No, please, Geoff, tell us more
Sorry to fuss about details but honestly. A woman writes a piece for Inside Higher Education about the desuetude of the faculty lounge, and the tweet promoting it looks like:
A professor laments the widespread disappearance of the faculty lounge (opinion)
Bonnie J. Morris laments the widespread disappearance of a traditional campus oasis.
Come on. Academics are supposed to be hip to semiotics, aren’t they? Which should include people who work at Inside Higher Ed? That picture could be worse only if the women were crouched on the floor covering their heads.
First of all the guy is in the middle, facing outward, so our eyes are drawn to him as if on a string. Then he’s holding his arms out and has an ankle propped on the other knee – he’s taking up space, he’s relaxed, he’s the master of ceremonies. Third, he’s talking. Fourth, he’s the only one talking. Fifth, he’s flanked by two women, both facing him and listening submissively while he kicks back and tells them what’s what. Sixth, they’re not doing anything – they’re in suspended animation, watching him perform. Seventh he’s much older than they are.
No doubt there’s more; feel free to add.
It wouldn’t be so annoying if it weren’t a woman who wrote the piece, but it is, so it is.
Hmm…
To me it looks like the woman on the right is scolding the man, the man is making an expression like “what did I do now?”, and the woman on the left is laughing at the whole situation.
Well, that’s one interpretation. Not what I saw.
They both appear to be women of color as well.
Are you sure that isn’t “Bonnie” in the picture? Can’t go presuming gender dontcha know.
Looks like they used a stock photo. It looks ‘casually’ posed to me and suspiciously well lit. But yeah, why not just a pic of Ms Morris?
Yeah, it’s definitely a stock photo. But that only means someone chose it, presumably with the sense of a job well done. Ghastly.
The colours.
Guy in ‘neutral’ colours, surrounded by blue everything. Women in pink and yellow.
Women poised to take notes of the man’s wisdom.
That sort of thing.
Yeah, you see, the problem with this sort of image interpretation is that there is no right answer. It’s the same game as assigning meaning and significance to literature and film. Trying to support a given reading can be a rather fun exercise, and it can even reveal details previously unnoticed about the media you’re analyzing. You can end up reading Neo in the first The Matrix as an antichrist figure, contrary to the creators’ intent and the thrust of the subsequent films. You can decide that Jar-Jar Binks is actually a Sith lord, that The Babadook is about coming out as gay, or that The Lord of the Flies is about toxic masculinity.
Buuuut… it’s still just a game of bare coherence, with no guaranteed connection to reality.
@Nullius:
There’s no ‘right answer’ because there’s no question. But it is a perfectly legitimate and worthwhile exercise to look at an image and think about the message it conveys. Personally, I didn’t have to think; the image screamed at me the same sort of things it screamed at Ophelia.
Perhaps what we should do when we see pictures like this is to imagine how they might look to people who aren’t us.
New question: are Nullius and Skeletor THE SAME PERSON???
The Skeletor Narrative, as I choose to call it (I’m a computer scientist, we have to compulsively name things) does work, I think. If the scene is described that way then you can see the things that fit.
I think this is where Skeletor and I differ. I don’t see a narrative, I see things like body language and focus and composition and I see a stock photo designed to appeal to a wide audience of people who might buy it for a couple of quid without giving it much thought. I’m not thinking about what’s happening in that pretend scenario, I’m thinking about the (possibly unconscious) bias the photographer had when putting the composition together.
That’s why I think Nullius is missing the point.
Yes, and it’s not just the unconscious bias of the photographer, it’s the message that is unconsciously read by people who view the image. If there was no patriarchy, no oppression of women, a few pictures like this wouldn’t matter. That’s not the case. The whole subservient woman, admiring woman, woman being instructed, woman being not a major player, is everywhere. It is so much a norm that most people (like Skeletor, perhaps) don’t notice it, but it sends messages to our brain without our recognizing them. We see the roles as the proper roles, and internalize those messages.
It isn’t the picture itself, it is the context of which the picture is a small part. The context of a society that doesn’t value women as highly as it values men – unless, of course, society is hungry and wants a sandwich.
The number of stock images approaches infinity but it’s very hard to find ones that aren’t like this. It’s bullshit to blame the cycle of supply and demand. Suppliers and demanders both need to sort themselves out. There are some excellent people breaking this cycle by providing great, public domain images that are not horrific. We should all support those buggers more.
The questions are implied by the answers: What is happening in this picture? What do the picture’s compositional elements convey? How will/can/should other people read this picture? What did the photographer intend to convey? How can/will this picture be subconsciously read?
What point am I missing?
That one can look at the pic and see something negative? One can read negativity into an abstract swirl of colors.
Out of curiosity, I went to the article in which the late lamented faculty lounge is described thus:
So, an even more obvious fail at image choice.
“There is no right answer” but all the same it’s accurate to say that the man is central while the two women are peripheral, the man is facing us while the women are facing him, the man is gesturing broadly with his legs as well as his arms while the women are more held in, the man is the first thing we see, the man is more brightly lit than the women.
Sure, you’re free to say all that is arbitrary and meaningless, but I can still wonder aloud why IHE chose that photo of all stock photos to illustrate an article written by a woman. I think it’s a bizarre and somewhat irritating choice.
I’m not sure what the problem is understanding this. (1) It is a stock photo. (2) It has the standard set up of a photo with both men and women, where the man dominates the photo and women are subordinate. (3) There are different possible ways of reading the photo. These seem to be agreed on.
The problem isn’t whether the photographer intended a sexist message. It isn’t with whether everyone in the world sees this particular photo with a sexist message. It isn’t even with the fact that in many ways, this is probably a reasonably realistic portrayal of one small moment in time.
The problem is the fact that pictures, movies, stage plays, works of art, literature, textbooks, news articles, etc, are overwhelmingly (1) dominated by males, with (2) females in subordinate positions. It is a build up of message after message after message, and it normalizes that view of things to the extent that people can argue (perhaps in good faith) like Skeletor and Nullius above that there is no overt sexism seen in the picture. For most people, this one single image looks like a small hill to die on, even if they accept the picture as being a dominant male and subordinate female. Well, things like that can happen at least sometimes in a perfect world, right? The male talking? Him sitting in comfort? The women backgrounded and in listening mode? It doesn’t have to be a problem.
But…it is merely one point in a wash of similar images that surround us nearly non-stop, messages that our brain takes in without recognizing them, normalizing conditions that privilege men over women and give our brain instructions that this is how the world works. In a world where women and men enjoyed true equality, and gained equal respect for hard won skills, this picture would not be a problem, and Skeletor and Nullius would be right.
In the world we actually live in, however, this stuff needs to be pointed out, dealt with, and discussed honestly, not by treating the picture as a stand alone, non-threatening object. Because it doesn’t exist alone, it exists in context with millions of other pictures that we want to deal with individually because it is easier than trying to deal with the problem at the root.
[…] a comment by iknklast on No, please, Geoff, tell us […]
Strongly agree with iknklast here. The problem isn’t that one photo existing alone, it’s the context. And the context is one more damn data point that men are the talkers and thinkers, and women are the listeners.
I often take photos at conferences and workshops as part of my job. And I find myself working hard to make sure that – even though (white) men are often in the majority – not all the photos show only groups of white men. And when there is a small cluster of people talking together, I take my time to make sure I get shots of the women making their points and holding the attention of the group. It’s not always easy – men often take up more physical space and have more aggressive gestures and poses, but if I pay attention I can also show how women (and people of colour/people from other cultures) also are actively contributing. But I do notice that when other coworkers take photos we get a lot of shots of men doin’ stuff.
A side point – I quite like speakers who have active facial expressions and hand gestures – they look lively and interesting! But I was once chided by a women for taking “bad” pictures of her that showed her speaking and reacting in a more active way. She was actually really captivating, but I think she wanted to be perceived more solemnly. There are a lot of things to think about in photos!
Thank you! Exactly.
And, though I can’t know, of course, I’m betting part of the reason that woman didn’t like your more active pictures of her is a lifetime of being familiar with photos that show men activing while women watch. The drip drip drip. We don’t realize it’s happening, but it shapes what’s familiar to us, and thus what makes us uneasy.
Like…imagine this picture reversed – the central person with the spread-out arms and leg cocked over one knee is a woman and the two agreeable smiling silent listeners at the sides are men. Would it look very odd to us? I bet it would.
Ha. I do a Google images search for “woman talking two men listen” – Google doesn’t even understand the question. Zero matches.
Like, third row – no, Google, that’s not what I said.
Oh gee guess what, if you try it with “man talking two women listening” the results are much more productive.
I was looking for pictures of men and women today for a graphic I’m making for my students. The women were mostly sexy, dressed in skimpy or slinky outfits. Those women who were doing interesting things, like science, for instance, were young and beautiful. Mixing chemicals with long hair streaming down their shoulders? Really? Nope.
And finally I found some ordinary, average looking women, pages down, and what were they doing? Sweeping. Cooking. Threatening someone with a rolling pin. Middle aged women were non-existent. One clip art of a grandma in a rocking chair, while elderly men were dancing and waving canes.
This is the context.
I tried Ophelia’s search string on duckduckgo and there was actually an honest to goodness picture of a woman talking and two men listening!
Of course, one of the men was a doctor, the other was (presumably) the woman’s husband and the woman was crying, but you can’t have everything, I suppose.
I would say that the bloke in the chair is older, and in whatever context is senior to the two women in the academic pecking order. He also looks more certain, confident and in charge of the situation.
Then again, I could be in error. Either of the two women could be his tutor/supervisor or whatever: he has just been told by the one standing to lift his game or else, and he could be trying to bluff and joke his way out of that bit of bother.
It does happen. Occasionally.
Sure, but the point I’m making isn’t about what’s really going on but what implicit message a photo like that sends, especially when it’s illustrating a piece written by a woman. It’s entirely possible to come up with all sorts of scenarios it could be, but my point is what it looks like at a casual glance, which is all such illustrations generally get.