How the ‘dissemination’ predicted the corporate masculinity crisis

Leaving aside the fact that women have only 28% of all computing and mathematics work in the United States and only 52 women for every 100 men are promoted to management positions (according to Cio), Zuckerberg makes an excellent point: men in leadership have been terrified that women do their work better while the technological sector has existed. In fact, one only needs to return to the 1994 erotic thriller Divulgation To recognize how little original CEO was being when he began to mount the fear about the massive castration of the industry.

Directed by Barry Levinson, Divulgation It stars Michael Douglas as Tom Sanders, the manager of the production line of a Seattle technology company that is anxiously waiting for your right to be promoted to direct the CD-ROM division. He has been transmitted in favor of his ex -girlfriend, Meredith Johnson (Demi Moore), who gets from the Silicon Valley to lead everyone.

Meredith, drunk with lust fed by power, invites Tom to his office that night and tries to seduce him. As a affectionate family man with a wife and two young children, he only succumbs to oral sex, but does not stop at something representable when he sees his reflection in the office window. Furious for being thrown, Meredith yells at him, threatens to ruin him and then formally accuses him of sexual assault. The rest of the film involves Tom’s frantic attempts to test Meredith’s false accusations with the help of a lawyer. In doing so, he discovers a vast conspiracy that explains why his boss promoted Meredith in the first place because obviously he could not have had anything to do with merit.

The spurious accusations of sexual aggression are indefensible and also extremely rare. The very fact that the film focuses on a woman who lies about being raped is in itself a reflection of male insecurity. The saying says that the worst fear of a man is to be falsely accused of rape, while the worst fear of a woman is to be raped. Developer Divulgation You pass more than two hours illustrating why, statistics will be convicted, we should all worry about the first and there is no time in the second.

The male fragility about changing gender dynamics in the workplace is everywhere in the film. During his trip to the office, Tom gives him one of his colleagues’ visit to a male traveler who recently lost his job. The man looks at the card and says with melancholy: “You used to have fun with the girls. Now they probably want your work. “When Tom’s team finds out that Meredith has obtained the position he hoped to obtain, one of them says:” It’s like the Amazons: keep some of us for sperm and kill the rest. ” In mind that when he says this, the company’s CEO and almost all his shareholders are men, and only one of the management positions is in the hands of a woman.

Many erotic thrillers of the 1980s and 90s revolve around the demonization of women, especially when it comes to sexuality. Sexually assertive women, these films teach us, are the psychotic hateors that come for their family. Fatal attractionThe film in which Divulgation It is at least partially modeled and also starring Douglas, is the most notorious example. Glenn Close’s performance As a murderous and torn lover of a decent family man generated countless imitation characters, including Meredith Johnson.

The difference with Divulgation is that it is based very specifically on the corporate world. Women are not only here to ruin their personal life, they are also here to ruin their career. The corporate level of companies is no longer safe from the manic hunger of power that supposedly defines women of professional achievement. It is not surprising that Tom is terrified.

It is not an accident that Divulgation He was released a few years after Anita Hill’s hearings, in which a young lawyer testified to the Senate Judicial Committee about the accusations of sexual harassment against her former employer, nominated for the judge of the Supreme Court Clarence Thomas. At every step, he found skepticism of the men’s panel. She took a lies detector test and witnessed to corroborate her story (none of whom was called to testify), but in the end, Thomas swore as judge of the Supreme Court, and in some way, the main conclusion of The events seemed that the false accusations of sexual harassment were a very serious threat to men in the workplace.

In the heart of these fears is the belief that women want to demolish men due to a nebulous combination of sexual frustration and hunger for power. Although Zuckerberg and his classmates are not attacking women who present accusations of sexual assault, they are betraying their fears that women are in positions of authority. The affirmative action is demolishing the caliber of the corporations, they argue, regardless of the fact that men like Tom Sanders feel entitled to promotions simply to exist.

Three decades ago, Divulgation They offered men like Zuckerberg the perfect illustration of their fears, with such an castrated man who is sexually assaulted by a woman who is also her boss. It is not clear if the Meta CEO has been in a psychiathad for another MMA training round with repeated visits of the film, but the virtual reality headphones that the company in the film is engineering is suspected suspiciously to the goal Quest Pro. Unfortunately , Joe Rogan did not have time to ask about it.

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