Susan,

Just for the record I *never* contacted you directly about this event or my objections to it nor did you contact me about these events when writing this article for BitchBuzz. But since I was the lead blogger / most public leader on this, and you characterize friends who contacted you, I wanted to make that clear.

Second, to clarify: "Bra Burning Feminism" is a misnomer. When the women at Atlantic City 32 or so years ago were protesting a Miss America Pageant, they asked for a city permit to have a fire to burn their bras. The city refused, though they got the permit for the demonstration. The women there didn't burn any bras, because they were too polite to break the rules. The media made up "bra burning feminism." But it's false. Bra Burning didn't exist.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bra_burning#Feminist_protests.2C_Miss_America.2C_and_.22bra_burning.22

You say, "... now, women are faced with the third wave of feminism: the 'I am going to be as sex-positive and hot as I want to...' of the current millennium." I don't think this is the crux of current feminism. But whether or not that's the case, well.. the rest of your article then supports the wrong argument and your argument about whether women can be "hot" doesn't have anything at all to do with what actually happened around the event. Being hot or not is non-sensical in relation to the issues at hand. The Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner + Zivity (as event in-kind sponsor and speaker) + photographers (paid for by Zivity) doesn't give women a choice to be "sex-positive." It forces women to be objectified.

It's *not* sex-positive to force women at a work/networking event to be in photos later posted to Flickr with the tag "zivity" as if those women endorse the company which was the initial proposal when the announcement for the dinner went out (note that now, the 250 or so photos from that BAGGD still have the other sponsor of the event in the tags as "facebook" next to all their photos -- in other words, Zivity photographers had every intention of putting the "zivity" tag next the photos when the BAGGD#2 was announced). Zivity and their photographers changed what they were doing with the event and photos/tags because of my blog posts. But the results still bore out some problems we said would happen, like all the women would be photographed, not just women at the side inside a booth.

The choice women faced when they saw the original BAGGD announcement was to either attend with a porn company and their photographer, or not attend. That's a terrible offer.

A Women can objectify herself all she wants to, put herself at the Zivity porn site, as much as she wants to do so, be as hot or not as she wants. The point of our blog posts was to state this in writing over and over (only one other woman besides me was willing to blog publicly about her objections to the BAGGD+Zivity event.. of the 40 or so that told me they were upset, none wanted to do blog it, I think because they were afraid of being characterized as complainers about women's issues).

We agreed mostly in personal conversations we *didn't care* about Zivity on it's own, and my blog posts reflect that. We only cared about the combination of Zivity + BAGGD, especially as Zivity was paying (via in-kind sponsorship) professional photographers to photograph the event (and as we surmised sponsor tags would be put on the photos as if anyone who attended the event was somehow an endorser of the company who had sponsored, as the current 250 or so photos now are tagged with "facebook" which was the other sponsor still standing when the event went live).

As long as each woman is the one deciding and having the control about whether she participates, we have no objection. But by having a women's work event force women to participate in the photos if they attend, well, that is not "sex-positive" and so we made an alternative event where women weren't forced by attending to endorse or participate in porn company activities for work.

In other words: we wanted to take the porn out of work. It's okay for other times if someone wants it, just not work. It is especially not sex-positive to force porn on people.

Another issue we immediately realized was that due to the timing of Zivity's association with BAGGD, Zivity was likely using BAGGD to buy back girl geek cred after their founder took her shirt off in a video at the top of Techcrunch, a prominent business / technology blog. Since very few women founders make it to Techcrunch, especially in a video, the Zivity strip video placed at Techcrunch caused many women geeks to disdain Zivity's cheap shot at getting their woman founder onto Techcrunch just because she went naked. Again it was the combination, not the video on it's own, which in non-work contexts was funny. We wanted to talk with the BAGGD organizer about how this was playing out, but she kept proposing meetings and then not making them.

Zivity doesn't really care about whether they are using non-consenting girl-geek women because their have obligations associated with their $8 million in funding. This is a for-profit business and as such, has a fiduciary responsibility to it's shareholders not to care about anything but profitability. Of course they are going to try everything they can to become successful, including using women geeks in ways that may be damaging for the women, though may not be clear at the time, for Zivity's own gain.

However, your questions are exactly the right ones to ask: “How do women define themselves?” and “Who gets to make that call?” Yes, each woman should be in control of herself!

I sure don't think Zivity gets the make that call, but by sponsoring/speaking and photographing the event, to put whatever tags Zivity wanted next to photos, (though the sponsorship word was later removed at the BAGGD site only after my blog posts), they were saying they get to have all the power at the BAGGD event #2 in exchange for their payments to photographers and speaking.

Zivity also lied and tried to deceive me in writing. I wrote an additional blog post just before the BAGGD event just to pass along to my readers Zivity's written statements to us that they were *not sponsors and never were*. I wanted to clarify and be fair and get the story right. However, after the BAGGD event, it became clear that Zivity knew they lied as someone who works for them told me that their founder acknowledged to her that yes, an "in-kind" gift to an event is in fact a sponsorship and that was in fact what Zivity was doing. Zivity was trying to skate by the controversy without answering it publicly either at their blog, my blog, or anywhere else. The BAGGD announcement on Twitter still shows Zivity as a sponsor so clearly BAGGD was thinking (at the point of announcement, that Zivity was a sponsor for this in-kind sponsorship).

http://twitter.com/bayareagirlgeek/statuses/836642775

As a social media porn company (asking many women geeks and bloggers repeatedly to pose nude on their site and engage in social media with Zivity), you have to wonder about that series of events and why Zivity is unwilling to engage in a social media discussion about what they do as a company. As such, I don't trust them at all.

Part of being sex-positive, to me, is being up front, honest, and fair. And certainly not going out of your way to deceive people.

Lastly, half the women at the alternative event we held were under 30 yrs old. And a quarter were under 25. Some have even posed for racy pictures, but they get that forcing porn at work isn't sex-positive.

So unless you mean above that "mature" women objected, as in: the women who had more emotional maturity saw that "forcing women to engage with and endorse back a porn company via participation in a work event" wasn't sex-positive, then yes, the women who objected and held an alternative girl geek event were "more mature." But the women who objected are far younger than you. In fact, btw, the alternative event was Calley Nye's idea (and she's 22).

mary

I attended the first girl geek dinner at Google. I didn't attend the second with Zivity. I didn't want to be associated with a porn company. Wish I'd known there was an alternative event.

I'm 28, and to me, forcing me to associate at work events with a porn company just left a bad taste in my mouth. My boyfriend, who is a company founder in SF, when I told him Zivity was sponsoring this, said "Yeah - they are just trying to legitimize themselves by sponsoring your event. Not real complicated. I would do the same thing if it helped my company. That's what sponsorships are for.. to exploit."

When I read Mary's thoughts about how I should be in control, not Zivity, it rang true. Zivity was trying to control the event and how I am. Not women in the community deciding for themselves.

I attended the first girl geek dinner at Google. I didn't attend the second with Zivity. I didn't want to be associated with a porn company. Wish I'd known there was an alternative event.

I'm 28, and to me, forcing me to associate at work events with a porn company just left a bad taste in my mouth. My boyfriend, who is a company founder in SF, when I told him Zivity was sponsoring this, said "Yeah - they are just trying to legitimize themselves by sponsoring your event. Not real complicated. I would do the same thing if it helped my company. That's what sponsorships are for.. to exploit."

When I read Mary's thoughts about how I should be in control, not Zivity, it rang true. Zivity was trying to control the event and how I am. Not women in the community deciding for themselves.

Hi,
I just had lunch with a friend who then borrowed my computer to post a comment above, after chatting and showing her the post/comments. Apparently your blog made the comment from both me and her, even though she had to confirm herself in her email system before it would post.

Would you please remove it from me. I didn't make it, and would rather see it attributed to her. My BF is *not* a company founder in SF and he might get jealous if he sees this post from me (kidding).

Anyway, please help.
Thanks,
mary

Susan,

When I first spotted the tweet that Zivity and Facebook were sponsoring the Bay Area Girl Geek dinner I tweeted http://twitter.com/identitywoman/statuses/836650110

"@bayareagirlgeek I find it ODD that you have a porn site sponsoring your next event and 'shooting' the women at the event. why sexualize us?"

It was on the heals of this Newsweek article/video
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140457
"Revenge of the Nerdette: As geeks become chic in all levels of society, an unlikely subset is starting to roar. Meet the Nerd Girls: they're smart, they're techie and they're hot."

This article didn't focus on the women's abilities in engineering and computer science but instead focused on their sexual objectification.

I made the comment about Zivity and BAGGD because I felt instinctively uncomfortable by having a porn company "shooting" women at event. I had seen them "shooting women" at the Crunchies and it made me uncomfortable to see it at a tech event.

Having them come to a women and technology event was sending message to women that they need to be smart AND sexy and that if you are not presenting as conventionally beautiful and conforming to popular culture norms of "SEXY" (and being sexually avaliable if you are single) you will have difficulty making it in the industry.

Women in this culture are bombarded with images that say if you are not presenting "perfect skin" and the "Proper sized waist" and "big enough breasts" then you are inherently flawed you are worth less those who do reflect conventional beauty norms. I don't know if you ever read The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women published in 1991 (I think I read it in 1993)

I will quote the wikipedia summary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beauty_Myth:
"Wolf argues that women in Western culture are damaged by the pressure to conform to an idealized concept of female beauty—the Iron Maiden throughout modern society, from Victorian Times to today. She argues that the beauty myth is political, a way of maintaining the patriarchal system. It allows women to enter the labour force, but under controlled conditions. She also claims that this system keeps women under control by the weight of their own insecurities."

This analysis of what is going on - the inherent cultural control that is being imposed by creating insecuirty if you are not presenting "sexually" you are not cool or hip or worth talking to. This climate is hostile and not good for women or men.

Susan you say - "After all, so many of the women I know who are 24-27 have grown up comfortable playing with sexuality, identity, gender"

This does not mean it is appropriate to "play with your sexuality" at work or in professional contexts. In fact it is the responsibility of older women who fought hard against sexual harassment and hostile work environments that had pornography posted around the office to share with younger women the struggle they went through to create the workplace norms we have today.

We are still struggling with these issues in the Web 2.0 workplaces of today at Web 2.0 Expo last year as they prepared for their 5 min presentation Spock's founders desktop that flashed before 5000+ people had porn on it and the the demo itself had focused on searching for Victoria Secret Models. http://watchyourmouth.livejournal.com/203514.html
Comments about the demo also flowed on Tim O'Reilly's Blog.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2007/04/why-im-so-excited-about-spock.html#comment-553176

I also vividly remember the "hired help" that I encountered at my first big mainstream technology conference ever the Open Source Convention in 2004. The party was put on by one of the companies that had a booth on the exhibit floor. It was a regular bar but many of the women attending were hired by the company to be at the event - they were not strippers or anything but all had large breasts, lots of make up and tight fitting outfits on. I was there in my professional role and the whole thing felt odd. If you can't hire the eye candy any more does that mean we as a community we should generate it "in house" by promoting tech women women "being sexual" and women "playing with their sexuality" while in professional contexts. I don't think so.

It is good to be an embodied being (we are not just the brains in our heads or the text we type on the web) It is good to feel comfortable in our own skin, to wear cloths that are flattering and help us project who are to the world. It is good to be a whole person and be able to relate to other people in healthy ways. There is a diversity of how people express themselves as physical beings and to impose a norm of hyper-sexualization of women is unhealthy and inappropriate.

To me feminism is about being grounded and centered in your own body - comfortable in your own skin and having the confidence to present yourself to the world in an authentic way. This is what makes one beautiful. Feminism is not about "forward" about one's sexuality all the time and imposing it on others in professional contexts.

Kaliya

I disconnect with your premise. It's the post-divorce older women who are "as sex positive as I want to be." It's a majority of young women who are "as attractive and flirtatious as I want to be." Not sex-positive. Power-positive.

Anyway, the problem I had with this situation is always as it had been: if it had been a man's event, how would this have been interpreted? If an erotica-company had come in to take photos of men in conjunction with an event... how would that have been perceived? (Maybe it should happen, I don't know!... has the time come to help men, too, display their most superficially beautiful selves?)

The point is that this isn't just any old party, this is Women in Tech. Isn't the whole point of the technology meritocracy that intelligence and the ability to bring intelligence to market is The Key Variable? So are women held to a higher standard: just as smart but also must play the hottie game... or are we allowed "in" at a lower standard: not quite as smart so long as you also work as eye candy?

Or as Tracy Ullman conveys the double standard of beauty-at-work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQtqHwkTxWM

I've been following the various bloggers and the attention that this particular issue has gotten, and I'd like to have my say.

It is well and good to discuss what women in tech are doing and how it effects feminism and the nature of the technology field. However, if the goal is to promote women in technology, one should probably allow any woman moving into technology to have their say. I can understand some being troubled with Zivity sponsoring the event. As a speaker, though, Cyan is in tech, she's successful, and has been garnering a lot of attention. One would think that this would be exactly the type of person that should be at an event for women in technology, especially if she's controversial.

Women and pornography is certainly a battlefield issue in academic women's studies. I can see a feminist group splitting over the heated issue, but should BAGGD do the same? From what I can tell, the purpose of BAGGD is to promote women entering the tech industry, particularly in an entrepreneurial capacity. The focus should be on encouraging women to be active and to be able to lean on each other professionally to gain advantages in the industry. Secondary to this, discussions may rage as how women should be active. If we tear apart the community over these discussions-turned-fights it's not only overly dramatic, but harmful to inclusion of active women in the field. If you hamstring communities built to encourage women, you discourage women. It's as simple as that.

There are completely valid ways to bring all of the complaints mentioned here to light without making it seem that there are two camps for women in tech. If a woman has only the choice of maintaining complete distance from sexuality professionally or embracing sexuality professionally you will only end up with two types of women in the industry. This is exactly the problem that women, particularly in the geek community, face. We are polarized into stupid-and-beautiful or smart-and-plain by the media and the men around us. This polarized view is false, and you can't fix it by creating stupid-and-plain or smart-and-beautiful stereotypes. Women are a continuum, and if you can't accept that in business, then you're leaving people out. You can have your own personal opinions of what a woman should be, but this is about getting women involved.

If the goal is to encourage women to enter the industry in greater numbers and with greater strength, splitting the group that is offering amnesty to these women into warring factions harms the core issue. If a woman entering the startup culture sees that there are groups willing to help her, but that choosing one will make her an enemy of the others, she will be less likely to reach out to them. Without the help of these very important launching points, a woman is less likely to succeed.

It is for this very reason that I've posted this anonymously. Whichever side of the academic question of pornography I agree with can I, as a female entrepreneur (and therefore an endangered species), afford to declare myself a bitter enemy of either side? More importantly, I shouldn't have to. I can see the point of either side. I don't hate them. Holding a personal opinion on this matter shouldn't effect my business. People are willing to harm the inclusion of more women in tech, and in doing so harm our ability to succeed overall, to fight over a political side issue in blogs.

If the bad little girls want to go up against the good ol' boys, we have to stick together, and maybe even take a cue. Politics is secondary to our bottom line - a greater saturation of female presence in our industry. Much like knitting circles and tupperware parties, putting women together has historically improved their cause. Tearing them apart never has.

Jane - Thank you for your very thoughtful comment. You're right, things are very polarized and I loved this:

"If a woman entering the startup culture sees that there are groups willing to help her, but that choosing one will make her an enemy of the others, she will be less likely to reach out to them."

Very, very true.

Susan - Thank you for writing this brilliant post. I thought it was respectful, well-thought out and brought up some really good points. And I agree, we definitely DO need to bridge that god damned gap. I think a lot of the discussion around this post highlighted just how wide that gap is.

I think there is a real simple solution to the polarizing effects of having an event where women are forced to choose between staying in control of their sexuality, and giving control to someone else (in the case above, BAGGD and Zivity).

Don't take away the individual's ability to control her own sexuality. Then, end of polarization. End of asking women to choose.

Now we can all get back to our regularly schedule programming, where women in tech go to events, and we can be ourselves. In whatever form that takes. One woman wearing a slutty dress as Susan mentions, another wearing clothes that aren't sexy, another wearing something half sexy, half businessy. And all of them free to roam around, doing what they like without any requirement from the organizers or sponsors or loss of control.

Problem solved.

That's all we've asked for from the beginning. Let me be myself, and control myself. Don't force me to be sexy your way. Don't force me to have to be a certain way in order to be acceptable.

Just let me attend women in tech events as myself, in control of myself.

Thanks,
mary

ps, this article wasn't respectful toward the women involved in protesting the controlled sexuality of the BAGGD/Zivity event. It was extremely problematic in this sense. However, I've told Susan that offline and it's for future offline discussion. But I do want to make it clear that I don't feel respected at all in this article.

In cased you missed it Susan - this was posted on this site after you did your post.

http://tech.bitchbuzz.com/10CommandementsBeingaGeekyGirlinGeekGuyW.html

The 10 Commandments of Being a Geeky Girl in a Guys World

#6 You shall use your brain to impress, not thy countenance.

Darlings, wearing a pair of nerdy glasses and a short Catholic school girl skirt do not a true geek girl make. Geek girls have been fetishized for years, giving individuals like the NonSociety girls ample opportunity to capitalize on their good looks, branding themselves as “geek girls” when they really should have branded themselves as “brilliant PR girls” or “self-promoting girls.”

Not to slam them – they’re good at what they do – selling themselves. And, certainly all three are very attractive. They actually rely on that to propel them forward in their given careers.

True geek girls are sexy because of their big, voluptuous, gorgeous brains.

Yes, they may be drop dead gorgeous in addition to those beautiful brains; but, the grey matter is what they use to impress, rather than T&A. Thereby, earning them respect in addition to physical admiration.