ABSTRACT
From the late 1990s, my attention, as a feminist sociologist, was repeatedly drawn to media images intended to provoke some imagined group of (always humourless) feminists. These images appeared, in celebratory fashion, to reverse the clock to some earlier pre-feminist moment, albeit in a tongue-in-cheek way. The prevailing use of irony aimed to exonerate the culprits from the crime of offending what was caricatured as a kind of extreme, and usually man-hating, feminism (while implicitly acknowledging that other, more acceptable, forms of feminism had entered the realms of common sense).
