4 ms·

This is a nothing burger of an article. It's about consensual drug use and sex among adults. It happens to involve rich and powerful people who (gasp) can throw

This is a nothing burger of an article. It's about consensual drug use and sex among adults. It happens to involve rich and powerful people who (gasp) can throw these kinds of parties. In any unequal society, there will be people who are willing to trade sex for financial security or access to power, with others who are seeking sex. It would be deeply naive to think otherwise. The outrage here strikes me as hollow.

dang 9y ago
I don't think that's quite fair. The article reads to me like a good-faith attempt to explore some less obvious aspects of these dynamics. It doesn't arrive at new or substantive conclusions, but just standing in the neighborhood of these questions while keeping an open mind is worth something while society is in transition about them. The article also manages to stay more neutral and non-judgmental than the lurid material would easily allow, and that deserves respect too. Overall, it's better than the median for the genre.
- blueyes 9y ago
  You're right, I should have toned down the first sentence a little bit. I hope that young women working in Silicon Valley will read this article and make better decisions for themselves. Each new generation has to learn the ways of the world all over again. But some of them will read this article and make exactly the same decisions, because there are reasons why these parties are thrown and why people, with their eyes open, attend. What I was trying to say was: The article is overblown in its tone, and that's important for reasons I'll get to at the end. There are other, much worse things going on in the world, some of which Emily Chang has admirably broken as news.[1] It probably would have worked better if the orgy angle had been woven into a chapter of The Circle. I don't find much in it that surprises me. And given its lack of concrete details, it doesn't strike me as particularly newsworthy. I try to read things that I hope will surprise me and that I might learn from. This book chapter tells me that rich, powerful people behave in Silicon Valley much as they do in other parts of the world (Wall Street, for example), and much as they have done in other times (the Marquis de Sade's books are one example among many). Personally, I don't find the article to be neutral or non-judgmental. Quite the opposite. It is part of a book titled "Brotopia", and it advances a thesis that Silicon Valley is dominated by emotionally immature or egotistical men who use their relative wealth and power to prey on young women. These sex parties are cast as part of a gender war with two sides: straight males vs straight females. That's a vast oversimplification, making a lot of noise about a very small sample of the humans who constitute the tech community. The only reason why this doesn't fall into the cateogory of "things we can assume happen weekly" is that it's Silicon Valley. I could name at least one powerful lesbian in tech who left her wife to shack up with a female employee. I'm quite positive that some gay men in tech find opportunities to prey on male interns just as much as the revanchist straight male geeks in the article manage to live out their adolescent fantasies by acting like players. But neither of those fit the direction of Emily Chang's outrage (which is also the dominant direction of outrage in liberal circles). That tells me either that Chang is not reporting this story as diligently as she could, or that she's ignoring significant information to advance a point in this debate. The villain's role has been cast. Emily Chang is a professional journalist, and she knows how to maintain a journalist's neutral tone while letting her sources drive home her point. If you look at the most emotionally powerful quotes (take that of Elisabeth Sheff, for example [2]) or language like "sport fucking", you can tell which side Chang is on. She's portraying the males here as powerful, predatory and ridiculous all at once: "Furthermore, these elite founders, C.E.O.’s, and V.C.’s see themselves as more influential than most hot-shit bankers, actors, and athletes will ever be." All the voices in the piece are Chang's, because she selected them to tell this story, which is a very particular story out of all the threads she could pick. And those voices land heavily in the judging camp. She lets Founder X make a fool of himself between double quotes, just as she did with Tom Perkins. Is Founder X a fool? Probably. Is he typical of male entrepreneurs? Not in my experience. Did he think he was speaking to a sympathetic ear? Probably. That's how journalists get people to say embarrassing things. They use their sources, just like their sources use them to gain publicity. Just like the men and women at these orgies are using each other. And that's a fundamental part of human interactions that she sounds really judgey about.[3] My chief concern is that this article is part of a prurient and puritanical movement to police sexuality in America, a movement that has gone far beyond condemning acts of coercion or workplace sexual harassment (both of which I, too, condemn), and drifted into condemning the gray area of fluid power dynamics juxtaposed with consent. Masha Gessen has talked about it more articulately than I can: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/when-does-a-watershed-become-a-sex-panic https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/when-does-a-wa... https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sex-consent-dangers-of-misplaced-scale https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sex-consent-da... If we become too easily outraged and rigid in the way we judge sexual behavior publicly, we will simply become a society of hypocrites and rule breakers who can't talk about or understand real humans. A lot of things already can't be discussed calmly -- eppur si muove, as the man said. Good journalism pushes us to look at things in new ways that deepen our understanding of the world. This article didn't do that for me. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/uber-investor-shervin-pishevar-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-by-multiple-women https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/uber-inve... [2] “That’s exploitation. That’s old-school, fucked-up masculine arrogance and borderline prostitution,” she said. “The men don’t have to prostitute themselves, because they have the money. . . . ‘I should be able to have sex with a woman because I’m a rich guy.’ That is not even one particle progressive; that is the same tired bullshit. It’s trying to blend the new and keeping the old attitudes, and those old attitudes are based in patriarchy, so they come at the expense of women.” [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbN8jqDhHO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbN8jqDhHO8
RIMR 9y ago
I think the outrage comes from the appearance of predatory behavior by men who hold great power in an already male-dominated industry. I'm sure it's nice to have enough money to get people to bend to your will, but using it to manipulate people who are already marginalized in your industry into sleeping with you is not exactly an ethical thing to do. It may not be illegal, but people should maybe ask themselves if the men who use their money for sexual conquest are the kind of men we want controlling tens of billions of dollars in capital. I have no problem with open-relationships, group sex, drug use etc. amongst consenting adults - I have dabbled myself - but I do have a problem with power dynamics coming into play and exerting unfair pressure on people to engage in sexual situations that they wouldn't otherwise consent to.
- chronic193 9y ago
  > but people should maybe ask themselves if the men who use their money for sexual conquest are the kind of men we want controlling tens of billions of dollars in capital. Yeah, I'm fine with it. Really. I honestly don't care what they do. As long as I get my fat engineering paycheck every other week. Gonna pick up a Tesla Model 3 soon.
rayiner 9y ago
The fact that it's consensual doesn't mean it's not coerceive. > “What’s not O.K. about this scene is that it is so money- and power-dominated. It’s a problem because it’s an abuse of power. I would never do it again.” Can we imagine a society in which men with money and power in an industry don't use it to try and sleep with young women? Maybe that's desirable and maybe it's not. But society defines a wide range of conduct as legal, but unseemly or even unethical. Could this maybe fall into that bucket?
- philwelch 9y ago
  > Can we imagine a society in which men with money and power ... don't use it to try and sleep with young women? I can imagine it, yeah. But it’s one of the less plausible utopias.
  - rayiner 9y ago
    Economic coercion is unpleasant even when the transaction is consensual. (There is a whole movie about this: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107211 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107211). Maybe we can’t get rid of such conduct, but we sure can pass negative judgment on the people engaging in it. Speaking of which, the social opprobrium gets dismissed as prudishness, but I suspect most readers would react differently to the article if everyone involved was economically and socially equal.
    - philwelch 9y ago
      It's not necessarily economic coercion. Status, success, wealth, and power can all be very attractive. Even high-status women who can easily take care of themselves still sometimes prefer successful and powerful men. If you're writing a breathless Vanity Fair piece you're going to try and spin the economic coercion narrative, because it's fashionable to hate on Silicon Valley and we're in a weird cultural moment when it comes to the intersection of sexuality and power (thanks to stories that are coming out of the other, far more sordid side of California), but money and power are still sexy, and they always will be, and the rich and powerful will take advantage of that.
strong_silent_t 9y ago
As a tech-bro type person I'm not enjoying our daily two minutes of hate from ivy league and oxbridge types against our various failures of moral purity. But there is a lot of value in this type of piece for i.e. a 22-year old female fresh grad entering this environment to cast aside euphemisms and frippery and explain in real basic detail exactly who is getting fucked by whom, and what the terms are and are not.
- stcredzero 9y ago
  As a tech-bro type person I'm not enjoying our daily two minutes of hate from ivy league and oxbridge types against our various failures of moral purity. As an Ivy-leaguer, let me say this: There was plenty of questionable stuff that went on when I was an undergrad!

dang 9y ago

I don't think that's quite fair. The article reads to me like a good-faith attempt to explore some less obvious aspects of these dynamics. It doesn't arrive at new or substantive conclusions, but just standing in the neighborhood of these questions while keeping an open mind is worth something while society is in transition about them. The article also manages to stay more neutral and non-judgmental than the lurid material would easily allow, and that deserves respect too. Overall, it's better than the median for the genre.

blueyes 9y ago
You're right, I should have toned down the first sentence a little bit. I hope that young women working in Silicon Valley will read this article and make better decisions for themselves. Each new generation has to learn the ways of the world all over again. But some of them will read this article and make exactly the same decisions, because there are reasons why these parties are thrown and why people, with their eyes open, attend. What I was trying to say was: The article is overblown in its tone, and that's important for reasons I'll get to at the end. There are other, much worse things going on in the world, some of which Emily Chang has admirably broken as news.[1] It probably would have worked better if the orgy angle had been woven into a chapter of The Circle. I don't find much in it that surprises me. And given its lack of concrete details, it doesn't strike me as particularly newsworthy. I try to read things that I hope will surprise me and that I might learn from. This book chapter tells me that rich, powerful people behave in Silicon Valley much as they do in other parts of the world (Wall Street, for example), and much as they have done in other times (the Marquis de Sade's books are one example among many). Personally, I don't find the article to be neutral or non-judgmental. Quite the opposite. It is part of a book titled "Brotopia", and it advances a thesis that Silicon Valley is dominated by emotionally immature or egotistical men who use their relative wealth and power to prey on young women. These sex parties are cast as part of a gender war with two sides: straight males vs straight females. That's a vast oversimplification, making a lot of noise about a very small sample of the humans who constitute the tech community. The only reason why this doesn't fall into the cateogory of "things we can assume happen weekly" is that it's Silicon Valley. I could name at least one powerful lesbian in tech who left her wife to shack up with a female employee. I'm quite positive that some gay men in tech find opportunities to prey on male interns just as much as the revanchist straight male geeks in the article manage to live out their adolescent fantasies by acting like players. But neither of those fit the direction of Emily Chang's outrage (which is also the dominant direction of outrage in liberal circles). That tells me either that Chang is not reporting this story as diligently as she could, or that she's ignoring significant information to advance a point in this debate. The villain's role has been cast. Emily Chang is a professional journalist, and she knows how to maintain a journalist's neutral tone while letting her sources drive home her point. If you look at the most emotionally powerful quotes (take that of Elisabeth Sheff, for example [2]) or language like "sport fucking", you can tell which side Chang is on. She's portraying the males here as powerful, predatory and ridiculous all at once: "Furthermore, these elite founders, C.E.O.’s, and V.C.’s see themselves as more influential than most hot-shit bankers, actors, and athletes will ever be." All the voices in the piece are Chang's, because she selected them to tell this story, which is a very particular story out of all the threads she could pick. And those voices land heavily in the judging camp. She lets Founder X make a fool of himself between double quotes, just as she did with Tom Perkins. Is Founder X a fool? Probably. Is he typical of male entrepreneurs? Not in my experience. Did he think he was speaking to a sympathetic ear? Probably. That's how journalists get people to say embarrassing things. They use their sources, just like their sources use them to gain publicity. Just like the men and women at these orgies are using each other. And that's a fundamental part of human interactions that she sounds really judgey about.[3] My chief concern is that this article is part of a prurient and puritanical movement to police sexuality in America, a movement that has gone far beyond condemning acts of coercion or workplace sexual harassment (both of which I, too, condemn), and drifted into condemning the gray area of fluid power dynamics juxtaposed with consent. Masha Gessen has talked about it more articulately than I can: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/when-does-a-watershed-become-a-sex-panic https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/when-does-a-wa... https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sex-consent-dangers-of-misplaced-scale https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/sex-consent-da... If we become too easily outraged and rigid in the way we judge sexual behavior publicly, we will simply become a society of hypocrites and rule breakers who can't talk about or understand real humans. A lot of things already can't be discussed calmly -- eppur si muove, as the man said. Good journalism pushes us to look at things in new ways that deepen our understanding of the world. This article didn't do that for me. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/uber-investor-shervin-pishevar-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-by-multiple-women https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-12-01/uber-inve... [2] “That’s exploitation. That’s old-school, fucked-up masculine arrogance and borderline prostitution,” she said. “The men don’t have to prostitute themselves, because they have the money. . . . ‘I should be able to have sex with a woman because I’m a rich guy.’ That is not even one particle progressive; that is the same tired bullshit. It’s trying to blend the new and keeping the old attitudes, and those old attitudes are based in patriarchy, so they come at the expense of women.” [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbN8jqDhHO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dbN8jqDhHO8

RIMR 9y ago

I think the outrage comes from the appearance of predatory behavior by men who hold great power in an already male-dominated industry. I'm sure it's nice to have enough money to get people to bend to your will, but using it to manipulate people who are already marginalized in your industry into sleeping with you is not exactly an ethical thing to do. It may not be illegal, but people should maybe ask themselves if the men who use their money for sexual conquest are the kind of men we want controlling tens of billions of dollars in capital. I have no problem with open-relationships, group sex, drug use etc. amongst consenting adults - I have dabbled myself - but I do have a problem with power dynamics coming into play and exerting unfair pressure on people to engage in sexual situations that they wouldn't otherwise consent to.

chronic193 9y ago
> but people should maybe ask themselves if the men who use their money for sexual conquest are the kind of men we want controlling tens of billions of dollars in capital. Yeah, I'm fine with it. Really. I honestly don't care what they do. As long as I get my fat engineering paycheck every other week. Gonna pick up a Tesla Model 3 soon.

rayiner 9y ago

The fact that it's consensual doesn't mean it's not coerceive. > “What’s not O.K. about this scene is that it is so money- and power-dominated. It’s a problem because it’s an abuse of power. I would never do it again.” Can we imagine a society in which men with money and power in an industry don't use it to try and sleep with young women? Maybe that's desirable and maybe it's not. But society defines a wide range of conduct as legal, but unseemly or even unethical. Could this maybe fall into that bucket?

philwelch 9y ago
> Can we imagine a society in which men with money and power ... don't use it to try and sleep with young women? I can imagine it, yeah. But it’s one of the less plausible utopias.
- rayiner 9y ago
  Economic coercion is unpleasant even when the transaction is consensual. (There is a whole movie about this: http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107211 http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0107211). Maybe we can’t get rid of such conduct, but we sure can pass negative judgment on the people engaging in it. Speaking of which, the social opprobrium gets dismissed as prudishness, but I suspect most readers would react differently to the article if everyone involved was economically and socially equal.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    It's not necessarily economic coercion. Status, success, wealth, and power can all be very attractive. Even high-status women who can easily take care of themselves still sometimes prefer successful and powerful men. If you're writing a breathless Vanity Fair piece you're going to try and spin the economic coercion narrative, because it's fashionable to hate on Silicon Valley and we're in a weird cultural moment when it comes to the intersection of sexuality and power (thanks to stories that are coming out of the other, far more sordid side of California), but money and power are still sexy, and they always will be, and the rich and powerful will take advantage of that.

strong_silent_t 9y ago

As a tech-bro type person I'm not enjoying our daily two minutes of hate from ivy league and oxbridge types against our various failures of moral purity. But there is a lot of value in this type of piece for i.e. a 22-year old female fresh grad entering this environment to cast aside euphemisms and frippery and explain in real basic detail exactly who is getting fucked by whom, and what the terms are and are not.

stcredzero 9y ago
As a tech-bro type person I'm not enjoying our daily two minutes of hate from ivy league and oxbridge types against our various failures of moral purity. As an Ivy-leaguer, let me say this: There was plenty of questionable stuff that went on when I was an undergrad!