Distracted boyfriend is an Internet meme based on a 2015 stock photograph that social media users started using as a meme at the start of 2017 to depict different forms of disloyalty.
The photo was taken in the city of Girona in Catalonia, Spain, in mid-2015 by photographer Antonio Guillem from Barcelona.
Guillem told ‘Wired’ that he and the stock image models planned on having a session that would represent the concept of infidelity ‘in a playful and fun way.’ The boyfriend and girlfriend in the photograph are known by their stage names ‘Mario’ and ‘Laura.’ ‘Laura’ later described the experience shooting the stock images, saying: ‘When people saw us simulate those scenes in the street, they stopped to look and laugh and, in my case that I had to have a more serious face, I had a hard time to keeping it [sic].’
The image was uploaded to Shutterstock with the caption: ‘Disloyal man walking with his girlfriend and looking amazed at another seductive girl.’ Regarding the copyright status of this image, Guillem has stated that his images ‘are subject to copyright laws and the license agreements of the microstock agencies. It’s not allowed to use any image without purchasing the proper license in any possible way, so each one of the people that use the images without the license are doing it illegally. This is not the thing that really worries us, as they are just a group of people doing it in good faith, and we are not going to take any action, except for the extreme cases in which this good faith doesn’t exist.’
The first known use of the stock image as an internet meme was posted to a Turkish progressive rock Facebook group in January 2017. The post labeled the man as Phil Collins, who is being distracted from progressive rock by pop music. This meme was reposted on an English-language progressive rock Facebook page the next day, and then on Twitter on February 2, 2017. Later that month, the original stock photograph was shared on Instagram and got almost 30,000 likes.
The meme started going viral on August 19, 2017 after a Twitter user posted the photograph with the man labeled ‘the youth’ being distracted from his girlfriend ‘capitalism’ by ‘socialism.’ Another Twitter user copied this meme, getting retweeted more than 35,000 retweets and nearly 100,000 likes. The meme and its permutations went viral on Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. The distracted-boyfriend meme is listed by Know Your Meme as an example of object labeling. The girlfriend in the meme generally came to represent something that one is supposed to do and the woman wearing red came to represent something more desirable or riskier.
Some brands started using the meme when it started going viral. In early January 2018, a version of the meme referencing the biblical story of Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt went viral on Twitter. The meme was used in a sign for the ‘Enough! National School Walkout’ gun violence protest in March 2018. On June 25, 2018, Twitter user Ernie Smith noted other stock images in which the girlfriend from the original meme is surprised looking at screens.
In late January 2018, some social media users noted similarities between the meme and a ‘Mission: Impossible – Fallout’ teaser image featuring Henry Cavill and Angela Bassett. On April 16, 2018, a Twitter user called the Joshua Reynolds 1761 painting ‘David Garrick Between Tragedy and Comedy’ the ’18th-century equivalent’ of the distracted boyfriend meme; the painting itself would then become popular as a similar meme with historic references.
Nathan Heller of ‘The New Yorker’ wrote that ‘the delight of the Distracted Boyfriend meme was not unlike the perverse pleasure taken by Distracted Boyfriend himself: it allowed America to turn its attention away from much more important commitments.’
Joe McCarthy of ‘Global Citizen’ wrote that the original photograph depicts ‘sexual harassment,’ and criticized most uses of the meme for failing ‘to transcend the image’s inherent, toxic sexism.’ In September 2018, Sweden’s advertising ombudsman determined the internet service provider Bahnhof had broken rules against gender discrimination when it used the meme in an advertisement which portrayed Bahnhof’s employment opportunities as the attention-stealing woman and the ignored girlfriend as ‘your current workplace.’
The Daily Omnivore 
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