My 30-year-old uber lawyer buddy has a gorgeous blonde fiance. She's in med school and is crazy smart. She's awesome.
My buddy decided at 27 that he wanted to get into chess. He got really into it, hired a teacher and by 29 or so was moving his rating up pretty well.
As a newcomer though, he often finds himself competing against 13-15 year old boys at his weekend tournements. In fact he's often the only person over 18 playing in some of these tournaments.
He has a good sense of humor about it, but some of these kids, he says, are just total turds to the other kids they compete against.
When he learns he has to play against a kid who's mean to other kids, he calls in the Fiance and has her sit behind him while he plays, just reading whatever she has to read for med school. She'll spend a whole Saturday sitting there behind him while he plays, her nose stuck in a book.
It just destroys the kids. He catches them trying to steal glances at her all the time during the games. Just breaks their chess mojo.
For the cool kids, kids who are struggling to figure out women at that age, he introduces them to her and she knows to treat them like the coolest guys in the room. Meanwhile, the mean bully kids get ignored and seethe in the corner.
Bullies aged 13-15 are not, in general, bad people deep down. Especially not the ones who go to chess tournaments. It is, in general, not really their fault. Children this age have little control over their lives, so even if they had some good ideas to fix their situation they might well be prevented from doing anything. You can't really blame people for stuff they aren't in control of. So have a bit more sympathy and stop being actively mean to them.
That's liberal crap. Everybody is in charge of exactly one thing, and that's themselves. The difference between good people and bad ones is dependent upon exactly one thing, and that's how they treat others.
The idea that there's some truer "deep down" person vs what you see, is also crap. Sure there's potential in everybody, but your true, real self is what you show to everyone every day. That cool deep-down person you never show? That's the imaginary you, not the real you.
I've been told by people who've been sent on corporate junkets to Gartner shindigs/what-have-you, that they have lots of "high-status" (hot) women wandering around. It was the same with that french psychologist who had the Madison Avenue types eating out of his hand in "The Century of the Self" documentary. Having beautiful women around is a signal of dominance. People who want to project power use this, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Film-makers use this whenever they want to portray someone with power.
The flip side: when you are hanging out with the other geeks, realizing you're at yet another sausage fest, does this make you feel powerful, or not so much?
To paraphrase the opera Carmen: if you want any enterprise to succeed, be sure you have women along!
> Having beautiful women around is a signal of dominance.
Excerpt from a book by Emily Gould (ex-Gawker blogger), talking about her real job at a publishing firm
"One of my tasks at my first job had been to stand at the locked doors near the elevator bank and lead guests inside. I would stand in the doorway and wait and, when I heard the ping of the elevator reaching the publishing house's floor, I'd start smiling. After shaking the guests' hands I would lead them into the little waiting area where there were two armchairs and a little table next to a rack of our newest shiny hardcovers, and I'd bring them coffee or tea or water and then go sit back at my desk. Then, when my boss was ready - he let some people wait longer than others - he'd tell me to go and get them, and I'd lead them through the maze of the office, chatting brightly over my shoulder. If the person or people walking behind me were men, I would be conscious of their eyes following the movement of my back, conscious always like the books displayed in the waiting area: an ornament that demonstrated the company's power."
What you don't see here is the inherent double standard in this conversation about women as accessories. The awesome blonde med school girl at the chess game? Accessory. Hot Russian immigrants, accessories. Are women just decor?
What I find aggravating is needing to fight to get men to take me seriously and see me as an intelligent, capable, human being. As long as we have an environment like this thread, we won't have that many women in tech.
Is it an environment like this thread which is the problem, or an environment like those discussed in this thread?
Carmen in the eponymous opera and Marissa Mayer at the early Google were each a part of the enterprise as more than mere decorations. Carmen is trading off her looks, but she is using them to manipulate men and not just being looked at. Unfortunately, her character inhabits an environment where women's opportunities are limited.
Tori Amos once claimed to be "The queen of the nerds" or something like that. I think there's tremendous opportunity for women in tech, precisely because there are fewer women. Yes, physical attributes matter. Short men have a disadvantage where social dominance comes into play. Such disadvantages can also be exploited.
In my experience, I have seen that very attractive women who want to be taken seriously by men will have a man as a business partner. This seems to take the edge off for other guys who may be too intimidated to approach the beautiful girl or who assume that someone so beautiful cannot also be intelligent and capable of doing business.
As a woman, what bothers me is that we have to constantly tow the line between being beautiful and not taken seriously or being average/butch/unattractive and judged to be too serious. It's a problem because even the most open-minded men are still heavily influenced my a woman's appearance and will make assumptions about her business acumen and character based on that alone.
As a man, I never, ever worry about being beautiful at all. And it never, ever causes any problems in my working life.
If you worry about 'towing the line' between beautiful and anything else, maybe its your own priorities that are the issue? Why is 'being beautiful' even in the equation? Because you put it there. So you have to deal with it. But its absolutely not other peoples' problem.
Written from a truly male perspective. Even girls who choose not to make attractiveness a priority find that, eventually, it becomes a priority that society imposes on them. Or at least a topic that's constantly brought up when talking about a woman's abilities. How many articles talked about Elena Kagan's "mannish, butch" looks when she was appointed to the SC? Or Michelle Obama's fashion sense when she became First Lady?
The blonde in my story above isn't an accessory. She's an accomplice.
The Russian gals on the other hand are definitely accessories though. That's sketchy. That said, more than a few will take advantage of their opportunity and do something great with it.
"Film-makers use this whenever they want to portray someone with power."
My favorite recent example of this: The scene in the Dark Knight when Bruce Wayne is shown sunning himself on the deck of his yacht alongside soloists from the Moscow Ballet.
edited: It was the Moscow Ballet, not the Gotham Ballet.
The fact that the Google dudes got a brilliant, attractive woman on team google that early was no doubt a terrific qualifier as to the character of the founders and other early team members.
Investor think: "If she's cool with these guys, they must be cool dudes."
This post depresses me. I'm a man and certainly no feminist, but posts on the usefulness of attractive, female RoR developers leaves a really bad taste in my mouth. I was going to comment on the nature of our field, but it's probably the same almost everywhere, from banking to bricklaying to hacking.
I have a friend who works in the call center at a day trading firm in Chicago. He's a sailor and the owner/founder of the firm has a boat so he gets long stretches of unfiltered time with the guy outside of work. The guy regularly affirms that they intentionally try to hire only HRI's ("hot russian immigrants") when they hire women because it boosts morale, makes hiring ambitious men easier and apparently exploits a small dip in the local hiring pool where the the immigrant women have a slightly harder time getting jobs at most places than the non-immigrant hotties they go up against elsewhere. My friend's firm found that going the extra mile to help them with visa status stuff meant they could get better looking women on staff than their competition.
When I see any argument start with this sentence, I immediately mistrust it. I suspect that world works in mysterious, complex, and ever changing ways, and that I get to be a part of shaping it.
I prefer:
"That's how things seem to be going right now. If you don't like it, there are probably others out there who feel the same. You could work with them to make it a little better. As you're working folks will tell you to just deal with it. Smile politely, ignore their advice, and keep working."
I think you're being blindly optomistic. The only way to "make it a little better" is to:
a: make it so that ANYBODY can get a hot woman, which makes having lots of hot women about useless
b: flood the industry with women. This is happening slowly, but you can't force it. Of course, if the balance tips towards women, then we'll just have the opposite, and having hot powerful handsome men around will replace hot women.
c: (myriad of ridiculous examples about fundamentally changing our species and the nature of sexuality)
You have to remember this isn't about sexism. It may well be sexist, but all it's about is having what all of your peers want but can't have makes you look powerful. It just so happens the most common want-but-can't-have is attractive women. "making it better" can only be achieved my removing the want.
Slavery wasn't about racism, it was about cheap, unregulated labor. Pure economics. It doesn't absolve the moral dilemma inherent to it, or negate the racism that frequently underpinned public support for it. For what it's worth I'm sure people defended human slavery by saying "that's just the way the world works" then as well. You're not ethically tantamount to a slave owner by glibly justifying using women as ornaments or pawns in your little networking game, but it's a bit troubling that "treating women with the same respect you'd expect from your peers" doesn't factor into your assessment.
If you treat them and see them like pawns, then shame on you. (though odds are if you see them like pawns, you see everybody as a pawn, female or not. An equal-opportunity exploiter, if you will).
Still, I'd observe this is tied to basic human nature & sexuality. Unlike slavery, as best I can tell it cannot be done away with, short of making it illegal for a man to have a hot woman/entourage of women present (totally not a sexist law, btw)
Fair enough, but one can justify racism and ethnocentrism by appealing to our animal instincts as well – we may very well be predisposed to seeking power over others and reserving trust for those we perceive to be our own kind. Now granted, I have no way of proving that there isn't some kind of misogyny gene. But legally, slavery was done away with by passing a constitutional amendment that makes no direct reference to race. Culturally, there was a large precedent of underground and increasingly popular outrage against the practice, founded in principles of human equality that had to be actively argued for.
I bring up the parallel, again, not because it's an equivalent situation, but to illustrate what I think is a common ethical trap we can fall into: what good is it to see an injustice and wave our hands, saying that it's just the way the things are?
You suggested that the grandposter is blindly optimistic for wanting to change the way men relate to women in the workplace (or something like that), but think about how much has changed culturally, that we can have this conversation in 2010 and have it be basically a given that human bondage is morally wrong? It took a law in 1865, and it was controversial at the time. Today you have to be on the fringe of society in order to believe that it was ever morally defensible, presumably. That's not a triumph of law, it's a triumph of active social change.
On the latter point I agree with you, and I'm certainly not advocating that, merely suggesting we can do a lot more on our own to be agents of social change with the force of our moral convictions than would otherwise seem possible.
As for the question of our fundamental nature, we'll just have to leave it up to the philosophers. I appreciate your good natured debate, nonetheless.
Slavery wasn't about pure economics. In fact, it is not that obvious that slave labour is more efficient from the purely economical point. There're problems with incentives, with hiring staff willing to manage the slaves, controlling abuse etc. Such critique was known at least since Adam Smith.
To take a more modern example, the same is true about compulsory military service. Many people once believed and many still believe that conscription is simply way cheaper than voluntary military service. However, the people that are drafted into the military service could instead have been involved in the productive work in the regular economy, and paying taxes that may be used to pay volunteers.
In short, "pure economics" doesn't automatically go in favour of slavery.
Slavery was a sustainable institution not just because it was perceived as cost-efficient. It required general acceptance of the idea that it's OK to deny certain classes of people -- e.g., according to their origin -- their basic rights. And that is pretty much about racism.
I don't think a million years of sexual selection is going to be overcome by clever arguments. Any sensible, workable path forward just has to include accepting that men and women have strong urges to treat one another differently.
Yes, I agree with your statement, but it went way beyond anything we're actually talking with in order to elicit agreement from readers. You characterized the previous comment as being pro-slavery, hence creating a strawman argument.
In that case, I'll go for option b. But validating the attitude that hot techie-women should be paraded around as spectacles performing for the benefit of their men is not going to help us get there.
I argued that it is a fact that if you walk into an event with a cute girl on your arm. You will be treated differently by men AND women than if you walk into the event without a cute girl on your arm. This is how the world works.
It's why some people are streaky daters. When they've been single for awhile, they're always walking into rooms alone. But when they get some momentum going, men and women take notice and show more interest in that person, which can lead to more dating opportunities.
Agreed. Many folks confuse sex/sexuality with sexism. Sex != Sexism. Just as "not liking to hang out with gays" is not (necessarily) homophobia. You can not like a thing, or think it's unhealthy, even if you don't think it's a morally wrong or evil thing. Important distinction that people trip on all the time.
It's actually about respecting the fact that women are great judges of men. They're designed to be super discerning. So if a high-value woman singles out a guy as worth her time, it's a safe bet that he's worth your time, too.
I'm assuming that by great you mean better than men are of women. What evidence do you have for this, apart from the dubious[1] field of evolutionary psychology? Also, could you define your terms better? What aspects of men are women great at judging? They are, after all, not psychic.
>t's actually about respecting the fact that women are great judges of men. They're designed to be super discerning. So if a high-value woman singles out a guy as worth her time, it's a safe bet that he's worth your time, too.
What? Women are terrible judges of men. Probably even worse than men are.
Yeah really. And this particularly applies to guys justifying sexism by saying "that's how the world works". If you're not doing anything to change it, that's part of the problem.
There are many more important things to change in the world than the fact that men are impressed by a guy who is accompanied by an attractive female. I don't get how it's evil to point this out. It's not a pleasant reality, but neither is death, the odds of being in a car crash, the unemployment figures these days...i.e. all just statements of facts, neither good nor evil.
He didn't say that he was dating her because she was useful, or whatever. He didn't say "get a hot SO, it'll help you network", he said "If you have a hot SO, ask them to help you network." I think that's not bad.
She wasn't a developer of any description and as a matter of fact doesn't even work in tech. She knew of Ruby on Rails because as someone she was dating, she wanted to know what made me tick.
That is even worse. She didn't even know rails and she was the life of the party.
It's great to have SOs that try to dig what you are into (mine does, and after a while started writing up HTML and CSS for side cash; starting to get into JavaScript too), but honestly dude writing about using hot girls that barely know what rails is to get contacts at tech events certainly doesn't make us look like upstanding gentlemen. It makes it look like we look towards girls as if they are objects, rather than interesting people. The whole theme of putting yourself on a level playing ground with super rich guys because they just can't buy a smart hot girl is offsetting too.
But whatever, my original comments downvoted anyways, so I'm probably wrong and just being too touchy.
You make a lot of assumptions. Who is to say this was per se a tech event? It actually wasn't, it was the birthday celebrations of a major record company.
The people whom I spoke with were from a large advertising agency that use Rails developers internally. I don't see any reason to see why she shouldn't be the life and soul of a party, she is a very beautiful and very smart woman, an intoxicating combination!
I seem to have touched a nerve with you re this post. I apologise, I did not mean to cause any offence.
Yeah, I shouldn't have worded my previous two comments as I did, they were too inflammatory so I apologize for that.
I had just found out a day or two ago that a family member was severely discriminated against at work (it's all good though, she resolved it herself before telling us. When you work in tech you can often "prove" yourself right, which she did), so you're right about the touching a nerve thing.
Don't let the haters win! All you were doing is pointing out some facts:
1. Woman are crazy discerning about the men they hang around.
2. Smart men recognize this.
3. Therefore, if you see a high-value woman identifying a man as someone she thinks is worth her time, and you know she is crazy discerning about who she hangs out with, it's a safe bet that person is worth your time.
This is very dubious. Women are only more "discerning" about men insofar as mate preferences go. If I were at a networking event or party, and I was seeking out men who offered good reproductive fitness potential, then examining the "hotness" of their companionship would be a good way to go.
However, I don't form business relationships based on reproductive fitness. Most people interested in building a successful enterprise don't, either.
I will allow exceptions for sperm banks and male escort services, though.
Does anyone else find it comical that the author spends so much of his post talking up the virtues of not being a people user, while simultaneously offering advice on how to use women?
I guess if you're dating her that's one thing, but as a general strategy? Replace "girlfriend" with "hot secretary"(or "athletic looking black man", feel free to get creative here) – I honestly don't see how is this somehow more tolerable than pitching to a potential investor without getting to know them first.
Probably no one else has found it comical, because I haven't offered any such advice. The only thing I have done is highlight the apparent good will conferred by being associated with attractive women. The girl in question was not coerced or cajoled into doing what she did, she did so completely of her own initiative.
Also using the help of someone you are dating someone is completely different to 'pitching to a potential investor without getting to know them first' or 'being a people user' and I object to that. One does what one can to help a SO, there are many ways in which favours are returned.
I have to concede here – by the time I wrote this comment I was responding more to the general tone of the thread than to your article. I apologize for making you sound like a douche. Touchy subject for many.
He keeps people in his "repertoire" and gets to know them via the amazing mutual interest in "hot women", then protests that he is completely different from all those networkers because he doesn't use people and has shared interests. Riight.
Ha. I'm a hot girl who went to an ivy school with 4yrs in startups (yes I code), and got completely dissed by Dave McClure when I tried to introduce myself.
Do not approach this man cold. He is mobbed at every networking event being one of the more visible people in the valley. Try to find one of his zillion advisors in the valley, get them to know you, and make an intro. He's completely different if you've been introduced by someone he trusts. Case in point is my co-founder meeting him in Japan and having the best meeting ever.
I was at the same party and Dave was not surrounded by baying mobs of nerds, far from it. In general, he had a couple of people from his entourage (who arrived with him) that he spoke to most of the time. In fact, at one point he was clearly looking for more conversation, as I saw him wandering through the crowd alone and finally arriving at our group and joining the conversation.
Perhaps the baying crowds of nerds were in the author's mind.
I would argue there's a difference between this example and the original.
With someone like McClure or Arrington, the people approaching them want something specific. Their businesses are on the line, and the unwritten protocol is that you walk up to one of these men, give them your elevator pitch, and they make or break you. (If you were desperate to keep the metaphor going- maybe they're prostitutes? By this, I mean that when you walk up to them, you know what you want and they know what you want: 5 minutes of their time. Sure, they may be a hot girl, but it doesn't matter because it's a business transaction.)
The CFO, on the other hand, is more like a girl you would potentially want a relationship with. Very little good will come from pitching the CFO (or a movie star, etc). An example for me is Tim Ferriss- a bunch of people were standing and watching him outside at a conference he spoke at. I walked up and introduced myself, and he was one of the nicest guys I've ever met. If Tim Ferriss could make or break peoples careers, he'd have been mobbed, too.
I would say that the rule one should live by is to utilize the talents and physical attributes God gave you to the best of your ability, but use them in the most humble of ways. At the end of the day you will taste true success.
I'm reminded of Socrates quote in "The Great Dialogues of Plato".
"Because in your talk you do nothing but lay commands on people, like young society beauties who are regular tyrants as long as they are young and good-looking. And perhaps you have found me out already; I can't resist the handsome!"
The notion of young beautiful women in our society as having less attention than certain less attractive ones is completely wrong. Socrates was calling these beautiful woman tyrants because all men around them were showering them with whatever they wanted. Nothing has changed in the last 2000 years. The only hope for men is to join arms and completely ignore women, but this will never happen, until then they will call the shots until they get old, then they will be married to you, and then they will still call the shots.
> Beautiful women have the world by the balls, when I meet one of these women I remind them that they will get old and be in for a rude awakening.
That makes zero sense to me. Everybody gets old, beautiful women too, and for all of us it is a rude awakening. The relative difference between being young and old and being beautiful and average is smaller for 'beautiful or average' than for being young or old.
Do you berate the young too for 'being in for a rude awakening'?
Whatever you've got use your body to the best of its abilities, you'll never be able to recover time that you've lost and don't begrudge others the bodies they've got, after all you could have been even worse off, possibly lots worse. It's just a giant lottery.
To berate people for attributes they did not choose is just another form of jealousy.
It is a rude awakening for all of us, but I think the point is that one who heavily depends on looks has a much tougher time than someone not dependent on looks. Naturally not every beautiful woman has a heavy dependence on looks, but in general people tend to flaunt whatever extra-ordinary attribute they have, be it a natural and short-lived or learned and life-long.
I'm pretty sure that those that are beautiful are well aware of how fleeting it is, I just can't see it is a justification to put them down like that.
Should people that are born in to money discard it so they can live an average life in order not to offend? Should those that are beautiful spend their lives in burlap sacks lest they give offense to those less fortunate (Burka's?).
People don't 'depend' on their good looks, people simply use the tools that they've got and beauty in a society so focused on beauty is a very powerful tool.
The interesting thing here is that everybody else makes it in to a powerful thing, not the person having it, they just use the power granted.
It is well known that people rate the opinions of those that are taller/prettier higher than others. So, to adjust for that natural bias it might make sense to treat attractive people's opinions with greater scrutiny.
But maybe attractive people have better minds too? That's a possibility - however (IMHO) outward attractiveness is more to do with genetic fitness (in the procreation sense), than creative fitness (in the meme generation sense). The evolution of ideas is whether the action is now... (at least that's what I'd like to believe)
Specifically what I was referring to was power being used with little foresight and little wisdom. When it is used without the foresight that it will someday disappear, that's when the rude awakening can happen.
As you say, really it's no different than any other undeserving attribute that can disappear, it just needs to be used wisely and seen for what it is. Money, looks, power - it can all be a gift or a curse depending on how you handle it.
> Should those that are beautiful spend their lives in burlap sacks lest they give offense to those less fortunate (Burka's?).
My brother-in-law's sister was in Heathrow airport. She was in the bathroom with a woman who was initially dressed in a burka. She says that the woman she saw was was one of the most beautiful women she had ever seen in her lifetime.
Beauty can hide - if it hides, is it still beauty? Or not as political?
I can see wanting to 'get back' at them if they are really abusing their beauty. Though chances are most men who want to 'get back', including the original parent, were just jilted suitors.
In the example of this post, the male is perceived as being higher status because he has a desirable woman with him. The woman herself in this position isn't holding anyone by the balls. So the relationship is tenuous at best.
Here's a possibility: author feels especially confident when beautiful women are around him. This confidence/happiness projects to other people (via mirror neurons / the amygdala / etc.). People find him more enjoyable and approachable.
To clarify, I don't claim that being surrounded by bad chicks isn't going to make you feel better about yourself. I suspect that possessing other kinds of cultural capital can do the trick.
That's also a factor, I think. But it doesn't negate the argument that seeing someone with an attractive woman deferring to them sends a strong signal to people around you.
I don't understand why you guys are downvoting him.
Other than the "Pics or it didn't happen" meme, he is raising the issue that the article is hugely anecdotal even though it seems like common sense. That is a valid point.
My 30-year-old uber lawyer buddy has a gorgeous blonde fiance. She's in med school and is crazy smart. She's awesome.
My buddy decided at 27 that he wanted to get into chess. He got really into it, hired a teacher and by 29 or so was moving his rating up pretty well.
As a newcomer though, he often finds himself competing against 13-15 year old boys at his weekend tournements. In fact he's often the only person over 18 playing in some of these tournaments.
He has a good sense of humor about it, but some of these kids, he says, are just total turds to the other kids they compete against.
When he learns he has to play against a kid who's mean to other kids, he calls in the Fiance and has her sit behind him while he plays, just reading whatever she has to read for med school. She'll spend a whole Saturday sitting there behind him while he plays, her nose stuck in a book.
It just destroys the kids. He catches them trying to steal glances at her all the time during the games. Just breaks their chess mojo.
For the cool kids, kids who are struggling to figure out women at that age, he introduces them to her and she knows to treat them like the coolest guys in the room. Meanwhile, the mean bully kids get ignored and seethe in the corner.