Work
The Appallingly Sexist Origins of Facebook
How forward-thinking techies are backwards about women.
According to Ben Mezrich's juicy new expose about the birth of Facebook, The Accidental Billionaires, 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, Fast Company, and Fox were chronically unable to quote her without mentioning her blond hair. Slimier traces of sexism rose from last September's Details spread on "The Playboys of Tech," in which wunderkinds like iminlikewithyou's Charles Forman eagerly expounded on "[website] founder fetishist" groupies. Ditto for the (now defunct) hotness-ranking site Dig a Silicon Valley Girl, 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 that Culver slept her way to the top.
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Comments
Zuckerberg is a tool too, but
By: jdbizzy | Thu, 01/07/2010 - 17:47
Zuckerberg is a tool too, but I sometimes wonder who the bigger tool is, he or the millions of people who waste hours on Facebook giving his creation the billion dollar valuation.
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This whole piece is pointless:
By: nagatuki | Wed, 12/30/2009 - 11:12
"Zuckerberg has already distanced himself from the book—he declined to participate from the beginning"
~~~~~~~~~~~
Way to... bury the lede? I mean, I understand - you needed people to read the whole thing through - but if it ends with "oh, and by the way, the subject of the book claims it's all false and didn't participate in any way," aren't you then just going on uncorroborated, possible fiction to indict someone's character?
~~~~~~~~~
I don't know what Zuckerberg's like, but your few, flimsy examples -- he was hurt by a girl who rejected him, he thought it'd be funny to compare girl/animal pictures (which, at most, is juvenile, not misogynist), and possibly "got some" after - shock - he made money -- aren't enough to even flutter this feminist's outrage.
Evolutionary Excuses
By: ladymoonstone5 | Wed, 09/09/2009 - 12:27
To the unenlightened boor who claims that men will always see women as nothing but objects, and that women like it that way:
Nonsense. Complete and utter poppycock of the most cowardly and self-justifying kind.
You are more than a collection of chromosomes or a product of evolution. You (presumably) have a fully functioning human brain, capable of introspection and rational thought. You have the option of behaving like an intelligent being or a knuckle-dragging primate, but do not pretend that there is no choice. When you objectify women, when you refuse to acknowledge them as people, you are making a conscious decision. Palming it off as "biology" is nothing more nor less than justification of inexcusable and, frankly, stupid behavior.
By the way, not all men would agree with you. Plenty of men live in the twenty-first century. And your "disclaimer" that you are a guy is hardly necessary. You are definitely a guy. That does not make you a man.
Biology is not destiny.
By: vim876 | Sun, 08/09/2009 - 23:19
In relation to sexism being a response to high school female rejection, I call horse crap. My partner, and many of my male friends, were tech geeks who could barely talk to girls in high school. However, they are decent people who were raised right, and they learned to talk to girls in college and found geeky girlfriends they respect. There are reactions to low social skills besides misogyny, like...talking to girls.
In terms of the idea of the "natural" quality of male-conquest-female-allure model, no. No. Maybe you've never heard of Sweden, recently voted the best place for women to live. The culture recognizes gender differences without inferring inequality. Men and women are different, but there is nothing inherent about the idea of men conquering and women focusing on attractiveness. The Swedes, by making gender equity a priority, have made great strides. See this article: http://www.marieclaire.com/world-reports/news/international/best-country-5. American (and most of the world's) culture is simply organized around the sex with more physical strength, because whoever wins the fight to establish a society affects its culture, and our culture institutionalizes sexism. Here's an excellent example from a recent issue of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/opinion/15herbert.html. Bob Herbert makes a far better argument than I can.
A LOGICAL QUESTION EVERY FEMINIST SHOULD ANSWER
By: p.bateman | Fri, 07/31/2009 - 07:56
if you feminist lot hate the frat boys,
why dont you hate the girls who willingly become their objects?
.
.
if you think the frat boy sex culture is sleazy, sex crazed, misogynist and objectifying, demeaning to women, and if you hate the frat boys for that, if you hold them responsible for that, then why the hell you dont hate the the girls, who willingly show up on frat parties and let 5 drunk guys run a train on her, too? why dont you put the responsibility equally on the frat boys, the girls, and the authorities (for letting the frat parties happening)?
why the hell do you absolve willing women of the responsibility associated with something you dont approve of?
.
.
will any feminist answer this question
Facebook has been a trend
By: TierraJ | Wed, 07/22/2009 - 03:37
Facebook has been a trend since it started to boom few years ago. It is a social networking that can connect you to your friends and colleagues or meet new people. However, it can also be used for inappropriate acts. Heather Zeo is a name that will live in infamy. Despite the numerous times where a perpetrator has gone to jail, Heather Zeo it was her turn to pull a Mary Kay Letourneau and do something which anyone knows is wrong. It seems Mrs. Zeo (turns out she's married, and has children) contacted the boys she had the most inappropriate of relationships with on Facebook, as they were students of hers at North Penn High School, and when it was discovered, she got handcuffed – and maybe some payday loans for a lawyer. The prosecutors will be asking for prison time, so Heather Zeo will need some big payday advance loans for an attorney.
Let's talk REAL power
By: george | Wed, 07/22/2009 - 01:30
This story is cute about the sexism, until you realize it means dollars and cents to women working in the field. Where are the women starting technology companies? Why when you walk in these companies, women are only in the "chick" jobs like marketing and maybe web art? I work as a software architect, and a week doesn't go by where I'm not mistaken for the office admin. This is 2009. If you are a woman in technology, during layoffs, you are much more likely to be laid off. You are MUCH less likely to get a professorship or a research grant. It takes you much longer with more qualifications to get promoted or to get capital. If you are a Nazi, a hater of women, and some races, technology is the safe place for you to work as a man. Almost no one writes about this. They have a big NO GirlZ sign and, as a society, if you see women, they are in a dress, showing a lot of skin holding a drink at some "yay dude!" technology gathering. Or in marketing. Safely. Not anywhere near the creation of architecture or ownership. Chicks are cheerleaders.
A story on Facebook d-bags getting laid in bathroom stalls gets a lot of coverage. A story about women struggling for equity in technology in the "non-chick" jobs: nothing. I've even seen it where women who declare themselves feminists who work on a web business have men handle all their technology, as if they can't get past the geek stereotype themselves. It's not true that women can't handle high detail, possibly isolated work because women are pushed into accountant work, auditing work, editing work, and all matter of work evaluated on boring detail where they work quietly at their desks. In high school and college, you get the not-so-subtle message that technology is not for girls because they cannot focus and do detailed coding - when actually almost ever job that is incredibly boring is dominated by women (and if you are a creator and owner, it is NOT boring). Why can't women create a Family Guy? Where is the cartoon created by and directed and animated by women?
Software creation, animation, game creation all involve languages (women are supposed to be better at languages) and having the power to create.
Why is it nine times harder for a woman to get startup capital for software than a dude in a dirty t-shirt with 3 days growth and fewer qualifications? Why don't young women ask why they can't become owners and creators and have a seat at the high-paying non-chick jobs? Why can't chicks get promoted in technology to manage all the super cool dudes? Because if chicks managed and they had to worry about their approval, you wouldn't get so many haters. If the FaceBook dudes had female professors in computer science, females approving their capital, females that managed them (I'm guessing many of the dudes in technology NEVER had a female technology manager - imagine that. EVER. And probably NO female technology professor - imagine that, yet it's true. Young men in haut technology live in a world where they never see or answer to a woman in authority. It is like the KKK. Our Supreme Court is more diverse than most software design and architecture groups.)
FYI...
By: scifun | Tue, 07/21/2009 - 20:14
The "fuck truck" runs from Wellesley College to MIT and Harvard. It's official name, as you can look up in Wikipedia, is the Wellesley College Senate bus. Be horrified at the behavior of the nerds all you want, but many of the young feminists at Wellesley are willing participants in the social scenes at MIT and Harvard. Also, I second the comments on being careful about jokes on digg and such referring to things like Family Guy and on not overreacting about a reaction to a date failure. Also, Mezrich is a tool, so big surprise that he wrote something to inflame the responses. I do think Zuckerberg is a tool too, but I sometimes wonder who the bigger tool is, he or the millions of people who waste hours on Facebook giving his creation the billion dollar valuation.
Asperger's
By: Quindi | Mon, 07/20/2009 - 17:16
It seems many of the very tech-smart men who end up at these elite schools have some degree of Asperger's syndrome - limited ability to feel empathy or read emotional cues. They lack innate talent for interpersonal relations the way that some other people lack innate talent at math. Then they become bitter that women aren't attracted to them and can react in these immature, hurtful ways.
A good high school would never allow a student to graduate without at least some training in basic math. Yet we allow young people to graduate without any explicit training in social skills, even when it is clear they have huge deficits. Why is this? Eventually most of these young male geeks do figure out social skills by trial and error, later in life, but why not simply teach them, straightforwardly, early on? It would save them and the young women they interact with a lot of pain.
Nothing Surprising
By: lawdog67 | Mon, 07/20/2009 - 16:50
Disclaimer: I'm a guy.
I see nothing at all surprising in Zuckerberg's actions, even assuming the book is 100% accurate. Men have ALWAYS seen women as objects of desire and (possibly) conquest. What in the world makes you think that getting paid more at work or being on your own or whatever will ever change this biological truth?
For their part, women have ALWAYS sought to be or become those objects of desire or conquest. What makes you think that that has changed, either? Or that it will?
Just look at advertising, the most purely-refined look into the human psyche: men's advertising is aimed at getting him laid. Women's advertising has lately followed the male pattern a bit, but in all honesty women's ads mainly focus on making women more appealing.
You're fighting human nature by expecting some other state of affairs - and you're going to lose.