You gonna get raped (2001)

About

“You Gonna Get Raped,” sometimes seen as the acronym “YGGR,” is a catchphrase and image macro used to indicate creepiness. It could be a threatening glance or a fierce, direct stare, typically directed either towards someone else in the picture or towards the spectator. Most of the time, this kind of picture leaves an impression of being in front of a rapist or, at the very least, someone who seems up to something in a creepy way.

In some instances, the catchphrase’s meaning can be closer to pwned

Origin

In 1993 a photographer named Matt Kenlon was sent to cover the Mississippi River Flooding.
In November 1994 the photographer met a homeless man named William Todd in the town of Biloxi, Mississippi. Kenlon asked Todd if he could take some photos… the results:

The photos were published in a coffee table book produced by McLaren Press in 1996 called “America’s Refuse: Homeless in the Heartland.”

In 2001, the Something Awful forums began hosting a scanned version of one of the photos — the one with the fierce, vaguely threatening stare, glowering through that intimidating hood:

The words “You gonna be raped” were written on it.

From that point, that hooded man will be known as the “You gonna get raped guy”.

Fallout & Followup

This less-than-classy internet meme did not go over well for William Todd, the subject of the original photograph. According to a morrissey-solo.com forum user named snowfallsoon (excerpted):

[…]
That whole thing started at somethingawful.com…i forget exactly how but there was a thread that turned into something like ‘music to get raped by’- a photoshopped CD cover has Todd’s face on it. Todd was fired from his job and could not find another job for 6 months. He has been clean for 14 years and now works for a contractor rebuilding buildings in Biloxi.

You can see the whole comment thread here

There isn’t, sadly, any SomethingAwful archive talking about it.

You can find a more detailed explanation of William Todd’s life and how the meme was born in this LJ article

Excerpted from the article:

Someone had scanned the picture of Todd from America’s Refuse and placed it online as a sort of punchline. Julius wasn’t the first Biloxi native to notice. The picture was forwarded to inboxes across town. Todd was, by then, a supervisor at the newspaper. At his next employee review, the picture surfaced. He didn’t know what to say. He was let go. William was jobless for six months after that.

That picture got featured on Fark.com, then it was all over Internet.

While, at first, the meme could be seen as racist, focusing mainly on black people’s pictures, as one goes along, the catchphrase was used in any situation or picture in which someone got the same kind of stare.

YTMND

In 2004 YGGR meme reached YTMND — http://yougonnagetrapedson.ytmnd.com/ by user eggyolk was the first site, created in May 2004. To date it has gathered about 2,400 views.

eggyolk’s site led to an impressively prolific bunch of 71 variations on the fad, the most popular being http://rapedzelda.ytmnd.com/ (warning: flashy animation) by user j3pro on the 8th of October 2005, gathering more than 29,500 views.

Elsewhere

By 2006, the meme got its own Urban Dictionary entry.

By 2008, it got its own single-service website.

Finally, you can see there a great collection of Youtube videos using the meme’s running joke.