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Pinterest isn't feminine: An essay on ladymags and aspirational clipping

persephonemagazine.com

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Re: Pinterest isn't feminine: An essay on ladymags and aspirational clipping

#11

Post by ebiester »

billpatrianakos wrote: post #4

Ehh... It can be argued that Pinterest really is a female thing but the idea behind it most certainly isn't. Those two ideas seem contradictory but I think what makes it so appealing to women is the sharing part of it. Women love to share their needs and desires, especially material ones, publicly or so it seems. Men definitely do similar things but they just don't share it. Just today I met with a founder and we wer…

First, it's a some American women thing. The fact that this is common with women in this culture tells you something about this culture more than something about women. Similarly, something in this culture tells men that it is acceptable to talk about feelings while drunk, but not sober, until those conversations have happened enough times to have cemented an emotional intimacy between a group (2+) of friends.

I can point you to masculine evangelical USian culture where it is considered a mark of friendship to share spiritual struggles and aspirations, carefully negotiated within the intimacy of the group. (In some ways, it's a very healthy masculine culture, and I miss that part.) In this culture, it wouldn't seem out of place for a man to keep a clipping board of spiritual aspirations. (I think I've seen it, in fact, IIRC.)

Re: Pinterest isn't feminine: An essay on ladymags and aspirational clipping

#12

Post by Qz »

Drbble wrote: post #6

The entire essay is about how pinterest is a modern scrapbook for women, and has one line flatly and bizarrely stating that it is not feminine. How not?

That line is in response to the question, 'Is Pinterest fundamentally feminine in some way?' The answer of no in that context is that Pinterest is a derivative behavior associated with 'women's magazines' which is also not fundamentally feminine.

Re: Pinterest isn't feminine: An essay on ladymags and aspirational clipping

#13

Post by Tichy »

andrewcooke wrote: post #9
Drbble wrote: post #6

The entire essay is about how pinterest is a modern scrapbook for women, and has one line flatly and bizarrely stating that it is not feminine. How not?

i think that it's making an implicit distinction (which might not exist) between social and biological cause. the argument is that it's rooted in a social activity, which might be (implicitly, is) constructed / learnt, rather than innate. (and it's a better article than i expected - credit for being honest enough to detail the "defined by consumption" aspect in fairly neutral terms (or maybe it's just the male in me…

I find the materialism of it very off putting.

Re: Pinterest isn't feminine: An essay on ladymags and aspirational clipping

#15

Post by apricot13 »

the appeal of pinterest is the ability to see multiple things at a time instead of scrolling through one image at a time like tumblr. It also adjusts to the size of the image so things don't get cropped out. (If tumblr added a feature to make the dashboard a mosaic like layout it'd be amazing!)
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