Defeated Male Leaves

About

Defeated Male Leaves refers to a drawing of a skinny male lion retreating, illustrated by an orange arrow underneath it and the caption "defeated male leaves." The image comes from a 2008 issue of the National Wildlife Federation's Ranger Rick's Zoobooks about lions. The page containing the image was posted online in 2020 and a crop containing just the lion and the caption became popularized in image macros in April 2021.

Origin

On May 7th, 2020, the Ranger Rick website^[1] posted a page from their 2008 issue of Zoobooks on lions describing how a lion pride works (shown below). The page includes a description of how male lions will fight off other lions who come to challenge the pride for its females. If the male lion loses it has to leave the pride, described by an image of a skinny lion leaving captioned "defeated male leaves."

On April 12th, 2021, Redditor jjcrawdad posted an image macro to /r/dankmemes^[2] with a caption about a man farting and a feminist farting louder, using the cropped lion image to describe the man's feeling of defeat, gaining over 70,000 upvotes in seven months (shown below). This is the earliest known meme to use the image.

Spread

The image spread over the course of the year, becoming popular across sites including Reddit, Instagram and Facebook. On April 13th, 2021, Redditor TheSoulVibrators posted a new version of the meme to /r/memes,^[3] gaining over 76,200 upvotes in seven months (shown below). The meme was reposted to Instagram^[4] jokezar that day, gaining over 92,000 likes in the same span of time.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References