A garlic bread meme online has created a war and ignited a conversation regarding gender. Confused?
The drama began this past weekend when a popular garlic bread fan page called “Garlic Bread Memes” posted a meme that many viewers saw as transphobic. The meme pictured two pieces of garlic bread (shown above) with the caption “if I had a slice of garlic bread for every gender.” Immediately the photo raised lots of negativity and arguments between followers of the page.
The page serves as a place where garlic bread lovers around the world make fun of already existing posts and memes. Surprisingly, this is not just a small fan page; currently, more than a quarter-million people subscribe to it. People can follow the page, “Garlic Bread Memes”, on Facebook (265,000 subscribers) Instagram (10,500 subscribers) or Reddit (11,000 subscribers).
With this post, however, many readers thought that the page’s administrators, who love garlic bread as much as the followers, were rejecting gender identities beside male and female, which promptly ignited hundreds of outraged posts in the comments, on all of the pages sites.
While many people were outraged by the post, others defended that it was a meme mocking these kinds of posts that exist not as a joke. Many people joked in the comments themselves.
One comment read:
“Garlic Bread Memes, you have let me down. i really thought this page would never discriminate against anything other than banana bread.”
The Garlic Bread Meme’s main administrator, who is only an 18-year-old high school student named Boaz stated, “I am surprised by the scale of the reaction,” he said. “But [I’m not surprised] about the reaction itself.”
The garlic bread memes are intended to make jokes of the originals they depict, so Boaz was pretty much mocking the original transphobic memes by adding garlic bread. He stated that he expected it to offend “social justice warriors,” a derogatory name for people who speak out on progressive issues.
[H/T: Washington Post]