The defining meme of the pandemic
... originated in a Facebook group.
Embedded, the just-launched newsletter from the former editors of nofilter1, highlights the best and most fascinating of what's new in creator culture, Monday through Friday2. “Get Embedded” with us on Twitter and Instagram. And enjoy whatever meme it takes to get you through the day.
The Shakespearean Resilience of 'Go Piss Girl'
By Kate Lindsay
Many cite March 2020 as the most bizarre, PTSD-inducing month in recent human history, but I submit that April 2020 was even worse. April had none of the blissful ignorance of March, none of the hope that things would go back to normal in just a few weeks. Firmly settled in to a reality we still didn’t understand, we put our minds together and came up with the most listless, half-hearted, and stupid meme that’s ever been invented: “go piss girl.”
“This New Gossip Girl Meme Is Exactly The Sort Of Dumb Humor That Will Get Us Through This Strange Time” BuzzFeed claimed on April 14. Little did anyone know, “go piss girl” would have to get us through the next year. First posted in a Facebook group “Useless, Unsuccessful, and/or Unpopular Memes” on April 10 by a user named Tyler Wood, the photo is of Blake Lively’s Serena van der Woodsen with the caption “I have to pee.” To which Leighton Meester’s Blair Waldorf replies, using only the rearranged letters of the Gossip Girl logo, “go piss girl.”
A number of memes spun off from this, each getting more and more deconstructed and less and less tethered to the original conceit (even Lively herself got in on it). But “go piss girl” ... that one was hard for me, personally, to let go of. On a Zoom happy hour, when one of my friends would announce they were going to the bathroom real quick, another would chirp, “go piss girl.” A few months later, after inquiring about the port-a-potty nearest the park birthday hang: “Over there—go piss girl.” It’s gotten to the point where now, instead of politely informing my outdoor dining companion that I need to use the facilities, I’ll simply say, “I have to go piss girl” over my shoulder on my way into the restaurant.
“Why is everyone saying that?” my sister’s boyfriend privately asked her back in October after spending a half hour, tops, in a backyard with us.
Like most things about me, I assumed the ubiquitous use of “go piss girl” was both brilliant and unique. So when this TikTok appeared on my For You page in April 2021, I just about gasped.
“Me and Keaton have an incredibly important message for all of you today,” user @ichris.tine tells the camera. “Go piss girl.”
290,000 views and over 400 comments later, the universal rule of “go piss girl” became clear.
“This meme will forever have an unbreakable hold on me,” one person wrote.
“The way this meme still consumes me it’s just too good,” another added.
I took this search beyond TikTok to Twitter, where as recently as 10 minutes before I sat down to write this piece, someone had tweeted about the phrase having become a staple in their vocabulary.
And there were ample tweets like this to choose from in April 2021 alone.
A quick search on Instagram confirms the phrase has taken up long-term residence there, too.
(I searched LinkedIn, too, but no dice.)
The acceleration of our consumption of content on the internet has ensured that most viral moments have a shelf life of just about 24 hours. By that measure, the creator of “go piss girl” is linguistically the closest thing we have to a modern Shakespeare.
Getting in touch with Tyler Wood who, per the rules of the Facebook group, is the original creator of the meme, has proven to be about as easy as getting in touch with Shakespeare himself. For someone whose meme has retained a chokehold on the internet, Wood’s presence doesn’t appear to go beyond Facebook—but you can check out his band here. And you can think of him every time you excuse yourself to indulge in the most human of acts: going to piss, girl.
