more on sexism in "The Social Network"
New World, Same Old Gender Roles
By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
NEW YORK - It’s been the film of the moment since it came out of the gate early this month with big box-office pop, Oscar buzz and dozens of articles and blogs dissecting and hyping it. No question, “The Social Network” - the story of Facebook and its co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg - is as millennial a story as we have right now, a cultural touchstone, fast-paced and riveting, an explosive drama about the new tech generation.
(...)
But perhaps more keenly, “The Social Network” exposes a strain of sexism that runs wide and deep among the young nerdy entrepreneurs and exalted geek geniuses - the future tech empire builders of the Web 2.0 culture, all men, aspiring masters of the universe.
Where are the women at the start-up of one of the most successful Web sites of the new century?
In the movie, at least, the women are figurines in the background, one face melding into another, one lithe body identical to the next.
There are plenty of girls, to be sure - mostly Asian (presumably because of the common wisdom that Asians are good at math). They are the Web world’s version of rock ’n’ roll groupies, toadies, trophies, gold diggers and floozies.
They’re sexy, seductive, willing and eager to serve and service the boys, not unlike the waist-cinched women in “Mad Men,” the cable television show about the dominant and domineering men who ran the Madison Avenue advertising industry at its height in the 1960s.
It’s as if no time had elapsed in more than half a century - fashions have changed, and lip service (perhaps more, now) is given to women’s equality.
But in both worlds - in the 1960s and the 2000s - it is men who are the strivers, producers, creators, innovators, entrepreneurs and, in the end, billionaires.
Few movie critics mentioned the blatant sexism revealed in the film - that is, sexism that apparently ran rampant at Harvard among highly educated, brilliant and bratty young men brought up in the age of modern feminism. (The real-life Mr. Zuckerberg, the only son of a psychiatrist mother and dentist father, was born and bred, along with three sisters, in affluent Westchester County in suburban New York.)
But it wasn’t only Mr. Zuckerberg, with his preppy pedigree from Phillips Exeter Academy, and his band of geek brothers who treated women as disposable one-night stands. The Harvard men of the final clubs - fraternity-like societies - engaged in raucous, lewd nights, when girls from nearby schools were bused in to Cambridge to party hearty at drunken, drugged, sexually driven all-nighters.
That brings up the obvious question: What’s wrong with these women? Except for the girl who breaks up with Mr. Zuckerberg in the memorable opening scene because, among other things, he is a jerk (she uses a more pungent word), all the young women in the movie are empty-headed, giggly, drug-sniffing manipulative strumpets.
The film’s screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”), may have an answer.
Mr. Sorkin has said he was shocked at the extent of the sexism he discovered doing research for the movie and reading the book on which the movie is based, “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich.
“It’s not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about,” Mr. Sorkin wrote in a recent comment on a blog by the TV writer Ken Levine .
“Facebook was born during a night of incredible misogyny,” Mr. Sorkin said. “The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them….”
“I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people,” Mr. Sorkin continued. “These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the ’80s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now.
“The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them).”
The story of Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook fits into this new world of hackers and algorithms and geek geniuses. Not too long ago, a newspaper Web editor, female, middle-aged, told me that when she looks around her digital newsroom she sees plenty of female producers and editors. What catches her attention, though, are the Web developers, the creative brains, the innovators, the ones who stand a chance at glory - all young, and all male.
“The Social Network” is just a movie. It’s not a documentary. It’s not a biopic. We could leave it at that, but the harder truth is that, fiction or not, it reflects to a chilling degree a cultural reality.
from the IHT
OP's notes: I thought this was one of the smarter responses to this issue I've read, and thought you all might be interested. Also, fwiw, in the entire Sorkin blog comment, he states pretty clearly that he didn't embellish the female characters, especially Eduardo's girlfriend, which I thought was interesting. But the point this article makes -and which is why I liked it- is that that isn't really the issue, but that the sexism in the movie was pretty representative of sexism in society as a whole, and especially in the tech world. Sigh. Opinions?
By LUISITA LOPEZ TORREGROSA
NEW YORK - It’s been the film of the moment since it came out of the gate early this month with big box-office pop, Oscar buzz and dozens of articles and blogs dissecting and hyping it. No question, “The Social Network” - the story of Facebook and its co-founder, Mark Zuckerberg - is as millennial a story as we have right now, a cultural touchstone, fast-paced and riveting, an explosive drama about the new tech generation.
(...)
But perhaps more keenly, “The Social Network” exposes a strain of sexism that runs wide and deep among the young nerdy entrepreneurs and exalted geek geniuses - the future tech empire builders of the Web 2.0 culture, all men, aspiring masters of the universe.
Where are the women at the start-up of one of the most successful Web sites of the new century?
In the movie, at least, the women are figurines in the background, one face melding into another, one lithe body identical to the next.
There are plenty of girls, to be sure - mostly Asian (presumably because of the common wisdom that Asians are good at math). They are the Web world’s version of rock ’n’ roll groupies, toadies, trophies, gold diggers and floozies.
They’re sexy, seductive, willing and eager to serve and service the boys, not unlike the waist-cinched women in “Mad Men,” the cable television show about the dominant and domineering men who ran the Madison Avenue advertising industry at its height in the 1960s.
It’s as if no time had elapsed in more than half a century - fashions have changed, and lip service (perhaps more, now) is given to women’s equality.
But in both worlds - in the 1960s and the 2000s - it is men who are the strivers, producers, creators, innovators, entrepreneurs and, in the end, billionaires.
Few movie critics mentioned the blatant sexism revealed in the film - that is, sexism that apparently ran rampant at Harvard among highly educated, brilliant and bratty young men brought up in the age of modern feminism. (The real-life Mr. Zuckerberg, the only son of a psychiatrist mother and dentist father, was born and bred, along with three sisters, in affluent Westchester County in suburban New York.)
But it wasn’t only Mr. Zuckerberg, with his preppy pedigree from Phillips Exeter Academy, and his band of geek brothers who treated women as disposable one-night stands. The Harvard men of the final clubs - fraternity-like societies - engaged in raucous, lewd nights, when girls from nearby schools were bused in to Cambridge to party hearty at drunken, drugged, sexually driven all-nighters.
That brings up the obvious question: What’s wrong with these women? Except for the girl who breaks up with Mr. Zuckerberg in the memorable opening scene because, among other things, he is a jerk (she uses a more pungent word), all the young women in the movie are empty-headed, giggly, drug-sniffing manipulative strumpets.
The film’s screenwriter, Aaron Sorkin (“The West Wing”), may have an answer.
Mr. Sorkin has said he was shocked at the extent of the sexism he discovered doing research for the movie and reading the book on which the movie is based, “The Accidental Billionaires,” by Ben Mezrich.
“It’s not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about,” Mr. Sorkin wrote in a recent comment on a blog by the TV writer Ken Levine .
“Facebook was born during a night of incredible misogyny,” Mr. Sorkin said. “The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them….”
“I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people,” Mr. Sorkin continued. “These aren’t the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the ’80s. They’re very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now.
“The women they surround themselves with aren’t women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them).”
The story of Mr. Zuckerberg and Facebook fits into this new world of hackers and algorithms and geek geniuses. Not too long ago, a newspaper Web editor, female, middle-aged, told me that when she looks around her digital newsroom she sees plenty of female producers and editors. What catches her attention, though, are the Web developers, the creative brains, the innovators, the ones who stand a chance at glory - all young, and all male.
“The Social Network” is just a movie. It’s not a documentary. It’s not a biopic. We could leave it at that, but the harder truth is that, fiction or not, it reflects to a chilling degree a cultural reality.
from the IHT
OP's notes: I thought this was one of the smarter responses to this issue I've read, and thought you all might be interested. Also, fwiw, in the entire Sorkin blog comment, he states pretty clearly that he didn't embellish the female characters, especially Eduardo's girlfriend, which I thought was interesting. But the point this article makes -and which is why I liked it- is that that isn't really the issue, but that the sexism in the movie was pretty representative of sexism in society as a whole, and especially in the tech world. Sigh. Opinions?