I find the lack of a male poop emoji problematic. How come there is only a female poop emoji?

In case you were wondering, I never use emoji because I am -- as they say -- a grown-ass person, so I speak and write in words.

This is the point I would have made, so thank you for saving me the trouble.

Apparently some smartphones now have filters where one can automatically apply cartoon crowns, sparkles, rainbows, etc. to one's photograph.

I have been informed that it's not because the adult who does so is necessarily special-needs, but that the use of such filters is a la mode among those who take their own photograph as a regular recreational activity.

Based on what I have noticed at work the most popular foot wear is sneaker/trainer, then high heel, then ... uh, maybe injury boot with scooter?

Outside of work...sneaker/trainer and that is about it.

Who cares...sure add it.

Amy. we're not sure you can pull off the look... So to speak.

And now, here is a thing which happened that is absolutely true (there's probably a recording of it out there somewhere): Eldridge Cleaver once looked me in the eye and told me I'd never be President of the United States of America.

Precisely four decades later his prediction remains literally correct, but we can all agree that the formerly-quiescent statistical probabilities for such outcomes have been disrupted in recent years.

Are the sneaker, oxford, and ice skate emojis by default men's shoes?

While most of us would like to see emojis in general die a painful death, the recent flaps about equality and diversity in emoji content do make one want to defend the little guys, if from nothing more than a contrarian impulse.

The pants. The pants.

I'd vote for you in a hot second, Crid, over any of the candidates that ran.

Flats as emojis are fine, but why does it have to be a campaign as if this has any importance? Why must there always be a subtle “it’s the man keeping women down” element to this? It’s so tiresome.

When people believe nothing, they'll believe anything...

Our modern cargo cultists have adopted Apple as their god. This is the same insane nattering as when they discuss what emoji skin tone you are allowed to wear.

First, they kvetched that there were no skin tones in the characters - just a sickly, Simpsons color. Then, when they got their multi-hued thumbs up, it became a problem of racissssss and cultural appropriation to use the wrong one and "stay in your lane", since the god-in-the-box Apple had decreed thou shalt iMessage racial signifiers only.

Remember when there were no girls on the Internet? And it was because there was no identification of who you were? Those were our halcyon days of free thought and dirty pictures via the usenet...

It's funny about the sneaker. The only way to make it a woman's sneaker for these people is to make it pink. Remember 10 years ago when it was vile to assume girly things had to be pink?

I think this is the definition of a first world problem.

Not only do we have shoes. New shoes. Choices in new shoes. Both to buy and in our wardrobes. But we also have choices in our emoji shoes.

And here I thought the guys begging on the street corner maybe represent a problem that deserves our attention... but what was I thinking overlooking the sexist shoe icons!

Shannon's on to something. So, in the matter of days we've solved unwanted naughty behaviour in the work place and the wage gap.

Yeah, us!

And did we also solve the women in STEM "problem"?

In what situation would one want to put a shoe emoji in a message? What would it indicate? What is the emotion of a shoe emoji?

So yeah, I've searched my memory and I don't recall that I have ever used a shoe emoji, nor do I anticipate that I will ever have a use for one. And we have this statement: "Flip to your emoji keyboard..." the fact that such a thing as an "emoji keyboard" exists is in itself a damning indictment of our culture. Are we going back to writing in hieroglyphics?

So now that those damn kids are off my lawn... yeah, this is yet another place where post modern feminism has succeeded in tying itself in knots. Two responses: (1) aren't men and women exactly alike except for a few dangly bits? Why aren't the women just wearing men's shoes? (2) Yes, the pink pendulum seems to have swung again. I guess need pink version of household objects not to signify that the objects in question are specifically for use by women. Pink can openers, pink thermostats, pink doorknobs, pink stair rails. I guess we need pink high-voltage insulators, to signify that the pink transmission lines that they insulate are carrying electrons specially made for women. (3) If you don't like the emojis that exist, create your own. No one's stopping you. Oh, that isn't the point, is it? The point is to be able to command someone else's labor. Because you're privileged and all.

Okay, that was three things. Sue me.

"The fact that women cannot opt in to have a female shoe without a heel is deeply problematic as the vast majority of women simply do not wear heels in their daily lives," says Hutchinson.

"Deeply problematic?" Deeply? Problematic?

Problematic: constituting or presenting a problem or difficulty.

Poverty is deeply problematic. The opioid epidemic is deeply problematic. North Korea is deeply problematic.

Sexism in shoe emojis is laughably trivial, as is anyone who calls this issue "deeply problematic."

My 4-year-old white kid is going to be Moana for Halloween. They can pry that costume out of my cold, dead hand.

Furthermore, all that lumbar/angular/voodoo talk is just silly... That's just sophistry, flapdoodle composed to flatter the aestheic sensibilities of those with an undergraduate understanding of biology.

There's nothing precious that happens to a woman's bearing because she's wearing high heels.

Women can't run away in high heels, that's all.

Seriously, Amy...

[H]igh-heeled footwear increased women’s attractiveness only when wearing heels altered their lumbar curvature to be closer to an evolutionarily optimal angle.

What the honest Hell does "evolutionarily optimal" mean?

The insight of evolution includes everything from survival to extinction. It's a field of study unconcerned with picking winners and uninterested in bragging.

The coinage "evolutionarily" itself is a warning that someone has taken their eyes off the ball.

We hate it when you read trashy stuff.

Crid said:

> Women can't run away in high heels, that's all.

Only way you can get a woman to listen to you?

> What the honest Hell is an "evolutionarily optimal angle"?

> What the honest Hell does "evolutionarily optimal" mean?

You might start here -

Lumbar curvature: a previously undiscovered standard of attractiveness -

http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138%2815%2900018-5/abstract

This paper reports independent studies supporting the proposal that human standards of attractiveness reflect the output of psychological adaptations to detect fitness-relevant traits. We tested novel a priori hypotheses based on an adaptive problem uniquely faced by ancestral hominin females: a forward-shifted center of mass during pregnancy. The hominin female spine possesses evolved morphology to deal with this adaptive challenge: wedging in the third-to-last lumbar vertebra. Among ancestral women, vertebral wedging would have minimized the net fitness threats posed by hypolordosis and hyperlordosis, thereby creating selective pressures on men to prefer such women as mates. On this basis, we hypothesized that men possess evolved mate preferences for women with this theoretically optimal angle of lumbar curvature. […]

Men again tended to prefer women exhibiting cues to a degree of vertebral wedging closer to optimum. This included preferring women whose lumbar curvature specifically reflected vertebral wedging rather than buttock mass. These findings reveal novel, theoretically anchored, and previously undiscovered standards of attractiveness.

Verbose frogwash.

You source's reliance on the word "novel" in each cited paragraph demonstrates the problem precisely.

In case you were wondering, I never use emojis because I am -- as they say -- a grown-ass person, so I speak and write in words, not itsy-bitsy cartoons.
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Good, but...why do you use terms like "grown-ass"? I don't know anyone who would use that term in a serious speech.

One would, of course, expect certain people doing their jobs - COMEDIANS, that is - to use terms like that.

In the same vein, parents should teach their kids - if only by refusing to PAY for these things - that wearing clothes with writing on them is really not polite or acceptable, regardless of age, even when the message itself is something cutesy and not vulgar or nasty. (Never mind when it is!) As Fran Lebowitz said: "If people don't want to hear from you, what makes you think they want to hear from your sweater?"

Example: Teachers shouldn't have to be burdened with students whose parents are too cowardly to forbid them to wear Simpson shirts that say "Underachiever and Proud of It, Man!" Elementary. If you can't sympathize with that, don't become a parent.

> Verbose frogwash.

Well, look at a picture then:

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uJqU_OncRvk/Vc9IiW1NZYI/AAAAAAACu2I/WhzlHCUc25w/s1600/imrs.jpg

The woman on the left looks like she hasn't hit puberty yet.

The woman on the right looks like she has scoliosis.

The woman in the middle looks just right.

How do you ‘identify with’ an emoji!? These people are batty...

Is "serious speech" "evolutionarily optimal"?

> Is "serious speech" "evolutionarily optimal"?

Dunno... but childlessness definitely isn't evolutionarily optimal.

Snoopy, I would argue with that. Some say that there are more gay people than before, percentagewise, and that that's nature's way of curbing overpopulation. So, when it comes to heterosexuals, if they choose not to have children because they have to live in a high-cancer area (like West Virginia) or because they can't afford to give them a well-fed, safe environment in general, I'd call that optimal.

If this is her biggest problem, her life must be really easy.

Also, who the fuck uses a shoe emoji?

Alls I know is that a very very smart and very very personable woman just got transferred away. She has a couple of pairs of shoes that when she strides her ass swingulates like it's going to fly right off. And, I'm wondering whether this is going to be a career negative like low cut blouses are.

> Dunno... but childlessness
> definitely isn't evolutionarily
> optimal.

Optimized evolution! You little fuckers are totally *optimized* and totally *serious*!

There's no such thing as nuance and there's no such thing as irony! With your witless, defensive and trite appreciation of all the world's phenomena, you're completely ready to approach life as an earnest tournament in high school sincerity! You're ready to POWER THROUGH! It's all a competition, and you will not be denied!

Life is supposed to flatter your needy ego! You're just sure it is! You will insist!

Okay, that was over the top.

But sheesh.........................

....Shee-yish.

I affirm: Youse guys are selecting your beliefs to flatter yourselves!

You reply: Not true! Here's a bunch more stuff that flatters us!

Because *novelty*.

"Women can't run away in high heels, that's all."

Some of them sure as heck can... ask me how I know. Ahem... as far as women's shoes: #ThingsThatStraightMenDontGiveADamnAbout.

"why do you use terms like 'grown-ass'? I don't know anyone who would use that term in a serious speech."

Someone's irony detector is broken.

Funny, Cousin Dave, the Mayflower Madam always made her "girls" wear heels, because "men just adore them." (She was, of course, catering mainly to upper-class men with upper-class manners, FWIW.)

And maybe I should have said that I hardly know anyone who uses the word "ass" in public more than 5% of the time. EVEN when trying to be funny. It's just vulgar.

" What is the emotion of a shoe emoji?"

Spoken like a true heel. Have you no sole? Maybe she's feeling a little flat!

> It's just vulgar.

"Just" vulgar? Not everyone is interested in making social distance from the very people, distant and anonymous, with whom they're electronically communicating. Perhaps Amy's more interested in being clear with people, and more interested in expressing nuanced thoughts through modulated patterns of sincerity, than she is in convincing total strangers that she's the most interpersonally elevated and demandingly elegant personage on the internet.

Can't find it no more, but there was once a sort of reductive etymology for the word "vulgar" suggesting that the word used to mean "tongues": More figuratively, the words of the masses.

Are you truly so intimidated by the people around you?

Can't find it no more, but there was once a sort of reductive etymology for the word "vulgar" suggesting that the word used to mean "tongues": More figuratively, the words of the masses.
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Yes, I know. We learned that in high school when we studied Dante.

I should clarify a bit more. While of course Bill Maher is primarily a comedian, I get pretty tired of his trying to be a semi-intellectual scold of the not-so-intellectual masses, since he's always projecting a very immature personality with jokes to match - George Carlin would never have done that, for all his potty humor. Even though Maher is distinctly older than I am, I still have trouble thinking of him as an adult, which is why I'm not a complete fan of his.

(In the same vein, while I thought "The Book of Mormon" was funny and worth seeing, I couldn't get over the fact that the MAJORITY of the audience - howling at the foul language - was at least Maher's age, or older. Just didn't seem right.)