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This is an article about the design of Windows 98 icons. You’re complaining about two emojis in 2023.
I really have to wonder about the thought process that sees “iconography” and immediately goes to “can you believe Apple made a pregnant man emoji?!?”. It’s exhausting.
I would say Man in Business Suit Levitating is a more bewildering emoji, since men can't levitate no matter which suit they wear.
If that emoji is worth keeping then why not have a pregnant man emoji?
The other is a product of pandering and crazy talk.
Spot on. No sane person would ever say they saw a man in business suit levitating in their driveway. That emoji is a textbook case of pandering to mental ilness, treating hallucinations as some spiritual journey bullshit, rather than the health problem it trully is. It's literally crazy talk.
Not sure about the wicked sense of humor in the other one but it is hard to convey humor in the form of imagery so...
If ease of implementation was the sole driving factor then why are all the handshake emojis skin tones that actually exist, stands to reason it would be just as easy to flip some color codes and have every possible skin tone from green to orange shaking hands. Where's my alien-shaking-hands-with-oompa-loompa emoji dammit?
I personally don't care, and Apple is more than welcome to promote whatever messages they want on their private platform. But let's not pretend it's apolitical.
I'd rather say that corporations are amoral, not political. They are only seemingly political to the degree that it benefits the business the most. On a broader scale, you can observe that they behave differently in different regions, and behavior also differs on a larger time scale, often molding to the current times.
The whole point of Unicode and emoji in Unicode is to support and enable free expression for the whole world. It makes sense to lean inclusive.
https://blog.emojipedia.org/why-is-there-a-pregnant-man-emoj...
Edit: Also, aren't you undermining your own argument? If your standpoint that blandness and seeking to avoid offense is a bad thing, then surely the more weird and edgy emoji, the better.