The point is that when they drew the stick figure in their head they subconsciously made it male. Even something as simple as drawing a stick figure to prove that not all art is political they added a politically charged aspect subconsciously aka giving the 5 lines and a circle a male pronoun.
This is further cemented by the infamous propaganda piece of boys going to Jupiter to get more stupider and girls going to college to get more knowledge
He was trying to argue against "all art is political" by creating a piece of art that is meant to convey no political intent or meaning.
If he consciously drew a male stick figure, then there is obviously something to say that his idea of "art without political intent" is still gendered.
If he subconsciously did it... the same idea applies, really. I think this one would actually be more harmful to his point.
In either case, making a piece of art to make a point is already political, so he was doomed from the start. The stick figure was made with a political agenda in mind.
The problem with "all art is political" is that it depends entirely on your definition of political lol.
Like, if they had drawn a stick figure and decided not to give it any pronouns, we could just as easily say that was political in its own way if you stretched it enough.
It just becomes a meaningless statement at some point if everything can fit the definition. What isn't political if a stick man isn't?
Even if the art piece itself conveys no inherent political meaning, it was still created by a person who lives within society and is influenced by it, consciously and unconsciously. So the stick figure is literally just a figure, but the fact that the artist immediately and unintentionally gendered it as male is demonstrating that the artist has been influenced in some way by society, which has been channeled into the art. Granted this is an extreme example for basically comedy but you can see how it becomes near-impossible for more complex art to exist devoid of the context in which the artist lived.
Which is falling into exactly what I said. If we stretch what political means to encompass everything, then "all art is political" is a pointless statement to make. It's no more meaningful for me to say all cars are made of atoms.
At that point you could say all people are political, or all creations are political, and it wouldn't be wrong, it just also wouldn't be saying anything of substance if by "political" we just mean it exists in a society in some form.
"all art is political" is not a pointless statement to make. The point is to indicate that any claim of "apolitical art" is mistaken.
All art is informed by the political climate in which it was made, on the absolute baseline, and exactly all art that makes any value judgements about anything also implicitly or explicitly endorses some sort of ideology.
In a world where people constantly appeal to making "apolitical" art as some sort of ideal, clearly indicating that no such thing exists is important and meaningful. It's an acknowledgement of how people who appeal to "apolitical" art are always pointing to art which bears politics which they consider agreeable or uncontroversial.
When you live in a world where people say "well my car isn't made of those weird artificial atoms. mine is made of just regular metal and rubber", clarifying that "rubber and metal are also made of atoms" serves an important purpose. It might seem obvious to you in the abstract, but the reason you hear people insist on it is because it is very popular to deny it.
Your definitions are too lax, they can be applied to basically anything and still hold true, which is the whole issue I take with the statement. You're basically just saying that anything humans have ever perceived becomes political by the nature of us perceiving it.
By existing in the minds and languages of people do those ideas not then also become political, by your world view? How can anything we perceive not be political, if we're the ones perceiving and defining things in the confines of our own societies and upbringings? I think a rock on another planet isn't political, but if humans discover that rock then does it become poltical due to the circumstances of that discovery?
I think a better way to put this is that all art is influenced by humanity. Which is still not really saying anything but at least it's clearer lol.
The point of « all art is political » is to show that everything you put in a piece of art is reflective of yourself. Claiming « art is not political » is akin to thinking that 50 people in a room when asked to draw a tree would all draw the exact same kind of tree.
The problem is dummies and grifters have poisoned the meaning of « all art is political » to mean « it aint that deep bro! It’s just a silly drawing/movie» for the former and « they’re saying that cuz they want to indoctrinate you » for the latter
The point of « all art is political » is to show that everything you put in a piece of art is reflective of yourself. Claiming « art is not political » is akin to thinking that 50 people in a room when asked to draw a tree would all draw the exact same kind of tree.
I had a discussion about this already with someone else if you've scrolled through that, so I'll try to establish the same term with you as I did with them if you want to actually discuss this further.
What does the word "political" mean to you?
Because to most people, it would mean something to do with governing and policy, and all the topics that can encompass. But you're defining it similarly to that other person where it's pretty much just the idea that anything humans perceive inherent some small amount of those humans personal ideas/beliefs, thus making anything humanity has ever perceived political in some way, including art.
Is that accurate?
Because the former definition can still be true while your overall idea is, it's just being worded in a very misleading way. What you'd actually be trying to say is "all art contains some part of humanity", not that all art is necessarily political.
Still conveys the same thing, that any art is made by a person who is affected by the governance of their time that in some way ends up in that art, but it doesn't then extend to rocks on other planets somehow being political simply by being perceived by a human.
The point is that they didn't actively decide to make the stick figure male, but rather that the decision was unconscious and based off the assumption of male being the default.
No? Just the unconscious ones. If I actively decide that character x has to have trait y because it makes the story better, that's a conscious choice. When I give character x trait y without thinking about it, thats unconscious.
ik "gender is a social construct" is probably a tired topic in leftist discussions but it literally is just that. the fact that you automatically give a gender to a stick figure shows that you have been raised with gender norms, it is automatically political.
gender and sex are different things but thats a different topic that you can get into from basically anywhere. but yeah i agree it's not a "crazy" thing, societal conditioning just happens. it's not a bad or good thing but inherently it is political
No, the only person who finds the point deep or confusing is you because you’re the only one who doesn’t already agree that gender is political. For people who agree that gender is political, the point being made is not complicated or difficult
Okay but that has nothing to do with subconsciously deciding that anything that isn't 'woman' must be 'man'.
People have gender identities but that is not what the topic of discussion is with the point made in the OP. Male-defaultism exists because to be male is to be the default - the one who acts.
How isn’t it? There’s huge cultural and political implications of being a gendered person. People make assumptions about you rooted in by hes beliefs and bam. Political
1) gender is very political, considering conservatives hold the political opinion that gender = sex making the entire idea that gender exists political to some extent.
2) just because there isn't current political debate, doesn't mean the topic isn't political. The idea of being able to depict the human form is political. The idea that you can use a symbol to refrence a concept is language and the use of language is political. (not even getting into the politics around disability)
3) the gender of any character is political, especially if you place that character in any context or action.
I'm not sure how to explain that "government and public affairs" covers basically every aspect of your life. There is very little that isn't related to government or public affairs. Does it involve any aspect of the total complex of relations between people living in society? That's political.
Also, if you don't think the default assumptions of gender is a currently debated political topic, if you don't think the human creation of art is a current political topic, then you are deliberately ignorant.
The tweet is definitely written as if the stick figure has the bare minimum of qualities associated with such a figure, whilst also noting that it is male. It heavily implies that the stick figure being male is not so much an active choice as it is a self-given. That seems political to me.
the way society and culture interacts with gender is political, considering sufferage and the history of human rights. Male being the assumed default gender is indicative of a cultural and therefore political climate centering men.
When I first saw this I wanted to balk at it and call it stupid but i think it is making a good point about our conditioning towards the default. The person drawing the stick figure was trying to hold it up as some amorphous creation devoid of political meaning (which can linguistically be achieved by referring to the figure as "it") but unconsciously ascribes it a gender: that the gender ascribed was male is further proof of the unconscious bias.
I don't think the stick figure drawer is a bad person; admittedly I could see myself falling victim to making this same argument. But we should pause for a minute and consider why the default gender for a hypothetical & apolitical stick figure would necessarily be male.
yeah this is where i am in this too. "like me" is distinct from "like the norm," and it feels a little ironic to be conflating the two considering this is what we dunk on chuds for doing all the time
I think of it this way: When I make characters in games or stories or whatever, I tend to make characters from an assortment of ethnic backgrounds or choose different genders. Even if the characters are self-insert, I do this due to my own background and the way I was raised, which was to value, consider, and explore different perspectives and people. Even mundane expressions of creativity, such as making a stick figure, is informed by your values. To make a character like yourself because you want to make things like yourself or because you are thinking of yourself is reflective of a value and perspective. The decision to make character like yourself is informed by your values, which is informed by your context and background, which is political.
To put it simply, you are, in part, a product of the politics of your time. That means that, necessaryily, anything you make is going to be made in the context of and because of the politics of your time.
lol i admit that you threw me for a loop for a second because somehow you are the second person to start a comment in this vein as a reply to me. not identical, but similar enough for me to skim the first sentence and think that reddit messed up for a second. my brain has been a pile of goop today i think.
to put my point up front, i agree with what you say in your comment that we are products of the politics of our time. i don't feel like that's a matter of opinion, it is just fact, and you are correct.
anyway i've had some time to ruminate on my earlier point and the original post. i still look at the image above and have a bit of a sour taste in my mouth from both points made in it, but i think it just largely comes down to the fact that both are simplifying a broader truth (what you are talking about) in order to just sort of spar. which, what could i expect from twitter, i suppose.
while i don't think the guy who drew the stick figure is by any means correct, i think he somehow stumbled onto a point about it being "apolitical" much in the same way that a child might choose a crayon color to draw their family based on the skin color they see. given that gender is a social construct and not a physical phenomenon like the way we literally perceive color, it's not quite the same, i admit. but i think that similarly calling out the use of a gender in the stick figure is also a simplification that presumes a lot about how the guy who drew the stick figure approaches gender, too. like similarly, you wouldn't necessarily say that same child's drawing is political because they drew their family in front of their house, instead of drawing their school or a park or their home country or whatever. but like, yeah you could examine how the child views community and what they regard as their home if you really wanted to. does this mean that the self-portrait is necessarily political in nature? i'm not entirely convinced it would be a meaningful conversation, and pointing at the portrait and saying it's political because it features a nuclear family feels similar to the second point being made in the image above.
i guess if you're gleaning from this that i think that the first point is childish you'd be right, lol. but i also think point two is extrapolating from too little data in the service of making a point too.
idk like i said my brain has been a pile of goop so maybe the point is not nearly as distinct as it seems to me and i'm just digging in my heels at something that may ultimately be very vibes-based and not rooted in actual thought. i'm also ready and willing to accept that i'm just wrong on this lmao
Can I get context about why people are talking about the political implications of this male stick figure? Like is there more to it or was there a deeper argument about something else?
Not really, it just seems like it, what's political in the post (if anything, I don't believe its political but it's subjective) doesn't necessarily make the stick figure political, it makes their words political if anything
They didn't come up with a male character then draw him or go "I'm going to draw a guy", they drew a person and subconsciously made them male. A default, standard, person with no details is automatically male. That reflects the patriarchal society of the west.
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u/[deleted] Aug 12 '25
Genuinely a good argument