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The Short Wonderful Life of a Sincere Viral Meme

The “Girl Yelling” meme burned bright for a week and provided a nice counter view to the overused format

Jamie Cohen
3 min readAug 26, 2022
A cropped in version of the girl yelling meme. The image shows a young woman on the right, one arm outstretched, the other around her friend’s shoulder. She is singing into his ear and he has a non-plussed facial expression. The image is reminiscent of the bro-explaining memes and therefore resulted in this image becoming the girl-explaining meme.
Denise Sanchez and her friend in 2018 and the star of the viral meme

It can really happen to any of us. You’re enjoying yourself at a public event and the music is blaring and you are singing and dancing. In one of those moments, you sing into your friend’s ear… And then you’re a meme.

Denise Sanchez, the woman in the “Girl Yelling” meme wasn’t even the subject of the photo — she was in the background. But that brief moment was repurposed on the internet a wildly viral meme. The “girl-explaining” or “girl yelling” meme burned bright for a full week in the US, resulting in a lot of participation and coverage. However, the image was originally taken in 2018 and according to The Washington Post’s María Luisa Paúl, this isn’t even the first time it went viral.

The meme revived an overused format, but this time with a new twist. Traditionally, this meme is a bro-y mansplaining image. In each, the woman recipient of the explanation is non-plussed or…

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Jamie Cohen
Jamie Cohen

Written by Jamie Cohen

Digital culture expert and meme scholar. Cultural and Media Studies PhD. Internet studies educator: social good, civic engagement and digital literacies

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