On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. But chances are, they know your gender. Drifting through all that code is the promise of anonymity and equality, but for women, the Internet can be a very strange space.
1. Tell women they aren’t good enough.
2. Tell them being perfect is achievable, but only through consumerism.
3. Label these goals “feminine” and deride them as “frivolous.” Logically then, the masculine must be the opposite: the self-content and the serious.
4. If women object to such a label, or try to exit the “feminine” sphere and share your masculine one, object. Get really angry. Call them names you wouldn’t call your mother.
5. ????
6. PROFIT!!!!
What is it like to be a woman on the Internet? If you’re a woman, you probably visit social networking sites more than men do: women account for 99 million more individual social networking hits a month than men do. Pinterest is just one of these social networking sites, the Platonic form of the Female Internet. Created by Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp, and Ben Silbermann, Pinterest allows users to share hyperlinked images in the form of “pins” — and those images, overwhelmingly, link to items you can buy.
To say Pinterest is an example of the burgeoning gender divide on the Internet is an understatement: 82 per cent of its users are women, and they spend an impressive average of 14-plus minutes on the site per day. According to Internet analysis firm Comscore, this June Pinterest received around 31 million unique visits, no small total. This makes Pinterest a website of gigantic advertising appeal, because the advertising is crowdsourced: women are being recommended products by their peers, and those products and that advertising is, you guessed it, gendered.
To understand the basic premises underlying gendered advertising, all you have to do is watch some deodorant commercials: Hey, dude! Use this deodorant and you’ll be the manliest of all (Old Spice); Really sexy angels will fall from the sky to… um, sniff you (Axe). This is positive advertising. The emphasis is on what the product can do for you, the consumer. For women, the emphasis is different: there’s no leveling up from woman to Ultrawoman with a swipe of antiperspirant; instead, it’s all about making yourself the way you ought to be. An emphasis on presumed female inadequacies is central to the majority of women’s advertising. A man’s deodorant takes him from man to manliest man, to demi-god. A woman’s deodorant simply makes her the way she should be.
Why? No one’s swiping their credit card faster than a woman who’s repeatedly been told she’s not being a woman in the right way. This doesn’t mean men don’t experience shame or poor self-esteem. It’s just that female dissatisfaction sells. This is Pinterest’s — bastion of overly-complicated manicures, throw pillows, and crock-pot recipes — stock and trade. Designed as a social networking site, Pinterest has become an advertiser’s dream. It’s the ultimate resource for deliberately cultivated female dissatisfaction because it seems to provide so many solutions, most of them for a price.
What is it that Pinterest, and the rest of the “pink” Internet sells? It’s the Kelly Ripa mythology: having it all. Having it all isn’t a concept original to the Internet, but the Internet makes it seem so much easier. It’s the idea that the actualized modern woman is one en pointe at home with the kids and in the workplace (which is outside the home, natch).
In addition to finding this perfect balance, the Kelly Ripa ideal tells women they should be well-dressed, thin, happily married, and that their homes should resemble a combination of Crate & Barrel and Restoration Hardware. But she’s not having it all, she’s doing it all; household work and child-rearing are overwhelmingly still “women’s work,” with men putting in, on average, less than 20 minutes around the house every day. The failed dream of second-wave feminism was that by entering the workforce, women would become equal to men by not having to choose between work and family.
In reality, though, men do face those choices — society just doesn’t tend to penalize them for it. Louis C.K. jokes that he’s a good dad just for showing up and spending time with his daughters. For men, childcare is above and beyond the call of duty, additional labour after a day at work, whereas no matter what it might say on her business card, a woman with children is a mother first. Yes, people have to make choices and things fall through the cracks: not all women want 18-hour office days, and not all women want motherhood. But our popular dialectic is one of the “working mom” — and when you’re trying to have it all, there’s very little that can’t be sold to you in the name of ease or style.
If Pinterest is the “pink” Internet, of course, there must be a “blue” internet. As a news aggregation site, Reddit would seem to be primarily gender neutral, but 84 per cent of its users are male. Is Pinterest the really “female Reddit” as Reddit users are fond of calling it? The site, which provides an equal platform for both serious discussion and epic trolling, makes its money from what are surely the net’s most unobtrusive ads. (Seriously, go to Reddit right now. There’s probably just an Amazon ad with a picture of Scarlett Johansson at the top of the page, and a moose on the side thanking you for not using Google Adblock. Now leave Reddit. It’s a timesink.)
In a cultural sense, Reddit is, in fact, what we think of as prototypically male: supporting demographics aside, it’s equal parts serious news, overblown debate, toilet humour, and abrasive trolling. If Pinterest is your girlfriend, Reddit is your frattiest bro — drunk. These gendered divisions are as old, and as quaint, as Adam and Eve: Reddit, the masculine, is both earnest and lewd; Pinterest, the feminine, both frivolous and functional.
Even in parts of the Internet that seem gender-neutral in terms of access and appeal, it’s not hard to discover jealously-guarded gender roles. It doesn’t take much browsing to find that women on the Internet face discrimination in every domain that is not specifically feminine, be it Reddit, gaming forums, or the scientific and skeptic communities. The propensity of Reddit users to refer to one another as “Sir” without evidence of the other commenter’s gender is evidence of this. Women commenting on sites or topics not designated as primarily feminine face gendered trolling and bullying that make sites like Pinterest, despite its emphasis on materialism, seem like a haven for women on the web. Chances are, if you are reppin’ someone’s biscuit recipe or workout routine, you won’t be called a “cuntbag” or sent threatening tweets or emails for weeks, as recently happened to Toronto tweeter Stephanie Guthrie. However much we might like to think of the Internet as a safe and open space, the fact is that in terms of both advertising dollars and personal communication, the Internet is intensely gender-biased. You can see this tension in the linguistic tendencies of the Internet: on page after page, posters refer to women “females,” a term that while technically correct, is distant, clinical, and almost entirely confined to the web. Think about the last time you heard “female” used as a noun in real life. Outside of government forms, it’s primarily an adjective. On the Internet, the female is the alien. The pink alien.
So what happens when women attempt to join a typically male Internet community? The Internet has been abuzz lately with the threat of “fake geek girls,” women who are co-opting the attributes of the geek community for (so the argument goes) male attention. Why is the geek community — whose borders are broad and porous, reaching from Rohan or Westeros into deep space — so zealously guarded against female interlopers? Is it because geekdom, and to a lesser degree, the Internet itself, have been the province of men who don’t fit into society’s traditional masculine categories? In a post on science and entertainment site io9, Rachel Edidin, an editor at Dark Horse Comics, explains that “geek” is primarily a male-gendered noun, gendered for men who don’t fit America’s traditional model — either physical and cerebral — of masculinity, and thus that masculinity in the community is aggressively enforced. So it makes sense that women aren’t welcome, that they’re assumed to be there under false pretenses. When women want to game, or cosplay, or draw web comics, or do just about anything on the internet that isn’t shopping or personal blogging, they’re seen as a threat to geek culture because geek culture has for so long been a masculine refuge for men who were told by society at large that they weren’t manly enough, that any feminization indicates depreciation. And geekdom is protected, with bullying and gendered insults and threats.
Those who assess Internet culture from outside its borders (say, your mother, or the New York Times) are fond of reminding us that anonymity leads to bullying. To be a woman on the Internet is to be confined to the continuous consumption of your own gender, or face serious outrage. Femininity, which has since the earliest days of advertising been linked with the frivolous and the intellectually inconsequential, has translated into binary with little change in form or function. Traditional feminine interests are met with disinterest and limited to certain sites, and any attempt to deviate from these interests is met with scorn and derision. Don’t believe me? Read the comments.
