The British Museum was under fire this weekend for a social media post advertising its show on Roman military history as an opportunity for single women to attract men.
The meme, posted on March 3, encouraged female visitors to look “confused” at the exhibition “Legion: life in the Roman Army” in hopes a man would approach and explain the display. The museum said its meme was a riff on a popular TikTok trend of women asking their husbands, boyfriends, and fathers how often they pondered the Roman Empire.
The British Museum’s take did not land well. The since-deleted post read: “Girlies, if you’re single and looking for a man, this is your sign to go to the British Museum’s new exhibition, Life in the Roman Army, and walk around looking confused. You’re welcome x.”
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It added: “Come for the romance, stay for some romance.”
Social media users, in particular London and Oxford-based academics, shared their displeasure with the sentiment. Alexandra Wilson, a professor of music and cultural history at Oxford Brookes University, called the British Museum “misguided” in its marketing attempt in a post on X: “Really misguided marketing approach,@britishmuseum – really alienating to your (very broad) audience to assume they would ‘get’ the intertextual reference to something on TikTok.
“This ‘irony’ was bound to go wrong,” she said. “So boring when social media accounts try to be ‘down with the kids’.”
Responding directly to one critic, the museum wrote that its post was “actually poking fun” at a meme “where mansplaining is the butt of the joke.”
“We can assure you that we are *not* actually suggesting that women need to look for dates or pretend to be stupid,” the museums said, adding, “apologies to anyone who wasn’t aware of the wider context who felt offended by this meme!”