While I wanted to talk about gender representation in songs since we’ve been talking so much about it these past few weeks, I remembered something that I came across when we were writing our papers earlier in the year and I knew I had to write about it. While I mentioned it in one of my earlier posts, I decided to look at it a little more in depth and explain some implications of it’s use in today’s society. Honestly, it’s just so incredibly bizarre and unnecessary, but it’s very presence explains to me at least, just how gendered our media has become. It especially shows the stigma behind male participation in social media and obviously is a ploy to attempt and close the gap between male and female users. The site I came across was called Dudepins, an obvious spin-off of the popular platform Pinterest.
On Pinterest, users are able to search and access web-based content and then organize it according to theme, reference points or areas of interest. While Pinterest is free game and absolutely anything can be pinned, there are obvious trends on how the site is used, what it is used for, and who is using it. In the site-produced board, “Popular” it shows all the hot-trending pins and in the top five are 1) interior decorating tips for a breakfast nook, 2) a promotion for a honeymoon registry, 3) the recipe for the “Perfect Lemon Tart” and 4) the “25 Must Have Essentials to Build you Capsule Wardrobe” featuring a picture of a woman in an chic jumpsuit. So while these pins by no means exclude men from interacting and pinning with them, it is easy to assume that a large concentration of these pinners is probably female. Which isn’t an unfounded assumption. According to a site called Sproutsocial, “71% of Pinterest’s 72.5 million users are women.”
While the site’s users statistics note that men’s engagement with the Pinterest are steadily rising, the fact of the matter is that the site is still heavily gendered and promoted as such. But gentlemen, if you’re on the market for a good place to browse web-content, but you’re looking for a smaller for someplace you won’t be ashamed to pull up around your friends, look no further than Dudepins.
The site that is “all about fast cars, tailored suits, scotches that are older than dirt and everything associated with being a Man…It’s where you find the coolest pictures, videos & Stuff for guys.”
So, I took a look at the site and it’s..interesting. Clad with pins about sports, leather apparel, sports cars and motorcycles, the site’s content is obviously marketing to men. The content is specifically tailored to showcase things that are manly, or stereotypically so. But that word to me is so bizarre, who decides what’s manly? Why is it just accepted that bacon, leather jackets, beer and big knives are for men and men only? Technically it is the users. Just like Pinterest, the content is user created, which is incredibly interesting. In this case, it is the users who are reinforcing these gender norms and stereotypes, but I guess I’m not really surprised. I feel like the man who would use Dudepins in the first place, is probably threatened by the idea of his masculinity coming into question — which explains his avoidance of Pinterest — and so, it probably should come as no suprise to me that he would use the site for exclusively ‘dude stuff.’
The alarming thing here, however, isn’t the barber shop pictures and grilling recipes, but the rising trend of sexual content on these pinning sites for men. While I didn’t see hardly any of this on Dudepins, I came across other sites like Manteresting, PunchPin and Titerest which were all labled NSFW (Not Suitable for Work). These sites, which are advertised as pinning sites with cool content for guys, are basically pornography sites which showcase women as sexual objects meant for the viewing pleasure of their male users.
So, what may have been seen as a harmless idea by site producers to build a platform where men could feel included in creating and saving web based content to which they could relate to, it is incredibly destructive. Not only does it reinforce negative stereotypes about the stigma of male participation in media, but it serves to yet again, underscore the idea that scrutinizing women as sexual objects meant to be exploited under the male gaze is not only okay but a socially acceptable practices.
