What Women Want, According to the Designers of Women's Wearables

I learned this week that I love snakeskin, which is weird because everyone in my family has a debilitating phobia of snakes. I didn't know this about myself untilMica, a haute couture smart bracelet for women, told me so.

Mica also taught me that I love bracelets. This was surprising, because I've long argued that bracelets are annoying. They get in the way of my typing and cooking and scribbling and gesticulating. They make me a useless ornament. My husband used to buy me cheap bracelets for inconsequential holidays, and I eventually told him to knock it off because I needed my wrists free to work. But after looking at Mica and all the other smart bracelets that are so hot this holiday season, I realized I was wrong. Clearly, I owe my husband an apology.

Wearables have finally shown me what women really want.

Now, you might think that because I am me and I always have been, I should know what I like better than a marketing team. How could I learn so much about myself---nay, my entire gender---from a subset of connected fashion accessories? But of course, the truth is, the greatest mystery of all is knowing the secrets of your own heart. It took the brilliant marketers behind wearables for women to peer into my very soul and reveal myself to me.

It's not just me, though. It's all women. I've learned we long for shiny things that vibrate. We want pearls. We love self-involved names like Memi, which is of course pronounced Me! Me! We're suckers for gold and we’re not afraid to make a statement with chunky rings. We will not sacrifice elegance for connectivity; we want both, dammit! And above all, I've learned there’s nothing worse than a physically fit woman revealing how hard it is to be fit. That will not do. We want to have it all, and we want it all effortlessly.

It wasn't until now that I realized we women---who comprise more than half the people on this planet---are a great and powerful monolith. I thought we came in all variations, not least the bracelet-loving and the "bracelet meh-ing," the "vibrator-necklace-toting" and the "vibrator-necklace-declining." I thought we spanned all nations, races, ideologies, sexualities, proclivities and sensitivities. I thought we were beautiful in our innumerable differences and eccentricities. I thought we were just like everyone else: gloriously ourselves.

But then I saw all these wearables for women and realized we're each exactly the same.

I guess I love pink again, just like I did at 3 years old when Disney told me to. I thought I had grown up and rebelled against the pressure to be that kind of girl. But I guess I'm changed. I guess if I ever owned a gun, it'd be that pink lady Ruger.

Of course, the wearables market is only doing what Hollywood, cell phone manufacturers, every razor maker ever, the automotive industry, earplug companies, pen makers, and novelty toilet producers have done before. But the tech industry has a particularly unnecessary penchant for taking something that is fundamentally gender neutral and lacquering it in pink, appealing to society's basest stereotypes, and making women feel "other" under the auspices of being "personalized for" and catered to. When women walk, and our pedometers track our strides, there is nothing particular about it. We're vertical miracles of flesh and muscle plodding across space and time, just like every other human. Our gadgets don't need to be different. A phone is a phone is a phone. A fitness tracker, too.