About

Women Laughing Alone With Salad is a single topic blog specifically devoted to curating stock photographs of women laughing and eating salad. Since its launch in January 2011, the stock photo cliché has become a popular subject of parodies and satires regarding the stereotypical portrayal of women in media.

Origin

The first collection of photos of was created by blogger Edith Zimmerman on January 3rd, 2011, on the feminist blog The Hairpin. The post was titled "Women Laughing Alone With Salad" and featured 18 photos illustrating the trend with no accompanying text. As of September 2015, the post has been shared on Facebook over 206,000 times and on Twitter 15,400 times, and it has 730 comments.

Two photos from the original 18

Spread

Reflecting the viral impact of “Women Laughing Alone with Salad,” several other variations on the theme surfaced in the following months, most notably “Men Laughing Alone with Fruit Salad,” “Women Proud Of Their Two Apples,” “Women Resisting Delicious Cakes and Pies” and “Women Struggling to Drink Water.” The trend of men or women doing awkward things in stock photography was covered by various online communities and publications, such as 4chan^[7], Reddit^[4], The Huffington Post^[3], UpRoxx^[2], The Daily What^[5] and The Hairpin.^[6] In addition, a Tumblr single-topic blog titled Women Laughing Alone With Salad was created the same day as the original Hairpin post, and has continued to post through 2015.^[8]

Various Examples

Theatrical Adaptation

On September 7th, 2015, the Wooly Mammoth Theater in Washington premiered the play Women Laughing Alone With Salad. Written by Sheila Callaghan, the play was based on the photo series of the same name, originally featured on the blog the Hairpin. Callaghan told the Washington Post that “Nobody likes salad that much; it’s not built for that. And the notion that you’re supposed to feel that way -- [salad] will never be that kind of satisfying.” The play depicted three female leads discussing these types of false emotional standards, and used over 6,000 pieces of prop lettuce. It was set to run until October 4th, 2015.^[9]

me_irl Surge

On April 25th, 2017, the frontpage of the me_irl subreddit was dominated with pictures of women laughing alone with salad. Early in the day, user manawesome326^[11] posted an image of text to the site that read "I'd really like to live to see the day where the entire (sic) of the front page of me_irl is just stock photos of people laughing at salad." The post gained over 1,900 points as of noon that day. The subreddit responded by posting and upvoting dozens of examples of people laughing with salad that day. According to commenters, the first post^[12] to get an upvote was of Ainsley Harriott.

Search Interest

External References