What is How It Ought To Be?

It is a 2017 Twitter image macro format that pairs an unlikely subject carrying or holding another with a verbatim copy of Matt Walsh's caption "This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says".

Where did How It Ought To Be come from?

The source is an August 28, 2017 tweet by conservative blogger Matt Walsh, who captioned an AP Hurricane Harvey rescue photo with a line endorsing traditional gender roles. The parody format itself began the next day with @PraxisKenzie's Garfield illustration.

What does How It Ought To Be mean?

In Walsh's original tweet it meant that men and women occupy fixed protector and nurturer roles, which Mic described as a "June Cleaver-esque" and anti-gender-studies view. In the meme responses, the phrase was stripped of that argument and used ironically on absurd pairings.

How do you use How It Ought To Be?

Common convention is to post an image showing one thing holding or stacked on another, often a cartoon character or animal, and attach Walsh's full caption without altering it, as @GMPaiella did with a cat perched on a dog.

Is How It Ought To Be still popular?

No, it was a short-lived 2017 Twitter format tied to Hurricane Harvey news coverage; most of its traffic came in the week of August 28, 2017. It is remembered as a classic example of the "refuse to debate, caption absurdly" response style.

How It Ought To Be

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Published October 22, 2026

On August 28, 2017, conservative blogger Matt Walsh tweeted a Hurricane Harvey rescue photo captioned "This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says," and Twitter users spent the next 48 hours attaching the same sentence to absurd pairings of animals and cartoon characters. By August 29, parody posts featuring a muscular Garfield cradling Jon Arbuckle and a cat sitting on top of a dog were trending across the site under the How It Ought To Be label.

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Overview

How It Ought To Be works by pairing any two subjects, usually one holding or stacked on another, with a verbatim or lightly altered version of Walsh's original sentence1. Participants ran the template on a muscled Garfield lifting Jon Arbuckle, a cat sitting atop a dog, a pregnant SpongeBob SquarePants, Furbys, mutant sharks and Sonic the Hedgehog within the first 48 hours2.

The comedic engine was refusal: instead of debating Walsh's gender-essentialist claim, posters applied his sentence as a universal caption for any pairing imaginable2. Writers at Mic described the response as "irreverent, artistic and scathing," arguing the How It Ought To Be reply deflated a conservative talking point without engaging it on its own terms2. Participants carried the "despite what your gender studies professor says" tagline into each caption so the parody chain stayed legible at a glance1.

Gallery

Origin & Background

Platform

Twitter

Creator

@PraxisKenzie; Matt Walsh authored the source tweet

Date

2017

On August 28, 2017, Twitter user @MattWalshBlog posted an Associated Press photo of SWAT officer Daryl Hudeck carrying Catherine Pham and her 13-month-old son Aiden through floodwaters in Houston, taken by photographer David J. Phillip during the Hurricane Harvey rescue effort2. Walsh added the caption "Woman cradles and protects child. Man carries and protects both. This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says." His tweet collected more than 7,600 retweets and 20,000 likes within two days3.

Walsh is a Christian conservative blogger who has described himself as an extremist, "if truth is extreme"2. The How It Ought To Be meme format proper emerged the next day, August 29, 2017, when Twitter user @PraxisKenzie posted an illustration of a muscular Garfield cradling Jon Arbuckle with Walsh's caption copied word for word3.

How It Spread

On August 29, 2017, @PraxisKenzie's Garfield illustration drew more than 230 retweets and 850 likes in its first day, and a photo from Twitter user @GMPaiella of a cat sitting on top of a dog collected over 5,100 retweets and 18,000 likes under the same caption3. Mic, The Daily Dot and BuzzFeed covered the How It Ought To Be riffs the same day, with Mic connecting the format to earlier Twitter parodies like "This Is The Future That Liberals Want" and "Fellas, Is It Gay"2 1.

Gender studies professor Christina Wolbrecht (@C_Wolbrecht) replied with a thread arguing that Walsh's claim carried economic and social costs for workers in care industries, and her response collected more than 33,000 retweets and 72,000 likes in 24 hours3. Twitter's Moments team published two dedicated pages the same week, one for the parody images and another spotlighting Wolbrecht's rebuttal3.

On August 30, 2017, a Redditor cross-posted Walsh's original tweet to /r/The_Donald, where it reached more than 5,100 points at 92% upvoted within 15 hours3. By then How It Ought To Be was being written about across general-interest and political press, and the format effectively ended its viral run inside a week, filed with other short-lived 2017 Twitter formats that burned bright before fading2.

Timeline

2017-08-27

AP photographer David J. Phillip captures SWAT officer Daryl Hudeck carrying Catherine Pham and her son Aiden through Hurricane Harvey floodwaters in Houston.

2017-08-28

Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) tweets the photo with the caption "This is how it ought to be, despite what your gender studies professor says."

2017-08-29

@PraxisKenzie posts a muscular Garfield cradling Jon Arbuckle; @GMPaiella posts a cat sitting on top of a dog; Twitter Moments publishes a page about the meme.

2017-08-29

Christina Wolbrecht (@C_Wolbrecht) posts a counter-thread that collects 33,000+ retweets; Mic, Daily Dot and BuzzFeed cover the format.

2017-08-30

Walsh's original tweet is cross-posted to /r/The_Donald, reaching 5,100+ points at 92% upvoted within 15 hours.