Female supremacy in action?

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 thumb’s 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