The Social Network scriptwriter Aaron Sorkin posts about the portrayal of women.

> Facebook was born during a night of incredibly misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard.

What a bunch of pretentious self important nonsense. Fact is, from age 12 to age 25 or so, both men and women are incredibly superficial and petty and immature in their relations to each other. There's probably a lot of reasons why, but I think one big reason is that young people spend these days spend very little time on things that actually really matter, thus aren't relating to each other on topics that actually matter. So both genders descend into social pettiness pretty quickly and easily in their younger years.

Young men and young women both act petty. But these days, it's very fashionable to point out all the sexism... on men's parts. Applause lights go on. "Yes, fight that evil male sexism!" It's like, okay, there's a bunch of 20 year olds drinking too much and jockeying for attention and being to mean to each other and then throwing up for all the liquor... neither men nor women at that age seem particularly enlightened to me, but people like to be very grave and serious about "this horrible sexism among men today." It's seems like feminism succeeded at all its objectives, but was doing so well that it just kept going. Nowdays any immature male behavior is portrayed as a sign of some deep cultural problems. Immature female behavior? What, no, that doesn't happen. What are you, a sexist or something?

Edit: Reply instead of downvoting. I disagree with the author's perspective and think he's spouting cliches that don't match reality or improve things. I listed a counter perspective. You're welcome to disagree with me, share your thoughts.

>These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. 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.

I'm finding Aaron Sorkin incredibly irritating lately. Jeff Jarvis called it 'revenge on the revenge of the nerds' and this absolutely is. The movie hasn't been released where I live yet, but I've read several interviews with him where he makes statements like this. It's complete nonsense. There is no us and them, no global jocks vs geeks battle being waged here.

If anything the cultural conflict is generational; media and communication is changing faster than some people can understand. And Sorkin is one of those that doesn't. He doesn't understand what facebook is for, why people like it, or what Zuckerberg wants. He claims that facebook is just the backdrop of the story he's telling - and movie maybe good as a movie, but it's a fictionalized account, by somebody who doesn't understand what backdrop was all about.

Disclaimer: I'm historically a fan of Sorkin's movies, and a vocal critic of Facebook's privacy policies.

> Please read the guidelines

You've been here 170 days? Well, welcome, but it's fairly standard practice to add a quick edit to let people know you're looking for discussion instead of trying to stir up trouble after attempting to write a thoughtful-yet-controversial comment. It shows you're looking to have discussion instead of just get a rise out of people.

> The perspective you mentioned is well-known to anyone. (At least I hear it more often than I hear from actual feminists.) If people want to spend their time responding to you, they will; there's no need to generate long debate threads.

Except the author of the article that was just posted, you mean? That's what I was commenting on. And anyways, discussion on a discussion site seems like a good thing, and not something to be discouraged.

I was one of the people who downvoted you (though it looks like the crowd is back on your side again), so here's an explanation:

First and mostly unrelated to your post: I have big issues with the Social Network's accuracy in its storytelling. Besides all the things that were completely made up, it's very telling that Sorkin in the OP states that the voiceover from the Facemash sequence was completely factual, with only minor things removed from Zuckerberg's blog posts. In fact, if you track down the original blog posts on Scribd, you'll find that Sorkin inserted several of the most offensive sentences, such as the crack about the Erica character's bra size, and also including the sentence "Do you think that's because all BU girls are bitches?", which Sorkin seems to be attributing as a quote in the OP but were not in the blog posts. So when I talk about Zuckerberg's misogyny, I'm talking about the misogyny of the character named Mark Zuckerberg that Aaron Sorkin made up for the movie, not Zuckerberg himself, as I'm convinced the two are mostly unrelated.

So all that said, the stuff movie-Zuckerberg does in the Facemash scene is blatantly and unambiguously misogynistic. He blogs about his ex-girlfriends bra size, he calls her and all other girls attending BU a bitch, and creates a site allowing you to publicly compare the hotness of various women using pictures obtained without their permission. These acts demean women, portray them as just sexual objects, and are essentially misogynistic.

What's bizarre about your post is that you didn't dispute any of those things. Instead, you presented an argument than women and men are equally petty and immature, and then an argument for how the feminist movement has led to an over-interrogation of male sexist behavior while ignoring similarly problematic female behavior. You can make those arguments, but the fact that you did so in reply to the paragraph you quoted strongly implies that you believe that the actions portrayed in the movie were not sexism and not misogynistic. You seem to be characterizing the things movie-Zuckerberg did as just "a bunch of 20 year olds drinking too much and jockeying for attention and being to mean to each other", as if those were the reasons why people saw movie-Zuckerberg as misogynistic.

I agree that feminists are often too quick to see male sexism in places were it isn't there, but that doesn't mean that male sexism doesn't exist. It's one thing to think that feminists go too far, and another thing to go on a rant about the excesses of feminism when confronted with a (fictional) example of actual sexism. The things movie-Zuckerberg did were sexist, and if you disagree with that, and it seems like you do, I'm honestly a little disturbed.

Well OK, if your argument really was "Sorkin created a fake caracter that acts really misogynist in order to make a political point about feminism that I disagree with", and not "what was shown in the movie wasn't misogyny, just college boys being equally immature as college girls are!", then I must say I am more than a little surprised, but tone is hard on the web, so I'll give you be benefit of the doubt.