformation studies perspective (Kuo & Marwick, 2021). This approach acknowledges that disinformative and conspiratorial claims, such as those propagated through RMEM memes, increasingly draw on social constructivist and embodied forms of argumentation (Harambam, 2021; Kuo & Marwick, 2021; Panofsky & Donovan, 2019). From this perspective, describing the story of “male oppression” RMEM memes produce as false or as lies—as is implied in the definition of disinformation as “false content that is spread intentionally” (Søe, 2019)—fails to understand the felt truths upon which these claims of male oppression are built.
6Instead, this approach to disinformation builds on research on the cultural and political fringe, highlighting the importance of understanding the stories, myths, or “kind of truths” held within transgressive communities to analyze, understand, and counteract them (Blee, 1993; Griffin & Feldman, 2008; Mosse, 1999; Sheenan, 1981). Describing and understanding that creators and consumers of RMEM memes “are trying to tell a kind of truth too” (Owens, 2019, p. 105) is an essential step toward understanding how their disinformative content can become believable within and beyond the borders of such communities, thus creating a basis for counteracting such disinformative communities and practices.
7On a metaphorical level, storytelling is a lens to understand the practice through which RMEM memes create and shape their claims of “male oppression.” The stories RMEM memes create emerge collaboratively in the interplay between the dense visual material of the video memes, the deliberate editorial choices of the meme creators, and the interpretational responses of the audience in what has been described as “the dynamic triangle [between] the story, the teller, and the audience” (McDowell, 2021). Neither the visual material of RMEM memes, the meme creators (tellers), nor the audience shape the “oppression of men” alone; instead, the story emerges through the relational and affective practice of storytelling that always involves all parties of the storytelling triangle. The story of male oppression exists somewhere between the editorial choices of the meme creators, the affective dimension of the meme’s content, and the authentic claims of common hardship and oppression in the audience’s comments. The lens of storytelling emphasizes specifically the collaborative aspect of the storytelling embedded within RMEM memes, which understands the disinformation and anti-feminist, racist, anti-academic knowledge produced, shared, and circulated within the community of RMEM memes not only as the result of a vile disregard for “the truth,” but rather as the result of a collaborative and creative effort.
8The story of the male oppression told through the community of RMEM memes has to be understood in the context of a contemporary rise and re-emergence of narratives of masculinity-in-crisis within (online) discourse (Coston & Kimmel, 2013; Schmitz & Kazyak, 2016; Walsh, 2010). In what has been broadly described as the manosphere (Marwick & Caplan, 2018), masculinity-in-crisis narratives exist in various forms. The pornography abstinence forum /r/NoFap (Hartmann, 2021) describes men as suffering uniquely from an overabundance of pornographic material, believed to create regression of the mind. Communities of self-proclaimed involuntary celibates (known as “incels”) understand men to struggle uniquely by the double standards of liberated and feminist women (Sugiura, 2021), and men’s rights activists (MRAs) depict “white men as the new victim” and the actual, contemporary “second sex” (Coston & Kimmel, 2013, p. 376) as they describe feminism to force men into “subordinated position[s] in a number of contexts, including education, the workforce, and the family” (Schmitz & Kazyak, 2016, p. 8).
9What remains constant across these masculinity-in-crisis narratives is that they function to sow the seeds of doubt (boyd, 2018) about whether patriarchal hegemony exists and thus form a basis to discredit the feminist project under the pretense of being oppressed. Even as these narratives emerge from fringe online communities, their broader affective appeal and stickiness cannot be underestimated as they find their way into the constitution of contemporary male identities (Nesbitt-Larking, 2022).
- 1 Prevalently visible in the widespread right-wing trope of “hard times create strong men. Strong men (...)
10While this article firmly disagrees with the stories propagated through RMEM memes—pointing towards the fascist adjacent sensemaking embedded within masculinity-in-crisis narratives that seem particularly well aligned with the contemporary narratology of the New Right (Antón-Mellón, 2013), which describes “the West” as declining due to a softening of masculinities1 (Ferraresi, 1987; Sheenan, 1981)—investigating and understanding how this particular “masculinity-in-crisis” narrative emerges in and through RMEM memes is an essential step towards critiquing the narrative structure and argumentative basis of a story that appears to resurface in mainstream discussions.
11Empirically, this article is based on the analysis of fifteen Reject Modernity, Embrace Masculinity meme videos, and their comment data. These videos are part of a larger dataset of n=911 YouTube videos procured between November 2021 and June 2022. The subsample of n=15 videos was chosen based on their popularity and relevance within the community, which was determined by their popularity (high view count) and the frequency with which these videos were recommended across the dataset. While the number of n=15 appears comparatively small, the videos accumulated 17.967 individual comments between them, which was deemed enough for this project to achieve data saturation. All comments were downloaded using YouTube Datatools (Rieder, 2015) and filtered and annotated using the 4Cat Analysis Toolkit (Peeters & Hagen, 2022).
12The story of “male oppression” has been described as emerging through the interplay of the dynamic triangle (McDowell, 2021) between the video meme creators (teller), the visual material of the meme (content), and the commentators (audience). Thus, analyzing this story requires a methodological approach that accommodates all parts of the triangle. The method is therefore split into two interrelated sub-sections.
13The first part focuses on the visual material of the memes (content) and aims to locate visual tropes throughout the storytelling of the meme genre using “keyframe analysis” (Schlüter, forthcoming). This method describes the process of transforming the video content of RMEM memes by disassembling the moving image of the video into still frames that are then reassembled into “keyframe strips” [fig. 1]. This process intends to slow down the source material of the memes while maintaining its complexity and allows for a simultaneous analysis within and across all fifteen video memes in the subsample by clustering similar images and coding the visual material across the genre of RMEM memes.
Figure 1
Screenshot of the “keyframe strips” of eight of the fifteen videos in the sample. Each horizontal line of images represents a video meme, with each image representing a scene in the source material.
Source: Maximilian Schlüter, 2025.
14The second part focuses on analyzing the comments (audience) by exploring how the emerging tropes from the visual material were perceived and, in some cases, further developed within the comments of the videos. This part of the analysis uses the 4CAT Analysis Toolkit (Peeters & Hagen, 2022) to filter and annotate comment data from the fifteen videos. The resulting analysis of the comments and the visual material of the memes are interrelated processes, as the tropes of the visual material influenced how the comment data was filtered, and the comment data influenced how the visual tropes were made sense of [fig. 2].
Figure 2
Visual Representation of the methods used to explore the stories that RMEM memes convey superimposed on the concept of the storytelling triangle.
Source: Maximilian Schlüter, 2025.
15After transforming the video memes into “keyframe strips,” the visual material was clustered based on the similarity of their visual vernacular and coded based on immersion in the video comment data. This process revealed distinct editing and storytelling tropes that permeated the storytelling of RMEM memes.
16Given the embeddedness of RMEM memes in the discourse of online body-building cultures, it became apparent that portrayals of various “types of bodies” predominated in the visual material of the memes. These “types of bodies” could be clustered into body tropes through which the story of “male oppression” is established.
Table 1
Overweight Body Trope
|
N=53
|
Masculine Non-Conforming Body Triope
|
N=28
|
(Militant) Female Bodies Trope
|
N=23
|
Table showing the amount of keyframes in the three most prevalent tropes. Of a total of 154 keyframes, 53 portray overweight bodies, 28 portray masculine non-conforming bodies and 23 show (militant) female bodies.
17While all “types of bodies” portrayed throughout RMEM memes are perfectly normal, it becomes evident that within the editing of the memes, certain bodies are framed to highlight that they do not conform to hegemonic standards of attractiveness or beauty, making these bodies nonhegemonic bodies that “inhabit the world in the wrong way” (Massanari & Chess, 2018, p. 7).
18Among these body tropes, the trope of the “overweight body” holds particular significance in establishing the story of “male oppression.” Not only is it the most common body trope throughout the entire corpus of memes [tab. 1], but as male bodies increasingly face disciplining and “normalizing body discourses and practices” (Gill et al., 2005) specifically within bodybuilding cultures, the overweight male body has come to be seen as the antithesis of the ideal muscular male body and, by extension, hegemonic masculinity which the memes aim to motivate each other to achieve.
- 2 RMEM memes show between thirty and forty different scenes per video, with an average video length o (...)
19The trope of the “overweight body” has to be understood as the result of a concentrated effort to shape and create a specific depiction of what “overweightness” looks like. The short-form video format means RMEM memes are highly edited and fast-paced pieces of content.2 In this fast pace, it appears as if meme creators merely picked one image out of many potential videos to illustrate overweightness. Yet, upon slowing down and laying out the visual material, it becomes apparent that the visual material used across different memes is highly repetitive, and the bodies used to portray the tropes belong to a group of recurring, few individuals.
20A recurring type of scene, RMEM meme creators choose to depict the trope of the “overweight body” in the act of eating obscenely large quantities of food. While the amount of food is essential in establishing the trope, how these bodies are depicted is arguably even more relevant. Sauces and leftovers paint their faces, as these bodies use their bare hands as cutlery, almost indistinguishable from the food they eat.
21These scenes stem almost exclusively from a video genre known as “Mukbang” videos—“a type of live online audiovisual broadcast in which a creator or host eats large amounts of foods” (Kang et al., 2020). Given that “to gain popularity, mukbang creators not only performatively overeat, but they also eat irritating foods” (Kang et al., 2020), the video snippets portraying “overweight bodies” in the act of eating are visualized not as a civil, mundane, or “normal” practice but rather as obscene and vulgar. “Overweight bodies” are depicted as devouring food rather than simply eating it (Forth, 2020).
22What becomes evident is that in the visual memes, a select few individuals’ bodies are repeatedly used (and abused) to establish the trope of the “overweight body.” The people behind the bodies are never named or referred to in either the comments or the videos themselves. Instead, these individuals are robbed of their bodies, and their bodies become hyperbolic tropes through which the story of “oppression of men and masculinity” emerges.
23The trope of the “overweight body” is carefully constructed and results from deliberate editing choices by meme creators that draw on a hyperbolic depiction of overweightness. This particular depiction of “overweightness” draws on pre-existing and prejudiced imaginaries of fat and overweightness that describe “overweight bodies” as boundless and ravenously devouring entities (Forth, 2020) and frames those possessing overweight bodies as individual and moral failures (Gill et al., 2005, p. 55).
24The prejudiced imaginary upon which the trope of the “overweight body” is built draws on the idea that in the contemporary (western) historical context, abundance has replaced scarcity (Stearns, 2021) and, as Susan Bordo argues, in this context, “we find ourselves continually besieged by temptation, while socially condemned for overindulgence” (1993, p. 195). Ascertaining an overweight body in this context is understood as the logical result of an overindulgence in the abundance of modern life, of a form of losing the battle against the continual besiegement. Consequently, the “overweight body” as a trope becomes conceptualized as the result of a lack of individual willpower and an inability to self-discipline and self-control of one’s own body ( Bordo, 1993).
25The supposed lack of willpower creates a portrayal of overweightness as an individual failure and overweight people as “cognitively thick or dull” and “failed citizens” (Forth, 2020, p. 392), both in the way that they are understood as moral failures not living up to care for their own bodies (Gill et al., 2005) and in the sense that their unhealthy bodies are described as creating an unreasonable strain on Western welfare states (Gard, 2021).
26The carefully chosen scenes and bodies used to construct the trope of the “overweight body” create a sort of evidence collage (Krafft & Donovan, 2020) attesting to a reality in which “overweightness” is, in fact, the result of mindless and dull over-consumption described by the prejudiced imaginary. Scenes of “mukbang” video creators performatively overeating to gain popularity are not understood as a form of acting but rather as evidence that overweight bodies are, in fact, “ravenously devouring” entities. RMEM memes have to be understood as deliberately evoking and evidencing this historically prejudiced imaginary of fat and overweightness that foregrounds the overweight body as the result and evidence of individual failure, with overweightness seen as incompatible with society and culture.
27Simply exploring the trope of the “overweight body” as evoking and evidencing a historically prejudiced fat imagination that mainly describes overweightness as the result of individual failure only goes so far in exploring the story of male oppression propagated through RMEM memes.
28In RMEM memes, the “overweight body” trope is accompanied by what appears to be screenshots of “empirical data.” One frequently recurring image across the corpus of memes is a cropped screenshot of the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Disease, which, for the period of 2013-2014, showcases that over 70.2% of the US population above the age of twenty years are considered either overweight or obese [fig. 3]). While the institute and data are legitimate and not altered, the particular zoomed-in crop—which has “Overweight or Obesity: 70.2%” prominently positioned in the middle of the screen—leaves out the essential context of how obesity and overweightness are defined within this study and, incidentally, also cuts off female obesity rates from the visualization.
Figure 3
Taken from Video 15, this screenshot of the US National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases is recurring in video pastiche, having clipped away female overweight and obesity data, the graph shows that over 73.7% of the entire male U.S. population is considered Overweight or Obese.
Source : https://www.niddk.nih.gov/.
29In the context of the storytelling of the memes, these screenshots of “empirical data” function to portray the carefully constructed trope of the “overweight body” as a widespread and societal phenomenon. Through evoking this type of “empirical data,” the trope of the “overweight body” becomes embedded in what researchers within the field of fat studies have described as the narrative of a “fat epidemic” (Gailey, 2022; Gard, 2021). The narrative of a “fat epidemic” is widely criticized, both for its conceptualization of overweightness as a contagious disease and for its deterministic and totalistic portrayal of overweightness as the “predictable outcome of the North American lifestyle” (Hermiston, 2010).
30Despite the critiques, the narrative’s alarmist rhetoric has nonetheless ingrained the idea of a “fat epidemic” in the cultural mythology of Western cultures (Stearns, 2021). The carefully positioned and cropped public health data directly links the “overweight body” to this imagined societal crisis and serves to insinuate further that the very selectively chosen scenes (which make up the trope of the “overweight body”) are representative of a supposedly widespread crisis of epidemic level.
31The memes’ recurring portrayal of “empirical data” narratively intertwines the concepts of “Western society” and “overweight bodies,” which creates a double bind: “overweight bodies” are described as failed citizens who destroy Western society with their selfishness while simultaneously being described as the natural and deterministic outcome of modern life and thus shaped by it.
32While the prejudiced imaginary upon which the trope of the “overweight body” draws is not inherently gendered (fatty tissue is understood as a second-class tissue no matter the gender; Forth, 2013) within the storytelling of RMEM memes, the supposed structural and epistemic “crisis” of overweightness is essentially problematized and framed as a distinctly male crisis.
33To understand how overweightness is understood as such, it is important to consider the historical connection between masculinity and the male body, as Raewyn Connell describes:
True masculinity is almost always thought to proceed from men's bodies—to be inherent in a male body or to express something about a male body. Either the body drives and directs action (e.g., men are naturally more aggressive than women; rape results from uncontrollable lust or an innate urge to violence), or the body sets limits to action (e.g., men naturally do not take care of infants; homosexuality is unnatural and therefore confined to a perverse minority). (Connell, 1995, p. 45)
34(Hegemonic) masculinity as emerging and intrinsically connected to men’s bodies implies the necessity of controlling and managing the exterior of male bodies as an essential part of upholding masculine identities (Gill et al., 2005). As men’s bodies become increasingly visible and commodified in mainstream culture (Bordo, 1999), the exterior of male bodies has been exposed to disciplinary scrutiny to live up to a contemporary hyper-muscular masculine ideal (Bordo, 1999; Monaghan, 2005).
35Gill (2005) argue that this hyper-muscular masculine idea emerges “at precisely the moment that fewer traditionally male manual jobs exist, and those that do require less physical strength than ever before” ( Gill et al., 2005, p. 40). As physical labor (in Western societies) is slowly falling by the wayside, this staple of male identity creation appears to be replaced by “body projects,” wherein muscularity and hardness are understood as the causal result of sacrifice and hard work (in the weight room). The “hardened” body thus slides between matter and metaphor (for the metaphor, see Forth, 2013), where the bearers of muscular and “hardened” male bodies are interpreted as “tempered,” “in control,” (Connell, 1995) and, most importantly, as being able to “endure and invite pain” (Forth, 2008, p. 117).
36Hardening and shaping the exterior of male bodies through “body projects” has thus become an essential part of performing masculine identities and upholding masculine narratives (such as that boys become men through sacrifice and hard work, which is understood as an essential element of physical exercise). Controlling one’s own body, then, has to be understood as an essential part of contemporary masculinity, evidenced not least by the ever-increasing use of recreational steroids by young men trying to maintain and prove their masculine identity (Underwood, 2022). Hardening one’s body is intrinsically connected to a felt existential threat of what it means to be a man.
37In the understanding of RMEM memes, the “overweight body” is a body shaped by comfort, by doing nothing but giving in to one’s urges. It is a soft body that stands in contrast to the hegemonic masculine body ideal, which is hard and muscular. Softness is not masculine in character or body.
To be exposed as “soft” at the core is one of the worst things a man can suffer in this culture. Tears are permissible, even admirable, when they fill the eyes of an old warrior reminiscing about battle or a jock talking about his teammates. In such contexts, tears are like the soft penis after satisfying sex: they don't demean the man but make him lovable and human—because he has proved his strong, manly core. (Bordo, 1999, p. 55)
38In this context, male “overweight bodies” are understood as being in opposition to the “deeply masculine” (Connell, 1995) and essential narratives of male identities that describe men as “tempered,” “in control,” (Connell, 1995) and willing to “endure and invite pain,” (Forth, 2008, p. 117). It becomes evident how RMEM memes can describe the supposed crisis of overweightness they perpetuate as a distinctly male crisis. Not only in the sense that it disproportionally affects men but essentially in the sense that men are also disproportionally affected by overweightness, as the softness of the “overweight body” contradicts the very description of what it means to be male.
39Reject Modernity Embrace Masculinity memes do not only establish a claim of “male oppression,” they create a story of “male oppression” through the interplay between the meme creators, the video memes, and the audience. By following a specific narrative trope established in the memes—the trope of the “overweight body,” this article illustrates how the story of male oppression emerges by invoking digital and analog folklore and “empirical data” surrounding a prejudiced understanding of the “overweight body” to weave these elements into a cohesive and compelling narrative that describes overweightness as a particular male crisis and “overweight bodies” as evidence of societal issues decline. By focusing on bodies, RMEM memes introduce an element of undeniable fact to their storytelling, as these memes tap into viewers’ lived experiences, merging individual struggles with a societal critique to create a potent, if misleading, narrative.
40Reframing overweightness as a predominantly male crisis, of course, grossly disregards the disproportionate history of disciplining and scrutiny (overweight) female bodies (Bordo, 1993; Markula, 1995) have endured. And that overweight male bodies have historically been normalized through the understanding that to “occupy space” is an essential part of hegemonic male identities in the Western context (Connell, 1995, p. 57). Yet, the storytelling of RMEM memes disregards the historical female struggle, as they deem overweightness to not stand in direct contrast with their understanding of hegemonic femininity, as it does with masculinity. For RMEM memers, softness of body and character are traits that are already associated with female bodies and hegemonic feminine identities, which they describe as intrinsically soft, tender, and made to nurture:
The feminine is the force of chaos, the masculine is the force of order. There needs to be a balance, we need to embrace masculinity again. Not just men but women in men as well. (Comment)
41Behind these community interpretations that describe specific gender identities as intrinsically soft or hard resides a belief in a natural and deterministic attribution of certain character and identity traits to either masculinity or femininity as a “universal structure of the psyche” (Connell, 2005, p. 14) that is as underlying and unchangeable.
42The concept of “balancing” these forces ascertains immense importance in the discussions amongst the community wherein a “balanced” relationship between the masculine and the feminine forces is believed to cherish the positive attributes of “confidence, assertiveness, logical deduction” on the one side, and “outward love, embrace of emotion, tenderness” on the other. Within this belief, a “balance” between the masculine and the feminine forces is thus understood as necessary for a healthy individual and, by extension, a healthy society. An “imbalanced” relationship, on the other side, is described as leading to a “destructive,” “abusive,” or “manipulative” society.
43Given that RMEM memes describe modernity as being in “decline” and “destructive, abusive and manipulative” towards men, it starts to become tangible how this “male crisis” is framed to be emerging and evidencing an “imbalance” between the forces:
When masculinity is in decline, society is in decline. True masculinity propagates change and growth in society. True Femininity propagates nurturing and patience. We need more Masculinity AND femininity in todays society before we can reach true balance. Love the videos bro! (Comment)
44It appears as if Raewyn Connell’s critique of the polarity of Jungian archetypes (Connell, 1995) remains true, as she wrote: “Jung’s treatment of the masculine/feminine polarity as a universal structure of the psyche also leads to a quagmire. No historical change in their constitution is conceivable; all that can happen is a change in the balance between them” (Connell, 1995, p. 13). With RMEM memes attesting the balance between “masculinity” and “femininity” to be in danger, the memes claim that contemporary crises and ills are not caused by the androcentric and anthropocentric destruction of the planet but rather by the exact opposite–an underrepresentation of the “masculine.”