Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt from Amazon.com

It’s safe to say that memes are not the intellectual highlights of online culture.  Internet memes are often frivolous, humorous wastes of time and bandwidth, little more than inside jokes to share and enjoy with friends.  On the rare occasion however, they can be masters of inadvertent meaning, shedding light on cultural and gender issues.  So it goes with the meme of the Three Wolf Moon T-Shirt, which sent hordes of people to The Mountain’s amazon.com store to purchase a screen-printed wolf shirt of their very own.

The meme spawned from a humorous comment on amazon.com by Brian Govern.  He wrote a review of the shirt, creating a Walmart-roaming-trailer-park-living character that credits his success with women to the wolf shirt.  If taken on face value, it’s a mockery of the American lower class and hick culture, a class evidently peopled by fat men riding courtesy-scooters and meth-addled women with no teeth.  It’s a jab at the stereotypical redneck, a staple of the comic routines of Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy.  Yet how did the shirt, the store and the story all combine to create something unique and worthy of Internet furor?

Govern’s story is actually rather subversive: he describes the shirt as the embodiment of male fantasy, the desire to be the “mysterious loner who knows how to ‘howl at the moon.’”  It’s virile, rugged and manly with faux Native American charm, everything that Govern’s character is not.  This over- the-top masculinity on a person who represents the extreme opposite of society’s view of male attractiveness (fat, lazy, low income) is part of its humor.  Yet what originally begins as mockery evolves into a feel good story about the triumph of an underdog, albeit one with very low standards.  The story has a happy ending, with the hero getting the girl and scootering off into the sunset, all because of the empowerment of the wolf shirt.  It’s the 21^st century blue-collar male fairy tale, a complicated package of mockery and empowerment through the celebration of masculinity.  Govern’s character becomes an icon for every ordinary man who wants to be manlier, while at the same time serving as a source of ridicule, a reminder that at least you don’t ride a Walmart scooter.

10 Kittens T-Shirt from Amazon.com

If the Three Wolf T-Shirt represents bear-punching, shark-riding manliness, a woman wearing the shirt is humorously subversive, especially in the context of The Mountain’s store.  The Mountain’s images seem to gravitate towards extremes, from the shark shirt on the hardcore extreme, to the basket full of puppies that populate the nauseatingly sweet opposite side of the coin.  Even though both shirts are unisex, the store is definitely marketing to the stereotypical likes and dislikes of each gender: men like dark, earthy colors and dangerous wild animals in action, while women like lighter, less dramatic scenes with cuddly puppies and kittens.  Govern’s story increases the gender disparity by describing the shirt as practically oozing pheromones from its cotton fibers, a signal to women of the virility of the man who wears it.  Using that logic, a woman who dons the Three Wolf T-Shirt would be trying to attract women as well.  In this way, the story places the mantle of the shirt solely on men, but in doing so it opens an opportunity for women to take the meme a step further in its subversiveness.  When a woman wears it, it becomes a parody of a parody, a wink to both the story and the gender implications that come with it.

Ultimately, the Three Wolf T-Shirt is an equal opportunity farce, a double-edged sword where no one and everyone is the source of both ridicule and empowerment.  It’s a way for geeks to represent their online communities and their interests, with both males and females running with the pack.  Personally, I like my memes to come in pairs, so I’ll pass on the Three Wolf T-Shirt and stick with the much more intentionally hilarious Keyboard Cat Moon Shirt.

Tags: humor, memes, men, size, three wolf T-shirt, women

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 7:22 pm and is filed under Gender Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.