A transaction where the terms are fully disclosed with enforceable clauses and which has a clean starting and ending completion state is very different from what is being described in the article or what you are fantastically proposing.
A sexual assault tied to an entertainment career paths has indefinite terms, consists of unagreed upon jeopardy in terms of what is being exchanged, and for how long. It's nothing like an "opportunity".
> ... very high percentage of HN crowd would immediately say yes
The most powerful world in the dictionary is "no". As an entirely self-made / self-taught person I know the power of that word.
That you consider it a "pretty darn reasonable transaction" tells about your ethics and morality, not about the ethics and morality of a "very high percentage of HN crowd".
Regarding fame/money, here's Ruyard Kipling's take on it:
"Do not pay too much attention to fame, power, or money. Some day you will meet a person who cares for none of these, and then you will know how poor you are."
I'm raising my kid the way my rebellious parents rose me, telling her "no" is the most powerful word and she should use and abuse it and teaching her there's more to life than fame and money... But feel free to raise yours telling them selling their bodies to obtain fame/money is a "pretty damn reasonable transaction".
Sadly, that means that the few women in the tech industry experience even more concentrated abuse.
Furthermore, there are even fewer people up the tech management food chain than in other industries who appreciate the circumstances of sexual abuse victims.
Sort of. The lack of women in the field is a problem. However programmers are in demand which means that women have some awareness that they can scream and get away with it. A female in the arts who screamed can be unofficially blacklisted and not get anywhere, where as a female in programming can scream and find a different job.
Also a lot of tech companies (but by no means all!) are aware of the issue. You can be reasonably sure a large tech company has as good anti-sexual harassment program and will generally take actions to prevent it. A female is about as safe in tech as any other job: not perfectly safe, as safe as possible.
I mostly meant in a probabilistic sense. It's much more likely that a male VC will be having a meeting with a male startup CEO than a female one (on either end!).
Except that most sexual assault victims just get literally fucked and don't save 40 years of bad work.
People generally perceive winner-take-all economies like the music industry through this same fallacious lens: they assume that the star experience is the norm and ignore the long tail. The music industry is a high-profile but economically tiny; it is not representative of the wider economy, and the star experience within it is even more unrepresentative.
It's comments like this which remind me that HN has minuscule female participation. Because so many more women have experience with sexual assault than men, and because people who have experienced sexual assault would downvote this comment into oblivion, the fact that it survives is a testament to how screwed up HN demographics are.
Yeah, this shit didn't happen with a fucking contract - the entire sexual assault probably took place without the offender ever even mentioning a quid pro quo, you just heard from someone else that it was the only way. You can't sue the fucking guy if you don't get a callback.
And to be honest there are people here who loudly won't even do a three-hour whiteboard interview for a high-paying gig that isn't a sure thing.
I just watched Fran Lebowitz's Netflix special and according to her you couldn't even get a job as a waitress in NYC in the '70s without sexual favors. Basically a generation of service industry management looked at sexually assaulting job applicants as a perk.
The generic term "abuse" would have been more precise, and I have used it elsethread. However, it is common for these incidents to take the form of sexual assault: see Harvey Weinstein, Les Moonves, etc. In any case, "voluntary exchange" is a spectacularly inapt way to characterize sexual coercion by entertainment industry executives.
I thought so. At 20 I used to go out dancing every night for fun. After being repeatedly groped I decided I should get paid for dancing. It was a perfect decision. But not for the money. The thing is it's not the 'getting literally fucked' that is bad. It's that when you choose that as a way to avoid starving their is a social cost: You are a fucking dirty whore. And it follows you the rest of your life. I became a sex worker activist because in Toronto being a stripper/sex worker meant no protection from the law (if cops found you doing a lap dance or on the street they arrest you if you don't give them a hand job (stripper) blow job (hooker).
It's a race to the bottom though. Once one person does it, everyone else has to do it too, just so they don't fall behind. In the end you are back to where you started, except you have to sell yourself in addition.
It's hard to avoid this situation when the supply so greatly exceeds the demand and a small number of people control who gets to win; corruption is almost inevitable.
You're selling a service, not yourself. There's plenty of people for whom a sexual favor is not a big deal, and they see it as a huge return on investment.
> There's plenty of people for whom a sexual favor is not a big deal
And that's their choice. Sleeping your way to the top is a very separate debate. Requiring anyone who wants a job to fuck you is the topic being discussed.
> Sleeping your way to the top is a very separate debate
You keep saying that, but it's actually the same thing. One cannot exist without the other. You need both kinds of people for the phenomenon to exist. If a boss hires only people who have sex with them, and nobody is willing to, they will not hire anybody. Conversely, if a candidate is willing to sleep their way to the top, but no boss partakes in that, then they are not hired.
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how bad another comment is or you feel it is. That's what flags are for. Pouring fuel on the flames is exactly the wrong thing to do, so please don't.
To me your comment is illustrating your privilege. Prostituting oneself three times to be financially set for life could be a perfectly acceptable trade off for millions of people. The fact that you wouldn’t even consider it shows that you haven’t gone hungry for a while.
I’m not here to argue about a hypothetical utopia where nobody on the planet has to make terrible choices to protect their life. I’m just providing a commentary on the state of the world we do live in. Obviously this hypothetical utopia (or any step in that direction) would be superior to what we have now.
I was referring to the hypothetical utopia of “making sure people don't go hungry”, which is something that has never happened before in human history. But thanks for assuming negative intent.
The world produces enough food to feed everyone. Doubly true if you scope things to the developed world. Triply true if you scope it to the USA only. "No one starves" is just as reasonable a minimum standard to strive for as "no one gets raped".
Yes, there are serious implementation details, but there's a big societal will factor at play too.
I took that as a figurative statement. Hungry for success, or for a way out of a perceived poor future outlook, perhaps not literally hungry (for food).
That's not what happens though, is it? It's a dumb example.
It's more like the abuser forms a bond with the naive kid, and in exchange for their 'loyalty' they are rewarded with a form of insecure attachment where they do what they're told to try and get more approval, and basically just try to live with it as if it's normal.
Have a drink with me tonight and I'll make sure to call X about that role tomorrow, alright? Then tomorrow comes and maybe on occasion they actually follow through with the promise, enough to convince you they're being sincere, but most likely there'll be an excuse and another 'request', and more favours. And more dependence and more control.
Trying to compare this hellish cycle of abuse to getting fucked in the arse by Bezos for 100 mil is not just absurd, it's completely out of touch with the grim reality the victims spend the rest of their lives contending with.
> The fact that you wouldn’t even consider it shows that you haven’t gone hungry for a while.
"I give you $1 bn if you kill that one kid" and you answer "I'll never kill a kid, no matter how much you pay me" to which I reply: "Your answer is illustrating your privilege".
Certainly you see the gigantic sophism in your comment?
No, actually I think this is a fairly poor analogy. In your example, one is being asked to harm _another_ for their benefit. In the other, one is being asked to harm _one’s self_ for their benefit.
However terrible and painful the example is, abstractly, I believe people are free to decide what happens to themselves, but not to others. Murder is universally illegal, while prostitution, arguably, shouldn’t be, and isn’t in many places.
What are you talking about? In my understanding you're saying everyone that been offered sexual transaction from a superstar is dying for a piece of bread? I think that statement is very detached from reality
ain't sure what you mean by acceptable. All of this discussion comes to one question : do you have a choice or not.
You have a choice to run a start up and make any sacrifice you think necessary. You don't have a choice to eat something when you're hungry.
If you don't have a choice, then you're a victim.
(and yes, not everyone has a choice, not everyone just has to work more to get the choice, many people, at some point, don't have a choice; abusing their situation is criminal)
> To me your comment is illustrating your privilege. Prostituting oneself three times to be financially set for life could be a perfectly acceptable trade off for millions of people.
I hear you and get where you're coming from, yet my take is that I want to shift the dynamics of the system for everyone. Systems change, not personal change. Also this isn't about a 'facing a trade off' or sex work, it's about dehumanization and exploitation at the hands of an abusive powerful person.
And I want everyone to be 'set for life'. It's absolutely possible.
Don't equate sex work (which is what is in op's example) with rape. It simultaneously denigrates sex workers while trivializing victims of sexual violence.
There’s always one who takes any comment and has to act like that gatekeeper.
You don’t own suffering. You’re not it’s gatekeeper. It’s not for you to decide if one person’s proposed situation doesn’t take into account the situation of one of millions of versions of suffering.
This sounds like you never played “would you rather” as a child. If comments like this leave you disgusted, you would reconsider reading public forums.
The reaction anybody views probably comes from their own prior life experiences.
That doesn't change that a very high percentage of the HN crowd would take this offer are men. A lot men are not in a position to reject offers about their body's sexual value such that it turns into abuse.
A lot of men (99%?) don't get the privilege of making a choice to prove themselves in the business world, versus distinctly with their body.
If this was a more frequent choice, the gender representation in tech/corporate leadership roles would even out much faster. Because less men would be there, having chosen a different opportunity. I perceive this as an underrepresented reality.
It's easier and more honest to simply say "ew" to a crassly worded comment, than to drag the discussion into a pity/privilege party by making up some narrative about the poster.
> Ew. This comment is atrocious and shows your privilege. It sounds like you haven't listened to many stories of women experiencing systemic abuse and misogyny. It scares me that people say this stuff publicly.
The point is that for 2 girls complaining about abuse, in this industry there are 100 who perfectly know what they are doing and happy to play the sexual favor game.
The only part where you are right is that it should be made more public, so that "innocent" (not like amber heard) girls would not get so surprised then.
> in this industry there are 100 who perfectly know what they are doing and happy to play the sexual favor game.
Do they 'know', or have they just come to accept this level of violence and danger becuase of their gender?
> The only part where you are right is that it should be made more public, so that "innocent" (not like amber heard) girls would not get so surprised then.
Ah jeez, speculating about Amber's innocence is just tabloid celebrity gawking at this point. Have you met her or heard her story in person? No.
I can tell from personal experience and direct account that SOME girls are happy and proud at having sex with powerful or famous people, and that if it would lead to advantages in their life if would only be better for them because SOME people love the feeling of cheating at life somehow.
Everyone knows now that Amber Heard was physically abusive and literally said in a recording that "No one would believe your complaints since you are a man". Talking about girl privilege...
I agree, that was the intent. The article talks about gay sexual favors.
However, the distinction is that people with tangible experience with sexual abuse perceive this differently. And unfortunately, women have disproportionate experience with sexual abuse.
> if Jeff Besos would come to you and say: I invest into your startup $100M if I can fuck you into the ass tree times, very high percentage of HN crowd would immediately say yes.
What's the name for this kind of arguments?
Also, why specifically Bezos? Why not the billionaire next door?
Also, why only the HN crowd? Wouldn't a lot of people too?
I perceive your parent comment to be straightforward and not sinister in the least. Why not Bezos (the billionaire who most easily comes to mind), why not HN (the website we're on)? Seriously, what's with the weird angry insinuating questions.
> I perceive your parent comment to be straightforward and not sinister in the least.
I'll be straightforward too: it's shitposting with childish faux-provocation that doesn't bring any food for thought, littered with assumptions about everyone and presented as universal. Fool language doesn't help either, it's not straightforward it's provocation without substance . r/im14andthisisdeep is the other way.
