If earlier today you had told me that a meme might be responsibly for influencing the opinions of people on the Internet, I’d have been really super worried about the world. Luckily, we’re talking about Feminist Ryan Gosling and not Scumbag Steve or Insanity Wolf. Thank God.
Inspired by the meme created by Danielle Henderson in 2011, University of Saskatchewan PhD students Sarah Sangster and Linzi Williamson wanted to know if such an odd combination of eye-smolder and social politics could actually have a real, positive effect on someone viewing it. They placed 99 undergraduate students (a third of whom identified as male) into two groups; one group was shown 10 to 15 images of Ryan Gosling without any words on them, while the other saw such classic image macros as “Anne Kaplan asks ‘is the gaze male?’ but all I know is I can’t take my eyes off you” and “the post-feminist fetishization of motherhood is deeply rooted in classicism but I still think we’d make cute babies.” Hot stuff.
After viewing the images, both groups were given a 40-question survey that was meant to gauge their opinions of feminism. Across the board, women did not appear to be very much affected by Gosling’s feminist message. But even if they didn’t define themselves as “feminists,” the male survey takers who viewed the image macros were more likely to be sympathetic towards the cause—by almost 10% more than their control group counterparts.
Obviously, the study has its biases; for one thing, it’s only looking at a very specific type of person (college aged, relatively well educated, probably either white or aboriginal given Saskatchewan overall racial demographics), and not very many of them at that. It’s also tough to tell whether or not the men were reacting to just the feminist text, or if they were responding to the popularity of the Ryan Gosling meme in and of itself. But according to co-researcher Sarah Sangster, demonstrating the power of stuff like memes was kind of the point all along.
“What our research says is that we shouldn’t quickly dismiss pop culture phenomena, and realize that there is potential to use it as a persuasive device,” Sangster said. In her opinion, a lot of privileged people would come around on feminism and other form of equality if they were educated about it in a way that broke free of the stereotypes and stigmas they already associate with such theories. Which is what made the Ryan Gosling meme so pervasive in the first place. For whatever reason, you don’t expect to see the guy quoting Audre Lorde, and you certainly don’t imagine he’d use it as a very compelling pick-up line—but somehow it works. .
Of course, it’s also possible that Gosling has such a magnetic presence, it’s hard not to agree with him on everything. “It could have been they just really admired him or they think he’s a cool dude,” Linzi Williamson noted. Yeah. I’d buy that too.
(via National Post)
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