What It’s Like To Learn From George Takei’s Facebook Page That You’ve Become An Internet Meme

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the night I was inundated with text messages containing pictures of men’s penises after a still-unknown Tinder user gave out my number, requesting these types of pictures. My tweets about this night went viral, to the point that my dad started asking me about it because he heard about it from a friend. (That was not my favorite conversation.) The story I wrote then delved into Tinder’s lack of any type of infrastructure to address online harassment and the fact that they didn’t seem to care much, with their response basically being “Not our problem, call the police.”

There’s been an unexpected update.

The night this was all happening, I was responding to these men, trying to get information out of them in an effort to discover who was behind this whole thing. One of them sent me a screenshot of the Tinder profile that was giving out my phone number. Her name was “Carilyn” and it looked like this:

In my prior post about this, I wrote that whoever this woman is in this picture, there’s a good chance she probably has no idea that this is even happening. Let alone knows there’s a picture of her with a caption that reads, “I’m super horny. No point in lying, right?”

Last Sunday night, my “dick pic” saga took off again after George Takei linked to a Distractify post about all of this on his Facebook page. One person out of the many who read Mr. Takei’s post was a woman named Shannon who, yes, happens to be the woman in the picture – a picture that was taken way back in 1999 on a trip to Juneau, Alaska.

Shannon reached out to me on Monday night through Twitter to tell me that she is in fact “Carilyn” and, of course, has no idea how her picture was used in any of this. Shannon (who requested her last name not be used for this story) provided me with other pictures from that trip to prove she was telling the truth. Shannon also friended me on Facebook as a sort of, “Hmm, do we have any friends in common? And if so, is that person responsible for this whole thing?” We did not. We are complete strangers and do not currently and never have lived anywhere near the same area.

I asked for her thoughts on what it’s like to learn from George Takei that you are part of a viral internet story and she agreed to share her version of the story. So, here is Shannon, describing what it was like to be reading what she thought was a humorous post George Takei had shared, then seeing a 1999 version of herself staring back at her.

It was Monday morning and I was at home on the sofa killing time on Facebook while waiting on some ibuprofen to kick in. At that moment I couldn’t even concentrate, I had such a miserable head and chest cold. George Takei always has fun and entertaining posts so I clicked on one of those, not even sure of the title. I’ve always loved him, initially because I am a huge Star Trek fan and then because of what he stands for on many different topics.

I was reading a hilarious story he re-posted from Distractify about some poor guy getting flooded with dick pics one evening. I was laughing and generally enjoying the story as well as being rather impressed with the way the guy, Mike, was handling it.

I got to the part where someone had finally provided a profile pic of the Tinder account trolling him and I vaguely remember thinking, Oh, I bet this is gonna be good. Do you know the sound a record player makes when you scratch the needle across the grooves? My brain made that sound as I found myself staring at a picture of me in Alaska back in 1999. I froze.

The first thing I thought was, Wow, I haven’t seen that picture in a long time. And then I was flooded with memories about what a great vacation it was and how much I loved that hat. Dammit, it was a great hat. Then my brain locked up for about half a minute as I stared at the picture again. Did I really just see myself in a random post on George Takei’s Facebook page? Did that just happen or am I sicker than I thought and hallucinating? But that was me and this was real: Someone found this picture of me and used it on their dating profile and trolled some guy named Mike and George Takei posted the story.

By far the strangest moment was when my boyfriend, Steve, got home from work and I shoved my phone in his face before he could get in the door. “Look at this story,” I babbled as I began to scroll down the page.

“Oh,” he said, “I saw it last night, that girl looks like you. Wasn’t it on George Takei’s page?”

I nearly screamed at him, “It doesn’t look like me, it is me!,” unable to contain myself. And like me, it took him a few moments to truly grasp all of it. Then he looked at me with a huge smile and said, “You have to write the guy and tell him.” I said I didn’t know, maybe I would but probably not.

My friends were hard pressed to decide which part of this story they liked best. It was a toss up between the lovely headline above my picture, “YES. FINALLY. THE FACE THAT LAUNCHED A THOUSAND DICK PICS” and the caption beneath it saying, “I’m super horny. No point in lying, right?”

The big question is how did someone get my picture? And the only way I can figure it out is from an old MySpace account I had back when it was a thing. I still have not been able to get into mine; I haven’t touched the old email address in years and I don’t have a clue what the password is, either.

I still can’t believe this happened, it feels like The Twilight Zone. A few people have mentioned trying to find who did this to “do something about it,” but that’s not realistic. Plus I don’t feel harmed by the incident. It’s actually given me the best story I’ve had to tell in years! And obviously, a new nickname. “Carilyn.”

Did I mention I really miss my hat?

Mike Ryan lives in New York City and has written for The Huffington Post, Wired, Vanity Fair and New York magazine. He is senior entertainment writer at Uproxx. You can contact him directly on Twitter.

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