Yesterday there was a minor kerfuffle on Social Media around a video shared on the British Museum Instagram and possibly elsewhere. The gist of it was this: the video played on a recent trend of TikTok videos which parody situations where girls might pick up guys. The caption read (screenshot below):
“Girlies if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition Life in the Roman Army and walk around looking confused you’re welcome x”.
Look, let’s be real. It’s obviously meant as joke, a play on a 'current’ trend and an attempt to reach out to a younger audience. It absolutely fails at doing this, but it tries. The optics on it are shockingly bad though; whereas this sort of video would normally come from a tiktok creator and, based on the language, you’d expect them to be one of the ‘girlies’, this was from a Museum. The caption doesn’t quite read the same when it’s a faceless entity, not to mention one with quite an interesting reputation online. So it’s hard to imagine how this would have got past the initial first check.
Drilling deeper into it, yes it plays on the ‘guys always thinking about the Roman Empire’ trend from last year (not a fan tbh) and tries to rib them for their mansplaining, but wow is it hard to get past the face value of this sort of a statement. One of the problems with a media presence is not how you want something to be interpreted but how it actually is. In this case, a large number of people reading this were quite instantly shocked at the multiple currents of stereotypes and sexist tropes. Women looking dumb to pick up men, a guy mansplaining to impress girls, it’s all just a bit much when combined. And because it’s quite confronting on face value, people aren’t going to get past that layer into the softer meaning beneath.
Of course, this was not the only reaction people had. The first was to adamantly tell people criticising it that “it’s a joke!” as if that spared all other issues with it. This also suggests that they think a critic of this is too dumb to understand the intention of the post - which was especially funny when people told me I didn’t know what a meme was! The second was to say that, actually it’s quite clever, it’s subversive etc and only address the secondary meaning of it. The third was to hurl insults, most of which proved that the ardent supporters of the post were in fact, quite misogynistic and, for some unconnected reason, homophobic?? A lot of things were said and of course, by the end of it I was completely over it and threw the whole thing in the bin.
Of course, the British Museum quickly deleted it after first trying to defend it. Good on them - at the end of the day, it’s not really a question of the merits of the humour. It’s about the optics of the post and the fact that it’s a massive, powerful institution putting out something that is kinda cringe at best, and quite insulting at worst. It just felt like a massive misjudgment and I certainly hope they have learned something from this. It actually reminded me of a similar situation recently, where a New Zealand company, Watercare used a meme directed at ‘Ladies’ in particular and the response was similar.
Again, cringe at best. But just not the vibe for a company to be using, especially when addressing it particularly at women and seemingly placing the blame on them! The reaction was diverse, but ultimately the company recognised that they got the wrong tone and wholeheartedly apologised. Which I think was a good outcome - and one the British Museum could learn from. If they won’t apologise for all the stuff they stole, at least maybe for a bad vid…
Thanks for reading! See you next week :)