Memes

I'm sorry that was a bit glib of me, allow me to elaborate.

I'm of the opinion that basically any version of this meme that is not misogynistic would not be recognized as a meme by a modern audience.

First of all, the meme does not exist in isolation, it remixes images, ideas, esthetics already in the meme ecosystem. The bare-chested black and white image is a clear callback to the chad and old school cool archetypes, both quintessentially masculine. In fact, I'm not sure there is an image that you could present to modern meme audiences that stars a women and would immediately say "uncompromising cool artist - gender neutral". That is in and of itself in indicator or pervasive misogyny, but that's not surprising because the misogyny is often overt.

Which is my second point. The "black and white bare chested man cool, women and twinks and gender-nonconforming people not cool" is not an accident of the image choice, it's a feature. A lot of standard meme templates are just vectors to enforce the norms of patriarchy by shitting on "soy boys" and "simps" and other men deemed unworthy. The misogyny is baked into the format.

The third issue is that nostalgia memes are inherently misogynistic, even by meme standards. They aspire to RETVRN to the (often imagined) good old days when men were men and horses were horses and patriarchs traded women among themselves like cattle.

The medium is a message, and this medium really fights you when you try to transmit the gender neutral version of this message.

That said, I'd love to see a version of this meme with Bikini Kill as the top picture and commercial manly men losers as the bottom row. I just don't think meme audiences would get it.