So Facebook has been making some tweaks to some of its graphics. The company recently changed its already unexciting logo to one that is … even less exciting, but apparently easier to read on mobile devices.
But it’s what Facebook has done to its “friends” icon that has one lady MRA up in arms.
In a post yesterday, A Voice for Men’s still-banned-on-Twitter “Social Media Director,” known as JudgyBitch, declared Facebook’s “Feminist designers” to be “as shitty at designing as they are at equality” and offered them a virtual middle-finger in the style of Facebook’s iconic thumbs up icon.
So what has JudgyBitch in a snit this time? Well, a few months ago, Facebook design manager Caitlin Winner was struck by the fact that the site’s “friends” icon depicted the silhouette of a woman standing behind a larger man. This didn’t sit right with her. In a Medium post explaining the new graphics, she wrote
As a woman, educated at a women’s college, it was hard not to read into the symbolism of the current icon; the woman was quite literally in the shadow of the man, she was not in a position to lean in.
My first idea was to draw a double silhouette, two people of equal sizes without a hard line indicating who was in front. Dozens of iterations later, I abandoned this approach after failing to make an icon that didn’t look like a two headed mythical beast. I placed the lady, slightly smaller, in front of the man.
She also removed the silly spike in the man’s hair and gave the woman a cuter ‘do as well. (Scroll back up to see the old and new icons side by side.)
Facebook quietly rolled out the new icons, as well as several other icons Winner had tweaked (including an androgynous figure that can be read as male or female or neither). But not everywhere just yet: while the new icons seem to have made it into the mobile app, the old icons remain on the site’s web version. No one seemed to have even noticed the change until Winner posted her explanation earlier this week. The reaction has been mostly positive.
But to JudgyBitch, the fact that the woman is now in front of the man is yet more proof that feminism isn’t about equality at all, but female supremacy.
I honestly think a good number of women who call themselves feminists have swallowed the lie that feminism is simply about equality between men and women …
Hire a woman’s who went to a woman’s college if you want to see real feminism is action. …
Facebook is not making a business decision – our demographic skews heavily female, so we have changed our friends icon to reflect that – they are making an ideological one: men’s proper place is in women’s shadow.
Well, if you ignore the fact that the figures are now the same size, and simply look like two people standing close together.
JB also posted an assortment of generic icons of men and women to show that Facebook could have depicted a man and a woman together without one being in front of the other, or without the two looking like a two-headed monster.
Here’s one of her examples of icon equality in action:
You may have noticed that the man is in front of the woman. JB evidently didn’t.
Hey, the Men’s Rights movement needs a steady supply of phony outrages to keep itself going, and JB has provided it with yet another one.
H/T — @TakedownMRAs
According to them:
–Circumcision would be illegal, except with the consent of a patient 18 years old or older.
–The U.S. Constitution would include the Equal Rights Amendment as originally written by Alice Paul in 1923.
–Men would have the right to accept or reject parental rights and obligations during the period of time in which a woman can legally obtain an abortion, men would not be legally responsible for children they did not biologically father, and paternity fraud would be punished as fraud.
–Affirmative action based on gender would end.
–VAWA would be abolished, women’s shelters audited, “patriarchy theory-based models of domestic violence” rejected, primary-aggressor and mandatory-arrest laws ended, and DV programs funded for men as well as women.
–Family courts would not be funded from Title IV-D, joint custody would be the default in divorce, DV would not be allowed to be alleged without a criminal conviction, alimony would be abolished, child support would be rare, prenups would be binding, and marriage would be based on contract law.
–Sexual assault would be handled exclusively by criminal courts and not college tribunals, alleged rape victims would not be protected by shield laws, and penetration would not be required to define a criminal act as rape or sexual assault.
–Men would not be denied the right to form campus groups.
–Infanticide would always be considered murder, even if committed by the victim’s mother.
This is the world they claim to want. Although Paul Elam says the only thing he’s doing in pursuit of these goals is talking.
Honestly, I think this is pretty darn cool. The whole “not making men the default human being for once” thing. It’s nice.
That… is such a weird complaint. It’s like ultimate “Outrage Culture” in the form of a Facebook icon that most people don’t really notice.
Oh good, something terrible and stupid happening at Facebook, to make me forget about the terrible and stupid happenings on 4chan.
Wait, the original wasn’t Tintin standing in front of a decidedly short helmeted warrior? Learn something new everyday.
If this was truly a feminist takeover she’d have gone with the two headed mythical beast.
My feminist friend Katie has two heads, and she’s the stuff of legends!
Man in front of woman= equality
woman in front of men = evil feminazis oppressing men
I don’t know.
The new one could be a man standing in a woman’s shadow, but it could also be a creep sidling on up to a woman he is about to assault. Plus, we can’t see what either of their hands are doing. Knowing that could potentially change the whole tone of the picture.
Perhaps any interpretation of a picture of two silhouettes is going to involve a whole lot of personal baggage.
Even if the woman in front were clearly in a more dominant position, it seems like you could leave her there for 10 years and then things would be fair.
I think this nightmare judge might have just usurped JB for the queen feMRA crown. Holy shit. http://jezebel.com/judge-jails-kids-compares-them-to-manson-cult-for-refu-1716809001
I didn’t even notice the change until reading this just now. I know my eyesight isn’t the best, but the icon is already so small on my screen it’s hard to tell who is in front, anyway. And they accuse feminists of being ridiculous! What a strange thing to be so upset about.
@sunnysombrera
Yes, that’s obvious it’s just a reason to complain.
Just ruminating. Much like the question about what MRA’s would consider acceptable. I suspect the answer is “we don’t care as long as no one is actively addressing parity because that makes us feel “attacked”. “
In response to the mad cow, some of those seem like good things, like penatraion not being needed to be defined as rape (or being forced to penatrate which you’ll see put together kind of often) but most of those suck, and I get the feeling that they aren’t actually trying for any of the better ones.
so….in her example of an equal icon why does the woman only have one arm?
When these folks complain about feminists and “SJWs” and what not being too touchy I just have to shake my head and sigh. The “Men’s Rights” crowd and those in proximity to them are the most thin-skinned motherfuckers on the planet. Not even the most insincere, immature, misinformed and misguided pseudo-feminist has anything on them in that regard.
Robjec,
Yeah, I think they could actually get a lot of public support if they focused exclusively on certain items on their list that are no-brainers, like circumcision only with informed adult consent, or well worth discussing, such as termination of parental rights and responsibilities.
But they don’t. Instead they trawl the web looking for outrage-bait, and even when they do that they often focus on stupid shit like Facebook icons that are clearly non-controversial to normal people.
If feminism is the all-powerful enemy, why not focus first on those issues that most feminists would not be likely to oppose, such as circumcision and the ERA (the first two on their list)? They could build on those early successes.
Or if taking on feminism directly, why not do so based on issues that actually affect men’s lives in a serious way, like getting help to male rape and DV victims, or reforming child support via legislation?
Especially considering their list is so long, it is clearly necessary to at least set some strategic priorities for such a young movement. But they don’t seem to have agreed on any.
Nop is right “Talk about your first world problems”.
@The Mad Cow: My theory is that they don’t actually want to solve any of those problems. They just want a scapegoat. If any of them do want to solve those problems, they aren’t willing to work with anyone to do it. Anything a feminist would agree with seems to be automatically bad in their world.
Plus, if they actually were on the same page as their hated enemies about anything their whole hateful ideology might collapse under the weight of cognitive dissonance. The whole idea is “men good, women bad” and it doesn’t really have room for more nuance than that. Issues that actually matter would be outside these simplistic boundaries.
Hey, you know what’s bigger news? Way more awesome than this shit?
Goosebumps trailer! GOOSEBUMPS!
GOOOOOOOSEBUUUUUUMPS!
Because they aren’t actually for any of those things primarily. Those issues are just the things they come up with when someone asks them why men need activists at all. Primarily, they’re just a backlash against progressive values. They have been ever since the early 1900s, they just weren’t called MRAs back then.
Case in point: they keep talking about how things were much better in the 50s, when Men were Men and Women were Women, yet a lot of the male-centered issues they claim to care about were no better back in the day. In many cases, they were worse, and got better specifically because of feminism and gender role critiquing.
They see feminism as the thing that made everything worse. Their goal is to reverse all the progress feminism has made. Why would they want to negotiate and find common ground? Obviously since feminists are the enemy they must be against whatever things MRAs claim to stand for at the moment, never mind what actual feminists say.
Occasionally they do, when someone buys the rhetoric enough and starts to believe the the MRM really cares about these issues. Then they fail to find any sort of strong support and the issue drops. True MRA activists are statistical noise, not a core part of the “movement,” and often shot in the foot by their own rhetorical axioms even when tackling something real.
Soo, man stands in front of woman, is taller than woman = perfectly fine and gender neutral. Woman stands in front of man, the same height as man = evidence of terrible matriarchy, apparently?
lmfao, okay.
There are men’s groups that are actively trying to solve things. generally with women’s support, cause equality matters!
I find that the whole “we want to end male Circumcision” is an uber read herring, cause when you discuss it with many of them, they have the “i am normal, and I want my son to look like me” attitude. It truly seems (to me) to be women who are aghast at what is done to sons in the name of tradition.
Janet Bloomfield recently wrote “Why straight men should support gay marriage” on AVFM, and Paul Elam’s take on most non-MRM social issues is that of a pretty typical Canadian liberal (anti-racist, pro-choice, pro-gay rights, suspicious of corporate greed), so I don’t think they’re entirely opposed to progressive values.
But their obsession with feminism is clearly off-base. For example, they are correct that the U.S. justice system appears to display a clear bias against men statistically — to the point that in terms of punishment for the same crime it is worse to be male in a criminal court than it is to be black. (It is of course worst to be both black and male. It is best to be white and female.)
But it is impossible that feminism is in any significant way responsible for the problem. The bias against men in criminal courts long pre-dates the existence of feminism. And recent research shows that judges who are women display a bias against men less than judges who are men. That doesn’t mean that feminist judges are more fair to men in criminal court, but realistically it does make it more likely that they are. And it appears, in any case, that women jurists are.
Nonetheless, the MRAs are sure that it is feminists who want all these men shipped off to prison…
http://38.media.tumblr.com/6a98b9e2cf64fce276767b43c132a316/tumblr_inline_nmr26rs19Y1t5wl3j_540.gif
The men who make a huge fuss about circumcision are always horribly unaware of the scope of feminism in the first place. They make this huge deal out of feminists not fighting for baby penis rights, as though it has anything to do with women’s rights or liberation from patriarchy. Circumcision has never had anything to do with women, and now suddenly it’s women’s problem to solve? That’s bullshit.