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

I see far too many distortions and exaggerations in Sorkin's script for this to be credible. Some are already noted in this thread, but to add a few more:

- In this rebuttal Sorkin says that the party sequence is something Mark is imagining and seems to suggest that's right out of Mark's blog. I don't see how this can be supported by what was in the film; it is depicted as a real event. I don't see anything in Mark's blog (at least those few pages commonly quoted on the web) to support the contention it's Mark's fantasy.

- For most of the period the movie covers, the real Zuckerberg has a girlfriend and is an athlete himself -- he's a fencer. The movie Zuckerberg is a dateless wonder who believes athletics are beyond him.

- In a sequence that only a Hollywood screenwriter could have invented, interns are tested by hacking into a "python webserver running SSL (??)" while being forced to drink shots according to highly implausible rules. The script actually has stage directions for HOT ASIAN WOMEN pouring shots to be stationed a pace behind (!!) each male hacker.

Sorkin defends himself in this rebuttal by noting that the Erica Albright character, and the unnamed lawyer at the end, are Mark's moral superiors. But that's a form of sexism too, when you only have "good girls" and "bad girls".

The movie is clearly setting these two kinds of women in opposition and had to wildly exaggerate things in order to get there. The movie Mark Zuckerberg is frustrated he can't win the respect of "good" women like Erica as a peer, so he attempts to rise above the entire social system by creating Facebook, and thus enters a more narcissistic world (embodied by Sean Parker) in which "bad" women are mere accessories.

As a movie it works. As a programmer I am disturbed that so much innocent tomfoolery as well as brilliant creativity are dismissed as embodiments of misogyny.

For the record, I'm not a fan of Facebook or even Mark Zuckerberg. But many people, even smart people, are taking the movie at face value as a depiction of the real Mark Zuckerberg. I've seen feminist writer Naomi Klein quoting this "Facebook was born in a night of misogyny" thing too. It looks like this is destined to be part of Zuckerberg's legacy, whether he deserves it or not.

Wow. He doesn't hate women, he hates geeks.

I think this is one of those arguments where its really hard to find the line between art and reality, which has the effect of simultaneously making The Social Network an amazing and controversial film.

I'm a huge fan of Aaron Sorkin and I think he takes the screenwriting craft to a whole new level. When he's writing something I don't think he just creates a "story" in his head, I think he crafts a whole society as a canvas. He has the ability, like many artists, to craft an extremely vivid picture in his mind and then translate that vision and eventually the story to his writing. So when he's telling the "Zuckerburg" story he creates an alternate reality but with some small basis in truth. A world where women are treated in a misogynistic manner, in a world inhabited by socially inept genius and an out of touch upper crust.

In this case he bases a lot of what he's built on the books and stories written, quite frankly, by the losers of the Facebook battles. These inform and lead the story but by the time its complete the villains, attitudes, and societies have been morphed into something quite more archetypical then their corresponding reality. Small quirks he finds interesting get expanded into large issues. Molehills are turned into mountains.

And really he's done a great job. The level of discourse on HN alone testifies to his ability to tell a story - like it or not.

> These acts demean women, portray them as just sexual objects, and are essentially misogynistic.

How do you know that the real "Erica Albright" didn't make misandrist comments about the size of his genitalia or his inability to measure up to rowers? Those kinds of comments happen all the time to nerds (just look at any Jezebel discussion thread), and are exactly the equivalent of male dissing of female attractiveness.

In reality, women's groups fought what would become Facebook tooth and nail. Had Zuckerberg stopped doing what he did after the words of the strong womyn at Fuerza Latina, he'd have been a social outcast through college. Is the takeaway lesson here really to pay obeisance to the enforcers of conventional wisdom?

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creato...

"Comments on the e-mail lists of both Fuerza Latina and the Association of Harvard Black Women blasted the site."

Web companies are quite different from screenplays.