Pinterest: A Guy’s Hate Filled Perspective

The Guvnah13 years ago

If you don’t know what Pinterest is by now then you should make it your life’s mission to never find out. Unfortunately I wasn’t that lucky. My new job as a social media intern has forced me to open my eyes to the house of social media horrors that is Pinterest. For the most part social media is great. It allows us to take the irrelevant shit we look at on the internet, our feelings that no one cares about, and mildly witty things that would otherwise be lost, and share them with our friends. Pinterest, however, has taken it a step too far.

Pinterest is essentially the online bastard child of a sorority girls scrapbook, a poetry club, and a wedding registry. Based on the kind of people that use Pinterest, what else could you really expect? The only people with Pinterest accounts are sorostitutes, those of questionable sexual orientation, and interns (yours truly) forced to participate in the pastel electronic soup of estrogen. It’s what I imagine Stumble Upon would be like if you selected only the topics you aren’t interested in.

Unfortunately, I log on everyday and much to my dismay the images never seem to change. Wedding dress, puppy, and low fat nachos recipes. Side note: if you like nachos SO much that you can’t stand to live without them, even while trying to lose weight, you have absolutely no hope of losing weight. Pinterest also has shoes… and shoes… and more fucking shoes. Then there are the inspirational quotes and God knows what else. To hell with waterboarding, force any straight man to look at Pinterest for an hour and his secrets will be flowing like wine after dark at Altar Boy Camp. There might be some legitimate uses for Pinterest, doubtful, but there’s probably a diet cupcake bakery/bridal shop out there making a killing.

Despite the obvious problem I have with Pinterest’s content, I also have an additional qualm. Unlike Twitter, where you can choose who you follow, Pinterest forces you to sign up via Facebook and then auto-follows every single person you know with a Pinterest account. For me that equates to 300 sorority girls and the three people from high school I just found out were gay. I literally can’t avoid all this crap I don’t want to see. Every time I log on to promote something for the company a small piece of my soul dies. I can’t count the number of girls who have said “So I see you’re following me on Pinterest.” I imagine they think I’m either batting for the other team or taking stalking to new, unthinkable levels. “That’s sooo creepy, can you please just sit outside my window like a normal pervert?” If any of them said that, they’d be right, even stalking is not an acceptable reason to use Pinterest.

In a rare effort to be impartial in my evaluation, I concluded that there is one positive side to Pinterest. It works as a buffer to the rest of the Internet. Without this virtual corkboard that validates every sexist “joke” made on this website, I imagine this shit would just end up on Facebook for the rest of us deal with. Nonetheless, there does not need to be an entire site depicting the collective daily thought stream of Pan Hellenic.

No offense to the ladies on this one. The site is literally PERFECT for you. Obviously the fact that I only have an account because it’s a job requirement means I’m probably not in Pinterest’s target audience. A site like Pinterest was not made for those of us with a Y chromosome. And because of that, I hate it. So Goddamn much.