Have you seen the feminist Ryan Gosling meme? Chances are, by now, you have because it has been prolific since its creation in 2011.
More surprisingly, however, new research shows the memes might actually be making more men feminists.
The meme features pictures of the Hollywood actor with text promoting feminism superimposed over the top of it. The text always starts with “hey girl” and is written from Gosling’s perspective, implying he is endorsing and promoting feminist ideas.
“Hey girl, the post-feminist fetishization of motherhood is deeply rooted in classism but I still think we’d make cute babies,” one reads.
“Hey girl, tell me to go make you a sandwich,” says another.
And perhaps the most popular meme reads: “Hey girl, since you make $0.77 for ever dollar I earn, I’m happy to pay for the movie tickets tonight.”
But the question many have asked is, does seeing images of Ryan Gosling endorsing feminism make people more inclined to endorse feminism themselves?
The answer is yes, according to researched released recently by the University of Saskatchewan.
PhD students Sarah Sangster and Linzi Williamson wanted to find what impact – if any – the hugely popular Gosling memes have on attitudes towards feminist ideas. To do this, they conducted an experiment with 99 students in which they showed half the students a series of feminist Ryan Gosling memes (the experimental group) and the other half images of Gosling with no superimposed text (the control group).
They then asked all participants to fill in a survey about their attitudes to feminist ideas and were asked whether or not they self-identify as a feminist.
The results were surprisingly conclusive. Sangster and Williamson found that members of the experimental group were considerably more likely to endorse feminist principles after seeing the images of Gosling endorse them. The researchers tested both radical feminist ideas and social feminist ideas, and found the experimental group was considerably more likely to endorse both when compared to those who had not seen the memes.
Even more conclusive were the results the researchers found when they looked exclusively at the results for male respondents. While women in the control group already scored relatively highly when it came to endorsing feminist ideas, men in the control group returned average results. Overall, the majority of men in the control group did not endorse the feminist notions they were asked about.
But the men who had seen the Gosling memes responded very, very differently. Sangster and Williamson said men in the experimental group scored very highly in their endorsement of feminist beliefs after seeing the memes.
The difference in the level of endorsement of feminist beliefs in men between those who saw the memes and those who didn’t was therefore quite significant.
“That’s how we can determine that they have an impact on men’s endorsement of feminism after viewing the meme,” Williamson told the Huffington Post.
Unfortunately, however, the impact falls short of encouraging people to actually identify as feminists; the researchers found no change in self-identification between those who saw the memes and those who didn’t.
Williamson said it is hard for them to say based on this single study whether memes have a more general impact on global attitudes to feminism or whether the phenomenon is Gosling-specific.
But it is certainly interesting that one set of images alluding to a high-profile male’s endorsement of feminism can have this kind of effect on young men. Imagine what would happen if these male celebrities themselves – rather than just images of them – started speaking out against inequality? Let’s hope we will find out one day soon.