I have a huge problem with the Facebook friends icon, but you'll never guess what it is!!! (Click-bait title FTW)

So, it's been a really long time since I've actually written a serious blog post.  You'll have to go back to my freshman year of college (2005-06) when I was regularly posting on Xanga.  But something happened recently that bothered me in such a way that I felt the need to write about it at length.

I'm talking about the new Facebook friends icon.  And no, I don't have a problem with the icon itself.  I have a problem with the shitstorm that has transpired on the internet over the course of a few days.

The article I'm referencing is this one.  It's a fairly short read, but if you're too busy, here's the main gist of it: A worker at Facebook decided that the old "friends" logo needed to be changed.

Fig. 1: Old Facebook friends logo (left) vs. new Facebook friends logo (right)

There are a few things that changed about the logo.

 - The hairstyle of each person has been changed to be a bit more "modern"

 - The people are now roughly the same size

 - The person with longer hair is now apparently in front of the person with shorter hair

Notice how I phrased those changes.  "The hairstyle of each person...", "The people...", and "The person with the longer hair ... the person with shorter hair."  Unfortunately, that's not how most people see it.  Here's what the majority of people see in those changes:

 - The hairstyles of the man and the woman have been changed to be a bit more "modern"

 - The woman is now the same size as the man, whereas she was smaller before

 - The woman is now in front of the man, instead of vice versa

So... what exactly makes the person with the longer hair a woman, and the person with the shorter hair a man?  Maybe it's because of years of gender roles being forced down the public's collective throat for decades.  Google Image searches of "man clipart" and "woman clipart" can attest to that.

Fig. 2: GIS for Man Clipart

Fig. 3: GIS for Woman Clipart

So I suppose if the only thing we have to go by is hair style, then you should be able to tell me the gender of these two people:

Fig. 4: According to hairstyle, a woman (left) and man (right)

In case you have been living under a rock your entire life, the person on the left in Figure 4 is Brad Pitt (a man), and the person on the right is Emma Watson (a woman).  Same with the new Facebook logo.  The person on the left could be Brad Pitt, and the person on the right could be Emma Watson.

Fig. 5: Clearly this is who these icons represent

If you found the caption to Figure 5 to be a bit sarcastic, why?  Is it because it's the opposite of what you expect?  Why does a long-haired silhouette automatically mean "woman" and a short-haired silhouette automatically mean "man"?

This whole thing reminds me of a South Park episode.  In that episode, everyone was up in arms about South Park's flag, shown below. Warning: The following image may be offensive to some people who are offended by cartoon stick figure drawings...

Fig. 6: Flag of South Park

In that episode, a group of townspeople started protesting to change the flag because it's racist.  There was another contingent of townspeople who didn't want to change the flag because it was historical and showed South Park's heritage.  However, Kyle and the rest of the kids don't see the flag as racist because they didn't see it as a group of white people hanging a black person.  They just saw them as people.  And that's what we need to do here.

Finally, I'd like to come back to the "shitstorm" that I mentioned at the beginning of this post.  The comments in this Gizmodo article are mostly backlash at "the feminist agenda".  They're mad because the woman is now slightly larger than and in front of the man.  It shows how fucked up a lot of this world is.  I can be fairly certain that the majority of the misogynistic comments on that article are 100% sincere.  It's just awful.  It does show that there's a real problem in this world when it comes to gender equality, and equality in general.  And there's going to be an equality problem in this world until we change our way of thinking.  It's not a man and a woman in this icon, it's just two people.  It's not a black man being hanged by white men on the South Park flag, it's just people hanging another person.

Until the human race can work out all of its differences between the different races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, etc., why don't we just take a page out of MySpace's book and use nondescript icons.

Fig. 7: What gender/race/sexual orientation/religion are the people on the left?

Although, I'm sure someone would be offended by this, too.