First off, looks don't have much in the way of being a true indicator of anything other than your own personal looks.
These kinds of morphing from one thing to another are subjective to the information available.
Garbage in, garbage out. If you just had the three middle faces to contend with, it wouldn't look like much at all.
If you had an even broader range, with more faces on each end, it would look completely different.
They have cat to dog morphs. You can morph anything you want. We have apps for it somewhere. lol.
If you really want to consider androgynous to be in the middle of two ends of a spectrum, you need to have the right ends.
Very, very simply put, there is only one male and one female, everyone else falls somewhere in between.
It is the sense that there is an actual model to begin with that makes these kinds of comparisons wrong.
They only exist in advertising. Women are always shown with perfect makeup, otherwise we then notice that something is different.
Same with the male model. Which one do you use? The neanderthal look? The lumberjack. Perhaps a football player.
You could use the all American dad, but there is a variety of choices that we are expected to veiw as the proper 'look'.
How many of you actually know someone who has a distinct male or female look?
Everyone can say they do, but out of how many people that you know? Not very many.
For some reason, fashion is catching on to the idea that less than 1/100th of the population looks like the people they use in ads.
But what do they do with that? They take the perfect from each end and do a morph to see what the perfect androgynous look is.
Nothing could be further from reality.
One only has to spend a day at the mall, or whatever, to see that nobody actually looks anything like what they are showing you.
Even when they finally catch on to the fact that most people don't look like models, they blend and come up with...wait for it...
A blended model. That is how we are supposed to look. All clean and perfectly shaped. Fall within another standard.
Think about this... we have a thread called 'you look alright'. Which fits us. Not the idea that we need to have a certain look.
Do any of you look remotely like the middle three faces? Know anyone who does? Are they even a face you would strive for?
I know this isn't so much about fashion looks or advertising. They are trying to show you 'something'.
But it is a spectacular fail. They use a computer generated morph of one computer face to another and label them male to female.
Ever notice that somewhere around half, a good share at the least, of women and men don't really look all that masculine or feminine?
Does any of them look like a computer mannequin? No, they look like people of all sorts of shapes and sizes and such.
Go back to the mall or whatever and really look at people. Ignore the clothes. Ignore the hair style. Look at them.
Do you think of a morphed type of blend is the look that the people here have in the 'alright' thread?
Aptly named because we are just alright, most of us.
Not a single person who has posted in that thread looks anything remotely morphed.
We have some damn good looking people posting there. We even have VannaSiamese.
Nobody looks like an in between anything. We don't have a distinct look, nor do we need one.
So the look from one end to the other may have some justification to the end faces, but there isn't a representation in the middle.
I'll fall back on the examples I give that non-binary, Androgyn if you wish, isn't something in the middle of male and female.
To be non-binary is to be a separate gender. Not a morphed thing on a spectrum. Separate. And justifiably so.
Gender is in your mind. That's where it exists. Not in some spectrum of male to female gender thinking looking acting kind of thing.
It exists as it is because it is a separate thing from those. We share certain characteristics, but not all of them.
You can't take us apart and put the pieces in either the male pile or the female pile.
Just like you couldn't possibly take bits and pieces of male and female and build a non-binary. Doesn't work like that.
Ford Chevy Dodge. All share being cars and trucks, but after that, you'll find that most of the parts don't interchange.
Is it really that hard of a leap to understand that there is another gender, always has been and always will be?
It's pretty acceptable that a person can be born into the wrong body, one that doesn't fit their gender.
The only people who don't accept that, really have a hard time getting up from the comfy chair to stop watching Pat Robertson and Fox News.
And even most of those people will acknowledge that transseuals are real, just like they say they are. Because they are.
It's not that much of a leap to consider that non-binaries are a separate gender.
It's the perpetuation of the idea that we are an inbetween, that is wrong.
This is where people fall apart in trying to justify that we indeed exist.
When you use a spectrum, you can draw a line and say you're either on one side or the other.
That's what people do, it's the easiest way to think. Ask to draw outside the lines and people freak.
It's these spectrum things that make it hard for people to come to grips with non-binary.
It's full of assumptions that just aren't true and/or add up to anything. They can't.
We are not in the middle of two overlapping circles of gender.
We are a third gender that can also have some overlap, but we are separate as either of the binary genders are.
Even to use the term non-binary becomes wrong. There isn't any binary genders. It's trinary genders.
From my point of view, we are the first gender and the others run off to ends that nobody really knows where they go.
The idea of androgynous as fashion and being an Androgyne was toss around quite a while back.
There were people who came here that wanted fashion tips on how to look androgynous.
Even though they weren't Androgyne or non-binary (that first gender).
This ended up in numerous threads.
People were actually offended in some cases that we weren't all fashionistas of the androgynous look.
In the end, things got straightened out, but it was a struggle.
This morph with the word androgynous in the middle is offensive. We are not androgynous we are androgyn.
We can look androgynous, but we are still androgyn. If you look androgynous, you aren't androgyn, unless you are.
But this simple distinction is being lost again. And it's really pretty simple.
Androgyn is a part of a broader gender, that I just called the first gender. Because I can.
Androgynous is a fashion statement. Not that hard to understand, really.
Ativan
