Facebook’s Purchase of WhatsApp, Expanded Gender Identities Are Like Pop-Tart Sushi (That’s a Compliment)

I’ve
got a new column up at Time. It’s about Facebook’s recent expansion
of its gender-identity categories and, well, Kellogg’s
Pop-Tarts.

Here’s how it begins:

As any consumer of Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts could have told
you, Facebook’s new and expansive gender-identification
options are a woefully lagging indicator of the wide-ranging
and decades-long trend toward increasingly varied options for being
in the world. That’s true whether you’re a toaster pastry or a
human being. Indeed, until last week, Facebook users could only
identify themselves
as male or female, or just half
the number of flavors available to Pop-Tart fans over 40 years
ago.

Introduced in 1967 and named after the pop art craze
surrounding Andy Warhol, Roy Lichenstein, and others, Kellogg’s
popular breakfast product originally came in four flavors
(blueberry, strawberry, brown sugar cinnamon, and the quickly
discontinued apple currant). They’re now available in over 100
variations and versions. At a 2010 pop-up store in Times
Square, customers could even create hyper-individualized flavors
(and sample something called Pop-Tart sushi to boot).

The same sort of expansive multiplication
of variety has been happening to people. As the anthropologist and
business-school professor Grant McCracken put it in his 1997
book Plenitude, we live in a world characterized by a
quickening “speciation” of social types. “Teens,” he wrote,
“were once understood in terms of those who were cool and those who
weren’t.” In a tour of a Toronto mall in the late 1990s,
McCracken’s adolescent guide pointed to 15 distinct types of young
adults, including “heavy-metal rockers, surfer-skaters, b-girls,
goths, and punks.” By now, the same tour would easily yield double
or triple the number of types.

In a broader context, then, Facebook’s new policy — which allows
users to pick from phrases such
as androgynous, intersex, transsexual,
and dozens more — tells us less about changing social and sexual
roles and more about the social-media giant’s desperate attempt to
stay relevant in a world that often moves too fast even for its
greatest innovators. Facebook’s purchase
of WhatsApp, a dominant and fast-growing messaging app for
smartphones, for $19 billion is another.

I argue that Facebook has been
long been too much of a “walled garden,” in which users’ choices
and options are increasingly constrained. And so:

If Facebook fades, it will be because in an age of constantly
proliferating options and possibilities, it chose for too long to
try and limit its users’ experiences, and not simply in terms of
gender identification.

Read the whole thing.