In Other "By Guys For Guys" News, Apple's New Health App Doesn't Track Menstruation

Seriously? Because I track 3 things about my health now that I have to worry about thyroid issues:

1. thyroid hormone levels
2. poop schedule (officially old)
3. menstruation

Now, maybe it tracks the pooping, I don't know. Thyroid issues can cause "intestinal paralysis" but the medication has helped a TON and wow this entry has too much information. Seriously, you poop an average of 1.5 times per week and see if you don't freak out and start tracking it. But the thyroid issue and the medication have thrown my lady hormones seriously out of whack and I know because I am tracking my periods with an app and I've had 5 periods in the past 3 months. My last cycle was two weeks! Also, last October, my breasts grew a cup size for just no reason at all.*

Anyway, that is just entirely too many periods. I had an appointment to try to fix it but I couldn't get the appropriate treatment if I had breast cancer and my biopsy was the day after the appointment. (The biopsy was fine.) I got a new appointment for next week and hopefully the thing that we do at that appointment will straighten things out. But it will take some time to be fully effective, so I will have to track my periods to see how well it's working or not. And so period tracker!

 

This is one of the many reasons that I don't understand how anyone could make a "health tracker" and not track periods. There are so many reasons to track periods!

• The Rhythm Method
• Including tracking ovulation timing to become pregnant
• Migraine tracking
• Perimenopause tracking
• "Is my installed birth control working?" tracking
• "WTF is my cycle anyway?" tracking
• "Maybe I do have PMS" tracking
• "Oh frack, am I late? Frackfrackfrackfrack." (Yes, I just had a BSG binge-a-thon. It's disappearing from Nteflix streaming for a while! It was an emergency! I didn't know who the fifth Cylon was!)

From the article:

You can even use it to input your sodium intake, because "with Health, you can monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in," said Apple Software executive Craig Federighi back in June.

So apparently "am I pregnant?" is not a metric that women are interested in. "Do my migraines correlate with a certain stage of my cycle?" is not a metric that women are interested in. "Have I seriously been bleeding for 18 days? That can't be right" is not a metric that women are interested in. Or maybe there were no women in attendance. Or maybe he just doesn't include women in the set of "you" because women don't fucking count.

No, when he said "you" he meant "me" and he doesn't need to know his menstrual cycle and he probably doesn't care about his manstrel cycle or whatever the male equivalent is called. OMG I really wanted manstruation to be a word and other people are using it-- wrongly, ok, because they're 12 and they**... Never mind. It's been tainted. See what I did there? Man, I have been awake too long.

Menstrual cycle was probably left out because it was reproductive and they figured that issues surrounding pregnancy aren't "health issues." But here's the stupidest thing about it: iPhones are most popular with women. How do you design an... I just don't get it?

Here's the deal: men designed this app, men approved the feature set of this app, men built this app, and maybe some people with occasionally menstruating vaginas were involved as well but if they were they were, they were not listened to. I'm so unable to even with this. We need to put women on feature design teams and listen to them! It's not that complicated; it merely requires that you can admit for just a few minutes that you don't literally know everything! Even I do that sometimes! I know, but it's true.

Previously in "By Guys For Guys" News, ello doesn't grasp why women would want post privacy in social media.

* Except to make $600+ worth of bras no longer fit at a time when I can't afford new bras.

** Seriously, "To become moody, bloated, and generally vaginal?" How does a guy become "generally vaginal? Is he a cavity now? Is he covered with mucus membranes and sweating something vaguely fishy smelling? If he sits in the same spot every day, does that sweat eat a hole in the couch? If you poke him in just the right spot does his cervix-like head start flopping around, like a dog's leg kicks? And why are vaginas bad? These are boys calling things gay because gay is bad but vaginas are also bad and will you please make up your bleeding minds? Are penises good but only if you don't do anything with them? I seriously do not understand these people. Do you boys not even grasp that men have a similar cycle that can cause moodiness and way less than half of women even get "moody?" Of course, boys and misogynists use periods as "the reason that a woman disagrees with my awesomely brilliant but completely wrong self" to "prove" that the women are wrong to correct them on the facts. 

In WoW one time, someone said "why is everyone PMSing?" by which he meant "mad that he went for dinner in the middle of a raid fight and wiped us after spending the previous two fights ignoring directions and wiping us, then talking about how we terrible players were holding back his leetness so we should give all the loot to him." "There's no need to be PMSing! Mom called me for dinner! We had mac and cheese!" So I called him on it and some teenage boy whispered me to tell me that it was a joke and that PMS is just another name for a period. Oh FFS. I educated that teenage boy, oh yes I did. And eventually he asked "are you one of those feminists?" and I said "I believe that men and women are different in many ways but that neither is more valuable or 'better' than the other, which yes, makes me a feminist because that's what feminism means.  Also I out-DPSed him while typing lectures to him about how that joke is neither funny nor true. Some days, I want purge the Internet with fire. I should go to bed instead. Purging with fire will probably make my asthma worse.

Dear Out of State Guys Who Like Me

When this happens on Facebook:

Me: Who wants to go do something with me today to cheer me up?
Dude in Another State 1: Well, if I were there.
Dude in Another State 2: Come over!
Dude in Another State 3: I’d love to, but… you know…

It does not help. It makes me feel worse and not because I don’t get to hang out with your awesome self today.

I’m the one who got a migraine Friday afternoon, causing me to miss day 1 of an event that would have been really helpful for me. I’m the one on a new migraine medicine because it’s the only one on the formulary-- and had the medicine fail. Twice. I’m the one who couldn’t eat dinner because I just would have thrown it up. I’m the one who considered going to the emergency room with a migraine at 2am. I’m the one who woke up on Saturday with a migraine and skipped lunch because I thought I would throw it up. I’m the one who had to miss the second day of the event that I really wanted to go to because I was too sick to leave.

I’m the one who finally felt good enough to try to eat some delivery food and ordered a bunch of Thai food with peanut sauce, then discovered the hard way that the restaurant puts a life-threatening allergen* in their peanut sauce. I’m the one who spent $30 on a meal that I had to throw away—when I’m running low on food money. I’m the one whose tongue swelled up on one side and came close to anaphylactic shock from one fucking drop of sauce. I’m the one who had to take 3 different antihistamines and shoot a steroid inhaler into my mouth in an attempt to keep myself out of the ER. I'm the one who had this happen after over 24 hours without food, with a tendency towards low blood sugar. I’m the one who picked shrimp and tofu pieces out of a spring roll for 20 minutes trying to get something into my system, crying the whole time. I’m the one who found out earlier this week that the pie place puts a different life-threatening allergen into their crusts and has been telling me that there is none of that in the pie that I want, so not only have they been trying to kill me, I can no longer have anything from their restaurant.

I am seriously having a bad food week over here.

I’m the one who didn’t feel well enough to take a shower, even though I needed one. I’m the one who really wanted to go to an event and didn’t have the energy to take transit there, so I had to pay a cab to ensure that I would go. I’m the one who couldn’t eat any of the meat items at the café because they were all migraine triggers. I’m the one who had to take more medicine during a board game with people that I’d just met because my allergy attack came back. I’m the one whose hands were shaking and had to take a second panic pill during the game because the allergy attack was bad enough to cause an adrenaline surge that I'm still oversensitive to. I’m the one who went to the event hoping that a cute guy would show up, went through the expense and the crap—and didn’t have him show up**. I’m the one who walked to the bus stop disappointed at the end of the night with a heavy bag and a mostly empty stomach. I’m the one who almost missed my stop and doesn’t remember walking home from the bus stop. I’m the one who had to recheck what time I took allergy pills after I got home because my tongue was swelling for the third time that day—and discovered that it wasn’t long enough ago to take more.

I'm the one who has been running on a mostly empty stomach for over two days and really needs some food. I'm the one going back to bed instead of eating because I have no desire to eat.

I’m the one who posted to Facebook that I could really use some support from my friends, hoping that specific people who can actually help would reply. And they didn’t. I was the one hoping that someone that can help me feel better would drag me out of my apartment and buy me lunch so I would eat something. And they didn't respond. You did, knowing that you cannot provide the help that I asked for.

I get it. You like me. How fantastic for you. But if I ask who wants to get together today and you live in another state, I am already aware that you can’t. You don’t actually have to tell me that you can’t. It really doesn’t need to be said. At all. Ever. You make me feel like under the strain of all this crap, you expect me to be thinking about you. You make me feel like you are trying to cheer me up by reminding me that you think I’m sexy for the bazillionth time—all of you. You make me feel like you want my attempt to cheer myself up to be all about you and your penis—and I promise, guys, if I were interested in your penis, I would have told you that by now.

I asked my friends for help and you made me feel harassed and unimportant. I know that wasn’t your intention but I honestly don’t give a shit what your intentions are right now. Me asking for support is not about your penis. It’s just not. And I wish you’d leave your penis out of this.

If any cute guys or lunch-buyers who actually live near me want to try to cheer me up, text me because I give up for today.

* No, not peanuts. Curry powder.
**He said that he might show up but wasn't sure, so this is disappointing but not his fault.

Dear Techbros, We Need to Talk (Again) and This Time, You Need to Listen

I know, ello. The needs of women online don’t occur to you and since your project has no women who are listened to, you don’t handle women's needs. But then some women complain, ugh like women do, and you design some features to attempt to placate them. However, your project has no women who are listened to, so your solution doesn’t actually fix the problem or it makes some other problem worse.

The thing is: 50% of your intended audience is female, 4% of your intended audience is lgbtq, 2% of your intended audience is intersex, and 28% are not white. That means that about 80% 70%* of your intended audience is minorities that have different needs than you. However, you are still designing everything for yourself, then only after complaints, making patronizingly incomplete solutions for that 70%:

You will have the ability to block specific users from looking at your Ello feed and profile, and from commenting on your posts. We’re also adding a simple way to report uncool behavior.

You need to get it into your heads that you are not the people who can design products for women and minorities, that women and minorities count, and that there are women and minorities who will help you with this shit so maybe you should throw out “culture fit” for a few seconds and hire us. Then take a few minutes to listen to us. You don’t need to hire us because it looks good politically. You don’t need to hire us because HR is on your case. You need to hire us because your product design is harmed by your lack of diversity!

I feel for the guys who made ello because they made this product and they had it in public beta at just the wrong time. Then all the people mad at Facebook jumped into the beta, slamming it and scaling it way past what it was designed for-- in a single day. It must have felt great until the servers started falling down, and now the hosting costs must be skyrocketing before they have a payment system in place. ello guys, you’re in a tough position that’s very stressful and now you’re getting complaints that don’t sound real to you because you’re not trying to hide from a stalker and you’re not trying to hide your children from your abusive ex who’s court-forbidden to contact them. You took a step back and you recognized just for a moment that this is something that some people really care about, but probably not many people, right? You fell into the "it doesn’t affect me or my friends so it must be rare," trap didn't you?

But the latest stats are 1-in-4 women are domestic violence victims, 1-in-6 women are rape or attempted rape victims, 1-in-12 women have been stalked. Life is different for women than for men. I don't mean that domestic and sexual violence against men doesn't count. Those are very important issues as well! But I do mean that 1-in-4 is very different than 1-in-20, 1-in-6 is very different from 1-in-33, 1-in-12 is very different from 1-in-45. The statistics for rape, stalking, and domestic violence are very different for women and men. Add in the power differences and the physical differences between women in men in our society, and you end up with very different needs. All of these are things that women need to work around when using social media.

Guys have told me that they know that women lie about rape all the time because none of their women friends have been raped, which means that rape is rare. That makes those guys precisely the people that rape victims will hide their history from. Women will only confide that to other women or to men who seem to sympathize. If you don't know any women who've been raped, you might want to look at your own behavior to find out why they haven't told you. ello's PR response has been downright haughty and if that’s what you guys are like in real life, your friends are probably not going to confess these things to you—even if they are your employees! Those 1-in-20 men, 1-in-33 men, 1-in-45 men face a huge amount of stigma based on being victimized while male and they are less likely offer that information than women are. Do you have any male rape, stalking, or domestic violence victims on your staff? Probably none that will admit it.

ello launched with no way to make a feed private; anyone who hit follow could see the whole feed. Women who are avoiding stalkers aren’t going to use a product that sends “woot! Got paid! I’m going out on the town tooooonite!” to everyone— including that guy who for the last 2 years has been showing up where they go to walk by them whispering threats and slurs. People complained and you doubled down on your “but transparency” librotarianism but people kept complaining, so you decided to add a block account feature—which does not solve the problem that I just pointed out because you don’t understand the problem! The victim would have to know the account of her stalker to block it, which means that he won't tell her which account is his!

And then there’s online harassment. Let’s say that the manosphere goes after petticoatdespot on your service. They can create infinite accounts to send messages to me from. So you set up a block by user function! Solved! Except that again… they can create infinite accounts to send messages from. You’ve decided upon the Whack-A-Mole security service, with crime victims wielding the rubber mallet-- only the moles are Mogwai and mole box sits over a stream. Seriously, dudes, I made 4 accounts in the first hour and it was only that slow because it’s a PITA to add a google account when you have three other google accounts open on your computer at the time. There are proven solutions to some of these harassment problems; the problem doesn’t apply to you so you don’t understand the problem, which makes you fail to identify those solutions.

The consequence, frankly, is that you include criminals and exclude crime victims. And that's pretty messed up.

I'm not faulting you for not realizing in advance what women's needs are or trans people's needs or black people's needs. I fault you for not being diverse enough to have someone on your staff saying “but what if reddit finds out that I work in tech?” I fault you for thinking only of yourself and stereotypes of others. I'm faulting you for not realizing that in designing for yourself and only yourself, you're treating the other 70% of the world like they don't matter.

I get it! I really do! Our brains lack the ability to empathize, especially with people with whom we have outgroup bias. It is literally science that you do not have an understanding the needs of women online. The question is: do you want to cater to the small part of that 30% demographic that is incensed that anyone might try to include the needs of the other 70% or does your ingroup favoritism require that you cater only to that 30%?

Which seems like the better business plan?


ETA: It didn't occur to me until this morning when this was shared by a visually impaired friend that the photo navigation systems with no names and no alt tag with names is terrible usability for screen readers. That's not an issue that would occur to me naturally because I am not visually impaired, just like it won't occur naturally to men that women might need privacy features to avoid online stalking. It's really not a bad thing that we don't know everyone's needs by default; it's just a bad thing that we exclude people from the process enough to have end products that are awesome for ~30% of the population.


* ETA2: I made an error in the original math (carrying too many ones) and estimated 20% straight, white male. This should have been 30%. The percentages have been updated accordingly for the rest of the piece. Thanks to Turner Morgan for pointing this out.

Mithridates, He Died Old

It's one of those anniversaries that one can't escape.

 

I used to celebrate it with a nice dinner out and dancing with my friends. I sent out invitations in advance and called it anti-Homecoming. I never told them what we were celebrating, just that it was a personal tradition and I refuse to celebrate Homecoming. Then I admitted to myself that this was simply refusing to deal with it and I opted for a quiet dinner with a select few who knew. It turned into warning a few people that I might be upset that day and being right-- then discovering that I was wrong. This year, despite working for five days now on a blog post about that day and the events that followed, it didn't occur to me what the date was until it had passed. Twenty-seven years. Twenty-six years. Twenty-three years.

 

Twenty-seven years ago I was shoved into a pit. Twenty-six years ago, I was buried alive. Twenty-three years ago, I set a plan in motion to rise from the grave. Twenty-two years ago my head finally emerged. Twenty years ago, I took the hand of the person in the pit next door and we pulled for the other because we couldn't pull for ourselves. Seventeen years ago, I let go and started pulling for me. One year ago, I pulled my last foot from the grave. One day ago, the remains of the dirt had been washed away. Today, I noticed that my skin was clean.

 

Twenty-three years of freedom to be free. Twenty-three years because I deserve freedom.

Data and Dating 2: OKCupid Paid Services: A-List

OKCupid makes money in 3 ways (that I've seen so far).

1. Advertising
2. A-List: a set of site features only available to paying users (removes ads)
3. Boosts: 15 minutes of being presented to a larger than normal set of users

I don't care much about advertising. I don't use an ad blocker, although doing so might keep Flash Player from crashing so much and having so many memory leaks. But a site that provides me a service free of charge, should be able to make money off of me in a different way. What they provide to me costs them money; if they can't make money, why would they provide the service?  That said, in the case of OKCupid, I recommend that women turn on A-List.

 

I'll cover Boosts in the next post, because there's more data to look at and the A-List benefits are long.

A-List

Invisible Browsing

IMO, the most valuable feature of A-List is invisible browsing. Without A-List, if you go to someone's profile, it displays a popup to them for a few seconds and puts you in their visitor list. Let's say that you go to someone's profile and you decide that you don't want to talk to them; they have a notification that you were there and may follow up on that. This is what I initially got A-List for and having it meant that I could go to guys' profiles and spend some time looking through their answers without letting them know that I did. This helped in the CreepDar creation and testing, especially when I went to that missing stair's profile and caught him on the ethics section.

 

But the real value comes in elsewhere and I knew that this would happen. I cancelled A-List because I couldn't pay the bill on the day that it was due. I went without it for about 2 weeks while I caught up. During that time, I got a message from a guy who looked like a decent match, so I looked through his profile and his questions. He got dinged on every potential stalker/abuser question that he answered, which was 3 or 4. Everything else looked fine. However, since I looked without A-List, he got a notification that I viewed his profile; I immediately got a popup that he viewed mine, so I think he followed the popup that he got.

 

I didn't respond to his message, which had said that he read my profile and I'm hilarious and-- I admit that's actually what showed up in the email notification. I didn't read the rest of the message because I have him a pass after reviewing his questions. Several days later, I got another message from the guy asking if he'd set off my CreepDar.

 

Hey dude, if you think that someone probably thinks you're creepy, don't message them to follow up on that. That's creepy. If you'd been on the borderline, that would have been what pushed you over. Not answering is an answer, especially if you know that someone saw that you messaged. Ick.

 

I'm so happy to have invisible browsing back.

 

Increased Inbox Size

There's a feature (available without A-List) to filter out messages from people that aren't a n% match or higher, with the default set to 70. Women, you'll probably want to turn that filter on. You may or may not want to set the "seeking" filter so that you only see messages from guys in your area, looking for women your age, and who are single. I'm a fat lady with a huge rack and a brain the size of a planet, living in a major tourist destination that also has a sizable population of socially unfit dudes. And I don't mean socially awkward dudes; they're cute. I mean dudes who have been reading too many PUA articles and have set up profiles talking about how they're alpha and know how to treat a lady, but answer the "No means no" question "Never, they all want me. They just don't know it." *barf*

 

Because of the way that I answered my questions, if someone is being honest and is looking for sex while they are in town, they will probably fall below 70%. Barfalpha? Way under 70%. Guys who are just looking for sex are going to mostly fall under 70%. These are all filtered out and retained. The awesome thing about the increased inbox size is that I never have to look at those messages, which is good because these are my inbox stats:
Messages from single men near me that are at least 70% match: 10
Messages filtered out: 72

 

That's 72 dudes who were not a good match who messaged me anyway-- and because my inbox is huge, I don't have to ever make more room. I never have to open the filtered messages. I did anyway; here's some samples:

• "Hi, may I ask about your calves?"
• "We would make cute babies." (My questions say that I don't want to make babies and would prefer to adopt.)
• And approximately 50 messages saying that I have a nice smile, even though I'm barely smiling in my profile pic.

I didn't open them to find out what the rest of the messages were. They were probably form letters.

 

Another good thing about increased inbox size: it doesn't get turned off if you turn off A-List, so you never have to venture into the unwashed masses. This might save you from some of these.

 

Who Likes You?

I ask out most guys that I date. Yes, it is putting yourself out there and making yourself a little bit vulnerable. The person that you like might insult you or not respond or something else that's not ideal for you. It's inevitable that if you ask people out, you will sometimes fail and that can hurt. It's even harsher for women who ask men out, because it's going against the gender mold, which could be disturbing to the guy even if he would otherwise like you.

Thankfully, with A-List, you can look through your list of people who like you and check for ones that you like, then ask them out. It's much less risky, much less stressful, and much less time consuming. Unless, like me, you find one guy that you like in your likes list and wonder why all of those people with 3% match, 50% enemy like you. (I know, OKCupid did the research and discovered that most people don't even read the profiles; they go by profile pic alone.) 

Special Match Search Options

If you go to the "browse matches" page or use the profile search, there's a form at the top of the page to let you filter matches. A-List will allow you to filter by people who answered a specific question with the answers that you approve. That probably doesn't make much sense, but here's an example: I won't date a guy who doesn't know what no means. I can click the "advanced" select box, pick "question answer," enter "no means no," click "no means no," and then pick the answer to that question that I want, which is "Always period."

 

I can do the same thing with "can overweight people still be sexy?" and filter out anyone who says no. Because really, if someone can't stand that I'm fat, there's no reason for me to ask him out.

 

Total of People Who Saw Your Profile in the Last 24 Hours

This is not a documented addition from A-List but it turned off when I lost A-List, so that's what it must be. In the right nav, there a box that contains the profile picture from your account and the "Boost" button. If you have A-List, it also displays the number of people who have seen your profile. How often you are shown to other users is algorithmic, meaning that the site has some code to figure out how frequently you should be shown, based on things about your account. According to reddit, you get more frequent placement if you update your profile, so you should update it every day for that benefit. I have created a document with a set of things to go into the "The Most Private Thing that I'm Willing to Admit;" if my count is dropping, I rotate that item.

If you have that number of displays count, you can keep track of your average and edit if your count is low. I average 1000+ per day in periods where I've edited every day. In theory, this increase of views would get me better results. I get very few likes from guys that I would date based on their profile, so this probably has a better ROI for people who have fewer security concerns than I do.

Conclusion

For me, A-List is worth it. If nothing else, it offers features that provide me with better personal security, exposing me to fewer creeps. Peace of mind for a month is worth at least the price of dinner out for one in SF. The 6-month plan is priced more like a Mission burrito.

One burrito per month for not having to deal with creepy messages? Sign me up!

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the MUNI

Yesterday, I spent approximately 18 minutes at a bus stop, fiddling with my phone while the guy next to me attempted to have a conversation. During the conversation, he implied that he was taking the same bus that I was, a bus that I would be on for 40 minutes. The last 3 minutes went like this:

Dude: Can I have your number?
Me: No.
Dude: Why not?
Me: Because I said so.
Dude: But why not?
Me: Because I don't want to.
Dude: Well, I'll give you my number.
Me: No.
Dude: But why not?
Me: I don't want it.
Dude: Well, can I have your number?
Me: No.
Dude: Why no?
Me: Because I said no.
Dude: I'll give you mine then.
Me: No.
Dude: Why no?
Me: I'm not interested.
Dude: Why not? I'll text you tonight! We're friends.
Me: I've known you for ten minutes.
Dude: Haha well, ok, I'll give you my number.
Me: No.
Dude: Well then give me your number.
Me: No.
Dude: For what reason?
Me: Because I said no and I think that's reason enough.
Dude: But why?
Me: Because I don't want to give it to you.
Dude: Then I'll give you my number.
Me: No.

Repeat.

At one point he said "But I'm a nice guy!" and I almost responded "But you're not even wearing a fedora!" (He probably wouldn't have gotten that joke.)

To top it off,  my legs were super hairy because I was too sick to shave last week and I barely had enough energy to get through a shower, so I wasn't exactly dressed to impress.

By the time I said "Because I said no and I think that's reason enough" the first time, three other people were at the bus stop, one woman eyeing him suspiciously and fiddling with her phone. I considered texting male friends until one called to pretend to be my boyfriend, but I shouldn't have to do that.

So I just said no over and over. I didn't lie, make excuses, panic, or lash out. I repeatedly told him that me saying so should be enough. He didn't get on my bus and I just went on with my day and had a good time.

So there, Dude.