Alright, alright, that’s a bit of an overstatement but yeah, I’ve joined the legion (of mostly ladies, apparently) who have awoken to the joys of having an online scrapbook. It took me a while because it’d been unfairly pegged as Tumblr for Ladies, which made me think I didn’t need to look into it because I already have a Tumblr and the “for ladies” tag sounds like it’s being pinkwashed. Like Tumblr, but with a calendar that predicts your monthly cycle. Or Like Tumblr, but with reams of senseless advertising about weight loss.
Instead, from what I’ve been able to tell so far, Pinterest is just a website that visualizes bookmarks – a pretty handy thing to do considering the human preponderance for visual cues, the wealth of information out there, and our need to constantly organize it. Basically: mind-mapping, which I thought was both a guy and girl thing. In fact, how useful it’s been in JUST THE LAST DAY at helping me organize stuff actually makes me mad at both the folks who dismissed it as “Tumblr for Ladies” and myself for then going “Tumblr for Ladies? That sounds like it sucks!”
What I should have said at that point in time was “Tumblr for Ladies? What’s that supposed to mean? It’s not like Ladies don’t use Tumblr so you’re going to have to be a little more specific about why this website adheres to some gender-normative idea of femininity. Oh what? Scrapboarding? That sounds pretty awesome – do men not like having links related to a specific subject put in an image-heavy magazine-style format? Isn’t that what Flipboard is? Oh, I see… it’s because women are USING it for things like WEDDINGS. And that makes it worth giggling at. Jesus, it’s a good thing the first things put up on Twitter weren’t links to cute home decor or god knows what kind of internet social media life we’d be living now.”
HAPPY THREE DAYS PAST INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY!
Anyhow, if you too have an interest in collating recipes from the web (about twenty of which I want to try in the next week), I’ve gotten a head start:
http://pinterest.com/plasticlain/recipes/
