The fact that the iPhone 6 will get makeup on it if you wear makeup and then rub the phone on your face is the latest reason why the device is apparently sexist.
“Most women wear skin make-up, whether it’s a tinted moisturiser, foundation or blusher,” Radhika Sangaini writes in a piece for the Telegraph.
“It means that after a phone call, you’ll inevitably find a smattering of powder on your screen, which you have to awkwardly rub off on your clothes,” she continued.
But Sangaini didn’t stop there. She offered the difficulty women have with putting the phone into their pockets as more proof that the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus “seem to be designed without the female species in mind.”
The pocket problem has also been covered in a piece on the feminist site Jezebel.
“The iPhone 6 Plus, at 5.5-plus inches, is “unpocketable” for many, but especially for women,” Tracy Moore writes in a post titled “I Demand Pocket Equality.”
She offers fitting the device into “skinny jeans” as a particular example of phone misogyny.
Though many men also prefer skinny pants, Moore takes her argument a bit further, asserting that the very fact that men’s clothes usually have pockets more than women’s clothes is itself due to sexism.
“Ever get the feeling that the general lack of pockets on your lady clothing is a conspiracy designed specifically to keep you from advancing by rendering you less effective? You were right,” she wrote.
“Women going pocketless is an under-addressed, silent epidemic that has infantilized us all and given us a big giant baby’s purse to deal with in its stead,” she continued.
Speaking of purses — far more women carry them than men, and most designs could easily fit a larger phone. In fact, even Sanghani admits that the move toward to larger screens has been pushed by women for this reason:
“The drive to large screens and ‘phablets’ is driven by women, especially in China, because they can put them in their handbags,” she writes.
Sanghani also offers “#Hairgate,” the social media trend detailing experiences of people who say their long hair has been ripped out by the phone, as another example. But oddly enough, she counters her own argument here as well, conceding that the phenomenon was also a problem for “beard-owners” — who, for the record, are almost exclusively males.
Another one of Sanghani’s arguments, that new, large-screen devices are sexist because they are too large for small hands and women generally have smaller hands than men do, has already been the subject of technology-hates-women pieces for nearly a year.
— Katherine Timpf is a reporter at National Review Online.