I just watched the first half of the recently released The Social Network, verified a couple of facts online and discovered the sexist inception of Facebook.
Turns out that the first baby step Mark Zuckerberg took towards the creation of Facebook was blogging that his (ex-) girlfriend owes her deceptive 34-D size to Victoria's Secrets and consequently, breaking into Harvard's Halls of Residence networks and putting together a website to rate girls in imitation of the already existing Hot or Not! A particularly distasteful way of getting back at a girl for being dumped, I must say.
The development of the website to choose the 'hotter' girl from the two faces appearing on the screen hit it off rapidly, rocketing the total number of visits to the website in two hours to an astonishing 22,000.
And this is what brought Zuckerberg into the limelight, although for all the wrong reasons with the Harvard administration. Anyhow, to cut a long story short, a couple more incidences of not-so-honest deals (and ditching of deals), Facebook was founded in its entirety as we know it today.
The shock value here?
That Mark Zuckerberg, considered to be a genius today and the Harvard student fraternity don't appear any different than average/below-average sexist guys we meet everyday. That they too revel in mud slinging by 'revealing' girls' real breast sizes (because, of course, there's nothing more to the female species than breasts). That intelligence and creativity somehow seem to have no effect whatsoever on sexist attitudes.
The only reason I would be willing to overlook the sexist moment of inception of Facebook is that there are probably as many feminist groups on Facebook as there are sexist. Talk about dismantling the Master's house with the Master's tools. Ha!
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