“Why would you say that name!” he screams.

“What? Humperdinck!?” she shrieks back, gleefully.

One gets the sense that these two do this a lot — her Humperdincking, him screaming, which only makes her Humperdinck harder. That this problem has two obvious solutions only illuminates its intractability. Valerie could stop saying the name, but then again, Max could also choose not to react to its every utterance as if he’s been electrocuted. That neither of them are making different choices suggests that something about this dynamic serves them both.

I thought of this scene when the first “Your body, my choice” post from a male Trump voter skittered insect-like across my timeline in the wake of the election — closely followed by a handful of “My body, his choice” remixes by savvy OnlyFans models hoping to cash in on the moment. This crude riff on the feminist war cry that once defined the battle for abortion rights was akin to an inaugural shout of “Humperdinck!”, designed explicitly to trigger a meltdown among liberals. And lo: if you do an internet search for the phrase now, around 5% of the results are of people posting it and 95% are critics freaking out in response. “Women need to be kept safe from the ‘your body, my choice’ peddlers,” The Guardian announced, while CNN warned: “Attacks on women surge on social media following election.” And The New Yorker, for whom the phrase is a harbinger of a “coming era of gender regression”, described it as “A New Rallying Cry for the Irony-Poisoned Right.”

The phrase “irony-poisoned” in that last headline — which graces an essay by Jia Tolentino — struck me as an especially savvy bit of rhetoric. It functions as a preemptive strike against the obvious counterpoint to all this panic. Namely: “your body my choice” is a repulsive thing to say, but also the furthest thing from a legitimate threat.

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The men behind these posts are not rapists-in-waiting, announcing their intent to commit sexual violence; they are trolls, gleefully trolling away in the hope of making people Mad Online. But if Tolentino knows this is bait (and she clearly does), she nevertheless cannot help taking it, hook, line, and sinker. The piece is imbued with a near-religious sense of horror at seeing the feminist catechism of “my body my choice” twisted by nonbelievers into something unfathomably malignant. This is beyond distasteful; it is heretical. And unlike the provocations in which the millennial Left once delighted, back in the days when one measly crucifix soaked in urine could trigger a weeks-long meltdown among religious conservatives, this little joke (Tolentino argues) is simply not funny.

It is, of course, difficult to have a sense of humour about the topics one takes most seriously, even for those who generally enjoy making hamburgers of other people’s sacred cows. I was recently reminded of the 1999 Onion article titled, “That’s not funny, my brother died that way,” in which an aggrieved writer takes issue with a scene in the Police Academy movie where a motorcyclist gets his head stuck in a horse’s rear end. (“His life-insurance policy didn’t cover equine-anal suffocations. So now you might understand why I don’t think it’s funny to see that sort of thing played for laughs.”) That this essay is, in itself, funny, speaks to the unfortunate truth that also animates the “your body my choice” brand of trolling: the we-are-not-amused disapproval of another person can be pretty funny, especially when that person has been attempting to scold you into compliance with their preferred political agenda for years on end. It is no coincidence that this anti-feminist edgelording comes hard on the heels of a campaign cycle in which one side’s rhetoric was almost pathologically alienating to men: the more shrill the calls for conformity, the more naughty fun there is to be had in refusing to read the room.

This was easy enough for liberals to understand when we were the architects of an intentionally edgy counter-culture, whose pleasures derived in no small part from making self-serious moral authoritarians clutch their pearls and scream. Punk rock and heavy metal, Marilyn Manson and Damien Hirst, Saturday Night Live and South Park: if we loved these things on their own merits, we loved equally as much how they scandalised the prudes. Indeed, the Left’s conception of itself as the scrappy underdog poking fun at The Man was powerful enough that a decisive victory in the culture wars hardly put a dent in it; even after the legalisation of gay marriage, the passage of the Hate Crimes Act, and the annual rainbowification of every American city during Pride Month, there’s just no joy quite as potent as triggering the cons. That memes invariably provoke outraged reactions from people who don’t (or won’t) get the joke is the entire point. What can we say? You’re just so funny when you’re mad.

Alas, we are now discovering the same unfortunate truth as generations of edgelords before us: that you either die a provocateur, or live long enough to see yourself become the Church Lady.

“Posting now creates political reality”, Tolentino writes, by way of insisting on taking dead seriously what the “your body my choice” memesters evidently find hilarious. “There are parents all over social media reporting that their kids are hearing the phrase from boys at school. A therapist at a university in the Midwest told me that a student she works with had gone to a frat party where one man had yelled it, and that the people around him hadn’t called him out.”

Perhaps, needless to say, I remain unconvinced that the inane (and yes, often intentionally offensive) banter of teenage boys represents “political reality”, let alone a material threat — but convincing oneself otherwise is both a hallmark and privilege of middle age, and one you will pry from our cold dead hands. The therapist who openly frets that a frat boy yelled bad words at a party without being called out is clearly resonating at the same emotional pitch as the teacher who, circa 1994, made a panicked call to my parents after I doodled a pentagram in the margin of a biology test. Then, as now, the suggestion that she might be overreacting only exacerbated her outrage. What did they mean, I was probably just joking around? Satanism was no laughing matter!

If there’s one big difference between the moral majoritarians of decades past and the social justice warriors of the digital age, it’s that the former group was unapologetic in their authoritarianism. Today’s progressive scolds don’t like to think of themselves as such; instead, they finger-wag with one hand while still clinging to the mantle of the countercultural cool kid with the other. At one point in the essay, Tolentino describes being unsettled by the appearance of a “VOTE RED… LOL” graffiti in her deep blue Brooklyn neighbourhood; it is, she says, “one more reminder that we are typically closer to people who find us laughable and repulsive than we think”. It’s a new riff on that churlish Pauline Kael quip about the 1972 election — “I don’t know how Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him” — in this case reinforced by years of near-total Left-wing hegemony in America’s culture-making institutions, from media to museums to Hollywood and beyond. Amid a sea of narratives that only ever validate her place among the heroes on the right side of history, of course a Brooklyn-dwelling New Yorker columnist is stunned to realise that some of her neighbours think she’s ridiculous — to the point where she can’t conceive of it without suggesting that their mockery must mean they’ve been literally poisoned. Her Trump-voting neighbours, meanwhile, have surely never not known what she thinks of them.

But for as long as the Left still prefers to think of itself as powerless and persecuted by conservative oppressors, the insouciant trolling of Trumpian youths must be interpreted as something sinister and serious. As the meme goes, are we out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong… or aspiring rapists, as the case may be.

The irony — of the literary rather than poisonous variety — is that “your body my choice”, like any offensive joke, only achieved its current foothold in the discourse through amplification by the people who take it too seriously.

And could this stop? Sure, if somebody just blinks first. But just as with the bickering Max and Valerie, the fact that neither party is making different choices suggests that the current dynamic serves them both. In this case, the peacocking insensitivity of the MAGA bro fuels not just outraged op-eds by feminist media critics, but endless, tearful TikTok videos by the women of Gen Z, which in turn fuels more mockery, and in turn, still more tears. It’s too late, now: “Your body my choice”; has achieved velocity from the viral outrage cycle and into the echelons of the attention economy, where it will live on indefinitely in a toxic, self-sustaining symbiosis with its equally attention-seeking haters… at least until someday, inevitably, it is replaced by something even worse.

The interview went viral in 2012. And the final line, shortly after it was uttered, became culturally ubiquitous, particularly on social media where it proliferated as a reaction GIF — it was also, crucially, the subject of a fierce debate about whether its popularity was racist. Did we love Sweet Brown for her story and her screen presence, or was it because she was a walking, talking stereotype of the archetypal sassy black woman?

That debate has waxed, waned and evolved over the years, but the one thing it stubbornly refuses to do is die. Five years after Sweet Brown’s original interview, it was given new weight with the coining of a phrase. In a Teen Vogue essay, Lauren Michele Jackson described the act of non-black people using reaction GIFs featuring black Americans as “digital blackface”. And so, a trend was born: The New York Times weighed in, followed by The Guardian, followed by the mommy bloggers and the service journalists. Just when it seemed like the internet had squeezed the concept dry, it returned again, last weekend, in the form of a clickbaity banner on the front page of CNN: “What’s ‘digital blackface’? And why is it wrong when White people use it?”

For those who remember this argument in its original iteration, the immediate reaction is probably best encapsulated by a meme from the pre-social internet — not one of the ones that allegedly constitutes digital blackface, but the one from Mean Girls, in which an enraged Regina George hisses: “Stop trying to make ‘fetch’ happen! It’s not going to happen!” We do not need to do this again. This argument was transparent, racebaiting, outrage fodder even when it was new; now, it is all of that and tired.

If anything, the notion that, as CNN’s John Blake insists, employing reaction GIFs featuring black people represents “one of the most insidious forms of contemporary racism” is illustrative of just how badly the discourse is foundering in the wake of the massive racial reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd. All that momentum, all that money, all those marches and protests and pleas for real change end up being squandered again and again on luxury beliefs: galaxy-brained takes that circulate like wildfire among members of the coastal media class while being utterly bewildering to any normal person. The absurdity of Blake’s argument seems obvious even for those who think America is a long way from being a post-racial paradise. This is a country where black citizens remain underrepresented in key positions of power, and disproportionately suffer from poverty and violence. How terminally online must one be to think that the “most insidious” form of racism comes in the form of some 60-year-old Facebook grandma in Des Moines who feels that her emotions are best represented by a GIF of Stanley from The Office rolling his eyes?

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But then, one gets the sense that no one does think this. Not even the people who are earning a living — or at least, a few hundred freelance dollars a pop — by arguing as much. Every writer who tackles this topic has dutifully attempted to connect the mimetic phenomenon of reaction GIFs to the atrocious (and happily defunct) practice of minstrel shows featuring performers in actual blackface. But given the integrated state of contemporary society, and the substantive difference between posting a video of a black cultural icon and doing a mocking impression of one yourself, that’s a tough argument to sell.

Often, those recycling it don’t even seem to be trying. Women’s Health claims that using the wrong reaction GIFs isn’t just upstream from minstrelsy, but also from murder: “[As] it has been proven throughout U.S. history, a Black man can be killed for demonstrating aggression, confusion, or even indifference. Popular GIFs of Kanye West looking serious, Nick Young with question marks around his face, and others, show Black men expressing themselves which, while technically be harmless [sic], can oftentimes be fatal.”

This isn’t just unpersuasive; it’s practically incoherent. Does anyone believe this argument? Does anyone even believe that the writer believed it? The whole enterprise feels so convictionless, more like a simulation of an opinion than the real thing.

If anything, the concept of “digital blackface” reads like an attempt to meme more racism into existence by claiming that it’s already everywhere. Like the too-credulous coverage of outrageous hate crimes that turn out to be hoaxes, stories about the hidden racism of reaction GIFs suggest the need for constant vigilance, which in turn fuels perpetual mistrust. The overarching narrative, as I wrote last year, is one of a deep and roiling river of racial conflict running beneath the surface of American society. The moral of the story is that we can only ever relate to each other through the lens of power, privilege, resentment, and loathing — that, as Robin DiAngelo instructs, there can be no question of racism’s presence in any given interaction, only of how the racism manifests.

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It’s a pessimistic and profoundly superstitious mode of thinking — racism, the devil lurking in every room — and one that has spawned a particularly fervent adherence among millennial white women, for whom self-help and self-hatred have always been inextricably intertwined. Blake’s essay quotes a young woman named Elizabeth Halford who narrates her use of reaction GIFs with the ecstasy of the confessing sinner: “I’ve appropriated Black trauma as punchlines and peeled their faces off to put on my own and say what I can’t say, to make you laugh, or just because it went viral.”

It’s hard to imagine who or what is served by this confession, apart from Halford’s masochism. It is also hard to imagine that any GIF could represent a greater affront to black people than the idea that selecting said GIF is akin to peeling their faces off.

But more discouraging than the pessimism (and bizarre Hannibal Lecter comparisons) inherent to this worldview is its racism — and not the insidious, subtle kind. The original Teen Vogue essay introducing the concept of digital blackface bemoaned that “black reaction GIFs have become so widespread that they’ve practically become synonymous with just reaction GIFs”, as if the ubiquitous presence of black people in American culture is a bad thing.

Blake’s CNN piece calls out specific, seminal memes: an outraged Tyra Banks on America’s Next Top Model shouting, “I was rooting for you! We were all rooting for you!”, or Michael Jordan crying at his induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame. Maybe these are “black reaction GIFs”, in that they are reaction GIFs featuring black people. But surely what they capture is something bigger. These are American celebrities. This is American culture.

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But lately, an impulse has found a regrettable level of validation in American media, academia, and cultural institutions — an impulse to fracture and resegregate society along racial lines. American colleges hold exclusive, separate graduation ceremonies that segregate students by racial background. Lizzo, a multiple Grammy winner and one of the most famous musicians in the country, is forced to defend herself against allegations that her music is too popular among white people. An influencer goes viral for urging white moviegoers to stay away from the new Black Panther movie. Media institutions fret over race-matching the authors of book, theatre, and film reviews to the content they’re critiquing.

All of this is great, of course, if you have an economic stake in keeping Americans at each other’s throats. But for the rest of us, it only fuels polarisation and mistrust. The most incisive response to the latest “digital blackface” article came from Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky, who tweeted: “This stupid article is important in only one way: it illustrates that, as actual racism continues to decline, new varieties will simply be invented/’promoted’ and used to make us fight one another.”

In a diverse, thriving, integrated society that includes people of multivariate backgrounds, of course non-black citizens are going to engage with, appreciate, and relate to cultural products created by their black countrymen — and vice versa. Not only could it not be otherwise — culture, in our highly mimetic species, has long proven itself impossible to contain — but isn’t it what we want? The popularity of these GIFs stems from the fact that they represent events, emotions, and cultural touch points that millions of people recognise and relate to; in many cases, they speak to something not just specifically American but deeply human. That something like the Crying Jordan meme has become a global visual shorthand for conveying our feelings — the fact that people of every age, shape, colour and creed feel represented by the raw emotion captured there — should be seen as a triumph of common humanity over identity category. It is, at the population level, exactly what an inclusive society should strive for.

In this context, it seems not just absurd but grotesque for our national news media to argue that we should wall off these memes from the American mainstream, or make it so fraught for non-black people to engage with them that it becomes effectively taboo. The idea that black culture, whether it’s memes or music or slang or style, needs to be kept separate for its own protection is indistinguishable in practice from the racist ghettoisation that once sidelined black artists and athletes from the mainstream, lest they pollute the spaces where white people gathered. At its root is the notion that black culture is not American culture, that black people are somehow other. And, well, you know, there’s a word (and a GIF) for that.