Recently, I happened to mention to a young woman of my acquaintance something that I’d seen on Pinterest, and she stopped me to say, in a mocking sort of way, “You’re on Pinterest?”

We were interrupted at that point, so I didn’t get around to asking her, “Why do you ask it that way?” But I didn’t need to. You see, guys aren’t supposed to be on Pinterest. It’s supposed to be a woman thing. If we had continued on the subject, I would of course have explained, in a deep voice, that I don’t really like Pinterest, that I had only checked it out because I needed to know about it for work (I had been asked to write a post about it for the ADCO blog, which I did, and then wrote a somewhat different one for this blog), and that for me to like it, it would have to have fewer recipes and “cute shoes,” and a lot more stuff about cars and war and Steve McQueen and the “Evil Dead” movies. (Insert Tim Allen’s caveman noises here.)

Last week, a site seeking the success of Pinterest, except among men, came to my attention. It’s called Tapiture. When I searched for information about it, I saw this piece on Slate headlined, “Pinterest for Dudes,” which posed the question, “Is it sexist to create a visual sharing site for men?” (To which my reply is “No. Yes. How could anyone possibly care?”)

I wasn’t all that impressed.

First, it seems to lack the one thing I really liked on Pinterest — which was sort of a limited thing to like, because it was a one-time experience. When I first signed up on Pinterest, as I wrote previously, it kept throwing new images at me based on images I told it I liked. That was interesting, as I played around with it — If I like this, what will it throw at me next? Whether on Netflix or Pandora or Pinterest, I’m intrigued by watching an algorithm try to get to know me. Tapiture gives you a similar opportunity to “like” a wide assortment of images, but if the images coming at you change in keeping with what you’ve liked so far, I couldn’t tell. I think I was just getting a generic feed.

After that, Pinterest and Tapiture are equally disappointing. I would really dig Pinterest if, each time I called it up, it gave me new pins based on the stuff I’d liked so far. It doesn’t. What it gives me is stuff I have pinned (which is limited, since I lost interest in pinning fairly quickly), and recent pins from people I have “followed.” And that gets pretty static. Each time I call it up, I’m looking at pretty much the same stuff. There’s none of the dynamism of new things — more to the point, of ideas — that following people on Twitter gives you. Bottom line, Pinterest gives me no reason to keep going back.

Tapiture does pretty much the same. Not that it’s necessarily boring. I was a bit startled by it at one point. The second time I called it up, having gone through the signup ritual the first time, all of a sudden the pictures of cars and cool architecture and food-that-features-bacon had given way to page after page of pictures that looked like they were from an early-’60s edition of Playboy. Very much softcore, but fairly racy as old-school cheesecake goes. Yikes, I thought, what if my wife uses my laptop and sees this? I didn’t sign up for this.

Actually, I had, without knowing it. In my first foray, I had run across a user who called himself “BillS Preston,” and digging the “Bill & Ted” reference, I “followed” him. All of the skin pictures were coming from him. Which sort of stands to reason, I guess, with a guy who names himself for a quintessential adolescent. (In his defense, he does post other stuff, such as this, but not as often, apparently.) So I unfollowed him, to keep myself out of trouble, and went back to the beer and hunting dogs. And bacon. And the occasional girly picture, but not so it looked like I was obsessed.

Speaking of which… Tapiture says “We do not allow nude photographic images that contain exposed nipples, genitalia, and/or fully exposed buttocks.” Yeah, OK. But you don’t have to be on the site long to see lots of stuff that stretches that envelope. Some users are always going to see just how far they can go, and Tapiture’s users are no exception.

But you know what? That’s not just a Tapiture thing. In fact, I’ve images of female nudity on Pinterest, which doesn’t allow “Sexually explicit content or photographs containing exposed breasts, genitalia and/or buttocks.” Yeah, what do you call this (sure, that’s pretty mild, but it does cross the technical line — and I’m intentionally avoiding anything racier, this being a family blog)?

More to the point, I can also find plenty of cars and dogs and military history — and, yes, bacon — on Pinterest as well. I haven’t seen anything yet on Tapiture that I couldn’t find on the larger site that is theoretically just for chicks.

So guys, if you’re really into staring at lots of pictures of stuff you like (which I find tiring), you really don’t have to remember a new password. It’s all there on Pinterest. Assuming you don’t have anything better to do with your time…

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