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It's hard not to be tickled by the new "gender flipping" meme making the rounds of late, which gently pokes fun at the media's penchant for absurd hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine imagery and stereotypes. Basically, the meme "flips" the gender of ads/book covers/movies posters/etc., turning female images into male ones and vice-versa, thus rendering them absurd.
The broad meme, which works on everything from video games to music to the very English language, is a simple, attention-getting, and hilarious way of raising awareness of gender expectations.
Advertising flips are the easiest, since women's semi-nude bodies have long been used to sell everything from toothpaste to monster trucks. In ad gender flips, we get a lot of faux ads of semi-nude men in goofy and improbable positions: buff models crawling pants-less on countertops, celebrity males in topless come-hither poses, and serious cases of duck face, "pin-up boys" wagging their butts at the camera.
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It all makes you wonder why so little has changed on Madison Avenue since the 1960s.
Comic books and video games have long been guilty of promoting hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine stereotypes, making them a particularly juicy source of genderflips as well. Here we get "Lawrence Croft," raiding tombs in little more than a pair of bike shorts, and the nerd-tastic The Hawkeye Initiative, which takes sexily posed female comic characters and replaces them with Hawkeye doing the same.