Sexist Film of the Month: The Social Network

[InMyPrime]

Did anyone else go to see The Social Network recently? It's the film everyone is raving about, all the critics love it and it seems to be in line for some major awards. Well DH and I just saw it tonight and both thought it was one of the most sexist films we've ever seen - and that includes 'Knocked Up' and 'The 40-Year Old Virgin' and other Judd Apatow creations.

Here are some examples of misogyny from the film:

1.) While all the men in the film work hard on their business ideas (in case you don't know, the film is about Mark Zuckerberg and his first year setting up Facebook while at Harvard), on coding and investment strategy, the women are basically eye candy, getting high in the background and falling over each other in lesbian embraces or coming on to Mark Zuckerberg and pals in lectures. Message: men do important stuff like make money and have ideas, women are there for sex
2.) After the initial test site for Facebook goes live, Mark Zuckerberg and his friend, Eduardo, are in class when a 'hot' girl and her 'hot' friend ask them to go for drinks. They proceed to take the guys to the bathroom to give them oral sex and have sex with them. Afterwards Mark and Eduardo say ' wow, we have groupies now!' Message: women are cheap and will sleep with anyone if they think he's successful
3.) Mark's motivation for setting up Facebook is his 'bitch' ex-girlfriend who breaks up with him at the start of the film. In anger at her having broken up with him, he writes offensive things about her (her looks, her family, her breast-size) on his blog which is read across campus and then decides to set up 'facemash', a precursor to Facebook that ranks Harvard women for their 'hotness'. Message: women will break your heart but it's OK because you're smart enough to take elaborate revenge and publicly humiliate them
4.) When Eduardo does develop more of a relationship with one of the 'groupies' (these are Harvard students we're talking about but might as well be street hookers in this film), she turns psycho on him for no reason, following him, sending him 47 text messages and trying to burn his apartment. Message: women are unstable, irrational psychos and even if they're 'hot', they're just trouble

All this misogyny just got me down through the whole film and ruined it for me. What's worse is that not one critic seems to have picked up on this aspect of the film and criticised its awful depiction of women and total lack of any female characters who are people in their own right rather than just sex objects. In the film, Mark Z's development of the facemash ranking website for girls is depicted as something offensive and terrible and yet the whole entire film itself is nothing more than 'facemash' writ large. The women in the film only matter if they are 'hot' and up for it. It's truly depressing. It's particularly depressing because we're talking about young people so surely feminism should just be something that's embedded in people under the age of 30? Acceptance of cultural diversity, racial diversity and homosexuality is now just the norm among the younger generation - so why is it still some kind of crime to have a vagina?

Also, the film worried me because it depicts highly talented young men being ambitious and entrepreneurial and yet young women are reduced to being nothing more than prostitutes for free. Is that really the best young women can aspire to? Why not have some balance in the film to show entrepreneurial, hard-working young women who are smart? The film is only loosely based on real events so they could easily have developed a smart female character who had a good business idea of her own or who did something useful other than look pretty. The only barely developed female character is one of Mark Zuckerberg's lawyers defending him in a court case but - again - at the end of the film he asks her out, so all along her only purpose was to be - again - a sex object.

Sorry for the lengthy rant but I have not been so depressed by a film in a long time. The fact that all the critics seem to love it is even more worrying. I have looked on Tiger Beatdown and other feminist sites and no-one else seems to be picking this up. Am I on my own in this or has anyone else seen the film and thought it was disparaging of women?

um, but it is an historical document isn't it? as in 'the way we were' bleurgh? and pretty much depicting internet geeks views on wimmin?

i can't say i'm burning to see it tbh - hav enough techno geeks in the family to know what their views are.

i kind of assume films like this tell us something really important about the makers/ context, however godawful depressing they are.

thanks InMyPrime, good analysis. I'm amazed that it is even more sexist than 'Knocked Up', that is really bad. I haven't seen it and was not and am not intending to. I saw the adverts for it on TV and thought that it didn't seem real.

It is not the type of film that would appeal to me, because it seemed to be about computer nerds etc. and therefore appeared boring to me. I watched the adverts and thought that they had deliberately tried to spice the film up by showing lots of parties and lots of sex etc. It didn't look believable that some computer nerds would be part of all that. I think they were desperate to spice the film up to make it interesting and depict a wild time.

From what you are saying, it sounds like they have really gone over the top, possibly for the benefit of geeks who would be attracted by a story about computer nerds.

Hi there
Just a quick message as I am getting RSI from typing on my phone!

Mark Kermode said that he thought the characters were misogynist and unpleasant but that he didn't think the film itself was misogynist, if that makes sense (I am paraphrasing). Either way, it doesn't sound like a film that will put me in a good mood! Thanks for the warning. I might give it a miss now.

What do you think of this review OP?

I do agree that there is an element of fact to the film so there's a chance that the events described just really happened like that but Mark Zuckerberg and others have not endorsed the film and have even disagreed at how they are depicted so most of it is fiction. The depiction of women seems to be the product of the writer's imagination rather than anything factual because it is just gratuitous misogyny and is not central to the plot. It's also not a realistic depiction of tech entrepreneurship anyway as I work in the field myself and have many friends who are tech entrepreneurs and the sector is not full of misogynist geeks who never meet women. In fact, I even know a number of - gasp! - female entrepreneurs in the tech sector who can - gasp! - code and invent and raise finance. Why wouldn't the writer want to show that in the film, if it's supposed to be such a true-to-life depiction of geekdom?

To me, the film was just a porny fantasy version of elite college life, written by a 50 year old guy who thought 'college girl' and got all hot and bothered thinking up raunchy scenes for these college girls to star in, rather than bothering to write any decent women characters into the film who could be equals to their male peers. It was borderline porn, basically. Whether it was to drive up ratings or just a sad old guy writing his own fantasies into reality, I don't know, but it certainly offended me (and my husband, who is by the way, a feminist geek!).

Thanks also for the link to the New Statesman review, Evil - I think Laurie Penny makes a valid point that Aaron Sorkin may have been trying to capture the roots of Facebook with the misogynistic characters and the pornographic version of college life. It would be nice if he were that clever but having checked some interviews with him on the topic of the film, he doesn't seem to have even realised his female characters were just 12-rated porn actresses. Actually, that's another thing I didn't like about the film: it's rated 12A. If I had children in that age-group then I don't think I'd want them to see it as the message it sends out about women is so negative. The more reviews I've read since posting, the more I think people are just making excuses for Aaron Sorkin because he wrote the West Wing and smart people like Mark Kermode don't want to admit that someone who wrote such a witty, left-wing series might actually be a sexist.

This is interesting as I Just checked Aaron Sorkin's comments on the film and he has recently come out to defend the depiction of women in the film and say that he is just telling it like it is - link here. Problem is, that's not the way it is or even the way it was, according to Mark Zuckerberg and others.

To me, it's no different to a white director making a film about white cops / good guys fighting crime in which the only black characters who appear are bad guys - criminals, drug-dealers, pimps and murderers who are also uneducated and stupid compared to the white characters. Maybe one token black cop shows up just once for a short scene, but then even he turns out to have links to the crime world. If that kind of a film was made, it would be uncomfortably racist and heavily criticised. If the writer came out and said 'oh but I know a lot of cops in Chicago / New York and that's really how it is for them so it's just reality', that still wouldn't be acceptable to anti-racism groups or just anyone who hates to see racial stereotypes in film really. Why isn't sexism as big an issue and as unacceptable a mindset as racism is?

lol, inmyprime, my sister is a fully qual'd up technogeek (and has been for 15 years), so fully aware there really are women in the industry (and lots of them). they are still marginalised by the stereotype of 'computer geek' being a skinny white male who needs to get out more hence tongue in cheek ref to sweeping generalisations...

i'm finding claig's point tempting though.

Don't watch the West Wing sisters, you'll be appalled!

Watched it, loved it thanks. And I don't remember when I decided to adopt you as my whinyass litle brother? Do remind me.

Touche!

I am a bit whiney, aren't I CJ?