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'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

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Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#81

Post by Emma_Goldman »

Waterluvian wrote: post #74

What perplexes me is the level of ignorance of the people pushing these. You don't get to decide how people use emojis. That kind of evolves naturally. I'm more concerned with it being yet another thing activists get upset over when people start "using it wrong." I just wanted to communicate that I had Chipotle last night.

I don't think the two organisations 'pushing' these - the UK national health service and a humanitarian organisation - expect that the emojis will or should be used solely to represent menstruation. But they will make that a possibility for the first time. And the likelihood is that that will be their dominant use. By doing so, they hope to make talking about menstruation more normal.

Your comment has almost nothing to do with the actual article. It reads like pure reaction: you don't like feminism, so you don't like this.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#82

Post by thinkingemote »

salex89 wrote: post #57

Funny how these things can have different meanings. Here I read menstruation, threat and what not. If somebody sends this to me, I would instantly think:"Going to donate blood?". This droplet emoticon , or a variation of it, is very often used as the blood bank/transfusion center logo on my country, and based on Google, in some surrounding. You can see it around on t-shirts (donors get a t-shirt and they wear them pr…

It's like a word. It can be used in sentences to mean other things. To you, seeing it makes you feel humble on it's own - but emojis are hardly ever used alone.

I would imagine it being used in a variety of ways to communicate blood. I imagine some might not make people feel positive about it's use. That's language for you!

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#83

Post by thinkingemote »

walrus01 wrote: post #29
thaumasiotes wrote: post #22

It seems virtually certain that the "drop of blood" is more useful for issuing threats (jocular or serious) than for talking about menstruation, for the simple reason that there's a lot more threatening than there is talking about menstruation. Calling blood "the symbol of the period" is overreaching a bit.

I would think knife and skull emojis are more effective for threats.

Emojis are rarely used on their own.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#84

Post by mirimir »

OK, so I'm male, and sometimes I'm clumsy, or act too impulsively.

So if I used emojis, this one would be about "Oh shit, I'm bleeding again." Head wounds are the most impressive, in my experience. Just a scratch, and there's blood everywhere. I've shown up at meetings, with blood running down my forehead. But hey, they heal quickly, too.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#85

Post by thaumasiotes »

FabHK wrote: post #80
josteink wrote: post #49

While countries with traditional ideograph-based languages (China, Japan, etc) are slowly turning to the alphabet to simplify their written language, we are reinventing ideographs, poorly and politically. Quite fascinating, but also incredibly sad.

No. A) Emojis are better ideographs than CJK characters, not poorer ones. This is a horse, recognisably: [imagine the horse emoji here... :-) ]. This not so much in my view: 馬. B) Nobody is proposing to replace all words with hackneyed emojis. (“Although” sort of sounds like “old owl”, so let’s replace it by an owl with gray hair, maybe sitting on top of a mouth so we can disambiguate it from a reference to an owl.)…

Chinese characters pretty unambiguously represent syllables and not meanings. [1]

Japanese characters are the other way around. They have semantics, but the only way to know the intended pronunciation is to look at the specific sentence in which one is being used. It's fair to say that a kanji in isolation doesn't have a pronunciation. This is the reason the Japanese weren't able to get by with just the characters -- Japanese text makes liberal use of kana to make up for the fact that kanji are, like emoji, all semantics and no pronunciation or syntax.

[1] Well, they do represent meaning too, much as English spelling does, but that's incidental to the way they function.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#86

Post by kakarot »

beaker52 wrote: post #39

I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good intentions but don't really know wh…

Yes, we live in the age of Inclusion by Exclusion. It's maddeningly cognitively dissonant and the Overton Window appears to have split in half, with extremists on either end ripping logical, neutral people to shreds over not picking a side and thus "working with the enemy" or "being indecisive"

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#87

Post by beaker52 »

Emma_Goldman wrote: post #78
beaker52 wrote: post #39

I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good intentions but don't really know wh…

This and the thread that follows are conspicuous for the fact that the group being discussed is never defined. 'Social activists'. 'These people'. It's a good discipline to argue against actual people and their beliefs, not a vague phantasm of them. Your argument - to associate the words of one unnamed person with an large and multifarious politics - is equally unhelpful.

Bit of an odd response because I did define them as "Social activists" (for want of a better term, but it does the trick), which is a far cry from "these people". If you don't understand what I mean, that doesn't mean it's necessarily inadequate, just that we haven't communicated very well.

And the unnamed person - you can easily find in the article as a tweet. But it wasn't important to name the person because my intention was to draw attention to the attitude behind the words, which I feel is more important than the particular person behind that tweet. No point in muddying the waters.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#88

Post by kakarot »

oliwarner wrote: post #60
beaker52 wrote: post #39

I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good intentions but don't really know wh…

I agree. That's when I disconnect from the discussion. I think everyone deserves an equal stab at life. Nobody should be discriminated against for their beliefs or what's in their trousers... But the methods used by some to reach that end are appalling. Equality isn't accomplished by publicly shaming everyone for every little social infraction. It deliberately excludes the people you need to improve to achieve equali…

> That's when I disconnect from the discussion.

That might be good for you, but each rational being we lose in the fight against extremism weakens our overall chances of escaping this madness within our lifetimes.

If someone tells me I shouldn't be participating in a discussion about womens' or transgender rights because I'm a cis white male, walking away from the discussion doesn't do anything. It's like quitting your job after you've already been fired. I feel compelled to impress upon people that I will not be silenced based on the color of my skin or my sexuality, that "reverse racism" really doesn't exist because it's still just called racism.

It's incredibly frustrating and fills me with anxiety, and was a huge component of why I left Facebook and other social media...

One of the final straws was in a thread about domestic abuse. Someone asked a question of how false rape charges could possibly ruin a man's life, because it seemed impossible to them that there could be lasting consequences for false rape accusations.

I shared a story about my own childhood abuse as well as the time I was physically assaulted by a sexual partner, which led to a large portion of my friends turning against me in the belief that I had hurt someone. My life was majorly affected in a negative way by this person's assault and subsequent defamation of my character. It could have been even worse as multiple people encouraged her to go to the police, but I made it clear to her I would fight tooth and nail to expose her and get her jail time for a false accusation.

I was then bombarded with hundreds of people tagging in from various "support groups" calling me a liar, saying I probably deserved it, that it probably wasn't as bad as I said, that I probably assaulted her first, declaring that I am likely to be a future rapist solely on the fact that I'm a cis white male (really wish I was making that up) etc etc. Literally all of the victim-blaming behavior that people complain is the bane of inclusion and understanding... came out in waves. Eventually I was banned from the thread. I felt ashamed for absolutely no reason at all. These people had successfully shamed and invalidated me for being a victim, based on the color of my skin, gender and orientation. I lost several real-life friends over that incident as well, and it wasn't long after that my Facebook was gone for good.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#89

Post by belorn »

rfw wrote: post #65
int_19h wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inclusivity is a word with a broad meaning, and that's not it. Has it also been recently redefined in terms of "... + power (and we'll tell you who has how much power!)" in the social studies dictionary, same as racism?

1. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/inclusivity > The practice or policy of including people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized, such as those who have physical or mental disabilities and members of minority groups. 2. Without an understanding of power, is there a useful definition of "inclusivity"? Or is it just a whitewashed feelgood platitude that can't mean anything in the end, because if…

Lets follow that dictionary and looking up minority groups.

> A small group of people within a community or country, differing from the main population in race, religion, language, or political persuasion.

With women being slightly more than 50% and men being slightly less than 50% of the main population in the country, that will makes men the minority group.

Women is not a minority group according to any dictionary.

Re: 'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists

#90

Post by onion2k »

stinos wrote: post #43
onion2k wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a lot more women than there are blood donors. Periods, something that directly affects half the population at some point in their life, is going to be a much more common point of discussion than donating blood.

Your statement only holds if women talk about their periods. Which depending on culture, how they were raised, personality, ... definitely is not the case for all of them.

The same is true for blood donors. :)
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