Hola comrades! I'm gonna need your help with this one. I'll explain that part later; first let me catch you up on what I've done so far.
Life has been really busy for me lately. I apologize in advance if anything is amiss. Everything feels rushed to me, and this website has also been giving me quite a bit of trouble. I'm a mess (when am I not, honestly?).
Amidst all of the chaos, I've been pondering my Munsell gender problem. I knew I'd signed myself up for a headache when I wrote that post. Yet here I am.
In terms of the axes for gender, I decided to stick with the type of gendered feeling, the intensity of that feeling, and the intensity of the presence of that feeling. I consulted with various friends of mine - cis and otherwise - and everyone seemed to like that version. I realize that was a massively confusing sentence, so I encourage you to read the previous installment if you haven't already. The context helps, I promise.
My main issue occurred with choosing the correct color space to use. I know Munsell is in the title, but that is for the title's sake. Munsell is simply a commercialized space; Munsell is just its name, and it is property of a company. For this project, I've narrowed our options down to two color spaces: HSV and HSL.
HSV stands for hue, saturation, and value, but is also often represented as HSB - hue, saturation, brightness. They mean the same thing. HSL, on the other hand, stands for hue, saturation, and lightness. My indecision comes down to one conflict: lightness vs. brightness. Before we get to the differences, we'll recap the similarities.
The two spaces are so similar because they are both based off of the sRGB model/space (yes, there is a difference between models and spaces, but for the sake of simplicity I won't go into that here). I unexpectedly found several lovely diagrams on wikipedia that helped me see the differences between the two.
*Do try to ignore the third path, the rightmost one. I don't know exactly what is happening there, and it doesn't seem very intuitive. *
As you can see, both HSV and HSL are obtained by manipulating the standard RGB color cube into different orientations.
I personally find it easier to visualize these representations in their first stages, when they look like gemstones. The cylindrical approach is harder to look at for me.
Either way, the two spaces are significantly different, and I've been going back and forth over which one I ought to pick.
(if you still have a hard time seeing the difference, these should help)
So here's the issue - if we make red femininity, blue masculinity, and green 'other', our question becomes "which shape better represents the extremes of gendered feeling?" In my mind it is easiest to think of white as representative of pangender, and black as representative of agender. This excerpt (also from Wikipedia -- I'm surprised it's been so useful this time) really highlights my lightness vs. brightness dilemma:
"The difference between HSL and HSV is that a color with maximum lightness in HSL is pure white, but a color with maximum value/brightness in HSV is analogous to shining a white light on a colored object (e.g. shining a bright white light on a red object causes the object to still appear red, just brighter and more intense, while shining a dim light on a red object causes the object to appear darker and less bright)."
I'm simply stuck. I am neither pangender nor agender; I am cis, not even close to those extremes. Besides, I am just one person. I feel that, in order to make an informed decision, I need a wider range of input. I need YOU to help me decide. Before moving forward, I want to ensure that I am representing y'all in the best way possible.
Thanks for your patience again, guys, gals, and enby pals. Give me your input, if you so desire. I'll see you in the next post!
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