<![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, women]]> http://tags.gawker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/gawker.com.png <![CDATA[Gawker: valleywag, women]]> http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/women http://gawker.com/tag/valleywag/women <![CDATA[#Urahoe: More Proof Of The Stupidity Of Twitter Trending Topics]]> Thanks Twitter, for bringing us first #liesgirlstell, and now trending topic #urahoe, in which users list ways to determine if a woman is a "hoe."

Here are some gems:

SmackurFavRappa: #urahoe if u have known me less than 7 days & u already want it

Because someone who is attracted to you and want to have sex with you must be a "hoe." Nice girls are reluctant and require extensive convincing.

jCOOP30331 #urahoe if u wear them stretchy pants where u can clearly see ass cheek division and camel foot in front!

Ah yes, the time-honored wisdom that you can determine a woman's sexual proclivities by the way she dresses. So useful in rape trials.

hoecop #urahoe if plan B is really plan A

This is where #urahoe and the Christian right intersect. If Plan B is readily available, women will use it for regular birth control. And become hoes.

womanmarine206 #urahoe when ur phone never stops ringing and u no everyone

Popularity now = hoeness.

EllieLuvVP #urahoe if you have sex on ur period

This one reveals to anyone who still doubted that perceptions of female promiscuity and ideas of ritual purity are linked.

sartastic #urahoe If you're a guy and having an affair with a cougar.

Here's a stereotype we didn't know existed! Apparently guys who have sex with older women are hoes now. Sorry @aplusk.

But this one is the best:

PeteOMalley #urahoe if you are an agricultural tool used to agitate the surface of the soil around plants to remove weeds

As we believe a commenter pointed out last week, ho as in "skanky slutty woman" as in "the kind of woman who would have sex on her period, take phone calls, wear stretchy pants, and use emergency contraception," should really be spelled without an e. A "hoe" is a gardening implement, and we appreciate PeteOMalley's helpful tip for determining if we fit the bill.

#urahoe [Twitter]

Earlier: "I'm Pregnant," And Other "Lies" Twitterers Say Women Tell

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<![CDATA[Magazine Editor Retrained as 'Google Trends' Watcher]]> Lois Draegin was an editor at TV Guide before she got laid off—now she has an internship to help her build internet skills. That's admirable! But the internship's kind of awful. We should know!

Draegin, who is 55, is now an intern at Liz Smith-publishing older women's site Wowowowowowowow.com. Her boss is 24. We find that inspiring—someone who reached the top of the publishing profession, got laid off, and, with no trace of entitlement or snobbishness, put her head down and took a shitty internship to learn new skills to build her career back up again. It's nice! But as you can see, the internet has already eaten any shred of editorial dignity she had left:

Arriving before 8 one day, her immediate task was to look for story ideas and mash together information from other websites into a brief news item for the "Wow Watch" column. Finding topics was easy enough — Draegin fits WOW's demographic and instinctively understands the interests of its savvy readers.

But she repeatedly had to check her gut instincts against that all-important tool — Google Trends — to make sure her ideas would attract readers to the website. That morning, she chose to put yet another angle on a story about the California mother of octuplets who has been omnipresent on the Web.

Draegin quickly cranked out four paragraphs emphasizing that the "octomom" had decided to give all eight babies the same middle name — Angel.

Keep trucking, Lois; there's still quite a ways to fall on the internet.

[LAT. Unrelated: Brian Bosworth, Jessie Logan, adenoid cystic carcinoma.]

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<![CDATA[Pretty Girls Becoming Popular Online: What Does It Mean?]]> Justine Ezarik is a pretty blond girl who calls herself "iJustine" and gets hundreds of thousands of hits on her YouTube videos of her doing completely irrelevant bullshit like shopping or telling boring stories to the camera, because of the fact that young men will generally watch pretty blond girls do anything, which then makes said girl popular, which then attracts young female viewers, who will watch popular girls do anything. Mindless lemmings drawn to reflections of our own vapid selves, we all are. For a more thoughtful exploration of this issue, let's see what former Gawker ed. Emily Gould has to say:

Ezarik is one of a new breed of completely self-constructed celebrities. Like my friend Julia Allison, whose online self-­promotion recently landed her on the cover of Wired, she is a Web 2.0 version of the American everygirls with bleached teeth and fake tans who have enjoyed reality-show notoriety for a decade. But Ezarik didn't wait around for a reality show to cast her: she trained the camera on herself, controlling every aspect of how she was portrayed. And while her shtick is that she's just putting quotidian stuff online, she's actually as invested as a reality-show producer in shaping and policing a brand.

So, yes, reality shows are now micro-targeted and self-produced, but still just as vapid as they were on network television. Justine has fans, Justine has stalkers, Justine has a manager, but overall Justine likes the attention she gets from "lifecasting." Fair enough. The takeaway:

Attention's a touchy subject right now. As we trust cultural arbiters less and less to tell us who deserves attention, calling those who seek it—especially women—attention whores has become a dismissive, silencing insult. But here's the thing: understanding that your blog is less a shrine to your awesomeness and more a location where a like-minded community can form—and genuinely being okay with that—is actually pretty rare, even among Internet personalities.

We're genuinely okay with that. Now you, our like-minded community, can comment on this random video below if you so choose. [Technology Review]

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<![CDATA["My favorite part about being a woman in tech"]]> Unlike my editor, my favorite part of tech is the women. Lifehacker editor Gina Trapani's preferred distaff privilege:

"Empty restrooms at conferences."

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<![CDATA[Women! At Mac World!]]> Three months after San Fran's Mac World Expo, there's finally evidence that women did attend. Codesignal.com interviewed them on camera. Amazingly, most of them weren't booth babes.

The sexy fun geeky Women of (Apple) Mac World Expo San Fran [Codesignal on YouTube]

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<![CDATA[Or at least some women in its news photos]]> The true meaning of this photo aside, it can't be fun for Lars at the office today:

"Hey Lars! Heard the Herald said you need a makeover!"

Google in need of the feminine touch [Sydney Morning Herald]

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<![CDATA[Waggable: And that's not counting booth babes]]> My favorite line of conversation from last night's Stirr Mixer:

You know there's a bubble because the chicks at these events are getting hotter.

Don't worry, he loves them for their minds.

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<![CDATA[Old Girls Network: Try "Young enough to kick your ass"]]> SiliconBeat (or "The Mercury News: the Relevant Part") says the Old Boy Network has a new neighbor in the Old Girls Network.

"Old girls"? Let's see, SiliconBeat mentions two Valley women. According to the Internets, their ages are:

Jennifer Fonstad (pictured): 39 or 40
Amy Vernetti: 38

You guys are so in the doghouse.

Old Boy Network? Forget it. Try the Old Girl Network [SiliconBeat]

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<![CDATA[Microsoft's Origami: a "niche product for women"]]> Microsoft's moving into hardware again, but this time it looks painful. The software-and-one-hot-gaming-console company confirmed the authenticity of viral ads marketing its new handheld, the Origami. An in-the-wild photo from Engadget looks like the wallet PC that Bill Gates wanted back in 1995.

Microsoft officially announces Origami tomorrow. Most coverage right now is speculation, but there's a gem from PC World: "Origami will be a niche product, appealing mostly to women rather than a large audience."

Now that's the way to get gender balance in tech. (Not that we can talk.)

Photo: Microsoft's Origami project [Engadget]
Wallet PC [bit-tech.net]
Today @ PC World [PC World]

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