Here’s how the story got started. Back in October, the FBI announced that it had broken up an international crime ring when it arrested six Estonians in what was then heralded as “the biggest cyber criminal takedown in history.” The Estonians had, over the course of four years, hijacked more than 4 million computers in 100 countries through the use of malware known as DNSChanger. By redirecting the infected browsers of unwitting users, DNSChanger was able to send high volumes of traffic to the criminal ring’s rogue websites and servers, collecting more than $14 million in fraudulent advertising revenue and exposing their victims to information theft in the process.

“Operation Ghost Click” (as the FBI dubbed its sting operation) put an end to the Estonian scheme, but a problem remained. If the feds simply shut down the Estonian servers, the 4 million infected machines — nearly 1 million of which were in the United States — would be unable to reach the Internet. To give the cyber-crime victims time to clean up their machines, the FBI contracted the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to maintain valid servers in place of the criminal servers. The new servers would remain online until March 8, 2012.

And so it came to pass that the FBI tried to warn the people, but the people were not listening. The people were too busy swatting the pop-up ads that buzzed like flies around TMZ.

As things turned out, a cabal of Estonian thieves in an international crime ring wasn’t enough to get the public’s attention. By early February, nearly half of all Fortune 500 companies and half of all major federal agencies still had computers infected with the virus — along with 400,000 other computers around the world. If the government shut down its proxy servers on March 8, as was planned, all of these computers would be unable to access the Internet. (The FBI, frankly, hadn’t done the best job in getting the word out about DNSChanger: It slapped up a PDF on the Web and assumed people would find it.)

And then it happened. Somebody put two and two together. There was a larger, more familiar narrative at work here. The tale of Operation Ghost Click and DNSChanger held all the elements of a familiar story. A set date. The need for the wayward computer users to repent before the date came. The smug satisfaction that when the date finally came, the non-believers would be cast into a disconnected hell, with nary a Google Map to lead them out of it. Have you not accepted Norton AntiVirus as your savior? IT nerds across the nation waved their MacBooks in contemptuous indignation.

This wasn’t just any old computer virus. For those who did not repent — or at least scan their computers for the virus — March 8 would be INTERNET DOOMSDAY.

Let’s back up for a moment: “Doomsday?” one might ask. Really? Some accountant at Hormel might not be able to access the Internet one day because of slovenly security habits, and that becomes doomsday? Has the apocalyptic bar really been set that low?

In fact, it has — and there are three reasons for this.

Understanding the first reason requires a quick trip back to the last time apocalyptic rhetoric was as mainstream as it is today — the 1970s, when the country was buffeted by oil shocks, stagflation, Watergate, spiraling crime, inner-city decay, and defeat in Vietnam. A paranoid and pun-filled tome soon emerged to explain the chaos as signs of the end of the world — Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” the “No. 1 nonfiction seller of the decade” (as the New York Times put it), which found its way onto the bookshelves of more than 15 million Americans. And now the teens and 20-somethings who had clutched copies of “The Late Great Planet Earth” in the 1970s are editors, writers and producers, and they bring to the media landscape the narrative of their youth, in much the same way that indie music from the 1980s and ’90s, which never sold very well at the time, has reached a wider audience in the 2000s as Gen Xers find themselves program directors at radio stations or music supervisors at ad agencies and television networks.

The second reason came at the dawn of the next decade, with the launch of CNN in 1980. The rise of cable news (and, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, the rise of the Internet) didn’t merely transform the media landscape; it exponentially expanded it. Prior to 1980, the “Big 3” networks — ABC, CBS and NBC — programmed little more than three hours of news per day. Nowadays, even the “24-hour news cycle” seems like an antiquated idea; Twitter has brought us the 24-minute news cycle, with reporters on their Tweetdecks chasing headlines like little kids playing soccer. In this new media landscape, where speed and hyperbole trump investigation and accuracy, apocalyptic headlines draw the all-important consumer eyeball, regardless of the story that runs beneath.

The third reason that we so readily embrace the apocalyptic story line — not merely as producers of news, but as consumers — can be found in the decade behind us. As we’ve written before, the first decade of the 21st century was a decade punctuated by historic events that seemed (or were treated as) nearly apocalyptic in scope. From preparations for Y2K to the attacks of Sept. 11, from rising evidence that climate change has arrived to the economic collapse of 2008 in which we still find ourselves entangled, the belief that the world is coming undone — that the final straw is just moments away from being lowered onto the camel’s back — has surged from the edges of conspiracy and into the center of our public discourse.

The problem with this arms race toward the ever more apocalyptic is that it depletes our reservoirs of concern. If everything is an apocalyptic threat, then nothing is. And when each overhyped threat passes with nothing happening — where are you now, Ebola virus? — we find ourselves more capable of dismissing real concerns like climate change as overhyped as well.

We called the FBI Press Office to ask them why they were trying to frighten people with their overheated rhetoric about “doomsday.” Didn’t they know that small children also used the Internet, and might be haunted by nightmares of never feeding their Moshi Monsters again? “I don’t think we’ve ever used that word,” the press officer who answered at FBI headquarters assured us. “We’ve never called it ‘Internet doomsday.’”

Ever since Y2K, the media has mastered the technique of combining any potential threat — no matter how remote the probability and no matter how localized or contained its likely impact — with the apocalyptic story line. The result has been an increasing hyperbole in the news, and an endless parade of stories that imagine the “end of the world” in the most unlikely of scenarios, from solar flares to polar shifts to … well, some get-rich-quick scheme cooked up by some hoodlums in Estonia.

Take, as another example, the headlines in March that warned us that an impending solar flare could knock out most of our satellite communications, GPS and utilities, plunging the world into unplugged chaos. Beneath the headlines, usually in the final paragraph, was a little-noticed caveat: Such flares occurred with regularity a decade ago, with virtually zero impact.

But it’s the headlines that matter, not the details or the subsequent paragraphs, and “Internet Doomsday” was a great headline. The blogs lit up with stories about the horrors that might befall us if we couldn’t access Gawker. And like all good apocalyptic narratives, the Internet Doomsday quickly took a turn toward the conspiratorial: The FBI itself was going to pull the plug on the Internet on March 8, it was said. Government efforts to protect computer users had become a government plot to unplug computer users. There was much logging on, and rumors of not logging on.

But this was not yet the end. A judge, apparently consulting with Harold Camping (who knew much about the flexibility of having a backup date for the apocalypse), ordered the FBI to keep its goodly proxy servers going for another 120 days, until July 9, to give the unrepentant more time to download Kaspersky. And the FBI became more Internet savvy: A few weeks ago, it unveiled a new website where computer users could check to see if their computers were infected with DNSChanger.

The press dutifully reported on the FBI’s valiant effort to help the remaining victims of the scam — perhaps 200,000 out of 2.3 billion Internet users in the world — repair their computers. The most common headline? You guessed it: “Internet Doomsday Coming July 9.”

Sometimes she would text the person to find out what they needed: “Sorry I missed your call,” she would type, although technically she wasn’t, and technically she hadn’t. Instead, like so many people I know, she had simply stopped using her phone for the one purpose Edison intended: to speak to another person.

Jennifer calls this “telephobia,” and whenever she mentions it, friends nod in vigorous empathy: I have that. Me too. But “telephobia” is not quite accurate, because the truth is that most of us, Jennifer included, covet and depend on our telephones in a way that was unfathomable to previous generations, burdened by such clunky accouterments as Samsung video recorders and leather Day Runners big as a phone book. (Dang, phone books: Remember those?)

Instead, our phones have become so powerful, and so enmeshed in our lives, that a whole genre of journalism has sprung up around our thorny relationship to them: People who can’t break away from their cellphones for a mere conversation; people who rediscover the joy of life only after chucking them. Our phones are a 24/7 carnival of distraction – Facebook, Twitter, texting, Words With Friends – and the temptation to lose yourself, to become overwhelmed by the demands of a portable fun factory is an American experience currently being hammered out in a thousand trend stories (this one included).

People talk about how tough earlier generations had it, and I for one have no clue how to plow a field. But challenges simply mutate according to the demands of the day. I may be worthless with crop rotation, but I’d like to see a pioneer woman take a left-hand turn at a busy intersection while reading a suggestive text from the guy who is currently making her heart pound. Or, because we all know that’s a terrible idea, I would like to see her take that left turn and not read that text message from the guy. The internal fortitude it requires not to cave in to these seductions on a minute-to-minute basis? Massive.

But this is a story about talking on the phone, and why so many of us stopped doing it. It’s not news that this happened. A December 2011 Nielsen study on mobile media usage shows that voice calls have dipped 12 percent since 2009, while text messaging has exploded in the same time period, even tripling in volume among teens. When I asked friends whether they felt anxiety about talking on the phone, the response was more of a confused look: Why would I talk on the phone? A great 2011 New York Times Styles story by Pamela Paul talked about this shift, how much easier it was to punt our daily communication over to text and email, where we could fiddle with the knobs at our convenience, leaving a trail of evidence as to what we agreed upon and when. Even Miss Manners declared that the old-fashioned phone call was, well, kind of rude.

What I wish I heard more in all these stories about how we communicate — whether it’s about the death of voice mail, or whether or not Facebook is destroying our humanity — is the fact that it’s just plain scary to talk to other people. We avoid it not because people don’t matter — but because they do. And each of us brings emotional baggage to these interactions. When my phone rings, and I don’t recognize that number – forget it. I’m too scarred by the years I spent dodging credit card companies to take that kind of dare. I also don’t jump off cliffs, or do cartwheels on the highway. In fact, it’s amazing to me that there was a time when the phone rang, and someone just answered it. Who could it be? Could it be the guy who was currently making your heart pound? Oooh, let’s pick it up and find out! Now, when I see an unfamiliar number, I feel nothing but outrage: How the hell did someone in the 405 area code get this number? What could they possibly want?

Our social expectations evolve. After all, there was a time when door-to-door salesmen made the rounds in every neighborhood, but if anyone rang the doorbell in my New York apartment, I would cower like I’d seen a masked man outside wielding a crowbar. That’s just the moment we’re living in. We make ourselves wildly available online – dangerously available, some would say – and in real life, we are way more defended. Celebrities pay publicists hefty salaries to control their image, and then jump on Twitter and tippy-type away. Surely it won’t always be like this.

But we have so many alternatives for communication that agreeing on one dominant form is simply not necessary. A lot of people I spoke with despise the phone, and have for a long time. Why would they use it if they didn’t have to? “I’m pretty much always better in written communication than spoken,” a male friend told me via Gchat, where our conversations can thread throughout an entire workday, flaring up for 10 minutes at noon only to pick up steam again at 5 p.m. He adores instant message. “You don’t have to worry about interrupting the other person. You don’t have to listen to the other person while also trying to think of what you want to say. If the other person is telling a long, boring story, you can just let them tell it.”

A voice call, on the other hand, demands too much attention from him while offering not enough in return. No visual stimulation. Even a casual silence “can feel like a thousand deaths.” Not to mention crappy reception. As phones all go digital, the warmth of a land line has been replaced by an irritating buzzmuffle that requires constant affirmation. Can you hear me? Are you there?

Still, I was taken aback by the vitriol some friends have for talking on the telephone. “I really, really hate it,” a friend said over email, which is how she and I often have deep conversations. “Maybe it’s that there are too many distractions (TV, folding laundry) and I am guilty of giving in to them OR it’s that I can hear the other person doing the same thing. There just never seems to be a good time to sit down and speak into the void.”

Another friend complained that chatting on her iPhone was like “cradling a brick to my ear.”

And don’t even get people started on voice mail. Everyone detests it. “I cannot handle how uncomfortable it makes me,” said a friend, who is the kind of extrovert who can join any conversation. “There is an intimacy that seems too great, like a song that was written just for me.”

At a time when devices keep us at arms’ length, phone calls rocket the voice straight into the ear. It’s a revealing way to communicate. “The telephone conversation is one that really exposes nuances of meaning,” says Edward Tenner, a visiting scholar in the Rutgers School of Communication and Information, who is also the author of “Our Own Devices.” “So much of language is not just the words as they might appear but the inflection or accent, the deciphering of sarcasm.” Tenner and I spoke by phone, naturally, where the land line he used was nearly decadent in its clarity. I felt, at times, like he was in the room with me. “People have become much more guarded about their public persona,” he continued. “They will manage it on social media and dating sites. They will present carefully tailored pictures. When they’re in an actual conversation, there’s more revelation than they’re comfortable with.”

But that’s different from not wanting to converse at all. In fact, what I heard in these conversations was not a retreat from connectedness but a desire to do it better, to play to one’s own strengths. I happen to love long conversations on the telephone, probably because I think I’m pretty great at it – I’m highly verbal, thrilled by the joust and parry of a good debate, and the pure audio allows me to stop worrying about stupid stuff like how I look in this dress, and what your eyes are staring at right now OMG there is something in my nose. Because my closest friends are scattered across the country, I make regular phone dates that I treat like actual dates. That’s not to say I play Barry White and sprinkle rose petals on the bed (though, sure, when the mood strikes), but I do commit to offering that person my full attention for an hour, or an evening, or until the batteries on our phones go dead. A phone call offers a connection you can’t get anywhere else — not from a text, or email, or Gchat. Not even from a face-to-face conversation.

Then again, I also understand my friend Jennifer’s irrational fears of the phone. How do you say no to someone on the other end? How do you untangle yourself from an awkward conversation? Avoiding those messy, human questions can be awful tempting. But Jennifer found her anxiety, or her “telephobia,” or whatever we’re calling it was getting in the way of her life. “I was not available for people,” she says, “and that bothered me a lot.”

So she made a resolution to call a friend every weekday for a month. They didn’t always have long conversations. Often they were quite short. She says it was nothing short of amazing, though. I don’t want to pretend that Jennifer made a few phone calls and, poof, her life changed. But I also don’t want to undersell how transformative it can be to stare down a real, live fear and slay that sucker. In her month of voice calls, Jennifer grew a little closer to people in her life, but she also grew a little closer to the person she wants to be, who is not someone ducking into the closet whenever the phone rings.

The tricky thing about technology is letting it work for you, but not letting it do all the work. Otherwise, you don’t grow. Personally, I hope in the future we have robots that can do difficult things, like standing in line at the DMV or waiting for a text message from the guy who is currently making your heart pound. Until then, I have my friends to help. I can call Jennifer – and I know she’ll pick up.

When asked about this, Google argued that its provisions merely “enable us to give you the services you want – so if you decide to share a document with someone, or open it on a different device, you can.”

As reassuring as that seems, though, it’s not that simple when considered in a larger context.

In the last few years, major technology companies have become integral to interpersonal communication and information management. At the same time, many of these firms have tweaked user agreements in exactly the way Google has, helping the industry legally position itself for a mass intellectual property grab. That means whether you are using a photo-sharing site or a Web-based email account, you may have signed off on letting one of these corporations do whatever it wants with your data. As evidence of that reality, Facebook in 2009 let advertisers employ users’ uploaded photos to market products without users’ explicit approval.

Such a use unto itself may not offend you, but remember – that’s only what you can see. Indeed, nobody has any comprehensive idea of how tech companies are using these provisions in their secret business-to-business dealings. If they are already using your photos, what else are they doing behind their firewall? Are they selling your data? Are they mining your cloud files looking to preemptively appropriate the next great innovations? Nobody knows … well, except the tech companies themselves.

It’s easy to ignore such concerns by believing that the scope of a mass data mining operation is prohibitively large. But that’s not true. With the government already mining data from millions of Americans’ phone records in the name of fighting terrorism, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that multibillion-dollar corporations can do the same.

Of course, companies providing these services assert that intellectual property is a substitute currency for cash. As the logic goes, even though online services cost money to create and maintain, you the user don’t have to pay actual cash for them because you are already paying in information about yourself, which technology companies then monetize.

That may seem at first like a good deal. But amid companies’ ever-intensifying pursuit of profit, the monetization process opens up the possibility for serious shenanigans. And here’s the worst part: If a company ultimately pilfers inventions or trade secrets or anything else from users, it will already be too late. Because we so quickly hit “agree” when we originally opened our accounts, we will have signed away any claim to what we believed to be ours and ours alone.

“Imagine you’ve been diagnosed with an incurable genetic disease and you are told you will not only lose your ability to walk and move your arms, but you will die between now and the next 18 months. What would you do?” Avery’s blog reads. “This has become my reality. But before I die, there’s a few things I’d like to accomplish … this is my bucket list and my story.”

During an adventure riddled with so much good humor, so many images of smiling, laughing people that it’s damn near impossible to read about it without dissolving into a sobbing, balled-up wreck, Avery and her family went about achieving the feat of simply “celebrating life.” Avery’s objectives were as seemingly mundane as to “stay up past midnight” and “keep smiling even after surgery” — and as grand as raising a million dollars to fight SMA. Along with good-natured jokes about man-purses, hospital cribs that look like “Lockup: Texas Children’s” and insanely cute pictures of a smiling baby with a chick fuzz hairdo, are the harrowing realities of life with a fatal disease. There were tubes and operations and weight loss and reflux issues that affected her breathing and swallowing.

For all the items Avery got to cross off her list in just a few brief weeks — “eat ice cream,” “meet someone else with SMA” — there are many she didn’t. She didn’t, as she’d written she’d hoped to do, graduate college. Or get married. She didn’t play in a softball game or ride a Ferris wheel or attend a birthday party. She died suddenly on Monday afternoon, when, as her father wrote later, “one of her lungs collapsed and she went into cardiac arrest.” And one last time in Avery’s voice, he wrote that her final dream was “spreading awareness and helping to fund a cure for my friends.”

We live in a mortality-denying culture. Just this month, an Aflac WorkForces Report announced that “sixty-two percent of U.S. employees say it’s not likely they or a family member will be diagnosed with a serious illness.” Yet disease comes for many of us, and death comes for everybody. That’s not an abstract concept. It’s the truth. I didn’t always get it, either. But I certainly understand that much better now than I used to, after watching a few of my loved ones die over the past year while my best friend and I faced our own life-threatening cancers. And I’ve got to say, death really clarifies the hell out of one’s to-do list.

Avery’s goals were not her own, of course. They were the ones her parents set to maximize her remaining time. But it’s easy to see in her photos what a cheery, friendly baby she was, and the ways in which her sunny nature inspired others. It’s easy to see a mother and father who could have become embittered by a devastating twist of fate, who instead chose to fight fear with love, pain with compassion, who are trying to use their loss as a means of raising awareness and doing service for others. They did it in a matter of weeks. Think of what the rest of us could do with a few decades.

You shouldn’t have to wait for a diagnosis to consider the possibility that you are going to die. You are. Maybe even in the next six months. The question is: What will you do with the time you have left? Will you eat a cupcake, get a kiss? Avery did. Will you reach out and connect? Will you love and be loved? Will the ones you leave behind be able to call your life a “celebration” too? As Avery and her parents tell us, “You can live life dying or you can die living life.” Imagine you’re on the clock. Start acting like it. Go.

Even a cursory glance at Pinterest makes it easy to see why so many of its critics have been dismissive about it – specifically about its girlishness. In Salon earlier this year, Jude Stewart called the site ”basically online scrapbooking.” Slate’s Farhad Manjoo summed it up in a feature called “Cupcakes, Boots, and Shirtless Jake Gyllenhaal,” wherein he admitted, “I just don’t get it.” And when I first looked at Pinterest, my initial impression was “social networking for cat ladies.”

Just last week, Buzzfeed came up with a much-forwarded list of “125 Reasons Why Guys Are Scared of Pinterest” – almost all of which involve scary declarations of man-averse female feelings, a testament to the ways in which Pinterest has not only become emblematic of the gender divide, but a repository for knee-jerk sexism. No wonder then that a host of new Pinterest-inspired, decidedly dudely sites like Dart It Up and Manteresting are springing up in reaction to Pinterest’s Girls Gone Gluegunning vibe. The results have been mixed, though — even with self-aware senses of humor and more cars, bikini girls and red meat than an entire Axe campaign, you can’t just butch up a “pinning” format that is inherently about as studly as a subscription to Real Simple.

This intensifying social media gender gap reveals a great deal both about how social media works and how conservative ideas about gender find themselves reproduced online. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Instagram, YouTube and MySpace (aw, remember MySpace?) all managed to evolve by hinging their successes on their anybody-can-join-the-party appeals. Sure, they’ve always attracted a variety of gender-specific subcultures, from soccer moms to frat dudes. But those communities grew up as their own neighborhoods within the larger entity, rather than the destinations themselves. The results have been a pretty equitable gender split among users — evidenced by the fact, for example, that women account for roughly 57 percent of Facebook and 59 percent of Twitter users. In contrast, Pinterest’s U.S. demographics shake out very differently — hovering between an impressive 68.2 percent and an overwhelming 83 percent female audience.

What is it about Pinterest that makes it so lady-friendly? Is it the way its curvy font seems so much more feminine than Facebook’s manly block? Is it that the words “pin board” themselves just sound kind of femme? Perhaps, although I’d wager five years ago you wouldn’t have thought there was anything too macho about the word “Twitter” either. Could it be that women just naturally prefer sorting stuff into tidy categories?

It’s likely all that and more, a brand identity that the company has both coyly cultivated and gently refuted. In its mission statement, Pinterest says its raison d’être is “to connect everyone in the world through the ‘things’ they find interesting.” But when you’re enticing “people all over the world” to “Redecorate your home!,” “Plan a wedding!,” “Find your style!” and “Save your recipes!,” you might as well announce, “Guys, it’s like when she takes you towel shopping at Bed Bath and Beyond.”

Other sites encourage you to root around a bit first, to tailor it to your own vision. When you first sign up for Instagram or Tumblr, for instance, they’re as aggressively plain as Google’s home page, circa 1999. Pinterest, meanwhile, deluges you with its cavalcade of ever-changing, disarmingly pretty content. That immediacy makes for a sensible gambit for a site based on visuals. But depending on your inclination, a bombardment of wedding gowns, fancily frosted desserts, maxims about what it means to be “a lady,” and multiple repinnings of the same litter of puppies represents either an instantly addictive rabbit hole of inspiration — or the kind of thing that makes a person want to run out for a cleansing Michael Bay marathon.

Pinterest’s sunny, sincere, straight out of a yogurt commercial personality has been a rousing hit so far, a style that’s clicked instantly with legions of devoted “pinners.” Though its growth has slowed down in the past few months, it still pulled in 20 million unique visitors in March alone. But the challenge the company faces moving forward is whether it can maintain its formidable presence with an identity that’s so heavily chick-centric. As professor of linguistics at Georgetown and author of “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation” Deborah Tannen says, “I remember years ago people saying, ‘Online communication is going to be gender neutral. This is great!’ But the same patterns show up everywhere.” And, she explains the cold reality is that “Anything associated with women is thought to have less value.” In other words, even with all the uniques in the world, would anybody ever pay a billion bucks for something so feminine?

The question now for Pinterest is whether it will hang on to its ladylike charm,  thoroughly dominating in that domain but risking becoming a pink ghetto — or broaden its scope and potentially crowd out the folks who come to seek advice on how to do a smoky eye right there on the landing page. Stacy Horn, who created the pioneering online community Echo back in 1990, notes, “People like to gather in all sorts of ways around an idea, an interest, a TV show, a band, or a gender. It’s only a problem, I suppose, if places like Pinterest would prefer not to be so girly, or if they’re trying to attract [different kinds of] advertising dollars.” And she points out that “When you’re talking about places the size of Pinterest, even if it is mostly women, how insular can it get? ‘Women’ is a large, diverse group. I’m a woman, Michele Bachmann is a woman.”

Unsurprisingly, Pinterest itself wants to have it all. A company spokesperson told Salon Monday that although “People who initially discovered Pinterest were largely women who were pinning for hobbies or activities … The act of collecting is a universal behavior.” She adds, “We believe our demographics will shift over time as more people discover the many different ways in which Pinterest can be used … to evolve to a broader and more demographically diverse audience.” Pinterest’s U.K. audience is already more gender balanced, perhaps because while Americans use it primarily for “crafts” and “gifts,” British users view it for inspiration on “venture capital” and “blogging resources and services.” Eventually, American Pinterest may go down a similar path, once it figures out how to attract men to get past its current, scented candle store ambiance.

Gentlemint co-founder Brian McKinney says that despite the evocative name of the mustachioed, manlier “visual social bookmarking site,” “If, at the end of the day we’re just copying some other site, what’s the point? We never set out to be the ‘manly’ Pinterest; we just wanted to have a site centered around sharing the type of content that was interesting to us – and it happened to appeal to a lot of people.” What Pinterest and Gentlemint have in common isn’t so much about gender-specific orientation, he says, but the understanding that “the future of the Web is less about having these mammoth sites that are focused on everything under the sun and more about niche sites with really supportive, passionate users.” And, he says, the fact that “it’s supposed to be fun and very tongue-in-cheek.”

Whatever Pinterest’s future shape, there’s no denying female-oriented businesses can rock the world. The Martha and Oprah empires were not built on manpower, after all. But we live in a culture in which the triumph of anything that skews toward women is still considered revolutionary. Look at how “Bridesmaids” and “Girls,” entertainments whose femininity is conveyed right there in their names, became instant flash points — their success viewed simultaneously as flat-out flukes or compelling evidence of the awesome, heretofore untapped power of the female audience. That’s what likewise makes Pinterest’s current position unique — and no doubt precarious. Within a seemingly tame array of cute animals and wedding ideas, nearly 20 years into Web culture, we have nevertheless somehow managed to create something formidable — at long last, the Net’s first true woman-centric blockbuster.