“It was literally supposed to be seen by like, five people,” Henderson said.

Henderson put up five images on a Friday in October; by Saturday afternoon the Tumblr was on Jezebel; the next week it was picked up by the Huffington post. By November, she had a book deal.

Later images loosen up the conceit, weighing in on current events—“Hey girl. Did he actually think that naming the bill after two civil rights pioneers would prevent us from exposing it for being a racially discriminatory aggression against the reproductive options for women of color?”—and more obviously playing up the humorous contrast between the scholarly ideas and the smoldering image: “Hey girl. The post-feminist fetishization of motherhood is deeply rooted in classism but I still think we’d make cute babies.”

Henderson's book launch was co-sponsored by Tumblr (responsible for furnishing the alcohol) and Word Bookstore (selling copies of the book, 80 percent of which is new material). Maris Kreizman, of the Slaughterhouse 90210 Tumblr, which pairs quotes from works of literature with screen shots from television shows and movies, also made a guest appearance. She had prepared a special “Slaughterhouse Ryan Gosling” slideshow: a shot from Lars and the Real Girl was paired with a quote from Sheli Heti's How Should a Person Be?; a shot from Drive was paired with lines from Frankenstein

“I like the Frankenstein comparison because he is evil and yet very godlike,” Kreizman said. Stills of The Notebook and Gosling during his Mickey Mouse Club days drew audible "awwww"s.

Despite the appreciative response, the event was filled with women (and a few men) who were not particularly interested in Ryan Gosling’s face.

“He’s kind of like cats on the Internet, you know?" said Nozlee Samadzadeh, an editor at the website Food52. "Even if you don’t like Ryan Gosling, you like Ryan Gosling.” But apart from the woman whose name tag read “Mrs. Gosling” (though wouldn't feminist Ryan Gosling want his wife to keep her own last name?), partygoers did not seem to be particularly turned on by him either.

“I can tell he’s attractive, but I don't burn for him,” said Sarah Brown, host of the monthly reading series Cringe. “I would find it attractive if anyone said the things that feminist Ryan Gosling says,” said rising NYU senior Alison Maney.

Though feelings for the real-life Gosling were lukewarm, conversations about sexual politics were more heated; people seemed eager to talk about feminism, and how the cultural conversation might be influenced by Henderson’s book.

Over the phone Henderson had mentioned that her goal with the Tumblr and the book was to get people to laugh: “Feminism and the women’s rights movement, especially in America, is so serious right now…. [T]here are many different ways to approach feminism, and they're not all negative. You might not resonate with all of them, and that's okay.”