“Is it just me or does the mindset of the Silicon Valley Power-Schlub imply that caring about clothing or how you look invalidates your ability to work?” wrote New York magazine’s Allison Davis in an essay titled, “Zuckerberg Explains His Gray T-Shirts, Sounds Pretty Sexist.” “Of course, male CEOs are far too focused on changing the world or building the next Big App to care about something as ‘silly’ or ‘frivolous’ as dressing professionally—they’ll just leave that to Marissa Mayer.” Mic’s Ellie Krupnick, meanwhile, claimed Zuckerberg’s comment “reinforces a sexist double standard.” His use of the word “frivolous” suggested “that women’s focus on ‘unserious’ things such as fashion preclude them from focusing on more important things.”
Seriously? Zuckerberg did not explicitly—or, I’d argue, implicitly—contrast himself with women, but merely stated that he finds fashion concerns to be “silly” and “frivolous.” If anything, he was referring to his fellow male tech CEOs, like Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and his Prada suits; after all, only 6 percent of Silicon Valley CEOs are female. But in criticizing Zuckerberg, Davis and Krupnick relied on a stereotype that he himself did not—that only women care about clothes—and perhaps even reinforced that stereotype in sounding the feminist alarm.
The Zuckerberg critique comes on the heels of a much louder feminist attack on Lena Dunham. It began with The National Review’s Kevin Williamson arguing that passages in Lena Dunham’s memoir, when a 7-year-old Dunham checks out her little sister’s vagina and masturbates near her in the same bed, amount to child abuse. That Williamson would target Dunham is not surprising—attacking feminists in particular and women in general is his main beat. But the critique gained ground when many feminists agreed with him. On private listservs and public social media, they eviscerated Dunham and attacked anyone, including other feminists, who dared defend Dunham’s actions as normal—or, at least, not criminal—childhood behavior. This culminated with one feminist writing a public letter to Planned Parenthood asking them to drop Dunham as a spokesperson due to her “pattern of coercion that happened over the course of years, and the near-pornographic and remorseless way Dunham describes these incidents as an adult.” There is a hashtag, of course: #DropDunham.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member