Wanna sammich?

At 16 years old, Australian explorer Jade Hameister is the youngest person to ever complete the polar hat-trick by reaching the North and South Poles and crossing Greenland, but even she has to deal with loudmouth critics who have opined that her place is in the kitchen. In 2016, after the then-14-year-old become the youngest person to ski to the North Pole from outside the last degree of latitude (a distance of about 60 miles), she gave a TEDx talk in Melbourne in which she encouraged young women to embrace an adventurous mindset, and to resist societal pressures that discourage them from their ambitions. Male YouTube commenters took offense to Hameister’s message, as users flooded the page with the phrase, “Make me a sandwich,” an internet meme that mocks women for having ambitions aside from making food for a man.

Well let’s not be too restrictive about it. The meme mocks women for any form of doormat-status-refusal. The meme mocks women for having the bad taste to consider themselves fully human and not inferior to the male version.

So a couple of weeks ago she posted on Facebook:

We spent this morning cleaning out our sleds to be ready to fly out to Union Glacier tomorrow morning (depending on weather). Then we skied over to the Ceremonial South Pole (probably the Pole that everyone knows as the only South Pole – the barbers Pole with the flags) and the actual Geographic South Pole (which moves around 10m each year), which is marked separately. In the afternoon we were given a tour of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. It is seriously as close to what a Base on another planet would be like than anything else on the planet – a mini-town based around the scientific work of the National Science Foundation. Tonight (it never gets dark this time of year) I skied back to the Pole again… to take this photo for all those men who commented “Make me a sandwich” on my TEDX Talk. I made you a sandwich (ham & cheese), now ski 37 days and 600km to the South Pole and you can eat it  @natgeo @natgeoau @australiangeographic

Burn.