Gender Norms and Stereotypes – A Visual Representation

Table of Contents

Last Updated on December 21, 2022 by Karl Thompson

Men are simple and straightforward: they just want quick sex with porn-star lookalikes, exaggerate the number of sexual partners they have to gain status and need women to give them space to get on with the important matters of football, beer and sleeping.

Women are more complex. They prefer wining, dining and love-making, feel the need to downplay their number of sexual partners for fear of slut shaming, and their ultimate goal in life is to manipulate a man into giving them the babies they have an obsessive need for.

Or maybe not…

In a recent book ‘Man Meets Woman’, visual artist Yang Liu presents some binary pictograms depicting the roles, relationships, and clichés of male and female experience.

Yang Liu says of the project:

“We are living in an age of constant social change, in which the subject of the sexes … is rapidly evolving in people’s consciousness. Each generation re-assesses and questions the role models currently in place…

It is interesting to see how Man/Woman clichés have indeed changed in our daily lives and to what extent the attributes that were assigned to the sexes in the past, often centuries ago, are still relevant in today’s society. And to consider which desirable role models are already rooted in our thinking but are still in the process of transformation”.

Below are some of the pictograms taken from the text, look at them consider the questions at the bottom of the post.

Love and Sex

The Sexual Double Standard

Sexual Experiences

Perfect Evening

Perfect Partners

Babies

Discussion Questions

To what extent do men and women themselves still conform to the traditional (binary) gender norms (stereotypes) depicted in these pictograms?

What do you think the transformative potential of such visual art is? (How effective a technique is this for getting people to break free of binary-thinking where gender is concerned?
Is it a good thing for women and men to start thinking and acting in more gender-diverse ways (breaking through binary stereotypes.