@Forum_account:

What you're missing is that we live in a society where *no hair*... not "the explicit depiction of no hair" but "no explicit depiction of hair"... is read to be the same as "short hair".

And "no articulated hips at all" is read to be "narrow hips" rather than "hip width unspecified".

A chest with no features at all is seen to be a chest that specifically has no female breasts, not a chest that lacks both male and female identifiers. The missing male identifiers are less... protuberant... but they're still missing.

If you're not getting this I really don't expect you to ever grasp the fine point on the chest, but just look at male iconography re: hair. If you've never thought about it you might think "Okay, well, baldness is more typically seen as a male trait so the generic male stick figure is bald." But as the xkcd examples (or the "short hair" on my icon) demonstrate, that's not really how it works in our culture.

In the world we live in, no depiction of hair whatsoever == no information about hair conveyed == default hair == "male" short hair. That's not a side effect of the fact that long hair is short hair and then some. It's about marked and unmarked cases.

AlexandraErin wrote:

If your icon is a human, then it must have a neck. Humans have necks, your icon has a neck.

Okay, then show me the nose in the following image of a human face:

:)

The problem with this argument is that we are culturally conditioned to 'see' a smiley face in this image. I'll bet if you showed a colon and a right parenthesis to someone living in the 16th century, they wouldn't have seen a face in there. Likewise, our experience of pixel art gets us to associate certain shapes with the pixelated depiction of the human body. These shapes include a defined neck, and if there isn't a neck we try to somehow see 'why' (hence seeing a thick neck or a helmet there).

Here's the thing, though.

If I show you a simple "male" figure like on a restroom door, you read it as a guy with short hair without thinking about it.

Put the simple flared lines indicating a dress/skirt on, and the figure becomes "female". And if you extrapolate it to a person, you're not thinking specifically "woman with short hair"... because that's not the "female default".

Or to use another example: women in xkcd are distinguished purely by hair. You don't look at the stick body with no other difference from the male stick body and conclude "This is a flat-chested woman with hips like a boy." Once female gender is assigned, in the absence of any information to the contrary, there is no dissonance caused by the lack of breasts because it's actually a lack of information to the contrary of the default assumption about breasts.

No information = default. With the gender assigned as female, default = noticeable breasts and hips.

And once we've established that a stick doesn't need breasts to be a "normal breasted" woman or a door legend doesn't need long hair to be a "normal haired" woman, it becomes apparent that it's not the lack of explicitly depicted hair or breasts or hips or anything else that makes the "default stickman" or "default door icon" male.

Or rather, it is all of that. If nothing says woman, nothing needs to say man.

Default.

(The stick figures are a good example of how there can be an equal lack of information about male chest. You're preconditioned to think of a male chest as "plain" or "empty" or "blank" compared a female chest, but it would take as much added detail to turn a stick into a realistic male chest as it would to make it a female one. A sexless body like a rectangle or a stick conveys no information except "here is a body". The details are inherited, object-oriented style.)

So again, it's not a matter of assuming a lack of hips/hair means "little hips/hair". It's a pure default assignment. Putting an explicit gender assignment on the figure through other means changes what the "lack" means, because the lack actually means nothing... the default assignment is carried over from our assumptions. If our culture had men with long hair but all other things were the same, a circle with lines coming off it to make a body and limbs would still read as male because that's the default case for human being in our society. In the absence of information to the contrary, we'd assume a standard male hair style, which would be long hair.

Likewise, if Randal Murnoe wants to depict a woman with really short hair in his strip, he'd have to specifically draw a short haircut on her and make sure her femininity is assigned some other way. He'd need to override the default inherited gender (male) and also the default hairstyle associated with the new gender (long).

So it's not that "no depiction of hair" naturally extrapolates to "short hair".

I don't think it's a way of slighting the females by saying "male is normal, female is a special case".

Who brought up slighting?

This is why this stuff is so hard to talk about. Hiro thought a casual sociological analysis was a rant. You're defensive about it because you think the world (and by extension, yourself) is being accused of sexism.

Listen. This has nothing to do with intent. It does have everything to do with effects, because the effect is that women are marginalized and denigrated by it.

If the world invents a machine that it depends on for the ongoing welfare of civilization but this machine, say, automatically punches every fifth person in the throat, and someone wants to talk about this problem... is it helpful for everyone to say BUT NOBODY DECIDED TO PUNCH EVERY FIFTH PERSON IN THE THROAT. JEEZ, WHY DOES THE FIFTH PERSON HAVE TO BE SO SENSITIVE? YOU'RE ACTING LIKE WE'RE OUT TO GET YOU!

No. No, it's not. As long as we make proving how little we want to punch people in the throat, the problem of the machine is never going to be addressed or improved.

Now, our society has many tendencies like this "male default" (and "white default", and so on) that have the net effect of disadvantaging, marginalizing, and othering people who don't fit into the "default" and this has actual negative impact. That doesn't mean that people are being actively and overtly racist or sexist or bigoted. But why is proving everyone's intentions are innocent the priority and not addressing the harm?

If people are getting punched in the throat, addressing that should be the priority... not proving our own individual "not-in-favor-of-throat-punching" credentials.

I would assume a gender-neutral figure is male because I'm male. Questioning that arbitrary assumption implies that one side is being slighted by it.

The examples you use all have female counterparts. Is the male figure on the restroom door assumed to be male because that's the default? Or is it because we know that the figure on the door to the women's room is distinctly female and, by deduction, the plain figure on the other door must be male?

The premise that male is default leads to the creation of the plain figure for male and the detailed figure for female. Just because we ended up having the plain figure for male and the detailed one for female doesn't mean the initial premise had to be that "male is default". There are many different potential causes*. My guess is that it's just easier to draw a figure that's clearly female than it is to draw one that's clearly male.

* Maybe the project to design bathroom signs ran out of funding. They spent their time designing the detailed women's bathroom sign and ran out of time. In a rush to finish the men's room sign they only came up with a plain figure. This would explain the result, but that doesn't mean this is how it happened. Things like this happen often, usually with the origins of words (often swear words, but "cops" is an example).