Abstract
Virgin young adult men (VYAM) are often stigmatized for deviating from the social clock. Despite the importance of media in young adults’ lives, few studies have examined media representations of VYAM, and none have yet examined the numerous memes about virgin adults. Memes are sets of visual and cultural elements diffused and replicated on the internet. An increasing number of studies reveal the importance of memes in youth identity construction through the memorable messages they often convey. This is especially prominent for communities whose values or behaviors (or, in the case of VYAM, lack thereof) diverge from mainstream tendencies, such as the social clock. While memes are abundant online discursive tools, they tend to reproduce stereotypes and misrepresent marginalized groups. The objective of the present exploratory study was to describe the memetic representations of virgin young adult men (VYAM) published on the platform 9GAG, which is particularly popular among VYAM. Our hybrid analytical strategy combined content analysis, textual analysis, and tenets of dialectical team-coding, taking inspiration from a past study on media representations of VYA—both men and women—in films and TV series. A sample of 47 memes showed the emergence of three categories grouping 10 VYAM profiles: (1) virginity as a mark of belonging (the integrated and the notorious virgin), (2) virginity as a subjective experience (the voluntary, the sublimated, the naive, and the subversive virgin), and (3) virginity as a burden (the stigmatized, the resigned, the anxious, and the gender double standard-affected virgin). The different profiles support stigma and self-determination discourses relative to virginity experiences. This study sheds light on the stigma surrounding sexual inexperience in adulthood in the memetic culture.
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Notes
The primary idea of this memetic format is to contrast the characteristics of the insecure virgin (Virgin) with “Chad”, who is an attractive man sexually successful with women (“Virgin vs. Chad”, Know Your Memes, 2017).
In the Incels’ lingo, Chad is a socially constructed masculine identity and the archetype of an attractive, successful (but superficial), hypermasculine man, with robust features, looming stature, financial wealth, and “raised in a loving family”. Chad has access to all the resources that Incels covet (which they refer to as ‘privileges’), which mostly consists of young attractive women and a large social network (Fowler, 2021; Maxwell et al., 2020). The Chad figure is highly present in the manosphere, including in memes.
The Wizard refers to the idea that those men who remain virgins past the age of 30 gain special powers (Know Your Meme, 2015).
The Socially Awesome Awkward Penguin is a meme resulting from the combination of the Socially Awkward Penguin meme, which depicts a lack of social skills and self-esteem predisposing one to embarrassing life situations, and the Socially Awesome Penguin meme, a charismatic character. Thus, the Socially Awesome Awkward Penguin paradoxically exhibits both social awkwardness and success in a given social situation (Know Your Meme, 2009, 2011). The authors wish to thank Kate Hunter, Laurence Dion, Léa Séguin and Léa-May Burns for their help with a previous draft of this manuscript.
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This research was partly funded by SSHRC Grant number 430-2018-00668 to the second/corresponding author, by the Developmental Sexology Research Chair and by internal grants from the Faculty of Social Sciences from Université du Québec à Montréal.
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Lamoureux, J., Boislard, MA. Representations of Virgin Young Adult Men in Internet Macro Memes. Sexuality & Culture 27, 1527–1555 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-023-10077-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-023-10077-z