BeachyKeen

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Posts posted by BeachyKeen

  1. Posted

    15 hours ago, Urthman said:

     

    When my daughter was 4-years-old, I had to take her to the bathroom on an airplane.  When we got in there, she protested, "This is the boys' room!" and pointed to a diagram showing a stick-figure person putting trash in the right place.  Because, of course, the symbol for "person" is the same as the symbol for "boy" on the boys' room.

    That may have been the day I became a feminist.  Or at least convinced that inclusive language matters.

     

    Yeah, I definitely thought about that too. That the symbol for "male" and "human" are symbolically synonymous which implicitly differentiates "human" from "female". It's at least a little fucked up.

     

    11 hours ago, Jake said:

     

    Sure, at one point the sign said "restroom" and had the picture of "man" or "woman," but increasingly the word restroom or toilet has been stylized away and only the icon remains. That's what Chris was amused by I think - that bathroom signage has evolved to the point that an otherwise unadorned picture of a person on a door unquestionably means "you pee or poop in this room" to millions of people. 

     

    Right. That's fair. Now we just have to be wary about further mental coupling of the stick figure symbol with restroom functions, lest the "wet floor" signs become a self fulfilling prophecy.

  2. Posted

    On 3/9/2017 at 8:10 PM, Gamebeast23456 said:

    ...

    To the point about bathroom signs, I think you guys are at least slightly underestimating the variability in bathroom designs. I think the detail that actually serves to seperate them is more general than a picture of a human on the sign. Rather, it's the fact that a room is labeled pictographically, as opposed to numerically or linguistically. 

     

    It's also worth noting that the symbol of the guy probably wasn't intended to simply denote "bathroom" but instead was used (in conjunction with the stick figure with a skirt) to try to denote gender in the most language agnostic way possible.