Earlier this week, Toronto-based writer Katie Cunningham posted this joke on Twitter.
And then, according to Cunningham, a random guy who follows her tweeted this back at her:
And then Cunningham delivered a master class in trolling:
After her Twitter conversation, Cunningham screenshot the whole thing and it quickly went viral.
@voldemortsbicep i'm so sorry but this was truly perfect
In fact, multiple screenshots of the conversation have been retweeted thousands of times.
Not all heroes wear capes
Cunningham told BuzzFeed News that the reactions she's been getting have been mostly great, but there are some men who are taking it a little too seriously...
"The majority of the reactions have been really great! Lots of slow clap GIFs and crown emojis haha, it's been pretty fun," she said. "Obviously, there are plenty of mean @'s, mostly from people who have apparently never been condescended to, or people calling me a sociopath for this 'game.'"
She said that unfortunately, because it's a tweet, there isn't a lot of room to explain that the whole joke was a commentary on how often men talk down to her in professional and academic settings — or just in general.
And what about the Twitter user who got epically dunked on? He's tweeted a little bit about it since Cunningham's tweets started picking up steam.
Cunningham said she's actually direct-messaged with him about it. He told her that he was being sarcastic.
"He says he was playing along, and we had a pretty legit talk about the fact that sarcastic or ironic misogyny is inadvisable on a platform where you can't read tone," Cunningham said. "Apparently, he's been pretty shocked at the people defending him and criticizing me, which just proves my point: So many men @ me horrible, condescending stuff (this morning I got a DM that just said 'cancer') that there's no way to tell who is serious and who is 'joking.'"
She, all in all, he's been a pretty good sport about everything.