Wifejak, Icon of the Normal

Social-media sites are dark places. Bigotry in every direction, footage of random ultra-violence, porn and OnlyFans content—all this and more is part of the routine user experience on these platforms, especially X, the app formerly known as Twitter. But a ray of light has lately illumined our otherwise benighted online lives, and her name is “wifejak.”

A crudely drawn young woman with flowing red hair and a subtle smile on her face, wifejak is the first genuinely wholesome online meme in I-don’t-know-how-long. Appearing in various commonplace scenarios, she enacts the familiar and charming foibles of wives and girlfriends—the sorts of things many young men imagine to be unique to their own better halves before life experience reveals them to be characteristic of most members of the fair sex.

Wifejak is silly and a little annoying and painfully normal—and she’s endearing in the extreme not in spite of these qualities, but precisely because of them. Her rise thus attests to the enduring yearning for matrimonial and family normality in an age when the normal is under attack, in different ways, from both the institutional left and the hard online right. 

Many of wifejak’s statements are in the interrogative. Her arms laden with numerous shopping bags, for example, she asks, “Do you think we got enough?” In another, she asks, “What if I made us matching flower crowns?” Seated on a bench at a snow-covered park: “You remembered the hand warmers, right babe?” Roasting a marshmallow outdoors: “Why don’t these taste like the ones in Lucky Charms?”

Internet memes are by definition highly mobile, and wifejak is no exception. Indeed, some of the best versions transpose her beyond her contemporary setting to other historical periods or even the distant future. Standing inside a spaceship orbiting some far-off exoplanet, wifejak asks, “Why are your mag [magnetic] boots in the middle of the hallway?” In my personal favorite, a cave-painting-style wifejak says, “We haven’t had mammoth in a while.”

Speaking of memetic mobility, wifejak is a variation on “wojak,” described by an online dictionary as “a cartoon drawing of a bald man with a wistful or melancholic expression.” Dating back to 2009—ancient history, in internet terms—wojak was and remains a symbol of knowing resignation in the face of the sheer craziness of a rapidly changing world. You could deploy that wistful, melancholic expression, for example, in response to the mindless celebration greeting Syria’s recent takeover by a branch of al-Qaeda. Wojak’s repressed misery could convey more than most several-thousand-word essays.

Unlike wojak, however, wifejak is notably optimistic. The pace of technological disruption might accelerate, democratic sentiment might shift this way and that, ideologies might die and be reborn, but wifejak will still be there, importuning, “Babe, is it just me or is the cat’s litter box starting to smell?” Wifejak is an icon of the normal (in the term’s normative or evaluative sense, as well as its more statistical connotation).

Since the 1960s and ’70s, a complex of anti-normative ideas and practices has come to be associated with progressivism. These range from the rejection of traditional Freudian psychiatry, with its focus on helping individuals attain normal sexual development, to the attempted abolition of sex as a bodily reality and the promotion of a panoply of genders and orientations. A meme that celebrates the joys of normal relationship patterns utterly defies progressive anti-normativity. And sure enough, wifejak has drawn lefty condemnation for a “reliance on stereotypes” that “quickly veered it into misogynist territory.” 

Far more vociferous opposition has come from the barbarian right—my label for newish “dissident” tendencies emphasizing hereditary differences among large human groups, eugenics and IQ, and a worship of strength.

Nick Fuentes—one of the barbarians’ avatars, with 450,000 followers on X and counting—has been waging an anti-wifejak crusade for days. On a recent episode of his online streaming show, Fuentes lamented how online young men have gone from “lionizing” the likes of the Unabomber and Hitler to posting adorable memes about their wives. He added: “If I ever see wifejak in the streets, I’m going to ram my car into her car. I’m going to hit her on the driver’s side head-on. And if she doesn’t die, I’m going to break through the windshield and kill her myself.”

Why the rage? In addition to overt racism and anti-Semitism, one of the defining features of the barbarian right is a cartoonishly misogynistic account of relations between the sexes that resembles sadomasochistic porn far more than authentic complementarity. Not unlike the anti-normative left, the barbarians can’t seem to view sexuality through any other lens but that of domination and submission, power and counterpower.

The barbarians associate femininity with democratic egalitarianism, collective social organization, solicitude for the weak, and the suffocation of the (white) man’s adventurous spirit. Modernity, in this telling, is a high-tech communal “longhouse” lorded over by HR ladies and henpecking wives. Women, moreover, are supposedly all too happy to uphold the normal, the average, the area of peak statistical distribution—whereas the online barbarians are interested in the right-hand corner of the bell curve.

Enmity for female sexuality and normativity can lead the barbarians to curious places, such as dabbling in homoerotica, or, in the case of Fuentes, spurning heterosexual coitus itself as “gay.” But the popularity of wifejak is a reminder that normal is irrepressible, that the average or ordinary is worth defending, that the longhouse of social order is finally better for most of us than the barmy visions of the “exceptional.” Who would choose the spittle-flecked rantings of a Fuentes over wifejak’s asking you to help her choose whether she should use the green or the red font for this year’s family Christmas card?

Sohrab Ahmari is the incoming U.S. editor of UnHerd. He is writing his next book, on the triumph of normal, for HarperCollins.