Lust Provoking Image, Irrelevant Time-Wasting Question

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About

Lust Provoking Image, Irrelevant Time-Wasting Question or Lust Provoking Image, Mundane Question is a copypasta and exploitable meme format used to criticize the practice of posting a provocative image alongside an unrelated, unimportant question to 4chan. The catchphrase was popularized on the site in April 2020 across several 4chan boards, inspiring a meme format in which a Wojak-like pink-colored character holds a printout of a 4chan post titled "lust provoking image, irrelevant time-wasting question" along with a representation of a provocative image.

Origin

On April 3rd, 2020, an anonymous user of 4chan's^[1] /pol/ board responded to a thread sharing an image of a woman titled with the question, "why do white men steal Chinese women?" with the comment, "(Lust Provoking Image) >mundane question." This is the earliest known use of the phrase on the site (shown below).

Anonymous ID: 5Uf2j1t6 Fri 03 Apr 2020 20:21:29 No. 251827881 (Lust Provoking Image) >mundane question Report

The comment gained viral spread across 4chan^[2]^[3] that month, with several other examples of anons using the phrase on similarly formatted posts to criticize the trend of posting a "provocative" image with an unrelated, unimportant question.

On June 20th, an anonymous user of 4chan's^[4] /tv/ board posted a meme in which a purple Wojak-like figure holds a sheet of paper representing a 4chan post with a crude drawing of a woman's breasts on it and the title "lust provoking image, irrelevant time-wasting question" (shown below, censored). This is the earliest known user to post the meme.

L R: 316/112 (Lust Provoking Image): >irrelevant time- wasting question

Spread

The term and meme format gained viral spread on 4chan over the following years, with a 4plebs^[5] search for "lust provoking image" returning over 4,200 results in March 2024.

The meme also gained viral spread outside of 4chan, inspiring edits and redraws altering the character or the image on the paper. For example, on March 23rd, 2021, X^[6] user @CalicoBggs posted a Dan Vs. redraw of the meme, garnering around 290 likes in three years (shown below, left). On July 26th, 2022, X^[7] user @JustDaveFND posted a redraw that gained over 820 likes in two years (shown below, right).