The Many Faces of the Distracted Boyfriend Meme

iStock photo from Getty Images – Disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl, photo by Antonio Guillem

You all know this photo, right? It’s the image from the Distracted Boyfriend meme that you’ve seen used a 1,000 different ways.  The image was made by Spanish photographer Antonio Guillem in 2015 as a stock photo that could be licensed from iStock photo for as little as $12.

Guillem told photo blog PetaPixel:

“The setting was completely improvised as we didn’t have time to search for it. As I always work with the same models, it was quite easy to create the situation even though it was quite challenging to achieve face expressions that were believable. Mainly, because we always have a really great work atmosphere and almost all the time one of the models was laughing while we were trying to take the picture.”

Guillem has been pretty good natured about the widespread unlicensed use of his photo:

“All our images are subject to copyright laws and the license agreements of the microstock agencies.

It’s not allowed to use any image without purchasing the proper license in any possible way, so each one of the people that use the images without the license are doing it illegally.

This is not the thing that really worries us, as they are just a group of people doing it in good faith, and we are not going to take any action, except for the extreme cases in which this good faith doesn’t exist.

What really worries us and we are not going to allow it, taking the appropriate legal measures, is the use of the images in a pejorative, offensive or any way that can harm the models or me.”

(It might be noted that the memes based on his photo distributed in the United States are probably not illegal as they would likely be considered parody under the fair use provisions of American copyright law.)

The original photo had the irresistible title of “Disloyal man with his girlfriend looking at another girl.” It’s first use as a meme was reportedly a slam on former Genesis drummer Phil Collins by a Turkish prog rock Facebook page:

Case zero of the Distracted Boyfriend meme.

But the meme didn’t really take off until this variant of the meme exploded in August of 2017.

For the last year, the Distracted Boyfriend seems to have been everywhere:

It has even been used as a grammar lesson by publishing giant Penguin Random House:

Or as an expression of journalistic frustration:

But what brought this meme to mind this morning was a brilliant revival of the Distracted Boyfriend from legal issue blogger Ken White, who operates on Twitter under the handle @Popehat. I really liked his characterization of both major political parties heading into next month’s midterm election:

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Add your favorite Distracted Boyfriend meme in the comments. (Just keep it reasonably clean…)