He Man Womun Haters Club

Hello, Friend,

Today I’m sharing a video with some cursory thoughts that I’ll be digging into over the coming week. These are thoughts about gender roles, archetypes, stories we tell ourselves and each other, social norms, stereotypes, and the ways in which they inform our day to day existence, the larger cultural picture, and the illusory stratification of our social order. There is a lot to parse here and I’m only scratching the surface in this video, much more to explore. As always, I hope we can talk about it all further in the comments section over the coming week.

Just a quick history lesson before I go…

The original version of Facebook was called Facemash, a website (not an app as I said in the video) created by then Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg who was so insecure and mean spirited, he uploaded pictures of female students hacked from the school directories without their permission and encouraged people to rank them through voting on who was ‘hotter.’ The quote on the site read, “Were we admitted for our looks? No. Will we be judged by them? Yes.”

Here is what Zuck wrote on a blog post at this time, “The Kirkland Facebook (referring to the Kirkland House intranet) is open on my computer desktop, and some of these people have pretty horrendous Facebook pictures. I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” (Source Wikipedia, see link above.)

This tells you everything you need to know about the He Man Womun Haters Club founding member, Zuck.

Years later, with all of his money and success, he’s still so insecure that he thinks people asking for equity and denouncing toxic and abusive behavior are a threat to his cartoon version of masculinity.

Sad.

Tim Walz was right.

What a weird timeline we’re in, friend.

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