One way to ensure that a female image won't be sexualized is by using a non-representational icon, such as the chromosomal images that announce the site for Double X Chromosome , a collective devoted to stopping sexism, hatred against girls in popular culture, and violence and prejudice in general. Other sites make the female symbol their dominant visual image and often tailor it to the topic of the site. The University of Maryland's Women's Studies site shows three interlocking female symbols, suggesting a community of feminist scholars; in Feminist Mothers at Home, a single female symbol encircles a house with a sheltering tree; in Feminist Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Utopia, a group of these symbols emerges in electric blue from a star-studded galaxy. Rows of female symbols form a celebratory wallpaper background on the women's rights site Feminist Majority Foundation ; conjoined pairs of this image suggest intimacy between women in the lesbian sites Women Loving Women Webring and Girlfriends ; a single female icon creates the "o" in the title of Feminist.com , printed boldly on the solid trunk of a tree; and in Women's Issues , the symbol changes shape from page to page depending on the subject--a magnifying glass on the home page; a globe on the Third World countries page. There are dozens of uses of this image, but in each case, it appears prominently, a proud banner announcing that the website is woman-centered.

Other symbolic representations of women are ironic. They take disparaging images long associated with women and invert their associations. On Girls Can Be Anything Except Roosters, the central female image is a hen--but its symbolism is transformed: rather than the nag who henpecks her beleaguered husband or the silly gossip at a hen party, she's a proud barnyard creature, carefree and strutting. Women's Wire symbolically identifies woman with an apple, but not the plump fruit that Western artists have used to signify destructive female beauty. It is neither the apple that Eve offered Adam--that led to their expulsion from the garden of Eden, and, as Milton put it, "brought death into the world and all our woe"--nor the fruit in the Judgment of Paris story that the Greek goddesses competed for and that led to the Trojan War . This apple has been gnawed almost to the core, offering an asexual and unaesthetic image that undermines the traditional sensuous one. Furthermore, the Women's Wire apple is not only aesthetically untempting, but it also becomes a different metaphor and thus tells a new story. Because the gnawed apple functions as a link to a page on women's health, it has life-affirming rather than destructive connotations; it offers a narrative of constructive female self-sufficiency--in which women take charge of their health and their lives--that replaces the myths of catastrophic female beauty told in the Fall and Trojan War narratives.