Saturday, May 26, 2012

The mean girls of Pinterest

Having just about run out of things to pin onto Pinterest, I suspect that this will be my last post musing on that site. (The previous.) It had such time-suck potential, but having scoured the internet for that which is space-age, gamine, etc., and reached a bit of an end-point, for me, at least, it may have run its course.

But one final observation. There's one truly objectionable use of the site that I haven't seen mentioned anywhere, which is the creation of boards dedicated to that which is, like, gross, and totally not cute at all. In the "Go Fug Yourself" mode, I suppose. I think I'd noticed it before, but I was reminded of it when I posted some outrageous menswear which was repinned three times, onto boards called "Hmmmmmm........," "Judgement" (subhead: "In what world was this a good idea?"), and "things that weird me out," respectively.

This is fashion in the Quinn-from-"Daria" fashion-club sense, which is not fashion at all, but "fashion" as a pretext for anything from dressing so as not to stand out, to actively mocking those who are more adventurous. And with Pinterest, unlike life, there isn't even the angle of, not everyone has the privilege of experimenting with pastel hair colors, because there's no requirement/assumption that you, personally, own/wear anything you post.

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