Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, you’re going on the Bye Felipe Instagram. The Bye Felipe Instagram account acts as a hub to embarrass rude guys on the Internet. The account, created just over 10 months ago, makes a space for woman to share their harassment experiences and laugh at them as a community. And it’s no small joke- both in scope and content. The mens’ comments are misogynist harassment. And the account has more than 306K followers, with an average of five posts per week. In a report with NY Mag, the @ByeFelipe founder Alexandra Tweten said,
I wanted to start a conversation about the entitlement that a lot of men feel they have. It’s definitely not all men. But the ones who send these insane messages need to be called out and publicly shamed.
The Bye Felipe Instagram collects screenshots from Facebook, OKCupid, Tinder and texts of men lashing out at women for a number of ridiculous reasons. Commonly, these men will harass women who do not respond, do not show enthusiasm, or seem like a “tease” in conversation. After any sort of rejection, these men will use foul words, body shaming and even threats against women.
While the Bye Felipe Instagram does not suggest that every man acts like this, it does not protect those who do. Names, usernames and pictures are rather unedited. If Tweten is contacted by any harassers, she will often delete the post but warn them not to do it again. Because even with a deleted post, there’s always some other idiot doing the same thing unreported. And as more women find out about the account, more screenshots will be posted. Perhaps this account can even lead to some change and unconventionally discourage this sort of behavior.
The phrase Bye Felipe stems from Bye Felicia, a line in a Ice Cub’s movie Friday. It’s now used similarly to its original context: to dismiss a woman. However, the Bye Felipe accounts switches the perspective to disregarding a man. The account is both fundamentally a funny social media account as it is a feminist social media account. But the fact that men talk to women like this is obviously an upsetting societal issue. Yet, in the mean time, at least women can come together and seek a little harmless revenge.
To see examples from the Bye Felipe account, please refer to this gallery and click to enlarge images. Although these are more milder Bye Felipe posts, please be aware that it still contains mature language and content.
