
'Drop of Blood' Emoji, Symbol of the Period, Is Praised by Activists - furcyd
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/02/08/692481425/why-period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win
======
saagarjha
I'm not sure I understand why people think that we should add the other emojis
that were suggested. Emojis are in no way supposed to represent every single
thing that you could possibly want to talk about; that's why many of them end
up representing other things based on context (for example, the eggplant or
peach emojis). The blood emoji is fine, but the soiled underwear is
just…weird. That would be like asking for a used toilet paper emoji–it's super
specific and not all that pleasant.

~~~
hgdsraj
This isn't "every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about".
This is something that half of the world population experiences roughly
monthly for some number of years. Certainly it's more frequently experienced
than the emojis - though I appreciate those. So it's clearly something that
should exist. The underwear might seem odd but it's no weirder than the
smiling poop emoji...

~~~
hh3k0
> This isn't "every single thing that you could possibly want to talk about".
> This is something that half of the world population experiences roughly
> monthly for some number of years.

Morning wood emoji when?

------
thaumasiotes
It seems virtually certain that the "drop of blood" is more useful for issuing
threats (jocular or serious) than for talking about menstruation, for the
simple reason that there's a lot more threatening than there is talking about
menstruation.

Calling blood "the symbol of the period" is overreaching a bit.

~~~
KozmoNau7
A drop of blood is a traditional symbol for blood donors, and I wager that is
the context where it will end up seeing the most use. That is certainly how I
would use it.

~~~
onion2k
There are a lot more women than there are blood donors. Periods, something
that directly affects half the population at some point in their life, is
going to be a much more common point of discussion than donating blood.

~~~
briandear
Is a period a topic of normal conversation? “Hey Susan, are you going to the
blood drive? Have you checked your glucose today? By the way, how’s that
period of yours coming along?”

What’s there to say about periods? Seems a bit polite to be discussing periods
in normal conversation; about as uncouth as one discussing bowel movements or
mucus coloration. Of course there are legitimate reasons to talk about a
period, but are those occurrences frequent enough to warrant a dedicated
emoji?

~~~
DanBC
> What’s there to say about periods?

I think girls should have the same level of access to education as boys, and
currently they don't because girls need access to tampons and pads. Some
schools do not provide these. Some schools do provide these but girls need to
ask for them. (You can see how normalising talk would help there).

If a school does not provide these products a girl's family has to be able to
afford them, and we know that curently in the UK some families feel they can't
afford them. [https://www.independent.co.uk/news/international-womens-
day-...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/international-womens-day-period-
girls-missed-school-uk-sanitary-products-menstruation-a8244396.html)

One of the reasons people feel these products are too expensive is the VAT
added to the price. People talk about periods because they're talking about
tax reform.

------
Waterluvian
What perplexes me is the level of ignorance of the people pushing these. You
don't get to decide how people use emojis. That kind of evolves naturally.

I'm more concerned with it being yet another thing activists get upset over
when people start "using it wrong."

I just wanted to communicate that I had Chipotle last night.

~~~
Jonnax
The article doesn't even say this.

The story is that a group was pushing for the creation of an emoji.

They wanted underwear with a droplet symbol on it, but Unicode only approved a
blood droplet.

Of course it can be used for other things and that's what the quote from that
group said, expressing their disappointment.

I'm confused as to why most the comments here seem to outraged about activists
trying to own the emoji when that wasn't mentioned at all in the article and
sounds ridiculous.

------
salex89
Funny how these things can have different meanings. Here I read menstruation,
threat and what not. If somebody sends this to me, I would instantly
think:"Going to donate blood?". This droplet emoticon , or a variation of it,
is very often used as the blood bank/transfusion center logo on my country,
and based on Google, in some surrounding. You can see it around on t-shirts
(donors get a t-shirt and they wear them proudly), vans for gathering blood
away from the center, public announcements and calls.... Basically a like a
logo, not sure how official. I felt humble the second I've seen this emoji.

~~~
int_19h
FWIW, it's used in that manner in every single country I've lived in, US
included.

Also, it looks like this is exactly how they got it adopted:

"Then in September 2018, Plan UK teamed up with NHS Blood and Transplant, the
U.K. government's blood and organ donations service, and submitted a new
proposal for a blood drop emoji. Unicode selected it as an official emoji in
February."

------
beaker52
I noticed that someone criticised the blood droplet as "Ambiguous and multi
functional". I've noticed a lot of this kind of attitude around discussions of
race, LGBT and women's issues - activists pushing for "exclusive rights" to
things like emojis, words, activities, places for specific groups. That isn't
very inclusive. I feel like the most outspoken "social activists" have good
intentions but don't really know what equality or inclusivity really mean.

~~~
Emma_Goldman
This and the thread that follows are conspicuous for the fact that the group
being discussed is never defined. 'Social activists'. 'These people'. It's a
good discipline to argue against actual people and their beliefs, not a vague
phantasm of them. Your argument - to associate the words of one unnamed person
with an large and multifarious politics - is equally unhelpful.

~~~
beaker52
Bit of an odd response because I did define them as "Social activists" (for
want of a better term, but it does the trick), which is a far cry from "these
people". If you don't understand what I mean, that doesn't mean it's
necessarily inadequate, just that we haven't communicated very well.

And the unnamed person - you can easily find in the article as a tweet. But it
wasn't important to name the person because my intention was to draw attention
to the attitude behind the words, which I feel is more important than the
particular person behind that tweet. No point in muddying the waters.

------
josteink
While countries with traditional ideograph-based languages (China, Japan, etc)
are slowly turning to the alphabet to simplify their written language, we are
reinventing ideographs, poorly and politically.

Quite fascinating, but also incredibly sad.

~~~
FabHK
No.

A) Emojis are better ideographs than CJK characters, not poorer ones. This is
a horse, recognisably: [imagine the horse emoji here... :-) ]. This not so
much in my view: 馬.

B) Nobody is proposing to replace _all_ words with hackneyed emojis.
(“Although” sort of sounds like “old owl”, so let’s replace it by an owl with
gray hair, maybe sitting on top of a mouth so we can disambiguate it from a
reference to an owl.)

C) The notion that CJK characters represent ideas, not words & sounds,
(embedded in the term “ideograph”) has been extensively criticised, eg by John
DeFrancis in his _The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy_.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_a...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy)

~~~
thaumasiotes
Chinese characters pretty unambiguously represent syllables and not meanings.
[1]

Japanese characters are the other way around. They have semantics, but the
only way to know the intended pronunciation is to look at the specific
sentence in which one is being used. It's fair to say that a kanji in
isolation doesn't have a pronunciation. This is the reason the Japanese
weren't able to get by with just the characters -- Japanese text makes liberal
use of kana to make up for the fact that kanji are, like emoji, all semantics
and no pronunciation or syntax.

[1] Well, they do represent meaning too, much as English spelling does, but
that's incidental to the way they function.

------
jimmcslim
Something that seems to be missing from both the article, and the discussion
here, is the idea I've heard elsewhere, that to signal menstruation you would
combine the blood droplet with a moon emoji.

The blood droplet emoji by itself has plenty of other uses; blood donation,
etc.

------
KaoruAoiShiho
It still seems a bit euphemistic and doesn't accomplish the goal, but a good
step in the right direction I suppose.

------
plainOldText
Also:

    
    
      > A new "people holding hands" emoji will let users mix and match 
      > different skin tones and genders, with 171 possible combinations.[1]
    

This reminds me of the article "Code Inflation". [2]

[1] [https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-
couples...](https://www.npr.org/2019/02/07/692260599/interracial-couples-and-
disability-friendly-emojis-coming-soon-to-smartphones)

[2]
[https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573](https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?arnumber=7057573)

~~~
sgift
"Code inflation" talks about programs expanding even when they already can do
everything needed (e.g. true going from empty to 8k bytes). That's not the
case here. These combinations didn't exist before, so the functionality is
expanded, not just the code size.

~~~
repolfx
I love emoji but they aren't needed for anything. You can always discuss
periods using ordinary words.

I have to admit that whilst emoji are fun the apparently endless growth in
them combined with the way they break essentially every assumed invariant
about text and thus create explosions of bugs all over previously working
software is ... a bit concerning.

At this point, why not just define a set of code points that let you embed an
SVG into the character stream? It'd result in fewer cases of broken text where
new emoji are rendered by apps that are all of six months out of date.
Actually defining an endless series of semantic code points just seems like a
dead end for the Unicode Consortium that opens it up to relentless attacks by
activists and political nonsense because it's changed its mandate from
encoding languages to defining new ones.

~~~
Crespyl
> embed an SVG into the character stream

I really think that we should've gone this direction as soon as it became
clear people would never be satisfied with any finite set of emoji. SVG might
be a bit verbose for transmission over SMS, so there's room for figuring out
some simplified and more compact encoding, but this would've prevented the
almost all the problems we're having with emojis today.

------
mirimir
OK, so I'm male, and sometimes I'm clumsy, or act too impulsively.

So if I used emojis, this one would be about "Oh shit, I'm bleeding again."
Head wounds are the most impressive, in my experience. Just a scratch, and
there's blood everywhere. I've shown up at meetings, with blood running down
my forehead. But hey, they heal quickly, too.

------
dvt
Outrage culture at its finest. NPR cites a few tweets. Let's analyze: [1] has
13 likes; [2] has 8. No one cares about emojis this much. _Real_ activists
(not Twitter keyboard warriors) don't care about emojis, they care about, you
know, actual social progress. It took this group like 2 years to get 54,600
signatures when joke petitions like [3] are in the same ballpark. I mean, give
me a break.

But articles like this are built from the ground up to (a) get clicks and (b)
get people fired up in the comments section to, you guessed it, get more
clicks. Journalism, if you can even call it that anymore, is in a sorry state
right now. And instead of proving Trump's inane "fake news" diatribes wrong,
we have highly-respected news outlets essentially printing garbage like this.

[1]
[https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src...](https://twitter.com/PlanUK/status/869632011316727808?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E869632011316727808&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoatsandsoda%2F2019%2F02%2F08%2F692481425%2Fwhy-
period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win)

[2]
[https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_sr...](https://twitter.com/Cearaa/status/1093430548171841541?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1093430548171841541&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2Fsections%2Fgoatsandsoda%2F2019%2F02%2F08%2F692481425%2Fwhy-
period-activists-think-the-drop-of-blood-emoji-is-a-huge-win)

[3]
[https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secu...](https://petitions.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/petition/secure-
resources-and-funding-and-begin-construction-death-star-2016)

~~~
mulmen
The existence of this story and any flaws that may or may not exist in it do
not represent the state of journalism as a whole.

~~~
dvt
Actually they do; this kind of click-bait yellow journalism has become the
norm, not the exception. From Breitbart to Huffington Post, they all do it.

~~~
mulmen
Neither Beritbart nor Huffington post are particularly reputable journalistic
outlets, they're both at the extremes of the political spectrum. My point is
that you can't condemn the entire discipline of journalism based on a single
story.

------
faissaloo
Emoji is the mistake that will kill Unicode mark my words.

------
logicchains
"2^16 characters should be enough for anyone" \- Bill Gates, probably, when
adding UCS2 support to Windows.

------
blululu
I'm not really sure if these new emoji are beneficial to the medium as a
whole. In many ways the trend toward more inclusive emojis is a good thing
(the addition of male/female and skin color variations was a huge
improvement), but there is also a cost of emoji bloat.

According to the article, the new blood drop emoji is justified because
someone would need to cobble together some sequence of emoji to express the
same concept. In many ways this problem is also the very reason that people
enjoy using Emojis. The limitations of the medium requires creativity and
humor from both the creator and the receiver. Having highly specified emojis
can also take away from the fun of this, while also making it more difficult
to explore the full set of available emoji.

