> and should be dealt with incredibly harshly.
Yeah, lets shoot them, because she said so. Date invitation is the worst form of rape.
Yeah, lets shoot them, because she said so. Date invitation is the worst form of rape.
How would you feel if you showed up to an event to raise money for your budding business, but instead of serious conversations with the mostly-female crowd of investors, most seem childishly interested in glancing at and discussing your butt, or perhaps feeling your biceps. You keep trying to bring the conversation back from butts and biceps to YourCompany, and finally one of the investors interjects that no, they only invest in "serious" companies (coded language which you know means: companies founded by people that look like themselves), but that they do like feisty men, and perhaps they could invite you out for a drink or two sometime.
Would that not be infuriating? How would you feel if you had listened to that conversation play out in front of you? What would you want to do in response? Would you empathize with the experience of the person that came to talk business but is instead treated as a sex object? Or would you laugh, because it amuses you to watch someone carelessly crush the dreams and soul of someone that doesn't look like you?
Date invitation, in certain inappropriate contexts, while not illegal per se, ought to be punished via civil means.
quoting from the article:
> It’s extremely intimidating walking up to older men, getting them to make eye contact, and then convincing them to fund you through a quick convo. It’s also extremely easy to confuse these approaches with flirting – which is exactly what happened.
jesus, it's hard as crap to get a one on one with VCs, no matter what gender you are. iif i was a hot woman and a VC wanted to buy me a few drinks, pay for a nice dinner, sure let's call it a date, but I'll still pitch you on funding. I'd go on all kinds of dates until I got what I wanted.
"if you show up for a fair fight, you have not prepared enough"
cheers :)
You're thinking as a man living in a patriarchy. In this world a man sleeping with some women to get ahead is more likely to draw admiration than denigration. A woman doing the same thing is likely to be shunned and slut-shamed. She doesn't even need to have a conflict of interest. See also #GamerGate.
life is not fair. business is not fair. use what advantages you have to get a head start.
that is my thought process.
Thank you for that incisive and articulate bit of commentary. I guess you sure showed me, eh?
Also, when/where can men sleep with women to get ahead?
And: going on a date with somebody does not imply that you have to have sex with that person.
it has nothing to do with who is more deserving or not. seriously, how did you get that out of my posts?
it's all about using whatever competitive advantages you have.
* Some women are willing to sleep with VCs in order to get funding, while others aren't
* This creates a situation where women who do not sleep with VCs are at a competitive disadvantage
* This may be great for VCs (in a super-creepy way), but it is not good for women. Suddenly they are forced to sleep with everyone they want to ask for funding, just to defend against the threat of other women who might do it.
* Meanwhile, if they aren't willing to do that, then they get raised eyebrows and suggestive questions from cofounders and early investors, suggesting that if they really cared about the company, they would use whatever competitive advantage they had, wink wink.
* The women who did sleep with VCs and got funding would face questions for the rest of their career. They only got funded because they were hot, right? Edit: in fact, even the women who were not willing to sleep with VCs would probably face the same questions, and often do even now.
All of this has the effect of reducing women to sex objects and removing their power over their own bodies. This is not some hypothetical scenario, it is largely what the world looked like for women prior to the 1970s, and they are right to guard against its return.
What right do you have as an individual to impose your viewpoint of calling her a sex object because she is using her body to her advantage?
I don't understand this logic. You ridicule women by saying they are sex objects even though they might inherently enjoy the act of sex itself and realize the advantage it brings them in a business environment.
And don't be naive, spend some time in San Jose at any Vietnamese Coffee Shop or Vietnamese Bar and talk to the girls working there. They make $200+ an hour or more for using their bodies, and on YC you have individuals and teams grinding away for pennies on the dollar for the man hours spent to get a startup off the ground.
Talk to any of those girls working at those coffee shops and the vast majority of them will tell you that they have made a calculated decision to use their bodies for their advantage. Not all of the girls, some girls fall on hard times and have to make due with one of their assets. It's not a fortunate circumstance to be in, but so is being homeless. And guess what? Some of them invest that money into higher education, and end up with advanced degrees. Due to leveraging their bodies. So again, generalizations don't work when talking about gender.
So please, get rid of your narrow mentality on how women think and work. You're living in a world of ideals, a nice bubble to be in but not an accurate representation of reality.
What about a women who enjoys having sex with individuals? What if those individuals happen to be VC's? What if by sleeping with those VC's she is allowed capital to fund her startup? She was just enjoying herself, and happened to be doing business at the same time.
I'm sure this does happen, and I'm not saying it's not allowed, or it makes that woman a "sex object." But when VCs go around soliciting sex from women who are asking them for money, it creates a climate where women feel coerced into having sex. Again, I'm not trying to stop women who want to have sex from doing so, but most women do not like being coerced into sex.
You ridicule women by saying they are sex objects even though they might inherently enjoy the act of sex itself
Research and anecdotal evidence have shown that women desire sex just as much as men. Desiring and having sex does not make a woman a sex object. For many centuries, women were not allowed to be anything other than something for men to have sex with. That is the cultural climate I am referring to when I say that women are reduced to sex objects. I'm not ridiculing anyone. I'm talking about something women today generally want to avoid.
Talk to any of those girls working at those coffee shops and the vast majority of them will tell you that they have made a calculated decision to use their bodies for their advantage.
Are you a patron of one of these establishments? If so then I would not count on them having an honest conversation with you about whether or not they really want to be there. That said, let's assume what you say is true. It's fine that women can choose to "use their bodies for their advantage." What is not fine is for women to have no other option than to use their bodies to get what they want.
I encourage you to re-read my post that you responded to, and see if you can understand it better.
The general sentiment on YC is that of idealism, but if you don't see the narrow alleyways and dark pits in which people live in then you can't fully comprehend the extent to what people will do to survive or thrive. Travel around East Oakland, East San Jose, and you can see that there are people who will do anything for any advantage out of their given situation. For some women, it is using their bodies to get out. And you see it in the competitive environment of tech. This is the art of competition, bringing the cost of everything down - one of those costs is that of the human body.
I recognize that some women resort to various kinds of sex work because they are financially desperate, while others do it because it is work they enjoy and it is lucrative (also to be clear, some women do it because they are forced into it by traffickers or others. This is not ok). I believe that prostitution should be legal, because its prohibition is bad for sex workers and makes their work less safe. I believe that consenting adults should be able to do what they choose in the bedroom.
However, soliciting sex from women who are seeking funding has no place in the ethical practice of venture capital, for the reasons I outlined in previous comments (it is coercive and creates a bad environment for female entrepreneurs). Additionally, accepting sex from someone seeking funding also has no place in the ethical practice of venture capital, because it is likely to cloud judgement and produce bad investments.
This is not idealism, it is a rational response to the fact that women had few other options than to "use their bodies" for millennia. People will do what they do, but if a VC tries to get a women to have sex with him in order to get funding, and instead of "using her body" she sues the shit out of him, he got what he deserved.
She's saying that making the conversation an appraisal of the woman's looks instead of ability, the VCs denies her self-determination. She puts forward the archetypical VC-friendly candidate to say he'd be the type of person that would clear a VCs mental filters and actually have a chance at being heard.
However - if the claims are true, you do not believe they merit repercussion and that the actions of the VC are just harmless 'date invitations'?