This zine puts the vacant misogyny of one man’s online social presence through a feminist lens
Conflicting images of spanking, oversized cartoon breasts and memes about ‘beastmode’ are nestled among motivational quotes about perfect daughters and keeping faith. A confusing image that paints the picture of the modern man, as part of the newly launched Wet Satin Press’ I’ve Seen More Plastics Than The Average Guy.
The zine documents the Facebook posts of a CEO, in his mid-fifties. With a huge social media presence, he continually shares images of attractive white women, sandwiched between posts about his luxurious lifestyle spent in bars surrounded by women and a Californian mansion, while also sharing wisdom-filled, motivational memes.
Reba Maybury, the founder of Wet Satin Press, stumbled across the man online. “I’ve been obsessed with following young, female social media celebrities who gain popularity through sharing images of their modified bodies that emulate contemporary standards of pornography,” says Maybury. “There was this one girl that I’d been following on Facebook who creates images of luxury goods neatly placed next to her enormous cleavage, the way she curated her aimlessly capitalistic life on the Internet is so extreme.
Anyway, one day I noticed that she was mentioning a man with a really generic name quite often and she was visiting him in California. I went on his Facebook profile and discovered one of the worst human beings ever to exist.”
“The reality of his life is that he’s created a culture of vacant misogyny and greed” – Reba Maybury
Her collection is a compilation of images he’s shared, ranging from the sexually extreme to the weirdly touching. For the title, Maybury was inspired by something he had shared that stuck with her. “The name of the book is now a direct quote that he shared in reference to him sharing the details of his favourite plastic surgeon and how he’s ‘seen more plastics than the average guy’ on women,” explains Maybury.
Maybury says she was fascinated by the power men like him have to creature a mass culture of “capitalistic sex”, feeding his social media audience “a form of masculinity where all women are is a pair of tits and arse”. Maybury describes him as “the absolute ugliness of capitalism…the reality of his life is that he’s created a culture of vacant misogyny and greed”. To counteract her initial anger, she took to taking screenshots of his page, to re-contextualise what he was doing with an extreme sense of irony, to highlight its ignorance and extremity. “Because what would make this man feel the most powerless? People laughing not with him – but at him."
Check out more of Reba Maybury's work at Wet Satin Press here
