About

Privilege Denying Dude is a series of image macros centered around a guy in a suit posing with his arms crossed, with captions satirizing the typical white male's patronizing viewpoint on a range of politically sensitive issues like racism, homosexuality and feminism. This meme functions similarly to the feminist bingo card or the oft-linked article "Derailing for Dummies", offering quick & funny punchlines (EX: "but what about the men?" or "what about the racism that white people experience?") for those trying to troll serious discussions about womens' issues and race equality. This practice is sometimes referred to as "mansplaining".

Origin

Privilege Denying Dude (PDD for short) series was created by Diane, a 20 year old blogger from South Carolina who launched the official PDD Tumblr site in early November. According to an interview with Jezebel, Diane bought the license of a stock photograph (shown above) at iStockPhoto and created the template, which eventually spread over to Memegenerator.net and reached the top tier.

iStockphoto Tumblr Takedown

Only a few weeks into its launch, the PDD blog was taken down by Tumblr in mid-November due to copyright claims by iStockphoto and complaints from the actual model depicted in the series. The image was originally available for purchase here, but has since been taken down.

You can read more about the backstory and exchange between Diane and the photo model in this Jezebel article.

Backlash

In response to Diane's tongue-in-cheek satire, the real "misogynists" on the Internet countered by creating another macro series called "Feminist Cunt," with a picture of actress Ashley Judd wearing a "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" shirt, and captions illustrating absurdly opinionated statements comparable to Privileged Denying Dude.

Coverage

• Tiger Beatdown post on 11/15
• BuzzFeed post on 11/15 (media has been removed
• Jezebel article on 11/16
• Schepps's Media Privledge Denying Dude spinoffs