From the sparsely dotted Chinese walking man to the top-hat-wearing, cane-bearing Dane, almost a hundred “walking men” are displayed life-size on banners that line the sidewalk.
“It’s important to me that they are on human scale because they really represent us,” said Ms. Barkai.
Only rarely are the icons depicted as women, she noted. Of the hundreds of images in her collection, Ms. Barkai has only “about six or seven women, mostly from European countries.”
— blogs.wsj.com
5 Comments
it's likely she's right, that there is a male bias. but...
i'd argue that 1 & 4 could easily be women. possibly 2, too. is the artist assuming dresses=women? long hair=women?
i'd want the artist to suggest a way to be gender-generic without her assuming the symbol is of a man.
...in other words, what does her reading of pedestrian traffic icons say about her culture?
The issue is that the Default Human, in everything from pedestrian symbols to airline seat width to medical research, is a Caucasian male. There is no gender-generic in our world, yet. So women are expected to see a male figure as the norm, as do men. If every ped symbol in the world tomorrow turned female, not with a skirt and ponytail but with narrower shoulders, rounder hips, etc., would males better start to understand humanness as multi-gendered?
...because I argue that in general males tend to *not* view humanness as multi-gendered, unless they really consider it as a topic, while women do. Men who have female children also do, for the most part.
Cannes obviously has a gender bias, and due to the sholder to waist ratio I would argue Calcutta does as well. However, my (admittedly male) eyes don't see a gender bias in Chicago or Blois. You could maybe argue that the left arm of the Chicago figure looks proportionally a bit masculine, but other than that I don't see a gender. The shoulders are basically absent, the waist is unrealistically consistent from the chest down, and the head is out of proportion with both a male and female figure. If anything I'd argue that in an effort to encompass both genders it reflects neither.
Blois just looks like Superman wearing Jinkos.
I agree with Donna about males not tending to view humanness as multi-gendered. That's why Hillary Clinton recently said that "women's rights are human rights", becasue if it where truly seen that way, we'd be (as a society) up in arms about the status of women in many countries where mysoginy hides behind "culture and tradition".
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