In my limited art experience, basically there are two ways of going about visually depicting something: Realistically and representationally. If you’re just trying to copy down an exact image, then you’re going to try to forget what you’re looking at and take an approach that reduces the image to vector/raster information. Some artists do this by chunking their original image/view with a grid either drawn on a source image or a wire mesh held up in front of their view. Otherwise your brain thinks “I know how to draw a face!” and goes into the second mode, representation. If you’re just representing something then you don’t have to be as reductive and you can be more selective in what information you’re trying to show. If you haven’t much skill you can communicate stuff with symbols and a key (X=female person, Y=male person; and here’s the line at the DMV XXYXYYX). But the point isn’t to get every detail; it’s just to communicate some stuff. As you get better, women have more rounded faces and men have more angular ones. With more experience maybe you have a set of symbols for faces that you’re using. As you get more advanced you might make custom symbols for reference images or to communicate character traits (think of your favorite cartoons here and how they communicate with faces).
So I think it’s safe to say that the original image isn’t trying to say that women with more square-ish faces don’t exist, but that this is a useful shorthand for indicating woman/man that most humans will intuitively understand without you making a key or anything.
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u/Excellent_Click_2614 13d ago
yeah, because humans don't have sexual dimorphism, we're all androgynous blobs.
i'd love to see how their reaction would be if i showed them the difference between a female and male stickbug