FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Pretty Girl Bullshit

Please Don't Make Me Hate Women, Huffington Post

We aren't all obsessed with donuts and fucking Ryan Gosling.

Hey, have you heard of this website called The Huffington Post? I’m going to go ahead and guess that you have because it's really famous. You probably call it HuffPo, like I do. Anyway, this is a website which frequently posts articles about women's rights and gender equality. However, this section of the website kind of blew my mind this week:

It's the Best Tweets From Women section! Aw, you guys! That is so sweet. Women are having a bit of a moment, aren't we! Thank you for recognising our struggle as a minority, and deciding to create a whole section of your website dedicated to showing our overshadowed and oft-ignored chit-chat to the masses. And look! You've even tailored the bar at the top to all of our tastes: Tina Fey (gosh, isn't she sassy and cool!), Girls (gosh, aren't they sassy and cool!) and "Hugging.. Kissing.. Cuddling" (awww).

Advertisement

The faceless entity who uploads the content to the site may be lax about spelling and sentence structure, but they sure are on top of things when it comes to adapting the links on every page. Watch in amazement as the green menu bar from the homepage changes pink, and the topics on the agenda change from "Politics", "World", "Tech" and "Culture", to "Weddings", "DIVORCE", "You're Old", "Fluffy!" and "XD".

I have to admit, sometimes when I'm tweeting pictures of fairy cakes that I baked with a puppy with hiccups, I feel like I don't get as many RTs as I deserve, often because there's some boring political drama going on simultaneously. Only recently have I realised that being ignored in this manner is actually a hate crime directed at me because I am female.

Stumbling upon this section of HuffPo, while I was looking for videos of Lena Dunham and Tina Fey hugging.. Kissing.. Cuddling  I felt like I'd finally found somewhere that I could be truly appreciated. The next day, when I returned looking for the latest news about multitasking and 50 Shades Of Grey, yet again they had what I was looking for. This is truly a haven of non-judgement in which my gender will never be an issue, they even made all the livery rose pink to make me feel more comfy.

You can be comfy in a ghetto, right?

Let's run through a few things that HuffPo wants to congratulate women for tweeting about:

1. LIKING DONUTS

Advertisement

I like donuts, OK? And perhaps if I was feeling really overwhelmed by a particular donut, I might tweet about it. But when donut tweeting becomes a key component of what the Huffington Post considers to be femininity, there is a problem. Look, sugar's great, but when is everyone going to stop assuming that every time a woman eats the magical combination of carbs and corn syrup, she lets out an animal groan of pleasure and drools into her lap (while Instagramming)? Have you seen Man v. Food? Bombshell. He's a dude.

2. LIKING RYAN GOSLING

Yeah I get it, guys don't find Ryan Gosling intimidatingly hot, so they're happy to name him the "King of Women". It's totally boring though, can we at least have a crush on someone who might actually fuck one of his fans? Again, this is not newsworthy. It's also annoying.

3. LIKING TALKING POINTLESS CRAP

Does this even need an explanation? Let me reiterate, The Huffington Post has cited these two tweets as "The Best From Women" this week. What. The. Hell. Imagine if you checked in to see what the best things women had to offer were every week. You'd probably start to hate women. Until you realised that there could only be one of four things going on here:

1) It was designed by men who have no idea what women are so decided to reduce them to a selection of mind-numbing cliches.

2) It was designed by men as a joke.

3) It was designed by some idiot who probably equates a topless tumblr picture of herself eating a Twirl with empowerment and reckons she's "redefining feminism for the internet age".

Advertisement

4) It was designed by women who knew they were being wantonly reductive, but did it anyway in a totally ill-thought out attempt to provide a platform for people who like to talk freely about "inhaling" a Cadbury's Milk Tray, and "slurping" a bottle of gin "all in one gulp". In other words, the Vicar of Dibley.

I'm not sure which of these scenarios is more depressing, but – oh shit, BRB, got a period to deal with!

Follow Bertie on Twitter: @bertiebrandes

Catch up on last week's Pretty Girl Bullshit:

An Open Letter to Anyone Thinking of Getting Their Labia Sliced Off