Ryan Gosling is a Real Boy. Or, Why Ryan Gosling?

By K.M. Zwick

When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme's propagation in just the way that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.  And this isn't just a way of talking -- the meme for, say, "belief in life after death" is actually realized physically, millions of times over, as a structure in the nervous systems of individual men the world over.' --Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene

When you label me you negate me. -- Soren Kierkegaard & Wayne Campbell

Part 1. My complicity.

Once upon a time, the only thing I really knew about Ryan Gosling was that I had liked him in Lars and The Real Girl. The End.

Then, many years later, something, perhaps a Facebook post, led me to the site Feminist Ryan Gosling. This was back in the Fall of 2011. I did not quite understand what was happening or how such a thing came to be, though as someone with a degree in Gender Studies, I did find Ryan Gosling ever-more attractive after viewing photos of him with phrases like “Hey Girl. Gender is a social construct. But everyone likes to cuddle.” stamped on his quirky handsomeness. The creator of Feminist Ryan Gosling, Danielle Henderson, had a note on the blog telling me the site is not affiliated with “Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling,” to which my fast-typing fingers responded, “What the hell is that?” 

Google gleefully answered. 

If you know about the “Hey Girl” memes already, you likely know they originated on the site Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling in 2008. On this site, photos of Gosling include free-floating captions, being presumably spoken by faux-Gosling, such as “Hey girl, can we just sit and watch the sunset together?” and “Hey girl, you’re the chicken soup for my soul.” It became clear to me – and this has been pointed out in other places many times - that women and men are creating these sites in an attempt to position Gosling as an ideal boyfriend. Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling is pretty straightforward – it’s a boyfriend who wants to include you in his daily life, introduce you to his parents, cuddle with you on the couch, someone who “gets” your particular love language and shampoos your hair every Saturday with candles lit and your favorite indie love song playing in the background.

Not long after, wondering how far down the rabbit hole the Hey Girls went, I traversed the Net in search of other Ryan Gosling memes to find a Librarian Ryan Gosling Hey Girl site, a Poli Sci Ryan Gosling Hey Girl site, and a, yes, truly, Classics Ryan Gosling Hey Girl site, on which everything is written in a Classics language, like Latin. I also found the adorable interview in which Gosling reads aloud some of the text from Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling and laughs - this interview is what apparently assisted Fuck Yeah! and the Hey Girl concept in really taking off.

And then I joined the fray. Because frivolity is the spice of life. 

It was after creating my own Hey Girl site based on my particular area of academic inquiry and spending some serious time with photos of Gosling and fantasies about sexy Freudian things he might say that I began to be interested in seeing more of his films. In the last couple months I’ve watched Crazy, Stupid, Love (was jarred by the shirtless-ness, I admit), The Ides of March (jarred by his character’s charming naivete), and Drive (jarred by his character’s surprising ability to kill someone with a curtain rod and fall in love with a woman he has not said word one to). I also found myself suddenly unable to resist reports of Gosling sightings and news items posted on Jezebel.com, Gawker.com, Huffpost, etc. Spending so much time with the guy's face and behind-texting him (ooh!) and figuring out the best font to accompany his pose fed my suddenly increasing interest in keeping tabs on him, someone who, only months earlier, I'd not have recognized in a line-up of Hollywood heartthrobs. 

"So, probably healthily, I forgot about Gosling again."

But I also wanted to understand – because it is what I like to do – why Ryan Gosling? As I watched myself fall prey to a popular trend once again (feather earrings, watching the Oscars, wearing Keens, vehemently loving soy then vehemently hating soy, etc.), I kept asking myself: but what is it, really, about Ryan Gosling? 

Then I got distracted by, you know, real life with a real boyfriend who is...real.

So, probably healthily, I forgot about Gosling again. 

Then, recently, two friends posted an article on my Facebook Wall from Jezebel.com regarding Gosling’s recent heroics in New York City, wherein he reportedly saved a confused journalist from oncoming traffic. The Gosling-loving Internet lit up like the face of a  fan outside his movie trailer (do those still exist?), and once again, I was struck by the hoopla surrounding this one man, early in his career, whom none of us, you know, actually know. 

And then, on the heels of his heroism in NYC, on Easter Sunday, colorful plastic eggs containing printed-out Hey Girls were dispersed around a small area of Manhattan for the general loving public to find. 

(image from perezhilton.com)

Srsly.

I’ve witnessed celebrity crazes before – most recently I was fascinated by the ultra-allure of Lady Gaga  – but the total and utter mania surrounding Gosling, which only appears to be increasing, got me back to a-ponderin’. The sheer quantity of Hey Girl memes now out there is excessive and baffling; the twitch with which we respond to the sight of his printed name in reputable and gossip online news sources alike; the quickness with which we would like to discuss him -- it's reached epic proportions, and I now truly ache to know: 

Part 2. Why Ryan Gosling?

a) He's a superhero/human. For those who might argue Ryan Gosling is an utterly amazing human being and that's why, I will say, on the surface, from what I can gather from Internet research, Gosling seems like a decent sort of bloke. He broke up a street fight, he said very feminist-y things about women being in charge of how they portray their own sexuality, he brought his mom to an awards show, and he is concerned about human rights in multiple African countries. Not a bad dude, probably. Perhaps.

Ok, but, the above-mentioned traits are found in many-a-dude I know personally and many-a-male celebrity.

b) He's the hottest and best thespian evar. While Gosling is attractive, his face is pretty (ha!) idiosyncratic, a sort of poor man’s Christian Bale. Don’t get me wrong – Gosling is gorgeous, but he’s not, say… well, Christian Bale. And there are no Hey Girl Christian Bale memes. Also, no Hey Girl Michael Fassbender memes. I mean here’s a guy - Fassbender - who, when paired with Gosling, was in every major movie of 2011, and he’s apparently not stopping any time soon. Where’s a Michael Fassbender Hey Girl?

All three of the men I mention here have chosen a wide range of films, from independent and artistic to popular and widely appealing; all three are also mesmerizing actors. All three, additionally, are best-loved and given serious cred by the tastemakers for doing off-beat projects and characters.

Gosling is not alone, is what I am saying. His contemporaries, however, get none of the type, kind, and level of attention that he gets. He has the corner on the Hey Girl memes. The entire swoon market appears to be his, despite the fact that earlier in his career he played really creepy murderous sorts. Viewers and fanatics seem to only want Ryan Gosling and a whole mess of him, at that. Just a big Internet pile o' Gosling, with some Ryan on the side and a scoop of Baby Goose for dessert. I'm not just talking Hey Girl. I'm talking people increasingly seem to want to eat, sleep, and breathe Ryan Gosling. 

(As an aside, I also think it’s fair to say he single-handedly has shut down - via his now larger-than-life heartthrob fame - the ridiculous obsessions with Robert Pattinson's furrowed brow and “staring as acting” thing. And I truly thank him and the Hey Girls for that.)

c) The Notebook. Period. While it might be posited that his perfect-boyfriend role in The Notebook is what inspired, at the very least, the original Hey Girl site, I find it hard to believe that one man could get all this attention a full 8 years after the release of said film, which, by the way, I haven't even seen (is this a cardinal sin at this point?). If I can join in the Godling, I mean Gosling, craze having never seen that film, it stands to reason that that movie may not be the shoulders upon which his wildfire fame rests.

Part 3. So, really this time. Why Ryan Gosling?

In the end – and I really hate to break it you and even to myself - I do not think that any quality of the actual Ryan Gosling is responsible for the onslaught of attention paid him, the Hey Girl memes, and fans falling all over themselves when he does a human and decent thing like pull a nearby women away from possible death-by-car. 

Because we live in a meme-y and mimetic world, in which we copy each other on the Internet in perpetuity until we, like a conglomerate of ADHD-riddled meaningful-activity-starved children, notice the next trending hashtag/shiny new thing and turn our ever-shortening attention span to it, our interest in Ryan Gosling was at first probably just a tiny thing that then exploded like every other random Internet meme (I Can Haz LOLcats; Angelina Jolie's leg), regardless of anything Ryan Gosling the person was actually doing. 

The Hey Girl phenom might have only occurred once, on one blog, if our relationship with the Internet, communication and imitation weren't what it has become. If we did not latch onto a meme as if for dear life and replicate similar stimuli over and over and over again as a way of bonding, isolating, and claiming an identity, who's to say Ryan Gosling would have certainly become our dreamboat instead of someone else?  

So this compulsive meme-ing - a behavior, as Richard Dawkins reminds me, we would have likely engaged in whether or not the first Hey Girl was based on Ryan Gosling or Christian Bale or someone totally different - lent itself next to the obsession (should this be a new DSM diagnosis? RGOCD?), which we now mistake as being about Ryan Gosling himself, the person. 

The Gosling Gene.

In the end, then: our now run-amok panty-tossing over Gosling is a statement not about Mr. Gosling but a statement about ourselves. In the end, there is no answer to the question "Why Ryan Gosling?" that concerns itself at all with Ryan Gosling, the human being. 

"No! What do you mean!? No!"

Yes. Here's what I mean:

In no way is Gosling the subject of the Hey Girl memes, with any agency or authentic rendering of a self. In every way imaginable, Gosling is an object. And like any good object, he is predominantly silent or, more to the point, silenced. It is the creators of the memes, not Gosling, who have a voice. In our memes and in our gushing coverage of his heroics, he is a two-dimensional depiction of our deepest longings; these longings say much more about us than they do about Ryan Gosling.

"In every way imaginable, Gosling is an object. And like any good object, he is predominantly silent, or...silenced."

This is not news, per se – this is precisely what we do with celebrity, with icons, with politicians, with musicians, with public figures we do not know. We create of them objects of our desire. We use their image, and sometimes their words (typically scripted), to imagine them as intimate subjects in our lives, when in reality, they are anything but. Robbed of their self-originating identity, they become our part-objects: we pay attention only to the parts of them we wish to pay attention to, we ignore any information that may resist our narrow definition of the person in question, and we idealize the parts of them we create. We project our personalities onto them, knowing nothing of their personalities. It is narcissism at its worst and at its best, and it is our narcissism. It belongs to us. 

In this process, if we are not careful, we mistakenly believe we know more about the object; in fact, our projections, if we can recognize them, tells us only more about ourselves as subjects. What we wish for or crave is about our psyches, not Ryan Gosling’s. People do this sort of thing to a lesser degree in relationships all the time; at first flush, our perceptions of anyone we just start dating are often imbued with our wishes and desires about who they are and what we want. It takes quite a bit of time before we actually know a person; until that time, we rely on trust – or our distrust - and our projections of who we believe them to be. 

That “honeymoon period” everyone loves so much is often a period of idealization in which we project all sorts of “good” qualities onto someone, mutually, so that we can feel safe enough to attach. It’s not pathological necessarily; it is one of the many crazy yet understandable things we human beings tend to do in order to deal with the terrifying prospect of intimacy. However, if we never leave room for the other person to actually be more than our fantasy, more than our own projections, we risk objectifying someone who is a subject in his or her own right; we risk losing actual intimacy, in the long run. When the honeymoon ends and we become more able to see an authentic person sitting across a table from us, the moment of truth appears: will we integrate reality with our fantasies or will we continue to hold a person to the standards of our psyche that in essence ask the other to become something of our creation rather than something of his/her authentic invention? 

I recall Seinfeld, for a pop culture example: Jerry was never able to make it past some annoying and human habit in his love interests. The honeymoon period never lasted more than a few episodes, sometimes never more than 30 minutes. For him, females were part-objects, born first from the recesses of his own desires; once the women showed that they did not belong to him and were not made up of the idyllic parts he was projecting onto them, once they showed they could not fully step into his mold, he freaked out and broke up with them. Narcissism, plain and simple. 

The low talker.

(image from netbrawl.com)

What I find important about the attention paid to objectifying Ryan Gosling, in particular through the Hey Girl memes, is that rather than merely having our purchasing of movie tickets and fan paraphernalia indicate what it is we ideally want in a spouse, relationship, lover, etc., (i.e. “I find Ryan Gosling attractive and I like the roles he chooses, so I’m going to see every movie he’s in”) we instead are going much much farther and proffer a DIY script for him ourselves. A stop-motion series of sexual and smart scenes erupting from our synapses. In some real way, it seems to me that women (and men) with access to the Internet and, at the very least, Windows Paint (ugh), are taking charge of what they find sexy, attractive, appealing, affectionate, intimate, and smart, and plastering it unabashedly on the physique and face of a stranger. If it weren’t so passive-aggressive, I’d posit that this is a revolutionary kind of outcry in which ladies and girls and men and boys are gluing together homemade zines of specific, profound longing and loudly pointing to them saying, “This! This is who I am and what I want!” 

Part 5. The Major Point, I Finally Make It. 

Passive-aggressive, I say? Yes, passive-aggressive. We are one important step away from owning what it is we want and who it is we are. The writer of Feminist Ryan Gosling is the hot one, in my opinion, not Ryan Gosling. She invented the come-on lines that I find so titillating. She stimulated my neo-cortex with remembrances of Gender Studies days past. She communicated profound ideas in less than 140 characters and to boot conveyed them as sexy and funny. That’s the real story, in my opinion: the woman behind the postcard who is, at root, writing brilliant advertisements for the sexiness and relevance of feminist theory. She found a model for her ad, but the model is not the subject (matter). She is. And, as a consumer who connects to her ideas, I am the subject matter. With her, as I read her words, I become the subject positioning Gosling as my object. What he says is only hot because he is saying what I think is hot. Reductively, but no less true, it is I who am hot, to myself. As I said above, our projections tell us not a thing about the other person; they tell us about ourselves. 

"At a very basic level, we are the Ryan Goslings we are attempting to create."

The same is true of all the creators of the Hey Girl memes, in particular (for me) those based on some aspect of academic inquiry. But even Fuck Yeah! Ryan Gosling, as teen-lit-lite starry-eyed as it may be, is about the person who creates it and the people who like it. So, you want a boyfriend who wants to take you home to meet his parents and cuddle with you under the moon? Then, my guess is, you also would like to offer that same type and kind of intimacy with a partner. And you would like that type and kind of intimacy to be returned. But first things first: what you want from another person is often what you can or want to, yourself, be able to offer. 

Or maybe you, yourself, cannot offer what it is you desire, which is why it can be so soul-crushing often to be deprived of it by someone else. (What? Ok, just quickly: for example, the common trope that many perfectly eligible women constantly run after unavailable men is a fallacy: a woman truly capable of an intimate relationship would not find a totally unavailable man appealing; she seeks what she herself is capable of offering and thus is stuck with a mirror image of herself: an unavailable partner). 

Embedded in the Ryan Gosling Hey Girls are calls for intimacy, but that intimacy is positioned as originating from the other person (faux-Ryan Gosling). And in this way, there is something about all this that undermines the very creators of the memes. What is so impossible about having the intimacy originate with, say, me? 

If Feminist Ryan Gosling, in particular, or even my less popular Psychodynamic Ryan Gosling, really wanted to turn Hey Girl on its head, their creators might have posted pictures of themselves or real-life friends or real-life feminist or psychologist men offering their own self-originating clever quotations, starting with “Hey Girl” or “Hey Dude.” This would make a direct commentary on the othering and objectifying going on with the Hey Girl memes and call into question the broad appeal of so intensely conjuring an “ideal man” from the image of a stranger and scripting his lines while at the same time disowning that it is I (the creator/the viewer) who is awesomely creating all this hotness, not Gosling.

At a very basic level, we are the Ryan Goslings we are attempting to create. We are that clever, that sexy, that intelligent, that affectionate. But the way in which we are owning and claiming it is passive, round-about, and via the use of wide-spread, rampant and unapologetic projection and objectification. It is as if our desires must originate in faux-Gosling. It is as if that – the pretense of origination and ownership being located within this man - is how our desires will resonate, that is how they will be humorous, smart, and sexy. That is how they will be validated.

Yes, it’s hilarious. It’s frivolous and fun. I lerv Hey Girl memes, and I like making up my own.

But, we have made Gosling our blank slate while at the same time behaving as if he is not a creation of our desires and fantasies and disowning that the brilliance of these desires and fantasies originate in the creators – ourselves. It’s not that it’s “bad” to do this, but in my questioning the extreme reactivity around Ryan Gosling – wherein everything the man does or says in public now sets off a chain reaction of gush (in more ways than one, I’m sure) – I have to say, finally, none of this is about Ryan Gosling. I don’t know him. You don’t know him. It’s important to have a fantasy life and to indulge in our deepest longings. It’s also important to own that those longings belong to us and say nothing in particular about the object into whose mouth we are inserting our script for intimacy and attraction. 

"When we think and feel in a black and white manner about people, allowing for no gray, that line between love and hatred is razor thin."

While I now have a pseudo-affection for Mr. Gosling due in part to overexposure, I remind myself that often my psychodynamic scripts for him are loosely based on my own real-life boyfriend and firmly based on my own sense of what is sexy about myself. 

I do honestly wonder how this will end. Will we just get bored with Ryan Gosling? Will he make a terrible horrible film in which he is unattractive? Will he say or do something in public that proves once and for all that he is fallible and that not everything he says and does is utter gold on our hearts and in our panties or boxer briefs? I don’t know. There is always a fall from the idealization grace into devaluation. It always happens, especially when there is this high a level of idealization. When we think and feel in a black and white manner about people, allowing for no gray, that line between love and hatred is razor thin. I’ll be interested to see what the crazed fans think when inevitably Gosling shows us the honeymoon period is over and we are sitting across the table from a real boy. I wonder if he’ll show us that at all. Most of them do, someday, though. Hey girl, just ask Mel Gibson. Or Tom Cruise. Or Christian Bale.*

*This article not meant to imply that Christian Bale is in any way imperfect.

Thanks to D. Clare Tessman, RN, for her "tastemaker" comments on this topic, to Tim Cook for ongoing editorial suggestions, and Angela Trombatore for reminding me about The Notebook and telling me to watch it for God's sake.

(Citations pending, check back lates)