Thursday, December 20, 2012

More sexism on Pinterest

It is no secret that Pinterest is dominated by women. The nature of Pinterest has become pictures of dresses, hairdos, cleaning tips, decorating advice, wedding planning, cutesy pictures of babies, sewing, etc. - all interests dominated by females (whether they should be or not). The few men on this social network are sadly, though understandably, outnumbered.

Which is why you end up getting many pins like these ones:

There's nothing really wrong with this one, except that there's only a woman in the picture. 




... and on and on and on. I've seen gift guides for husbands, sexy 12 days of Christmas for husbands, etc.

And all of them give good advice and ideas. I don't think I could really argue with "a marriage is made up of two good forgivers" and "use kind words."

My issue really comes from the fact that all of these are advice blogs are for wives on how to treat their husbands right. Although the advice is generally very gender neutral, it gets directed specifically at the women. I don't think I've ever seen one directed at men (though I have seen this excellent one by a man that is not necessarily gender specific: http://www.danoah.com/2012/10/16-ways-i-blew-my-marriage.html).

I understand that it is generally women who are writing these blogs, so it makes sense to give advice as a wife to another wife. But I really wish they wouldn't. I believe that by directing this advice solely towards women, they are putting all the responsibility on the young women reading this to work on their marriages. If these bloggers never specified which person in the relationship the advice was for, maybe young women would be more likely to share the articles with their spouses after finding it on Pinterest.

So please, fellow bloggers who might be reading this: Make your advice gender neutral. After all, don't we want husbands to be respecting and putting forth as much effort into their relationship as wives?

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