Cross Post: Internet Meme Demolition Derby: Girls are (NOT) Like Apples on Trees…

Editor’s note:  This cross post from Grounded Parents was written by Lou Doench for his Internet Meme Demolition Derby series. Click through the link at the bottom to read the full post and make comments. 

******

I usually let these memes stew on my desktop for a couple of days. Kind of letting them marinate while I decide what particular mixture of snark, cynicism, despair or disdain to add to the brew to make a perfect Internet Meme Demolition Derby Pie (mmmmmm Derby Pie…) But this particularly vile piece of wannabe folk wisdom, which came across my Facebook feed this morning via fellow Grounded Parent Emily Sexton, called for a faster turn around. In case you can’t see the image, what we have here is a bit of Concrete Poetry in the shape of a tree which goes as follows…

Girls are like apples on trees. The best ones are at the top of the tree. The boys don’t want to reach for the good ones because they are afraid of falling and getting hurt. Instead, they just get the rotten apples from the ground that aren’t as good, but easy. So the apples at the top think something is wrong with them, when in reality, they’re amazing. They just have to wait for the right boy to come along, the one who’s brave enough to climb all the way to the top of the tree.

 

Where to begin. Now I don’t expect every analogy to be perfect. As Chris Brecheen often opines, “If it were perfect it wouldn’t be an analogy… it would be the same thing.” But lets just get the obvious out of the way. This person has quite obviously never been anywhere near a fucking apple tree. Nobody eats the apples that fall on the ground. Apples that have fallen from the tree are usually very very ripe, ripe past the point of fitness for human consumption. A quick survey of apple aficionados on my social media network revealed that it is customary to pick the apples from the tree well before they reach that stage of ripeness. Usually this is done from the ground, maybe with a stepladder? We pay undocumented workers to climb the trees to get to those amazing ones at the top.

But that’s hardly the most problematic part of this piece of shit, and I’m pretty sure longtime Skepchick network readers have already guessed where we are going. But we have to go there anyways, no matter how icky. In our analogy, girls are the apples, and we are clearly given a hierarchy to follow. The best girls are at the top of the tree and the worst ones are the rotten ones that have fallen off of the tree. They aren’t as good as the super special top apples. But the boys eat them anyways because they are easy. Do I need to get out the double entendre stick and whack some people with it, or are we all in agreement that the thing the boys are looking for in this scenario is not pie ingredients, but is in fact SEX? Dirty, filthy, icky, sinful SEX! I mean I suppose I could be putting words in the authors mouth here, but that’s where my imagination wanders. If the author meant something else by pairing the rotten, fallen apples with the descriptor easy, then they should have been more clear. But I’m going to continue here with the assumption that one of the things our meme author is specifically valuing here is sexual virginity. The innuendo is too clear. One of the things that obviously makes the apples at the top of the tree more “amazing” is their sexual purity and pretty obviously the ones on the ground…

Read the rest of the post at Grounded Parents, where you can also make comments.