Angelina Jolie as Fox in Wanted/picture from outnow.ch

Everyone can agree that girls who kick ass are awesome.  When a heroine in a film knocks out a gang of men or saves her boyfriend from the monster-of-the-week on television, I always get an awe-filled, giddy thrill.  These women are empowering and exhilarating, symbolic of the strength and control women can have over their own lives and destinies in real life.

However, I’ve noticed that female machismo has become more and more rigidly confined to women who fit a stereotypical mold of female attractiveness, especially in regards to slenderness.  Women who are extremely muscular or heavier set are represented less in the horror/action/sci-fi entertainment circuit than the waif thin, and women who are both heavy and muscular are nonexistent.  This provides a very narrow image of what female strength looks like in real life, and sends a conflicting message than can reinforce unrealistic standards.

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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?

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