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
I just love it when idiots come barging in here like they’re about to drop a truth bomb, and the only conceivable reason for us to not talk about it with them or address it directly to them is that it must be true and not fit our “agenda”.
Or, could it be possible we’ve already heard this shit before and we’re tired of discussing it with people who aren’t here in good faith, and who are only looking for some sort of weak “gotcha” to bash us about the head with?
Could it be that we’ve already discussed this in other places and simply have no desire at all to discuss it with someone who has proven again and again that they’re not here in good faith and just simply want to restate their point until we cave from the tediousness of it all?
Could it be that your “study” (which is three years old and misses a LOT of valuable information), is something we’ve seen before and are tired of having to explain why it’s wrong?
What? Think we owe you a conversation because you graced us with your presence and wanted us to talk about it? Fuck off. We don’t owe you shit.
@ WWTH
To tie in with some of the other topics we’ve been discussing like the free pass given to people for fear of offending religious and cultural sensibilities, one thing that hardly ever gets mentioned when people are patting themselves on the back for finally brining a prosecution in that 2,000 raped girls case is that some of the girls were also indicted as co-conspirator along with their rapists!
It’s a weird feature of common law that you can be both victim and accessory. The classic example is arranging an illegal fight. So the winner can be prosecuted for GBH and the person he beat up is also prosecuted for inciting the offence by agreeing to the fight. it also used to be the case before the age of consent was lowered for gay sex that the younger person was prosecuted for consenting and therefore facilitating the offence.
In the rape case a number of the girls were co-indicted for effectively being part of the conspiracy by introducing their friends to the rapists. They ultimately weren’t proceeded against but the mere fact the CPS bought into the ‘decadent girls were willing to be prostetuted’ does stick in the craw a bit.
There’s a federal program here in the US to seize money from the pimps and award it to their victims, but the conservatives in Congress were trying every which way they could think of to prevent that money being used for abortions.
The last I heard, they proposed a compromise in which seized money is considered revenue, so that it couldn’t be used for abortions. I’m not sure what else they were offering as part of this “compromise.” Probably they think that they don’t have to offer anything, they called it a compromise, so it becomes one.
Probably something’s happened about this situation, but I’m about to sit down to supper. I’ll see what I can find later.
I suppose if you want examples of gender based laws, pimping could be one. In England only men can be prosecuted for ‘living off immoral earnings’. Then again only women can be charged with ‘being a common prostitute’.
There’s also the defence of ‘spousal coercion’. That’s where if a wife can show she only committed an offence at the behest of her husband and she was so in awe of him she felt she couldn’t refuse, she can be acquitted. The most recent, and probably only in recent years, example of anyone raising that was in a case where an MP’s wife said she was the driver of a car done for speeding when it was in fact her husband. The jury didn’t buy that for an instant and she went to prison.
So there’s your ‘the law is biased in favour of women’ examples. Don’t think it was the feminists arguing for those laws though.
This is semi-relevant: Ellen Pao has just stepped down as CEO of Reddit.
@Paradoxical
Didn’t she, like, JUST become CEO? Like, JUST.
@Panda
Yeah, but considering the torrential abuse she’s been getting from the He-Man Woman Haters’ Club since day one, I’m impressed that she managed to hold out even this long.
Alan: To your list of ‘prosecuting the victims’–in the U.S. we’ve had several cases now where an underaged girl sent her boyfriend a topless/nude pic as an act of flirtation/seduction or just in response to a direct request. The boy, either immediately, or after a breakup (we’re talking teens, so their relationships are short-lived), eventually distributes the photos to all of his peers in school, or even just posts them online someplace.
The prosecutors then, in turn, indict both the boyfriend and the girl for child pornography, treating the two actions as morally and legally equivalent, because a girl who loses her chastity must be punished.
On Ellen Pao:
Well, crap. I will credit the announcement written by Sam Altman–he didn’t sugar-coat the abuse Pao got after the firing of Taylor. He also declared the job of the new CEO to be pushing the same general agenda Pao was. Here’s hoping Huffman actually gets it.
Alan, I’m not sure I understand your anecdote about the MP’s wife. If the jury believed that her husband was driving (and she wasn’t), why would she go to prison?
Hi Orion
She was charged with perverting the course of justice (as was her husband) because they both said she was driving so he wouldn’t get the points on his licence.
@ freemage
Re the ‘taking a pic of yourself is making child pornography’ thing. I can sort of see the logic (although it’s obviously daft to prosecute a naïve kid) but when that law was introduced here it did make me think ‘is it now an offence to keep your eyes open in the shower?’
Jerbear, are you sure that circumcision is more difficult later than life than it is in infancy? I can imagine that circumcising a young child would be a nightmare, but (anecdote ahoy!) a man who got an elective circumcision as an adult said that the procedure wasn’t bad at all. He even speculated (uninformed medical opinion ahead!) that it was probably easier and safer to circumcise a fully developed organ attached to a man who can agree to sit still than the tiny organ of a squalling infant.
Evidently they did it painlessly with a laser.
Obvously what we need is not anecdote, but statistics on complication and error rates in infant vs. adult circumcision, but a cursory google didn’t turn anything up and I don’t have time right now to prowl the academic databases.
He, I bet I’m not the only bloke now sat with his legs crossed thinking about that scene in ‘Goldfinger’.
Binjabreel,
False. Starr controls for more variables than any prior study and still finds that the bias is present. And she certainly controls for violent versus non-violent crime. It’s absurd to suggest that she “ignores” that. Her study and, as far as I know, all prior studies controlled for this variable. They don’t compare shoplifting to murder. Do you think these researchers are idiots?
While it is true that men commit the majority of crimes, Starr’s study and others looked at how women and men were treated differently for the same crimes.
False. Starr’s study controls for prior offenses. Of course. Men and women with similar criminal histories were treated differently by the courts, with women always coming out ahead.
And the Berkeley study you cite says the opposite of what you say it does. It specifically says that men with dependent children are treated worse than women with dependent children. The paper first cites previous research:
Then the Berkeley study confirms, in its own research, the findings of this prior study. For example, it found a disparity in sentencing between “females with children” and “males with children.” The authors also found that it significantly benefitted women at sentencing if they had dependent children but did not benefit men at all. Page 31:
When it comes to leniency at sentencing, it doesn’t help to have children. It helps to be a woman who has children. If you’re a man, it doesn’t help.
Did you even read the paper?
Kinda seems like it.
Alan Robertshaw,
False. See the Berkeley study cited by Binjabreel. Page 22. The authors compare “females without children” to “males without children” and find, as did previous studies, that women without children are treated significantly more leniently than men without children. Do you really think that childless women will not be treated with this favoritism because men with children start putting in more child-care hours?
Paradoxical Intention,
Please do let me know about this “valuable information” that has apparently refuted not only a 2012 study but also all prior studies of the matter. I am not aware of any groundbreaking revelations in this area since 2012, but I’d be interested to hear about them.
Does putting “study” in quotes mean that you don’t have to take it seriously? Do you take issue with Sonja B. Starr’s work on the racial gap in sentencing as well, or do you only take issue with her work on the gender gap? Is your rejection of her work based on any specific criticism of her methodology, or is it just that you don’t like the results?
Hrm.
http://38.media.tumblr.com/6a98b9e2cf64fce276767b43c132a316/tumblr_inline_nmr26rs19Y1t5wl3j_540.gif
After searching a little more, yeah, that man’s anecdote aside, adult circumcision sounds pretty unpleasant.
I assume she last so long because she knew what she was walking into.
I was a witness (never called in court, but the police questioned me at the scene) to a similar situation as the one Alan described with an MP and his wife, if I understand his story correctly.
I was stopped at a red light when a car across the the street flew through the intersection and hit someone who had the green light. The man who ran the light must have had a driving history such that this accident would cause him to lose his license, or even get jail time, depending on how serious his previous offenses were, and whether he was driving with a suspended license or possibly even on probation. He rushed over to me almost before the cars stopped moving and tried to gaslight me into believing the woman in the car with him had been driving.
I was much more concerned with the woman in the car he hit, who was pregnant and worried about her baby, so I barely paid attention to him. But the woman with him backed him up. I imagine she was also guilty of an offense, because she was lying in order to help her boyfriend/brother/spouse/whatever. I don’t think it went that far, because the cops obviously didn’t buy their story, and there were plenty of witnesses who saw him get out of the driver’s seat.
I wondered at the time how many men would be willing to take the rap for someone else in that situation, and whether the woman was intimidated or just socialized to stand up for a man even though the legal consequences for her would be serious, had the cops believed her.
Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Vector might be the most boring-ass troll we’ve had since Mark.
Another anecdote, for the little that’s worth: my husband was circumcised in his teens, and he said it was no big deal.
I’m not sure if they even give babies anesthesia before circumcision. I know it wasn’t common years ago. When I was giving birth, I had to sign all kinds of papers so that my kid wouldn’t be circumcised routinely if I had a boy. (I have two girls, so the point turned out to be moot.) It baffled me why I had to sign more statements to avoid a medical procedure than I ever had to have one done.
@ Mari
It’s a pretty common scenario for people to claim someone else was driving for all sorts or reasons (previous points on licence, drinking, insurance issues etc.). The police seem to have an intuition about such things though; they get good at spotting people who are lying; also they note things like seat position, mirrors, what shoes people are wearing.
Usually they’ll give people a chance to come clean (“Are you sure that’s who was driving?”) and if people fess up at the scene they won’t take it further. Even if the matter goes to court the prosecution will usually agree to take a plea to the less serious offence of ‘obstructing a police officer in the execution of his duty’ if people change their plea before the matter goes to trial.
Stick by the story though and they’ll charge with perverting the course of justice and that nearly always carries a custodial sentence.
@Mari, that woman might have been intimidated or acting on internalized misogyny, but I wouldn’t rule out rational self-interest. If my partner were going to lose his license, lose his current job because he had no license, and maybe be unlicensed permanently thereafter, I would be much better off paying a fine, taking mandatory drivers ed., and even spending a few weeks in lockup than I would be after losing that income.
@Madcow, I notice you don’t address the suggestion of a possible cause for women being treated with more leniency than men as being a part of patriarchy – because in patriarchy, women need to be protected and coddled. Thoughts?
Mad Cow,
I don’t find the Starr study “ridiculous,” (and I’ll explain why in a bit), but it looks to me like you oversold it. When you said this:
It looks like you were wrong. Unless I misread it, the Starr study only looks are people who were arrested and charged with a felony. The chance of being arrested is not controlled. The chance of the charge being reduced to a misdemeanor is only partially controlled, because (I think — it was a complicated section) the chance of a lesser charge is lumped in with the chance of acquittal, dismissal, or transfer to another jurisdiction.
Can you point out to me where I’ve gone wrong?
As I mentioned above, stereotyping does seem to play a part in sentencing. What would be interesting is a study to see if there was a difference in the pattern of sentencing between male and female judges.
My gut instinct, from my own experience and therefore anecdotal so treat with a pinch of salt, is that women judges tend to be more even in their sentencing. They seemed less likely to be influenced by the sobbing and the ‘will nobody think of the children?’ aspects during sentencing exercises.