The Appallingly Sexist Origins of Facebook

According to Ben Mezrich's juicy new expose about the birth of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires [2], founder Mark Zuckerberg wasn't lusting after cash, fame, or resume-filler when he came up with the idea for the social networking site. Rather, he was just lusting. According to Mezrich, Zuckerberg needed something to soothe his rage after a girl rejected him.

No, really. On page 42, Mezrich depicts Zuckerberg returning from a blind date, blowing into his dorm room in a fury, and declaring on his blog, “***** is a bitch. I need something to take my mind off her.”

By page 45, he’s working on the program.

Facebook began in 2003 with two Harvard students: the now-famous programmer Zuckerberg, 25, and his classmate Eduardo Saverin, 26, who bankrolled the original operation and is no longer affiliated with the company. Both, according to the book, were self-proclaimed nerds who couldn’t get a date to save their life. The connection between not getting any and inventing Facebook would seem preposterous, if Mezrich weren’t so consistent in portraying Facebook’s founders as sexually frustrated. He measures each step of Facebook’s success in sexual currency. When the site goes viral at Harvard, Saverin and Zuckerberg take two girls into a bar bathroom and have sex in adjoining stalls, and when it picks up buzz on the venture capital circuit, Zuckerberg goes home with a Victoria’s Secret model. Even more damning: When Facebook is still in its early stages, Zuckerberg fantasizes about displaying girls’ photos next to shots of farm animals and having people choose the more attractive image.

That passage, in isolation, is a bit of a jaw-dropper. And yet it shocks without surprising, because Zuckerberg’s pig-versus-girl brainstorm fits as naturally in the current real-life Silicon Valley climate as it does in the book. The Valley is now ruled by the egalitarian technologies of sharing and social networking, but the cultural vibe is anything but progressive. And prehistoric woman-bashing is making a comeback.

The guys of this Valley generation—moguls, journalists and consumers alike—seem pretty comfortable not only harboring sexist views, but voicing them loudly and bluntly. Think of the puddle of media drool that collected when Google brought on VP of search Marissa Mayer: Outlets like BusinessWeek [3], Fast Company [4], and Fox [5] were chronically unable to quote her without mentioning her blond hair. Slimier traces of sexism rose from last September's Details spread [6] on "The Playboys of Tech," in which wunderkinds like iminlikewithyou's Charles Forman [7] eagerly expounded on "[website] founder fetishist" groupies. Ditto for the (now defunct) hotness-ranking site Dig a Silicon Valley Girl [8], where tech fanboys weighed in on the looks of ladies like Mayer and then-Pownce founder Leah Culver. In a separate, more malicious hit, Valleywag suggested [9] that Culver slept her way to the top.

Culver was also a target last November, when Fast Company published [10] “Women in Web 2.0,” its list of the most influential women in the game. The list was stacked with members of the new wave—Culver, Caterina Fake of Twitter, Gina Bianchini of Ning. And then the story was linked to the aggregator Digg, where a slew of commenters remarked [11] on which of the women they would have sex with: “Do her, wouldn’t do her ...” “Who hasn’t done her?” “Lose the pigtails and then we’ll talk.” According to the site’s media kit [12], Digg's audience is 94 percent male, 88 percent aged 18-39, and 52 percent employed in a tech job.

Masking chauvinist tendencies with a mellow veneer is part of Silicon Valley's history. The industry may have been started by shaggy-haired inventors toiling away in their garages, but it didn't take long for the Valley's original behemoths—systems, software, and search companies—to fall into the old-boy traditions of Wall Street and Washington. Women went virtually unmentioned as the technology made legends out of men like Jobs, Gates, Ellison. The Valley was born at the crossroads of two then-undisputed men’s fields: money and science. When women eventually pressed their way to the top of tech corporations, they became mired in controversy. Consider the debate over C-suite sexism ignited by Carly Fiorina’s exit from HP and Diane Green’s firing at VMware. Less well-known women hovering just beneath the executive level are still facing down blockages: A 2008 study revealed that Santa Clara County, home to Valley residents like Google, Yahoo!, and Apple, has the lowest rate of female executives in the state of California.

Still, the attitudes that pervade Accidental Billionaires and the Valley at large suggest that sexism 2.0 is uglier than its early versions. Mezrich’s book is lousy with bikini-clad chicks at frat parties, naked chicks in dorm hall lounges, imported chicks arriving at Harvard on a shuttle called “The Fuck Truck.” Not 10 pages go by without some sexual reference to women, ranging from piggish (celebrating “the first short skirt of the season” on campus) to jarring (Saverin explains to some friends why Jewish boys have to settle for scoring with Asian girls: “It’s not that guys like me are generally attracted to Asian girls. It’s that Asian girls are generally attracted to guys like me”).

With all the boobs and legs, there's not a single female character. Saverin and Zuckerberg’s chicks at Harvard (Asian, naturally!) each get a first name and a line or two apiece, but that’s it. It’s impossible to tell, of course, where the real story of Facebook ends and Mezrich’s embellishment begins. Zuckerberg has already distanced himself from the book—he declined to participate from the beginning—and some of the other principals may join him. Provided they’re better at P.R. than they are at getting women to date them.

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