Hi there!
This is the first instalment of Mon-Wed-Fri, which in a completely logical fashion will update on Sundays. A lot of the time, I’ll be reviewing and deconstructing individual storylines or entries in a webcomic, but today I’d like to look at one of the pitfalls that can come with work in a specific type of webcomics medium- the stick figure comic.
Let’s get it out there early- the big problem with stick figure comics is that they’re about guys. If you can, draw a stick figure on a nearby piece of paper. You don’t have to change anything to make that figure male, but you want to make the figure female, you can either go for drawing long hair on the figure, or drawing stereotypical female clothing, which would mean you’d have to draw clothing on all your stick figures for consistency. So why is this the case, when we know full well that many men have long hair, and many women have short hair?
The problem comes, in large part, from the idea of the “default human”. When we’re shown a figure as ambiguous as a stick figure, we imagine a man- usually a straight, white, able-bodied, cis man. This is because, as a society, we’ve framed every other form of human existence as a deviation from this “default human” figure. Think of how often, in the news, straight, white, able-bodied, cis male politicians are referred to as white, for example. Their race rarely comes up in an examination of their politics, unless their work is in an explicitly race-related area. Their able-bodied status won’t be brought up as affecting their feelings about welfare payments; the fact that they’re male won’t come up when they talk about the budget. Their sexuality and gender identity won’t be held up as an explanation for the way they vote on immigration. But if a human being dares to transgress one of these boundaries- dares to be black, or, disabled, or gay, or trans, or even female, then this difference- this deviation from the human “norm”- will be used to try and explain everything about them.
So how does this relate to stick figure comics? We’ve all internalised the idea of the default human. It means that when we look at a stick figure, the vast majority of us will see a “default human”- especially, we see a man. http://xkcd.com/790/ shows a perfect example- the two female characters in the strip have had detail added to show their deviation from the expected stick figure character of the white male. While xkcd is not explicitly feminist, it certainly has some feminist sensibilities, yet it’s unconsciously reinforcing this idea of the default human over and over.
So what can be done to combat this? One idea is to add a small level of detail to every character, thereby individualizing all the characters and ensuring there’s no basic stick figure in the strip to act as the default human. One could also go the other way, and instead remove all deviations from the basic stick figure, but that can cause problems identifying characters, especially in longer comics. A third way- and not one I’ve seen done before- is to frame a different human type as the basic stick figure type. Imagine if a stick figure comic gave all the males a shoulder bar, and left the female stick figures with their arms attached directly to their bodies. I don’t think I’ve seen it done anywhere, but it’d certainly be interesting to see!
Finally, it’s important to note that this problem isn’t a problem about drawing with stick figures- these deceptively simple little sketches can be used to make excellent comics. It’s a problem because of the attitudes and expectations we, the readers, can’t help but bring to the table; when someone draws a basic human, we expect a white guy. The best way to combat this is to make fewer representations of straight white able-bodied cis men, and stop sticking them in tv shows, comics and books to try and appeal to everyone. They really don’t. As consumers of media, we can vote with our daily dollar- support a book or a webcomic that represents more than just this little sliver of society. The idea of the “default human” is poisonous when compared to the diverse mosaic of human life; let’s demand to see it represented in all its glory.
If you want to see this phenomenon in action, the best places to go are www.xkcd.com and www.chainsawsuit.com, both of which are excellent reads as well as displaying male as the default figure. Also check out www.picturesforsadchildren.com, which tends to show a simplistic style with a deviation from the norm to identify each character (not all the time, though) so long as you can put up with a webcomic that is deeply, and sometimes hilariously, bleak. You can also check out cyanide and happiness at www.explosm.com, but bear in mind it is a long way away from being a safe or feminist space.
Alexander “Nines” Patterson
I noticed you didn’t mention Order of the Stick. Is there a reason for that?
Maridee, sorry this didn’t come up at first, the system saw it as spam because of a dodgy html tag.
I thought about Order of the Stick here, but while the art is simplified, it’s not really stick figures; all the characters are fully fleshed out, easily distingishable from each other, and they can be identified by race and gender (well, except for Vaarsuvius). So it doesn’t really count as a stick figure comic in the way I was referring to them, even though the title refers to stick figures by name.
It’s a cracking comic though, and it does show how a little bit of detail can really help a simplified art style avoid a default reading of the characters.
XKCD’s author pretty much admitted to and apologized for reinforcing the “male is default” convention, but said he couldn’t think of anything better to do (though he also admitted to laziness) — you might want to forward this to him.
You’re right that OOTS actually manages to avoid this problem (!!)
Nice post! I thought about this before, especially after reading about the signs on men’s/women’s restrooms (can’t remember where I read that), where it’s the same problem. I’d also very much like to see the different human as standard.
You probably saw it over here at sociological images, which is a cracking blog. There’s a really good post in it about different bathroom signs in different places! And thanks!
WRONG!!!!!!!!!
As a white man i see stick figures in comics as the characters peopole put to them so if they say
“Im looking for a new bra” its female
or “My cock itches” its male
otherwise like ninty percent of people a stick person is a STICK PERSON
short formed to Stickman just like huMAN.
This is another non issue like HIStory is sexist because it doesnt contain HERstory.
These sterotypes your talking about are being perpetuated by you and your ilk and thats about it
The idea that the “default human” is most often imagined as male by Western webcomic readers is definitely interesting. The reasons behind that perception are purely social, learned almost unconsciously in childhood, and reflect our culture’s base assumptions about people.
To me, it seems likely that the idea that of a Caucasian “default human” is a local phenomenon. In Japan, I’m willing to bet that the average person on the street does not identify the simplified representations of people on signs in the subway as “white”. When a child in Cote d’Ivoire, Chile or China draws a simplified human figure, I doubt the parents assume that the figure has a different skin tone than the most commonly seen “colors” in their local area. It could be argued that Western media, ever more pervasive around the world, might be influencing the default imagined human skin tone, but I’m not sure how often its influence dominates over what children see in the people surrounding them.
We part ways even further when you take issue with the idea that the “default human” is cis and able-bodied. I don’t see either assumption as peculiar. Unless and until Western society stops categorizing people into the binary categories of male and female, I don’t think it’s unrealistic to expect the default human to identify with the gender category that’s the closest fit to his or her genitals.
You also mention the “diverse mosaic of human life.” Applying that to gender identification, even societies with three gender roles don’t encompass the entire spectrum of human anatomical variation, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them assume that people will be divided equally among the three categories.
Again, with the assumption of able-bodied status, I don’t see anything startling. The default status of a statistically average set of human chromosomes is to code for a person with four functional limbs and the standard suite of human senses. DNA transcription events, gestational issues, and accidents during and after birth all move people away from the deault state, but to expect a statistically average human to be blind, to be deaf, or to be without the use of a specific limb, is to misunderstand both statistics and biology. A reasonably large proportion of people in the real world do differ from the statistical default, but when the difference is between baseline (able-bodied) and the collected group of all variations from baseline, considering the default human to be able-bodied does not seem unrealistic to me.
Stick figures are powerful because they’re symbolic representations that can be customized in the viewer’s mind. Expecting human beings to avoid the impulse to categorize everything we experience, to recognize and represent every individual item, from grains of sand to animals to other human beings, is ultimately futile. To ask us to throw away all symbols for exact representations of individuals, specifically in this case to give up “default humans” in favor of crisply defined individuals in our artistic endeavors, is to reject one of the most powerful tools we have for thinking about our world. It’s just not going to happen.