Just in case you missed the memo, iPhones are sexist now. Apple CEO Tim Cook recently announced a new series of iPhones, which includes the iPhone XS Max, which has a 6.5-inch screen. So sexist! Just in case you are an evil toxic male misogynist and can’t see the glaring sexism inherent in this announcement, I’ll enlighten you: 6.5 inches is way too big for delicate feminine hands. That’s right, even though men and women are exactly the same, men and women are not exactly the same. How could Apple not have understood that?!
Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, tweeted “Apple phased out the *only* phone I can hold without risking dropping.” (Meanwhile, Apple is still selling the iPhones 7 and 8, which have 4.7-inch screens, but never mind, that doesn’t fit the narrative. We’re complaining here!) Tufekci also explains that Apple makes “the most secure phone” so she absolutely cannot switch to another type of phone… because Apple is so awesome, and also terrible, and men and women are the same, and also different, call a psychiatrist.
"Welcome to the big screens" says Apple and women like me with small hands who need the most secure phone for safety reasons are stuck with something they can't hold and constantly risk dropping. Company that designs $5 billion headquarters without a childcare center for the win. pic.twitter.com/Owzy51RsrH
— zeynep tufekci (@zeynep) September 13, 2018
Feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez said that Apple “consistently fails to remember that women are 50 percent of the population.” Apparently Criado-Perez thinks that everyone at Apple has some sort of collective amnesia regarding gender differences (which don’t exist, but do exist, please keep up) and are totally unaware of the opposite sex. This oversight of memory might be forgivable if the only things identifying someone as a woman (as opposed to a man) were her vagina or her breasts, because most people keep those under wraps in a workplace setting, but how could they overlook the hands?? (Other than their private parts and their hands, men and women are exactly the same. But they’re not. Why is this confusing?)
Criado-Perez went on to explain: “I’m not saying Apple is being evil and deliberately setting out to design phones that injure women by being too big for the average female hand… but that doesn’t mean it’s ok.” Thank goodness. For a minute there I was thinking that, in addition to having never heard of women, Apple was also making products designed to kill them. It turns out they’re only accidentally trying to kill them. (For what it’s worth, I have no idea how we got from the phones being too big to the phones being dangerous, but we’ll just go with it because… why not?)
Sophie Walker, the leader of the UK’s Women’s Equality Party, said, “The boys at Apple are obviously obsessed with size but sometimes performance matters too.” She also complained that at Apple, “women’s needs are an afterthought.” No one is sure if Ms. Walker is referring to the phone or just commenting on her relationships with Apple employees. Either way, it’s probably TMI. To recap: the new iPhones are now too big, very dangerous, and some kind of phallic substitute in the mind of Sophie Walker.
Walker believes that the only way to stop horrible things like this from happening is if “companies like Apple have women represented equally at senior levels – as in all areas of business, politics and the public sector.” This will help because women are different from men, even though they’re not, and have different ideas from men, which are also not different. Glad we had this talk.
According to USA Today, many of the new iPhones in the series are already selling out, and stores are expecting long lines starting next week. Of course, only men will be in these lines. And women with very large hands. Of which there are none. Because women are different than men. But they’re also the same. I give up.
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