Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution (22 page)

The getting of the girl is a pivotal part of this story. The story wouldn’t work if the girl wasn’t got. The hot girl, in fact, is the motivating factor, both the prize and the peril – she is the Dark Crystal, the One Ring, the McGuffin that makes the rest of the narrative hang together. She isn’t a real person, of course – that’d be inconvenient. In some variations of this story, the pretty, popular girl gets her comeuppance – usually humiliating rejection by the now universally popular Geek Boy – and is replaced by a less popular but equally pretty girl who has been pining for the protagonist since Act 1. The trouble is that if the story doesn’t work out that way, and in an economic system designed so most of us lose it really doesn’t usually work that way, people start looking for someone to blame.

‘The web is geared towards constructing subcultures and for many years operated as a subculture,’ says Maha Rafi Atal, a journalist who writes on gender and tech for Forbes and other sites. ‘There is a real truth to the idea that the men – and at the time it was mostly men – who first built the web were at the margins of social power in a traditional, high-school-cafeteria sense – and because a lot of them were young, the symbol of the social belonging they didn’t have was their inability to connect with women.’
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Even though everyone is now online, including the jocks, cheerleaders and cool kids, Atal explains that ‘the culture still operates on the basis of woman as the inscrutable enemy’.

The story of the Genius in the Basement is the creation myth of many of our social networks just as the story of the founding fathers is the creation myth of American capitalism: it may only tell part of the story, but it’s the part that makes the rest easier for the most privileged to understand. The Oscar-winning 2010 film
The Social Network
, which spins out the fractious formative years of Facebook into a heartwarming tale of one smart loser’s triumph over romantic adversity to become the world’s youngest billionaire, tells just this story.

In the first scene, a young Mark Zuckerberg, played by Jesse Eisenberg, is dumped by his girlfriend. He takes revenge by using his superior tech skills to create a site that allows his fellow students, presumably men, to rate the attractiveness of women at their college based on pictures grabbed without permission from Harvard servers, blogging sexual slurs about his recent ex at the same time. The site, FaceMash, goes viral: Zuckerberg has created an incredibly clever toy, broken codes, beaten the system, and made a tool that reduces every woman in his peer group to their value as a sexual object. He’s the man, and they are just women, and he can control them; he has won. We see Zuckerberg applying the basic principles of this system to construct a social platform on which, ten years later, a quantifiably large proportion of human interaction takes place. Welcome to Facebook.

In the film, men who have been humiliated by women have had the last laugh: they have used their smarts to monetise social capital, to turn every one of us into a digital product constantly engaged in a ‘second shift’ of self-promotion, curating our online presence, developing our brand, updating our photos to make ourselves look like we’re having the best and most employable time possible, all the while making money for Facebook and its spin-off sites. Capitalism, technology and the revenge of the socially excluded have come together to create a world where all of us, particularly women and girls, are products, all social capital shall be categorised for cash, and the Geek shall inherit the earth.

The number of women working in technology isn’t just low – it is falling. Only 7 per cent of tertiary degrees in computing are taken by women and girls, and women leave the industry at all levels. Yahoo boss Marissa Mayer estimates that 15 to 17 per cent of Silicon Valley engineers are women, and just 20 per cent of engineering and computer science majors in the United States are female.
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Mayer, who didn’t become a regular Internet user until she was in college,
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disproves the rule that once we’ve failed to teach any given generation of girls about computers in elementary school, it’s too late for them. Tech skills can be picked up as late as you like, as long as you don’t believe that your brain is temperamentally unsuited to the task, as many girls and women do.

 Of course, Mayer proved her credentials as a leader in a land built and run by nerd men by taking away Yahoo employees’ right to work from home
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– making the company yet another Silicon Valley leader structured in a way that excludes women who have children, or who want them someday, from full participation. Tech is a notoriously hostile sector for anyone whose lifestyle doesn’t happen to chime with that of a single guy working ten-hour days, and it’s getting worse.

Kate Losse was one of Facebook’s earliest employees, and her 2012 book
The Boy Kings
tells the inside story of the company as it developed.
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‘I wrote the book because in working there . . . I noticed things that weren’t being articulated and that are really important in understanding how social technology is affecting us,’ Losse told me over IM. ‘One thing I noticed is how driven by women’s images and social media labour Facebook and other social technologies are. But that fact isn’t well recognised or rewarded by these companies for the most part.

‘There was this assumption that a very specific kind of person made tech products and that he was usually a young male entrepreneur with specific tastes and values and that he was somehow this genius of social media.’

This is not, in fact, the way the Internet works, and it’s not the way geekdom works, either. Being a geek isn’t about getting your revenge on the people who bullied you at school. It’s not about hanging out in dark bedrooms hating women. Being a geek is so much more than that. It’s about being curious, and clever. Being a geek is about making things, and fixing things, and taking things apart to see how they work, sometimes lines of code and sometimes countries. It’s about being excited, tremendously excited about awesome things like stories and games and comics and books and films and not ever having to apologise for thinking those things are brilliant. It’s about learning, and creating, and wanting. It’s about understanding, on a fundamental level, that being smart is more important than being strong, and who you are and where you come from doesn’t matter as long as you’ve got curiosity and guts.

One of the most important things to understand about cybersexism is that it comes from a place of pain, a place of fear and hurt that translates into violent incomprehension in the most personal ways. It is not, of course, the responsibility of those abused to make their abusers feel better, but compassion is a useful tool for understanding as well as a way forward.

For geekdudes, the Internet is a safe space. It always has been. Sure, it’s also a weird warren full of casual violence and bullying, but it’s their weird warren of casual violence and bullying, and unlike what those who live there like to call ‘real life’, they know the rules. They made up some of the rules. They grew up on the Internet, and they pride themselves on knowing its language and customs better than anybody else, whether or not they actually do.

It starts at school, like almost everything else. The sense that being smart and a bit strange makes you a target for violence, means you’re not a real man. It seems a cliché to point out that geeks, nerds and boffins of all kinds, anyone who was a bit clever or unorthodox or both and lacked the talent or volition to conceal it, anyone who was bad at sports and flirting, we all had to deal with daily harassment and ostracisation, usually for years. It affects everything. For boys, being tormented by jocks creates an embattled masculinity. That embattled masculinity sometimes finds a home online and a target in women, preferably women who are far away and can’t fight back.

One of the most important ways in which boys prove their social value, prove that they are or will shortly become men, is by exerting power over women: sexual power, physical power, the power to bully and threaten and intimidate and control. Sexism is a status play. At school, the fact that geekdudes are normally lower down in the status hierarchy is part of what creates the unique flavour of rage spicing up the murky broth of nerd misogyny, and the rage is knotted up with sexual frustration.

The creation myths of geek misogyny hold that almost every transformative piece of technology in history was invented by a man to impress a woman, who was normally ungrateful. A viral blog post by Crackd.com editor David Wong described ‘why no amount of male domination will ever be enough’: ‘Go look at a city skyline. All those skyscrapers? We built those to impress you[.] All those sports you see on TV? All of those guys learned to play purely because in school, playing sports gets you laid. All the music you hear on the radio? All of those guys learned to sing and play guitar because as a teenager, they figured out that absolutely nothing gets women out of their pants faster. It’s the same reason all of the actors got into acting.

‘All those wars we fight? Sure, at the upper levels, in the halls of political power, they have some complicated reasons for wanting some piece of land or access to some resource. But on the ground? Well, let me ask you this – historically, when an army takes over a city, what happens to the women there?’
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Whoa. Hold it right there. What happens to the women in occupied cities? Exactly the same as what happens to the women when players attack a town in a MMORG game: they get raped and murdered. Wong interprets that, on behalf of the lady-fancying male Internet-using community, as a massive compliment. ‘You’re all we think about, and that gives you power over us. And we resent you for it,’
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writes Wong, choosing to elide the experience of the millions of men who do not think about women in that particular way. It hasn’t occurred to Wong, and to every other angry man in front of his laptop, that not all ‘women’ have this power, because the category ‘women’ does not, in fact, include only ‘women David Wong wants to have sex with’.

Moreover, perhaps even the women who do have this kind of power don’t actually want it. Perhaps we consider it a raw deal that the power to turn men on is the only sort of power we’re allowed, and that we’re punished and resented and attacked and bullied and brutalised and killed for having it. Guys, listen up: we’re not conspiring with your boners against you. Women are people, not walking bags of pheromones and interestingly arranged body fat, and we like to be treated as such.

In 2003, a list of ‘Geek Social Fallacies’ – the particular social hang-ups common to many circles of nerds, hackers, gamers and oddballs
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– went viral online, and ten years later it’s still an important reference point for members of the communities that built much of the architecture of the Internet. The first and most important of these is that ‘Ostracisers are evil’. Geeks of every gender and background, having experienced the pain of being shunned and excluded, are loath to exclude anyone else, even if their behaviour is offensive, creepy or violent. This can lead, in groups that would otherwise consider themselves progressive, to the tolerance of vicious bigotry. In some circles of professional nerds it’s openly admitted that sexism and homophobia have long been tolerated, or written off as ‘ironic’, as long as the person spreading such hatred is a good coder or a decent gamer. A long history of learned defensiveness leads nerds to come together to protect any member of their group, whatever they’ve done. It’s an understandable impulse – right up to the point where you realise that tolerance of bigotry automatically ostracises everyone who happens to be a woman, or queer, or frightens them away from social and professional groups in which ‘white, male, cis and straight’ is the default player setting.

To the list of Geek Social Fallacies, one might well add ‘the fallacy of persecution’. Slowly but surely, being a geek – particularly a tech geek – has become a position of power. A job at Google or Facebook is for the young people of the twenty-teens what a job in finance was in the 1980s: a whole new world of pseudo-meritocracy, with its own laws and customs that happen to be that much easier to negotiate if you’re a white, straight, middle-class cis guy, however much the recruitment drivel claims otherwise.

That doesn’t mean that being a geek, a nerd or a weird smart kid at school is any easier now than it was ten years ago, and it certainly hasn’t stopped nerds from being mercilessly made fun of in a certain type of bro-comedy that still dominates mainstream Hollywood programming, from
The Big Bang Theory
to
The IT Crowd
to any half-rate thriller where the hilariously sexless scientist helps the jock hero to triumph. But the territory has fundamentally changed, and I don’t simply mean that thick glasses have become cool – believe me, I hate that too.

Part of the problem is the suspicion that girls just aren’t as clever as boys. It’s not been modish to say that out loud for decades, but it is implied every time excuses are made for why women remain vastly under-represented in tech, in politics, in business, in the top rungs of academia. Just look at the evidence: we apparently have equality now, and yet there are still far fewer women in ‘smart jobs’ than men. We’re told unremittingly that feminism has achieved all of its aims, and that even if it hasn’t, tech and research are fields of perfect meritocracy, so this must be a process of natural selection. If women aren’t making it to the top, that obviously means that they simply aren’t good enough, aren’t bright enough, aren’t committed enough.
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In her excellent book
Delusions of Gender
, neuroscientist Cordelia Fine meticulously debunks every cod theory attributing social sex class to hard-wired ‘brain differences’. The many available studies that show no practical difference whatsoever in the cognitive, reasoning or structural processing power of ‘male’ and ‘female’ brains
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tend to get far less press coverage and be less high profile than those claiming that the social mores of white, suburban 1950s America were laid down in prehistoric times – despite the fact that they are consistently more sound. Fine quotes many of the world’s most respected psychiatrists and neuroscientists, such as Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, peddling such codswallop as: ‘The female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy. The male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understanding and building systems.’
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