Home > Life > Digital Culture

The internet goes in on right-wing blogger's bad tweet about Harvey and the results are hilariously perfect

Including an actual gender studies professor.

Chloe Bryan

on August 30, 2017

The internet goes in on right-wing blogger's bad tweet about Harvey and the results are hilariously perfect

Credit: AP/REX/Shutterstock

It's a bad day on Twitter when you find yourself getting owned by an actual gender studies professor and, less importantly, getting schooled by an image of a pregnant SpongeBob SquarePants.

But Matt Walsh, a conservative writer who calls himself "one of the religious Right's most influential young voices," brought it on himself Monday when he decided to use a heart-wrenching photo from Hurricane Harvey to make an incorrect and extremely dated point about gender roles.

Walsh shared an Associated Press photo showing a male SWAT team member, Daryl Hudeck, carrying Houston resident Catherine Pham through floodwater as she held her one-year-old child.

Walsh's caption read, "Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says." Huh!

Fortunately, because Twitter is Twitter, less than 36 hours passed before he got totally shut down. And in the process a new meme, in the proud tradition of "this is the future liberals want," was born.

Mashable Trend Report

Decode what’s viral, what’s next, and what it all means.

By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

Thanks for signing up!

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

And -- memes aside -- the real icing the cake on the cake came from Christina Wolbrech, an actual gender studies professor at the University of Notre Dame, who soundly debunked Walsh's claims in a series of tweets on Tuesday.

In her thread, Wolbrecht discusses the history of care work, which, as she writes, "has been traditionally performed by women for free." As a result, many women have propped up men -- even ensured their success -- without compensation. As for paid care work, it's underpaid and stigmatized as "female," which renders women financially and politically vulnerable and men reluctant to join the sector at all.

Wolbrecht also addresses the hypocrisy of praising a woman for caring for her child despite the fact that thousands of mothers lack paid maternity leave or access to adequate childcare.

Finally, she points out that Walsh's "sexual division of labor" hurts society at large. "As budgets for care work ... have been cut," she writes, "a lot of that work has shifted to agencies like police and fire" -- agencies that often lack the resources to perform such work well.

"The value of work ... should be recognized & rewarded no matter who performs it," she writes. "Given how much care is needed, all hands on deck."

You can read her tweets in full below.