About

Feminist Nazi is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of Australian reality TV star Layla Joyce Subritzky from the ninth season of Big Brother Australia. The captions typically depict a naive approach to stereotypical feminist ideas, in a similar manner to College Liberal.

Origin

On October 21st, 2012, Redditor Galactic777 submitted the original instance of Feminist Nazi to Reddit^[8] in a post titled “It’s simple, really.” The background image features Layla Subritzky, a cast member from the ninth season of Australia’s Big Brother reality television series, looking upwards with her mouth agape in shock. The top caption read traditional views on chivalry such as pulling out a chair for a woman while the bottom caption said that all of these expectations also come with the expectation of being treated equally.

Precursors

Prior to its usage in the Feminist Nazi series, the same photo of Subritzky was used for a MemeGenerator^[5] page titled “Big Brother Layla,” with captions pertaining to her ditzy personality on the show (shown below). Instances of this appeared on a handful of Facebook pages for Big Brother memes.^[6][7] In addition, the earliest known Urban Dictionary^[15] definition of "Feminazi" was submitted on April 16th, 2003. The earliest known appearance of the term "feminist nazi" (sometimes shortened as "Feminazi") in print can be found in American radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh's 1992 book The Way Things Ought to Be, in which the label is attributed to Tom Hazlett, a professor at the Cato Institute. In the book, Limbaugh notes that a Feminazi is much different than a feminist because, to a feminazi, “the most important thing in life is ensuring that as many abortions as possible occur.”^[2] The term has been similarly used by anti-abortion activists to refer to several women’s groups including the National Center for Women and Policing and the Feminist Majority Foundation^[4], and high-profile women including Gloria Steinem, Susan Sarandon, Christine Lahti and Camryn Manheim.^[3]

Spread

On October 21st, additional instances were posted on image sharing sites including Random Overload^[11], Funnyshare^[12], lolfactory^[13] and 9gag.^[14] On October 22nd, Jezebel^[9] published an article on the image macro series, calling it the “world’s worst meme.” The article accrued more than 60 comment threads within five hours. As of that day, more than 130 Feminist Nazi images have been submitted to Quickmeme.^[10]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

[Not currently available]

External References