About

Rape Sloth is an advice animal image macro series featuring a photograph of a sloth that appears to be whispering in a woman’s ear. The captions often contain creepy sexual innuendo, pick up lines and alarming threats that are meant to disturb the reader, in a similar vein to the Prepare Your Anus and You Gonna Get Raped image macros.

Origin

On June 17th, 2009, the fashion blog Touch Puppet^[11] published a post about Terry Richardson's 2010 Pirelli Calendar photo shoot, which included a photograph of a nude model posing with a sloth (shown below, left). But the image macro series began years later on February 22nd, 2012, when Body Building^[10]Forums member VitaCrave submitted a thread titled "Rape Sloth"^[10] (shown below, middle, right). The thread continued to generate responses for the next 10 months, accumulating a total of 230 replies.

Spread

On March 16th, 2012, FunnyJunk^[9] user braindeadsixtynine submitted a compilation of notable examples from the series, gaining more than 56,000 views, 2,200 up votes and 100 comments within the next 10 months. On June 21st, 9gag^[7] user johniskewl resubmitted the same compilation, which received over 19,000 up votes, 2,000 Facebook shares and 80 comments in eight months. On August 31st, Redditor happyman91 submitted an image macro with the caption "You know what rhymes with sloth? / Rape" (shown below) to the /r/funny subreddit,^[4] receiving more than 4,600 up votes and 65 comments in the following five months.

On the following day, the post was linked in the subreddit /r/ShitRedditSays,^[5] which criticized the image macro for joking about sexual assault. On September 25th, the @RapeSloth Twitter feed was created, which tweeted captions from the image macro series. On January 21st, 2013, a Facebook^[8] page titled "Rape Sloth" was launched, which garnered upwards of 1,100 likes within the next month.

Notable Examples

As of February 2013, the "Rape Sloth" Quickmeme^[1] page has received over 100 submissions and the Meme Generator^[2] page has accumulated over 6,000 items. Additional examples can be found on the microblogging site Tumblr under the tag "#rape sloth."^[3]

Search Interest

External References