Though not explicated by the meme, this complaint takes a certain enforced standard of beauty for granted. The dominant ideology presented by this meme implies that all women must shave their legs if weather permits their exposure to public eyes. The creator “can’t avoid shaving legs anymore,” which almost certainly makes her a young woman living in a Westernized society. This could be explained by the link between the text and the image template, which seems to suggest that all FWP can be assoc iated with young white women.
This example is taken from, a popular meme aggregator, from which it has been shared 224,380 times, making it one of the most popular FWP memes. This particular instance of FWP uses specific language that could be lost on those outside its target audience. The meanings of certain phrases can be lost on those for whom the phrase bears no import in their lives. This is why it is important to note the context of the speaker - who they are, whom they speak to, and where and when they speak. At the same time, phrases can hold more than one meaning, depending on the socio-cultural situation of the speaker and the audience (Bakhtin 35). A word can have a certain meaning one year and an entirely different meaning the next, or its definition can vary across continents. The meanings of words are never fixed they change depending on the context of their use.
However, with a contextual shift, redirecting his utterance to an unknown woman on the street, its meaning changes - he may yearn for this mystery woman’s company. Here, the greeting is common courtesy he may genuinely wish his mother a good evening. A heterosexual American man can say “good evening” to, for example, his mother, as he kisses her on the cheek and sits down for dinner. In his essay “Discourse on the Novel,” Bakhtin notes that language is not unitary or immobile but rather constantly shifts in context (Bakhtin 32). But because the meme is meant to be shared across the internet, it simultaneously encourages these same complaints.īefore we can understand FWP, we must first understand its original cultural context. Applying Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of heteroglossia and the carnivalesque to First World Problems (FWP hereafter) reveals their intention: The FWP meme parodies a society that complains about relatively minor inconveniences. An extremely popular meme, some instances have garnered hundreds of thousands of shares across social media. A first world problem is one that ultimately is not so much a problem as it is an inconvenience to those who inhabit the “first world.” “First World Problems” combine short examples of these minor complaints with an appropriate image, a crying young white girl, in the form of an “image macro,” which most popular memes today utilize. Though not unheard of before, the idea of “first world problems” only came to prominence with the internet and the surge of social media websites. The “First World Problems” meme is an effective reminder that people love to complain.
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