Hey Girl, Ryan Gosling Might Turn Men Into Feminists

When journalist and academic Danielle Henderson created the hugely popular Feminist Ryan Gosling memes in October 2011, they were an attempt at escaping the confines of her gender studies graduate program.

Ironically, the memes, which pair critical feminist theory with photos of the hunky actor from The Notebook, have found their way back into academia and are now the basis of a new experiment conducted by two Ph.D. students studying psychology at the University of Saskatchewan.

Their study claims that the memes, which have since been collected in a book called Feminist Ryan Gosling: Feminist Theory (as Imagined) From Your Favorite Sensitive Movie Dude, do more than just amuse bored Gosling fans on the Internet; they also get men interested in feminism.

Researchers Linzi Williamson and Sarah Sangster arrived at their hypothesis by showing images of Gosling with and without the feminist text to a group of 69 women and 30 men. The group was then asked to respond to questions such as "Do you self-identify or consider yourself to be a feminist?"

The group of men who were shown memes with accompanying women-empowering texts were significantly more likely to endorse feminism.

So, are playful Internet images the key to converting men into women's rights activists? If so, then the increasingly popular Saved by the Bell Hooks blog, which was launched by illustrator and arts advocate Liz Laribee last month, could be serving a purpose other than just offering some 1990s nostalgia.

The memes combine imagery from the sitcom Saved by the Bell with critical feminist theory from author and social activist Bell Hooks. The most popular meme, which has been reblogged nearly 30,000 times, addresses the predicament of black women feeling they have to choose between the black movement and the women's movement.

But as New York Magazine's Jesse Singal points out, the University of Saskatchewan study was a poster rather than a full-blown peer-reviewed study, and the experiment wasn't well controlled. All members of the control group were exposed to some sort of image of Gosling, and many had probably already seen the meme prior to the study.

If one thing's for sure, the phenomenon of Saved by the Bell Hooks shows that there's a need for more research into the topic. Or, as feminist Ryan Gosling might say: Hey girl, women make up 76 percent of new psychology doctorates. Why not get your doctorate in memes?