Fun Chrome Extension Gender-Swaps The Internet

A blogger has created a fun new tool that switches the gender of all gendered words on webpages, yielding some amusing and thought-provoking results.

Danielle Sucher’s Chrome extension Jailbreak the Patriarchy swaps woman for man, she for he, Ms. for Mr., and so on (it has a little bit of trouble with her, since it can be an object or a possessive). The results are both entertaining and illuminating — swapping the genders really shows how ridiculous some stereotypes are, as well as what the world would look like if men’s and women’s roles were reversed. Below, a few examples:

Maureen Dowd’s column last week:

If you thought the recession had dampened interest in luxury accessories, you didn’t see the men lined up after daybreak at the Warwick Hotel on Thursday. A room there was the scene of one of New York’s most feral anthropological tableaus: the biannual Manolo Blahnik sample sale. […] Not since Cinderella’s stepsisters mutilated their feet to squeeze into that glass slipper have men leveled such fierce desire at footwear. At last fall’s sale, two men dumped their babies on Manolo employees in the lobby as they sped into the room.

A Times article on the effect of evangelical Christianity on fertility in Africa:

Traditionally, Kassena-Nankana men are not involved in everyday decision making, even about household matters. But the born-again men were forming committees, making speeches and organizing outings, fund-raisers and other activities. Tradition in Kassena-Nankana also forbids men to communicate with ancestors and other spiritual beings; only women can do that. But the Christian men were speaking directly to Jesus about their problems. She was, many of them may have felt, the first woman ever to listen.

From a Cosmo article that Jailbreak retitled “How To Tell Her You’ve Been Faking It”:

Last fall, the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University released the results from their National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. One glaring finding: Women thought men were having more orgasms than they actually were. Eighty-four percent of girls in the survey said their partner had experienced orgasm during the last time they had sex. But only 64 percent of men confess to actually having experienced an O. That’s a pretty major gap between perception and reality! We decided to investigate further and conducted a poll on Cosmopolitan.com. Eighty six percent of readers said they don’t think their girl knows when they fake it, and 90 percent of fakers say they don’t plan on telling their girl the truth. But delivering academy award-worthy performance in the boudoir merely encourages your girl to continue doing things in bed that don’t get you off. And that’s a damn shame.

From another Cosmo article, this one called “The Hottest Things to Do During Halftime”:

Whether you’re a legit fan or just enjoy watching jacked girls run around in skin-tight pants, we’re psyched for football season. And to make this Sunday’s big game a little more fun, we asked women to tell us what they’d love a man to do at halftime. No surprise here — their answers all involved sex, nachos, and you in practically nothing.

Her Halftime Fantasy: “That he’ll sit next to me in a jersey and matching panties.”

Your Game Plan: Forget the cheerleaders and put on your own damn show! Finally, the NFL is giving us some sexy options when it comes to fan wear.

From AskMen.com’s “Why Do Nice Girls Finish Last?”:

You hear this over and over again: Nice girls finish last. Men just don’t want a nice girl; they want the jerk, the bad girl. So you think to yourself, “I’ve got to learn how to be a complete player. I’ve got to learn how to put men down. I’ve got to learn how to not call him, how to make his want me. I’ve got to play games. I’ve got to create attraction that way — that’s what’s going to work.”

An excerpt from Steve Harvey’s famous Act Like A Gentleman, Think Like A Woman:

“We need to talk.”

For a woman, few words are as menacing as those four — especially when a man is the one saying them and she’s on the receiving end. Those four words can mean only two things to women: either we did something wrong or, worse, you really literally just want to talk. Now, we understand that we’re not the essence of perfection and there are going to be times when you’re mad at us and need to let us know it; we get that, though we don’t necessarily want to have to concentrate on an hourlong angry lecture about how we screwed up. But even more? No woman wants to sit around gabbing with you like we’re one of your boyfriends. Ever. It’s just not in our DNA to lounge around, sip coffee, and dab at our eyes with tissue as if we’re in an AA meeting or on some psychologist’s couch trying to get things off our chest. When women are talking, and especially when they’re listening, it’s with purpose.

And at left, a screenshot of our own homepage, featuring Erin’s post on “paternity leave.”