9 Jul 2015

Facebook Sums Up Feminism In One Easy Graphic

By ‘Feminists,’ declares Jessica Valenti, ‘don’t hate men, but even if we did, it wouldn’t matter.’ ‘Feminists care about men’s issues, too,’ insists Lindy West. Kate Harding, a literal ugly feminist doesn’t even bother to sugarcoat it (she’d probably just eat it then), screeches Fuck you MRAs. Here is the charming Kate for those unfamiliar with this vile creature.
kate-harding-feminist-overlord

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 (the majority of people agree with that statement, and reject feminism, because they know feminism has as much use for equality as fish have for bicycles). Many of the women who consider themselves feminists, I am quite certain, are merely innocent dupes of a sophisticated propaganda machine, and when questioned about specifics, are genuinely confused. The issue of shared parenting is an excellent litmus test: if a so-called feminist believes in shared parenting, she isn’t really a feminist. If she’s never heard of the ‘tender years doctrine’ or doesn’t now that NOW actively opposes equality, she doesn’t know what real feminism is about, and what real feminists spend their time doing.
Hire a woman’s who went to a woman’s college if you want to see real feminism is action. Facebook has done exactly that. Facebook skews towards women as a target demographic, so at first blush, their decision to redesign their ‘friends’ icon to make the female character more prominent makes a certain amount of sense. Demographics, however, had nothing to do with the designer’s decision.

Facebook design manager Caitlin Winner is introducing [new friends icons]. In a post on Medium, Winner explains how she changed the social network’s icons to bring women to the fore. She discovered that while the male friend icon was symmetrical, the female glyph literally had a chip on her shoulder. “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.”
If a man at the forefront means the person behind him is in his shadow, and not in a position to ‘lean in’, does that mean the woman at the forefront is placing the man in her shadow and impacting his ability to ‘lean in’?
Of course it does.
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. Or rather, they are letting their design manager make that decision, which amounts to the same thing. And quite frankly, she seems like a shit designer.

“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.
Are you fucking kidding me?





Why do friends need to be gendered anyways? Why can’t they be neutral? Isn’t Facebook the home of 7000 gender options anyways? Why so cis-focused, Facebook?





Feminist designers at Facebook: as shitty at designing as they are at equality. Here’s the new icon Facebook should have so people can express what they think of the friends icon:

fuck off
Now I like that!

like
Lots of love,

JB




Source

No comments:

Post a Comment