Here Mashable, take my vagina. I’m obviously not using it right.
According to Mashable, the In Touch of the social networking scene (bold and uppity upstart with a handsome Twitterface), I am not actually a woman.
On Mother’s Day Mashable churned out another one of their highly-re-bloggable social networking list of links. The focus of this new list is a bizarre niche group rarely mentioned on Mashable—women!
I felt special. All past slights undone. Mashable was finally compensating for their status quo sexism by exploring “some of the most popular social networking sites for women.” If felt like maybe the Mashable Twitterhead (aka Pete Cashmore) cared about me after all.
But I was wrong. I got all amped up for nothing.
And I was not alone:
I (Rubybeck) agree with AskFrasco. I was excited to see a post focusing on women, but sorely disappointed with the content. This post should be more aptly titled “Top 10 Social Networking Sites for Moms.”
Indeed. It seems that to Mashable a woman is defined by her incubating and birthing abilities. I, socialnet czarina, had only heard of one of the sites they listed. One! And the sites listed would be better placed on an April Fool’s Day post than on one for Mother’s Day. Cafemom was bad enough, but ParentsConnect? WTF.
And then it dawned on me. According to Mashable logic I must not really be a woman. I should just hand my vagina, my uterus—heck my whole endocrine system—over to Mashable because I am not using it right. Even if I did pop out a kid, I would never–ever–use these sites. My main life interests would not shift from historicization and social-net culture to parenting and motherhood. So obviously, even if I bore children, my lack of monomaniacal focus on child-rearing would make me a horrible mother.
In the end, Mashable would be doing the entire world a favour taking these simultaneously useless and dangerous organ-weapons off my hands. Or, um, out of my body.
The single problem here is that the Mashable Men assume that, once birthing, female interests shift to some generic, home-based mother category from whomever they might have been before. Even if this new breed of thin-framed, notebook-totting patriarch uses 43 Folders for excellent file system organization, a devalued housewife is still a devalued housewife.
So thanks Mashable Men for using Mother’s Day to remind me of how insignificant I am to the denizens of social networking because my destiny is to sacrifice my identity for the production of others greater than me. The men can then be free of my menacing feminist critiques to handily carve up the cultural landscape in the mirror image of themselves. I’ll never forget how special you’ve made me feel.
Sky Goodden: This is startling, refreshing, overdue, and damn good. Thank you, Shary.
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