Faith Merino writes over at VatorNews:
I’ve gotten hooked on Pinterest. It’s the only way to keep track of all the stuff I want. It makes it so easy to keep track of the cute baby clothes I want, and the home décor stuff I want, and the kitchen gadgets I want… I’ve become—pinfatuated. I might need…a pintervention.
Women account for 80% of all household purchases, so this might be the reason why one in five online women are now on Pinterest, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Pew researchers polled more than 1,000 U.S. adults and found that 12% said they use Pinterest, and of those, the vast majority were women. A full 19% of online women are now on Pinterest. Nearly 80% of U.S. adults are online.
Given all the reasons why I love Pinterest, the photo-sharing site’s popularity with women is not surprising.
“It is usually the case that people gravitate to services that match their interests and their needs. Some of the more popular subjects on Pinterest are likely to be especially interesting to women, such as food, fashion, interior decorating and design,” said Lee Rainie, Director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, and co-author of the study.
Indeed, in a recent study released by business intelligence firm RJ Metrics, more than 17% of all pinboards are categorized under Home. More than 12% of pinboards are categorized under Arts and Crafts, followed by Style/Fashion (11.7%), Food (10.5%), and Inspiration/Education (9%). Food is the fastest growing category on Pinterest and generates the most repins.
Yeah, well, she’s not alone. Above and below you find snapshots of Pinterest boards created by two otherwise perfectly normal, bright, sane, responsible American women, who have also succumbed to the siren call of this insidious social medium.
Above is a portion of a board called “Halloween” created by Lora Prill, who in whatever remnants of time that Pinterest allows her is VP of marketing and a partner in ADCO. Below you find a board called “Our fave food allergy things!” It has been compiled painstakingly by Debra Legg, a writer for ADCO.
Both women are moms, which partly explains their fascinations. Lora’s son’s favorite holiday is Halloween, for instance. So you can explain much of this time on Pinterest in terms of maternal duty. How else to explain all the boards devoted to “Fun education for kids” or “Cool kid stuff“?
Looking at these boards, you can well believe that Pinterest holds special charms for the distaff portion of the population. The computer screen looks like the result of Edward Scissorhands going to town on a 10-foot-high stack of old copies of “Better Homes and Gardens” and “Southern Living.” In trying to show your correspondent how the site works, Ms. Prill repeatedly stopped to cry, “How cute is that?” Which impeded our progress into the heart of this jungle of material attraction.
But Pinterest is quite adaptable, as your correspondent discovered in his own foray into the site. Being a man and therefore made of sterner stuff, he manfully swam his way out of the Pinterest whirpool after only about a day and a half, on his first try. But he had only been on it a few minutes and expressed a few “likes” before recipes and home decor and cute holiday ideas had given way to…black-and-white photos of WWII warplanes… stills from “Rocky” and “High Noon“… video clips of Monty Python and the Beatles… Bob Dylan, Gwyneth Paltrow, Peter Lorre, Marty Feldman, Frank Capra, Steve Martin, Edie Sedgwick, what appears to bethe original Emancipation Proclamation, and… lots of other stuff.
Anyone can be pulled in, at any time. Consider yourself warned…
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