Here’s why the ‘Girl Explaining’ meme is all over your Twitter feed

Although the meme first gained traction in Sanchez’s native Argentina in 2019, seeing her face spread across social media in 2022 — and having other people project their own ideas onto it — came as a surprise to her. She said she never imagined the meme would make the global crossover it has since mid-August.

To set the record straight: No, Sanchez was not shouting into the void. She was actually singing a cumbia song, one of the most popular genres of music in Argentina. This explains that her arm is pointing to the horizon.

“We dance cumbias that way,” Sanchez said. Unfortunately, she doesn’t quite remember which song was playing because “it was a long time ago.”

As is often the case, Sanchez was unsuspectingly captured in the background of someone else’s photo. About two months later, the actual subject of the photo uploaded it to Twitter and “tweeted something like, ‘When strangers mess up your photos,'” Sanchez recalled. Another person zoomed in on the hilarious footage of Sanchez appearing to speak loudly to a boy with a completely blank expression. And boom, a meme was born.

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A native account focused on food posted it in 2019 with a call not to trust detox juices and fad diets. The football teams and their rivals then weighed in. It reached several Spanish-language meme sites.

“It was funny to see him roll,” Sanchez said. “The music festival also gave us free tickets for next year. But I thought Argentina and other Latin countries would be as far as the meme went.”

In the nearly four years since the photo was taken, much has changed in Sanchez’s life. She added several tattoos to her body and dyed her then dark blonde hair. She began studying food – a bit of irony considering the meme’s origins. The boy she was photographed with? They have long since parted ways.

But to the rest of the world, she’s frozen in time as The Girl Who Explains or The Girl Bro. The resurgence happened on August 15, when a Twitter user shared her photo with one MeSSAge about incompatibility between Gemini and Scorpio, according to Know Your Meme. Soon, famous, politicians AND Make began to accumulate.

An old meme, with a twist

What makes the photo so shareable and meme-worthy is that it’s essentially a new twist on an old, familiar format, said Hannah Barton, a UK-based researcher of the cultural history of memes and member of the International Meme Studies Research Network. Viral memes often follow the same structure: having a “fixed element”, meaning an already played aesthetic or tone, and a “novel twist”.

Since at least the early 2010s, there have been various iterations of “Bro Explaining,” or a man talking to a woman who looks like she’d rather be somewhere else. But Sanchez’s photo is one of the earliest—if not the first—example of the opposite situation. Barton said. The trope is familiar; however, the subversion opened the door for people to take a look at the dynamic or poke fun at a meme format that’s already stagnated.

“We know what that format expresses,” Barton said. “And … it’s really kind of a useful format to get a lot of different points across. It’s the kind of media artifact that’s really useful for mass participation because anyone can put their own spin on it.”

While “Bro Explaining” often pokes fun at the “bro-y” things men say, “Girl Explaining” is primarily an “esoteric explainer meme” — a more complex article that’s about people’s interests, but held passionately , said Jamie Cohen. , an assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College.

“This young woman is screaming, but everything she’s screaming about is extremely esoteric and cool and very detail-oriented. It says a lot about how people want to express speech,” he said. “And also a lot about us wanting space to write specific information and not having containers to put it there.”

The search for authentic spaces explains not only current trends in memes, but also the rise of apps favored by Gen Z, TikTok and BeReal, Cohen said. Users — especially younger demographics — are pushing back against filters and curated feeds. “Girl explaining” may be another version of this dissatisfaction.

“It becomes an offense against the inability to use spaces like Facebook or Twitter properly and honestly,” he said. “Like, you might want to express this emotion, or this feeling, or this thought, but where do you put it? You are not going to post passionate thoughts like these there. But this meme offers an opportunity to express a very interesting and unique opinion.”

For Sanchez, it’s been surreal to see celebrities she follows — like Hailey Bieber — suddenly post her photo. It’s also a little weird to see an old photo of her ex hanging around forever, she said, but it’s been fun to see the different views people have had of the moment.

If she were to make her own version of the meme, Sanchez said it would be to raise awareness of gender-based violence. Ultimately, she said, “the point of the meme is to talk about these things that we all know are true, but somehow we don’t hear them enough.”

But she also knows the meme will probably die out soon. According to Barton and Cohen, once a meme reaches maximum saturation, its use begins to stagnate. Her death is destined once it starts being posted on Instagram (and, apparently, the meme has already reached that point). By the time it reaches Facebook, it’s basically a ghost.

Sanchez is ready for the meme to die down, but she knows it’s only a matter of time until another person is unwittingly put in the same situation. Somewhere, someday, someone will make another facial expression that the internet will find common ground with – and then throw it away.

In that case, Sanchez has a piece of advice: “Take it easy and laugh about it.”

And maybe don’t look too much in the comment sections, she added.