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
The trouble with plain circle silhouettes is that, rightly or wrongly, people tend to interpret them as male.
@katz
http://i.imgur.com/EWuq6Wt.png
I take cash.
Infanticide is already considered murder including when it’s the mother who is the perpetrator. So what’s the issue? Are they mad that women with post partum psychosis occasionally successfully plead not guilty by reason of insanity? Why are they mad about that? They just hate women so much that they think this plea shouldn’t be allowed? Men can plead not guilty by reason of insanity too. It would be discrimination to disallow women.
And lol at Mad Cow thinking jumping to a new thread is going to make us forget the “I’m not an MRA but…” sealioning in the other thread.
@WWTH
That’s what Maleficent gifs are for.
Which I totally forgot to post after their last post. I’ll correct myself.
@Mad Cow
http://38.media.tumblr.com/6a98b9e2cf64fce276767b43c132a316/tumblr_inline_nmr26rs19Y1t5wl3j_540.gif
Someone of the manosphere is bored. Bored and in dire need to be noticed by her peer.
I wouldn’t have even noticed that the icon had changed if it weren’t for MRA shitheads getting all pissy about it.
I guess it’s another example of how, to a privileged group, any change in the status quo that does not immediately favour them looks like oppression. Especially if they’ve been a privileged group for so long they just don’t see it.
YES! I don’t give two shits about the game, but Portal Legos are a dream come true. I’d given up hope after they turned us down last time, but hearing that they changed their minds was, just, eee. GIMME.
… Wait, this is a conversation about how much of a cynical cash grab it is, not about how cool the minifigs are? Uh… Erm… Down with this sort of thing? >_>
And I got so excited I somehow botched copy-pasting the quote. Oops.
Careful now.
I guess that JB was totally fine with he state of affairs when the woman appeared to be in the man’s shadow because that’s how she thinks that it should be (unless the woman is her, in which case she will be raping the man because that’s what she does).
Wow, how did this load slip through the cracks?
One of AVFM’s newest regular contributors is a Holocaust denier, he’s buddy-buddy with Roosh the neo-Nazi self-admitted rapist, all of this, etc. If that’s “Liberal” to you, “Conservative” must be… Well, I’d usually reference Hitler here, but you’re literally saying that Hitler’s beliefs are liberal, so I guess something more like this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v404/uglyweirdguy/teapartyspectrum.gif
http://www.bestwestern.com/img/bg-groups-meetings.png
Misandry!
Srsly tho short ppl st& in front of taller ppl; lern 2 camera.
True, but considering that every iteration of this is going to have some kind of problem with someone, I figured this would be an alternative.
Of course, I did bring up earlier that assuming the figure with the “masculine” short hair cut could also be wrong too. : P
Paul Fucking Elam, a “Canadian liberal”? Um, NO.
And whatever you’re smoking, you better put that pipe down, son.
Snurk. Yeah, sure, they’re “pro-choice”. Their “choice” is, however, limited to a rank idiocy known as the “paper abortion”, in which a guy who gets a woman pregnant effectively signs a slip of paper saying “You’re on your own, slut!” — and this shit is legally binding.
But, by all means, pull the other one!
So convenient that, in these situations only, we suddenly pretend that the only thing that matters is a criminal conviction. If we really wanted to be fair, we would say:
1. In family court, no accusations of wrongdoing or unfitness can be made without a criminal conviction. You say she cheated on you? Aww, too bad, it’s not illegal. Ergo, irrelevant. She neglects the kids? Well I don’t see a conviction on her record. She’s verbally abusive? Again, no conviction. She spends money recklessly? Sorry fella, if she’s not in jail for credit card fraud or theft, then she’s a perfect mother and wife.
2. Codes of conduct are illegal. The only way any organization is allowed to discipline or refuse any member is by filing criminal charges. Feminists trolling your blog? Well, it’s not illegal, so you can’t ban them or delete their comments unless they are convicted of hate speech or inciting violence or something. Student caught plagiarizing? Better bring that kid up on charges, or else they get an A. Professor of women’s studies declares all men to be horrible and fails every one in her class for being anatomically incapable of understanding women? Guess we just have to deal with it, unless and until men become a federally protected class.
Because really, the reason you’re allowed to bring up domestic violence in family court without a criminal conviction is because family court is there to determine what custody arrangement is in the best interest of the child, and we all know there are a range of behaviors, illegal and not, that may make a parent less fit to have a certain amount of contact with their children.
And the rape thing at college campuses is a code of conduct issue. Colleges, along with workplaces and blogs and clubs and restaurants, are allowed to decide what kind of behavior is unacceptable, and they do not have to rely on criminal courts or an evidentiary standard of “beyond a reasonable doubt”. Why would it be okay to kick out probable plagiarists and not probable rapists?
@Pandapool – You’re funny, and I’m tired, and I laughed out loud at the icon with the boobs. (They look like they’re made out of the music symbols that mean to hold a note. What are those called? Damn, I must be tired. I sing. I should know this.)
Also, alas, I think I missed the critical Goosebumps Appreciation Window in childhood. When I was 9 or so, my mom wouldn’t let me read them because they were “too scary” (oh the horror). Then when I was a snotty teenager and picked up one where a kid gets turned into a bug, I thought, “Such a rip-off of Franz Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis'” – with my nose in the air, I expect. So yeah.
@The Mad Cow – I suppose you could cherry-pick Paul Elam’s liberal views, but what’s your point? Are you implying that it makes his anti-feminism and anti-women rhetoric more reasonable, or just that there’s a contrast? I don’t get it. And why bring in Canada? I live in Canada. Elam doesn’t seem very liberal to me.
JudgyB grasps at straws, wonders why few take her seriously.
@epitome
It’s been a long time since I played any music, so I had to look it up, but it’s a fermata. (Or bird’s eyes, like I called them.)
MRAs are only for abortion rights when they want the woman to get an abortion. They aren’t pro choice, they’re pro controlling women.
Oh thanks! Yeah. Fermatas. 🙂
@WWTH
That makes me think this mad cow is a 4channer. They are far too use to posting free of consequence.
If memory serves, the first woman to plead postpartum after killing her infant said she did it because the baby was setting the house on fire with the lightening shooting from it’s eyes.
So, yeah. Her capacity was fucking diminished. It was her mental state, not her gender that was the issue.
MRAs and their weak little lies. *shakes head*
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20131202160812/the-house-of-anubis/images/f/fc/You_know_thats_right.gif