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Regardless, what we’re dealing with is a new society composed almost entirely of young men, a society that is being socialized as it grows. What I mean is that the dot-com boom became a sort of mass organizational rubric under which a group of generally isolated men with common interests came together as a new breed. Now, Georges Bataille argues that only under “primitive conditions” was “erotic pleasure...consequent upon the charm, physical vigor, and intelligence of the men, and the beauty and youth of the women.” The introduction of war and slavery into a primitive society also introduced the concept of privelege, and this “system of privilege made prostitution the normal channel for eroticism, making it dependant on an individual’s power or wealth, and dooming it to live as a lie.” So take your average internet whiz kid - in 1999, he’s 19 years old. He’s been living at home in San Jose since high school. His social skills are rudimentary at best and his sexual history is minimal. He owns nothing - any monies or property that he can obtain possession of belong to his parents - and has virtually no power. We could say that his conditions are “primitive” in that the concepts of rank, competition and ownership have not yet impacted his life, and that wtihout either charm or physical vigor, his intelligence is probably not enough to acquire young, beautiful women. Then he sells his idea or product and is inducted into the new billionaire boys club. Suddenly, he has wealth, rank, power. If we can follow Bataile far enough to agree that prostitution is the “natural” outlet for eroticism in a newly competitive society, we don’t have to go so far to see an IPO as the "war" that makes this kind of outlet appealing. Priscilla Alexander, co-editor of the seminal anthology Sex Work, notes that large-scale technological change often coincides with the kinds of gender conflicts that instigate a peak in the sex industry. As she wrote in 1987, Prostitution has tended to increase in times of social change...in 13th century France, prostitution was essentially a cottage industry, with a few women apparently working independently in a few small towns...The Industrial Revolution in the 19th century was accompanied by a marked increase in prostitution.This was due, in part, to the migration of large numbers of women from rural, agricultural communities to urban, industrial cities. When they could not obtain jobs in the new factories, or when they could not subsist on the low factory wages, significant numbers turned to prostitution. Like other technological booms, the dot-com spectacle most directly benefitted men, because it is men who were in ownership of the tools of production. It’s hard to say whether or not hiring practices in the tech industry were/are sexist in the traditional sense, because about 80% of engineering and technology students are male, and even though the most competitive schools like MIT make an active attempt to recruit female computer science students, female enrollment in engineering programs has dropped steadily since the early 80’s. Often times, the women working at a dot-com were working in public relations or marketing, or answering phones, and often times they were the most expendable when the money started to run out. It was not uncommon for a woman in San Francisco to turn to the sex industry when her New Economy employers decided they couldn’t afford her. |