About

Battered Women's Shelter is a place where women who were abused by their spouses typically go for shelter and security. Beginning in mid-2016 and growing over the next several years, referential memes that involve the abused women's shelter started to become more commonplace. These memes, often misogynist in nature, range from doing activities outside and near the women's shelter, to actively sending or picking up their woman from the shelter.

Origin

In June 2016, Imgflip user GotHighMadeAMeme^[1] uploaded one of the first surviving records of a meme involving the shelter, a 10 Guy meme, which at the time used the phrase "abused women's shelter" to play off the earlier setup in the meme (shown below).

Spread

The meme phrase continued to spread, with examples of it usually involving the OP being directly involved with sending his woman to the shelter or picking up a woman from there. For example, Overly Manly Man example uploaded to Imgflip on November 2019 by the user TrustiGoat^[2], which combined it with a Kitchen punchline (shown below).

On TikTok, the Battered Women's Shelter meme began to take off and spread with the addition of shadowboxing and push-ups being added to the equation. TikToks about dudes exercising, shadow boxing and doing push-ups outside of the battered women's shelter at night began to take off, with the trend having over 1.1 million views across the site^[3]. The most popular example of this format was uploaded by the TikToker tobycrowleyfit^[4] on May 12th, 2022, getting over 46,000 likes in one year (shown below).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References