One of those dopy Facebook memes, but this one touched off a heated discussion on my wall after I posted it late yesterday.
My commentary introducing the meme was
Wtf is this stupid shit?
Oooooooh yeah women are so weird and creepy and mysterious. What the hell do they want, anyway?
The guy pretending to read it looks like Penn Jillette. Nice touch.
It should be a very slim volume, with just one sentence:
If you need a book to tell you about it, you’re never going to know
(apologies to Louis Armstrong)
That discussion was maddening.
There would have been no “discussion” at all had the meme been, says, some leather fashion catalog with straight doods going, “I just can’t under Teh Gehy Lolololol.”
It’s not hard to see, doods.
I have no trouble understanding women. I treat them as people and the understanding comes as part of the deal.
Never mind the stupid snark.
I want to know what that is really a picture of.
The tax code… : (
Talk about othering. We are over half the population. It’s like the only people going to see the meme are the default gender. And thinking there is something dots tedious to understand is probably half the problem. How about ask, listen and believe?
I think I’ve seen that picture before — it was a few years ago, something to do with the Center for the Book here at the University of Iowa. I couldn’t find it with a hasty Tineye image search, however.
The Dood in the image has some sort of logo and script on his jacket pocket. Indeed that looks like some strange uniform smock…
Can anyone read it?
Abdul @ 4, no. The stupid snark is the subject. What that book really is is not the subject.
Reminds me of Freud’s famous assertion that he’d never found an answer to the simple question, What does a woman want?
Line up in your mind: Bob Dylan, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Babe Ruth, Leonardo da Vinci, Paul of Tarsus, Robert Kennedy, Arthur Ashe, H.G. Wells, the last man who fixed your transmission, Jonas Salk, Kent Hovind, Danny Kaye, Alexander the Great, Stephen King, James McNeill Whistler, John Eckhardt Jr., Langston Hughes, Warren Buffet, Lance Armstrong, Jeb Bush, Isaac Asimov, Ulysses S. Grant. Then ask yourself, based on this assortment of male human beings:
What does a man want?
The companion volume “Misunderstanding Women” is even bigger.
cactuswren – right, I was alluding to that in my commentary. Whadda they want???
But women are some sort of simpler species, like daisies or zucchini. There should be a single simple answer — “Plenty of sun, well drained soil, and a good 10-10-10 fertilizer” — that, once it’s taken care of, will allow the real (male) people to get on with their real (male) business.
This makes me want there to be a remake of that Mel Gibson movie in which he magically gains the power to read women’s minds, but instead of it leading to a stupid romantic comedy in which he’s conniving and insincere, he learns that that 90% of what he gets from the mind reading was exactly what was said out loud.
Oh, and could it star Ryan Gosling instead of Mel Gibson?
This meme goes right along with the one about women changing their minds all the time. Women be misterious and women be flighty.
The sad part is that whenever I see this type of meme on a non-feminist site (as in ‘a site not usually discussing gender’, not ‘anti-feminist site’), the vast majority of comments can be summarized as: “lol sooooo true, lmfao!”.
And many of these commenters seem to be women.
Link overload, I hope I won’t get eaten by the filter…
This article here seems to be the original source of the image. It’s “Poetry City Marathon”, weighting 10,119 pages.
The article requires a paid subscribtion to the archive now, but this Dutch blog here has captured the image.
Here’s an article with different pictures of the same book and here’s a clearer version of the original picture. I think I can read “Library” and “Preservation” on that uniform, maybe.
And my comment did get eaten by the filter because of the links. \o/
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/literature/would-you-read-a-10119-page-bo.html
Also
http://blog.lib.uiowa.edu/preservation/2011/01/07/10000-page-book-bound-at-conservation-lab/
The exact image isn’t on these pages, but I think the first article links to a paywalled article that has more images.
Sorry – out now.
One sentence, over and over and over again: Women are just like you, only with different experiences of the world.