On the origins of the man checking out another woman meme; or, please stop saying it originates from that Instagram post
[Below I will discuss how misinformation about the man checking out another woman meme has spread because of an incorrect suggestion made on a Know Your Meme submission. I will also go into my attempts at tracking down the origin of the meme.]
The man checking out another woman meme is a meme that poses some problems for the meme enthusiast interested in origins. First of all, it has been popular across many social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, and so it is difficult to know were to look for the origins. Secondly, it is an image-based meme. Whereas text-based memes have certain keywords that can help in the search, image-based memes don’t. And lastly, not only is it an image-based meme, it involves a stock photo, so reverse image searches often bring up instances of the stock photo, not the meme.
So Know Your Meme tried their best to find the origins and stated in their submission on the meme
(archived link)
under the “Origins” section that “On February 23rd, 2017, Instagram user @_dekhbai_[2] posted the image with the caption “Tag That Friend / Who Falls in Love Every Month”. (The submission was submitted by Don Caldwell.)
And so journalists took this information at face value and started crediting this Instagram post as originating the meme, which is kind of strange, actually, since the Instagram post does not take the format of labelling the three individuals in the stock photo. (How did it make that jump from just being a captioned Instagram post to being an adaptable image in which the people in the image are labelled?)
Below is a taste of how journalists have reported on the origins of the meme.
Up until a few days ago, “Man Looking At Other Woman,” as Know Your Meme dubs it, languished in obscurity, known mainly to fans of this six-month-old viral-ish Instagram post
From Buzzfeed (archived link):
This particular photo started going viral in February – but not in the way you probably know it. According to meme chroniclers knowyourmeme, the first use of it was on an Instagram page where followers were asked to “tag that friend who falls in love every month.”
From USA Today (archived link):
According to Know Your Meme, a website tracking viral content, the meme first appeared on Instagram in February.
Okay, I think if there’s something clear from this, it’s that the meme somehow has its origins in an Instagram post from February.
But, wait, plot twist!
On 2 February 2017 (that is, before the Instagram post from 23 February 2017), Twitter user goftrop posted an example of the man checking out another woman meme (archived link). (At the time of writing, the tweet had more than 2,000 retweets and 6,000 likes.) I messaged gostrop, who kindly wrote back to me to let me know the meme was taken from a Tumblr post by @theprogrocker.
On 31 January 2017, the Tumblr user @theprogrocker posted the example involving Phil Collins. (At the time of writing, it garnered more than 8,000 notes.)
The image was captioned “i saw this on a fb page and im not sure who to source it to but this is funny af”. Thanks to the helpfulness of @theprogrocker, I have been informed that the Facebook group from which the meme was reposted is called “Only Solitaire”, a group that follows the music reviews of George Starostin (and posts occasional music memes). The post that @theprogrocker saw was actually not originally posted in the group but was a shared post of a post made by the Facebook page Prog Snob. A screenshot of the Facebook post is below. (The date January 31 on the post refers to the year 2017.)
This Facebook post has been quite popular with more than 6,000 likes and more than 2,000 shares. In the comments, the page gives “Thanks to Kaan for the pic”.
I was able to find that Kaan submitted the image to another Facebook page (this one is called Prog Düşmanlarına Verilen Müthiş Cevaplar), which posted it a day earlier on 30 January 2017. A screenshot of this post is below.
I have reached out to Kaan but have yet to receive a response. [See update below.]
If there’s anything this shows us, though, it’s that memes don’t always have neat origins. The World Wide Web is a messy place, and we can only do our best to make sense of it all. And it’s okay to acknowledge when we just don’t know where a meme comes from.
TL;DR: Know Your Meme stated (or at least strongly suggested) that the man checking out another woman meme came from an Instagram post from 23 February 2017. However, I was able to find a tweet from 2 February 2017 with the meme. The tweet reposted the meme from a Tumblr post from 31 January 2017, which was also a repost from a Facebook post from 31 January 2017.
UPDATE (26 Aug 2017): Kaan has written back to me and informed me that he did indeed make the Phil Collins meme. However, the use of the image was inspired from a political meme from a Turkish group.
UPDATE (3 Sept 2017): Kaan and I have since corresponded more about this meme. It seems that the meme may ultimately have its origins in a Turkish political Facebook group. Kaan told me that he originally got the idea to make his Phil Collins meme from “siyasettin group”. When I looked for such a group on Facebook, I came across a Facebook page called Siyasettin. Once I scrolled through it, I found a couple examples of the man checking out another woman meme from January 2017. (A screenshot of such a post is included below.)
It appears to have been posted several hours after the Phil Collins meme from the group called Prog Düşmanlarına Verilen Müthiş Cevaplar, however. Kaan clarified that there is a non-public Facebook group that corresponds to the Facebook page, where such memes were published before they were published on the public Facebook page, which explains the discrepancy in posting times.
I have messaged the Facebook page Siyasettin but have yet to receive a response.
