Women Laughing Alone On the Internet

by Carrie Frye

This is the first installment in The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra will revisit internet marvels of the past. 

In each of the 18 stock photo images, a woman sat alone with a bowl of salad or fruit while beaming joy and delight, or with her head thrown back, laughing freely, the mirth produced by salad just too much to contain. 

It was January 3, 2011, the Monday after the holiday break; Edith Zimmerman, the editor of The Hairpin, finished arranging the images, considered, typed “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” into the post’s title bar, and hit publish.

As anyone who’s ever published anything on the internet knows, many a beloved joke goes unsung. You may hit publish in a state of excited suspense, all Wile E. Coyote pushing the lever on some Acme dynamite—only to wait for a “Boom!” that never comes. New jokes—shinier, sharper, better ones—pile past yours. The world goes on. 

This time, though, there was a boom.

Talking with me by phone, Edith recalled the satisfaction she felt as “Women Laughing Alone With Salad”’s Chartbeat numbers flew past the traffic of The Awl, The Hairpin’s parent site, and then just kept exploding.  

Oh, this is crazy, she thought. This is an enormous deal in my life, that I’ve made a certifiable hit blog post. And it’s weird that I’m alone.

“Women Laughing Alone With Salad” captured the derangedly corporatized marketing (and editorial) vision of “women’s health” and exposed it to a withering gaze, without resorting to a word of text. Yet the message was unmistakable, as the first comment on the post expressed: 

Know Your Meme charts the variations of the post that began appearing both on and off the Hairpin, with titles like “Women Struggling To Drink Water” and “Women Proud of Their Two Apples.” In 2015, the playwright Sheila Callahan debuted her play “Women Laughing Alone With Salad” at the Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington.

The Hairpin’s wildly inventive, akilter sensibility was full of Edith’s recurring enthusiasms—for deviled eggs, for bones, for dolls. One day it might be: “What’s the best way to hard-boil an egg?” Another: “Where is the best place in your apartment to hide a deviled egg?” If this sounds potentially twee, it wasn’t—she was too disciplined, too prickly, for that. 

In a favorite column, “Letters to the Editors of Women’s Magazines,” Edith reproduced genuine letters sent by readers to women’s magazines, and added a dizzy Hairpin spin.