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Quick quiz (posted 22 April 2006)
What’s wrong with the following iconic image for dating tips,
which I nabbed off of the front page of Friendster a couple days ago?
If you don’t notice anything off the top of your head, it might help to consider the date today.
nubian replied:
haha! damn, i’ve never seen that icon before. it’s so wrong on sooo many levels.
labyrus replied:
Beyond the obvious heterocentrist nature of the image, it seems pretty innapropriate even as a “heterosexual dating tips” icon. It looks to me like the icon should be telling me where a co-ed washroom is, not tips on dating.
John T. Kennedy replied:
Why are you guys assuming this is about heteronormativity?
Couldn’t it just as easily be about cross-dressing?
Mikey replied:
If friendster wants to give “dating tips” they should include gays and lesbians also, not just straight people. If they didn’t realize, there IS a lot of gay and lesiban teens/young people, and I think it’s in bad taste for Friendster to leave us out.
Timothy Hulsey replied:
Looks like an advert for conjoined twins.
Mike Enright replied:
Why do you assume there is anything normative about the icon?
Why can’t it just be a descriptive assumption? The overwhelming majority of people are heterosexual. I don’t see what is so offensive about assuming that most people go on dates with the opposite sex.
Rad Geek replied:
Mike,
I’m not offended by the presumptions behind the image. I find them more ridiculous than anything else; the point is to call attention to them.
As for those presumptions, the overwhelming majority of people are not washroom gender icons. So why not show a picture, or several different pictures, of actual people, rather than a schematic where the only feature intended to signify is the iconic representation of the genders of the two people pictured?
And I don’t think that and are as far apart as your remark suggests. If you’re giving a list of the norms in a given society, one of the things you’ve got to list is the set of categories they use to describe the world; in particular, the framework through which some situations are tagged as mundane or normal, and others tagged as abnormal — for good or for ill — or as deserving some kind of special attention or scrutiny. Statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of writers are right-handed, not left-handed; but I think very few people would use right-handedness as a signifier for writing, and very few people would find it weird if a particular graphic for writing involved a person holding a pen in her left hand.
heather replied:
excellent points, all, charles. i wouldn’t go so far as to say all description is normative, allowing for the axioms of logic not to be aligned with any particular political agenda, but it is damn hard to find anything else that doesn’t carry some normative weight.
hot damn, though, i think i made a pseudo-social-constructionist out of you. :)
Roderick T. Long replied:
The guy on the left is a Scotsman.
Stefan replied:
But who would run a dating site for gay scotsmen?
Lady Aster replied:
The girl on the right is butch.
For that matter, am I the only one who notices that it’s atypical these days for a girl to wear a dress? Yet our images are slower to change than this.
Lady Aster replied:
Also, now that I look closely, that is one short dress. ;)
Laura J. replied:
The girl on the right is myself and the guy on the left is my friend Dave. The problem with the picture is that as the two of us are not dating each other, it is inaccurate.
Anonymous replied:
my god, can you people not find something more important to talk about? an image showing a crude man and woman icon for dating tips is not going to persuade anybody with more than one brain cell that only hetero dating is ‘normal’, if you try to cover every possibility of dating in one icon it would be impossible, so for the sake of brevity and clarity its better to use the ONE most common representation of the subject in question (in this case dating), which is a hetero couple. Its silly to be offended by something so trivial.
Rad Geek replied:
Anon,
If you say so.
However, I’d like to repeat, for whatever it’s worth, that I’m not by the silly little icon (and I can’t find anyone in this comment thread who is). I’m just making a point with an admittedly trivial example. The triviality of the example is a virtue, not a vice, because the point has to do with the mundane stuff that people take for granted.
The point has to do with what kind of features are taken to be relevant when you want to signify that two people are dating each other.