Me Gusta is a crudely drawn face featuring swollen, bloodshot eyes and a grin that sits somewhere between pleasure and horror. It typically appears as the final panel in a Rage Comic, dropped in to convey a disturbing sense of enjoyment about something most people would find gross, weird, or inappropriate. Urban Dictionary defines it as "a rage comic face used in response to something that is painful or awkward to experience but somehow simultaneously soothing or pleasant"2. The humor comes from the contrast: the setup presents something uncomfortable, and the Me Gusta face reveals the character secretly loves it.

Originally tied to sexually perverse or bodily scenarios, the meme's usage loosened over time. By its peak, it covered everything from peeling dried glue off your fingers to the cold side of the pillow to the satisfaction of popping bubble wrap. The face itself is the joke: that unmistakable expression of someone caught red-handed enjoying something they know they shouldn't.

Me Gusta was among the most recognizable faces to emerge from the Rage Comics movement, a format that dominated internet humor from roughly 2009 to 2013. The meme pushed a Spanish phrase into the English-speaking internet's daily vocabulary, with "me gusta" becoming a widely understood shorthand for guilty pleasure even among people who didn't speak Spanish2.

The meme's origin story is also notable as an early documented case of deliberate viral engineering. Years before "growth hacking" entered the mainstream lexicon, Oswald was seeding her creation across 4chan with sock puppet accounts and faked organic engagement. The strategy worked so well that the meme's manufactured origins stayed hidden for over a decade until the 2021 interview.

The phrase "me gusta" also appeared as a song title from multiple international artists throughout the late 2010s, including tracks by Shakira, Anitta featuring Cardi B, and Inna, though none of these were directly connected to the meme4.