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

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

How a photo of a woman yelling in a guy’s ear became a viral meme

Denise Sanchez was singing along at a 2018 music festival when she landed in the back of someone else’s photo

Over the past week, Denise Sanchez received a flood of texts letting her know her photo was all over Twitter. An image taken in 2018 of her seemingly talking passionately into the ear of her rather unamused ex-boyfriend had gone viral — again.

Enter the “Girl Explaining” meme.

What started as a fleeting moment at a New Year’s Eve music festival in Argentina has suddenly gained added meaning through each new post — the photo has since become a template to shout about pop culture moments, air grievances about the ending of “Titanic,” share takes on the Marvel Universe and even push for action against climate change.

Though the meme first gained traction across Sanchez’s native Argentina back in 2019, seeing her face splashed across social media in 2022 — and having other people project their ideas onto it — came as a surprise to her. She said she never imagined the meme making the global crossover it has since mid-August.

To set the record straight: No, Sanchez wasn’t shouting into a void. She was actually singing a cumbia song, one of the most popular music genres in Argentina. That explains her arm gesturing off into the horizon.

In the nearly four years since the photo was taken, a lot has changed in Sanchez’s life. She added several tattoos to her body and dyed her then-blond hair dark. She started studying nutrition — a little irony considering the meme’s beginnings. The guy she was pictured with? They’ve long parted ways.

A recent photo of Denise Sanchez. (Denise Sanchez)

But to the rest of the world, she’s frozen in time as the “Girl Explaining” or “Bro Girl.” The resurgence happened Aug. 15, when a Twitter user shared her photo with a message about the incompatibility between Geminis and Scorpios, according to Know Your Meme. Soon, celebrities, politicians and brands started piling on.

An old meme, with a twist

What makes the photo so shareable and meme-worthy is that it’s essentially a new twist on an old, recognizable format, said Hannah Barton, a U.K.-based researcher of the cultural history of memes and member of the international Meme Studies Research Network. Viral memes often follow the same structure: having a “fixed element,” meaning an already-played-out aesthetic or tone, and a “novel spin.”

Since at least the early 2010s, there have been different iterations of “Bro Explaining,” or a man talking to a woman who looks like she’d rather be anywhere else. But Sanchez’s photo is one of the earliest — if not the first — examples of the reverse situation, Barton said. The trope is well known; however, the inversion opened the floor for people to take a jab at the dynamic or to joke about a meme format that has already gone stale.

“We know what that format is kind of expressing,” Barton said. “And … it’s really kind of a useful format to get a variety of different points across. It’s the kind of media artifact that’s really useful for mass participation because everyone can put their own kind of spin on it.”

While “Bro Explaining” often jokes about the “bro-y” things men say, “Girl Explaining” is mainly an “esoteric explainer meme” — a more complex item dealing with people’s very niche, but passionately held, interests, said Jamie Cohen, an assistant professor of media studies at CUNY Queens College.

“This young woman is yelling, but everything she’s yelling about is extremely esoteric and cute and very detail-oriented. It says a lot about how people want to express speech,” he said. “And also a lot about us wanting space to write specific information and having no container to put that out there.”

The search for authentic spaces explains not only the current trends in memes, but also the rise of Gen Z-favored apps TikTok and BeReal, Cohen said. Users — especially younger demographics — are pushing against filters and curated feeds. “Girl Explaining” may well be another version of that discontent.

“This becomes a pushback against the inability to use spaces like Facebook or Twitter properly and genuinely,” he said. “Like, you might want to express this emotion, or this feeling or this thought, but where do you put it? You wouldn’t post passionate thoughts like these there. But this meme offers an opportunity to express a very interesting and niche thought.”

For Sanchez, it’s been surreal to see celebrities she follows — such as Hailey Bieber — suddenly post her picture. It’s also a little weird to see an old photo with her ex stick around for perpetuity, she said, but it’s been fun to see the different takes people have had on the moment.

If she were to make her own version of the meme, Sanchez said it would be to raise awareness about gender-based violence. After all, she said, “the point of the meme is to talk about these things that we all know are true, but somehow we don’t listen to enough.”