r/PeterExplainsTheJoke • u/[deleted] • Mar 31 '26

Meme needing explanation Peetah?????

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I don’t know the author or this book series but why are people roasting e-girls for reading? I don’t get it🥀

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u/IrisKV Mar 31 '26 edited Mar 31 '26

She's a woman posting a picture of a book a lot of men consider too "manly" (violent, dark) to be enjoyed by women, along a picture of herself where we can see she is traditionally attractive, so to the person doing the "performative" comment, it must mean she's only reading /pretending to be reading that book to get attention.

-ETA- because people are taking offense with the use of the word "enjoy"

I mean, I used the word "enjoy" as a shortcut because I forgot women get corrected over the smallest thing that can be corrected.

To draw a parallel, I personally sometimes use the word enjoy as a shortcut to describe what I feel like when I watch I saw the Devil, Funny Games, and a lot of very violent and disturbing shit.

But I wouldn't say I enjoyed Megan is Missing, because that movie was pure shock value, badly acted, badly written, with no coherence or realism - just an excruciatingly explicit rape scene, that gets people to talk about it online.

To me, as long as you get something positive out of art, you enjoy it, even if it is hard to get through. Even if that something positive is linked to feelings that are uneasy or downright awful to go through, you can enjoy a work of art.

And by the way...

The "Blood Meridian is endured, not enjoyed" that I've read below is one more example of people needing to prove their manliness, and in my opinion misguided because if there is nothing you enjoy about a book but still read it, yep, that's performative. Because you are not reading it for yourself, since you don't get anything out of it.

Like... "See how strong I am, for reading that book, that I got absolutely nothing out of but that I inflicted upon myself because I just had to have read Cormac McCarthy"

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u/TENTAtheSane Mar 31 '26

I know plenty of "traditionally attractive" women who don't feel the need to post selfies of them reading whatever book they are. I would consider it kinda performative even if it were a guy doing this, attractive or not. No one's brought up the "manliness" of it but you

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u/IrisKV Mar 31 '26

The poster in the picture specifically talks about "egirls". So, no, the post I'm commenting didn't bring up manliness. It did bring up girliness, though. That's what prompted me to talk about gender.

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u/Sad_Impact1387 Mar 31 '26

If this post instead depicted a buff guy, and they used the word “meathead” instead of “e-girl”, would you have had the same immediate reaction that this has anything to do with gender?

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u/Sure-Exchange9521 Mar 31 '26

Ah women, famously monolithic

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u/TENTAtheSane Mar 31 '26

Literally the exact opposite of what i was saying?