I'm not rich or single so I am really not the target market here. But something about this feels really gross. I can't figure out how this was allowed. I've lost all sense of what is and isn't acceptable these days. It seems to change daily. It feels like not too long ago a couple guys lost their job for making a joke about dongles and forking. I fail to see how that was worse than this.
> But something about this feels really gross. I can't figure out how this was allowed. I've lost all sense of what is and isn't acceptable these days.
I thought you were joking (and maybe you are) but now that I think about it, that's a really good life philosophy. Tolerate behavior in others beyond what you would engage in yourself.
Of course, this works better for social conventions like "call me by my last name" or "pay for your date's dinner" than for stuff like "don't be gay", which is sadly what's more associated with conservatism in this country.
If you mean conservatism of the political kind, come live in Texas for awhile to get a taste of life in a conservative state; you're likely to reconsider how far you want to go down that path. I'm a lifelong Republican and always thought of myself as fairly conservative; in recent years, though, mainly because of the Tea Party -- and the life lessons learned from the challenges of, e.g., raising two kids to adulthood -- I've probably voted for Democrats almost as often as for Republicans. I have Republican friends who are so disenchanted that they've talked about switching parties.
> It feels like not too long ago a couple guys lost their job for making a joke about dongles and forking. I fail to see how that was worse than this.
That was Joe Schmoe male developer, who it is acceptable to fire for the slightest of reasons, including making an innocuous joke that wouldn't be out of place in a K-12 classroom. The men who are the customers of this startup are the rich guys in Silicon Valley who are awash in cash and cannot be fired.
The two are worlds apart, don't be under any impression that they mix in any sense whatsoever. Unfortunately, the first group (Joe Schmoe) is squeezed to the max by policing by interest groups like "Geek Feminism" and suchlike. Notably, Geek Feminism seems to have a neutral/positive approach to this Dating Ring thing (http://geekfeminism.org/2013/12/30/happy-new-linkspam-30-dec...) -- the company is referred to as "Y Combinator's first all-female company", and no negative comments.
Really? There's a interest police out to get all the poor guys? Or maybe, just maybe, it's time for guys to learn that women should be treated with respect. (And obviously vice versa, before that gets rolled out). Sexual innuendo does not qualify as respect. It certainly doesn't belong in a K-12 classroom.
As for your "evidence" from GeekFeminism, you will note that that's a linkspam page, merely linking and quoting, without any commentary. And the quote is not about The Dating Ring, but about the changes that are necessary for the industry to become more diversified. (Yes, there's a lot of irony in this coming from the women who're responsible for this bride-for-sale scheme)
I remember the case he mentioned well enough. As I remember, 2 male developers were making some perhaps tasteless jokes to each other, not referencing anyone in particular. A woman seated nearby, whose job is outreach to developers like them, overheard, and decided that it would be a good idea to take a picture of them, without their permission, of course, and call them out on the internet about it. A standard gender in tech scandal ensued.
Sounds a lot more like an interest police out to get guys than anything to do with respect for women to me.
This has been rehashed aplenty. Sexual innuendo between two people, when not directed at a third person does not qualify as disrespect to the third person, unless you're trying very hard to feel disrespected.
> It certainly doesn't belong in a K-12 classroom.
If you think it doesn't belong in a K-12 classroom, I seriously doubt you have ever interacted with anyone in high school. Please read the data in this and draw your own conclusions. http://www.guttmacher.org/pubs/FB-ATSRH.html
If I were to say that "you're ${INSULT}" when you can't hear me, is that not disrespecting you? If I close all my HN posts with "parenoob is ${INSULT}", is that not disrespecting you? Or, to stick with the 2-people restriction, if I closed all my direct e-mails with that statement?
The answer should be fairly obvious.
As for point 2, the fact that teens are currently taught to be sexist doesn't mean they should be taught to be sexist, or that it's OK. Especially not from adults.
This doesn't change the fact that those two are still awash in cash. They could easily be part of the rich guys in this program and this Dating Ring thing would welcome them with open arms.
Meanwhile, Joe Dev who is working 10 hours a day will be fired for saying "Hee hee hee, look at this huge dongle I just got." at a tech conference.
I think he means "tolerated by the public/any reasonable readership." Several articles come to mind (particularly an op ed about gender roles from Fox News some two years ago) in which readers become outraged by something they've read. This is usually followed by a flurry of other articles in which the offensive piece in question is condemned. I think he means "how are people not more disturbed by this piece." Though perhaps OP can weigh in and explain it better.
Yes. I didn't mean "allowed" as in some governing body handed down a decision to allow it. I've seen huge uproar over (what I see as) pretty minor things compared to this. Yet this seems to have rolled on happy without that. I don't like to use the F-word (feminist) but how are they managing to not explode in anger over this. I truly don't get it.
What specifically do you find offensive about this? All the participants (male & female, consumers and company) are willing and eager.
I don't necessarily agree with firing people over politically incorrect jokes either, but in this case there is no party that is potentially suffering damages. I.e. in the case of misogynist jokes by an employee, the company may believe it's reputation would suffer unless mitigating action was taken.
Ignoring the first emotional reaction... what's actually gross about it. Sure, I wouldn't want the whole society to be based on a mail order bride model, and the whole thing sounds like Breakfast at Tiffany's, but wrong/gross? I don't think so. There was only one actually wrong part that was mentioned as far as I can tell (inappropriate touching) which was dealt with. (was just ignoring it enough? I'll leave that to the author)
As long as the participants knew what they were getting into, I think it was fine - everyone got what they signed up for, no promises of results were given. (as far as I understand from the article)
This sounds more like the plot of a reality TV show than a y-combinator company. It's definitely exploiting people, and reading the article made me feel dirty and a little sad for society.
Well... I never said it should be banned. I am actually a pretty tolerant person. It just feels gross to me. I was more curious how it was allowed to happen at a time when lots of people are working hard to make tech a more inviting place for women. I don't think this is helping. Admittedly, I know this is not a tech recruiting ring... these women don't sound like they're on a path to be in tech. They just want to date a techie. But if this isn't insulting to women in tech (all women? everyone in tech? everyone?) then I truly have lost all sense of acceptability. I probably should have picked a better word than "allowed."
Why can't it be allowed to happen? I mean, nobody as far as I can see was forced, coerced, deceived or tricked into doing something that they did not want to do. Some guys wanted to meet some females that have specific qualities, some females wanted to meet some guys that have specific qualities. Things like that happen - both in RL and on specialized sites - literally every second. Do you have to like it? No. There's a lot of things that people do that I don't like. However I would never imply that should not happen - apparently, there are a lot of people that do like doing those things, and as long as there are people willing to do this and nobody is hurt, it's their business, not mine. So I wonder - why exactly should not it happen?
>>> But if this isn't insulting to women in tech
Who is "women in tech"? It's not a person that you can insult. Why "women in tech" should have single opinion about anything and be - all of them, collectively - insulted by something? And why, if some woman or multiple women are insulted by this, we shouldn't wait for them to tell us if they are insulted and listen what they are insulted by, instead of trying to guess it and wield that imaginary insult as a weapon?
I don't think he's saying, "I'm not the target market, therefore ban articles that aren't relevant to me." It seems far more likely that saying he wasn't the target market was more of a disclaimer.
I would disagree that his post is "intolerant." OP believes the piece is sexist, which you may or many not agree with, but taking issues with perceived sexism doesn't strike me as intolerant.
Out of curiosity, are you affiliated with the article? I couldn't help but notice your account was made a few minutes ago (HN highlights new accounts).
It's weird that people are punished for talking about dongles in a professional setting when dongles are a technical term relevant to their profession, and the context of the word is not a joke or innuendo unless there is some insinuating tone of voice to accompany that otherwise pretty innocuous comment.
Well that's my point. According to what I've heard about 'the incident', the statement could be interpreted to really just be about dongles in the relevant technical sense. And it was such a perfectly normal sentence that there were no clear signs of having deliberately tried to make a pun or something like that. So then you're just left with how the sentence was said, which we don't know much about (I think).
> It's not hard to tell the difference.
Perhaps, if you know that "dongle" is a technical term, and you don't take the sentence out of context (like overhearing only one sentence). Besides, many catch themselves in making unintentional puns and innuendos, only noticing after-the-fact that the sentence could be interpreted in another way. It surely isn't so unlikely that one can justify firing people point-blank when they do make such a mistake!
I guess I might be an amoral degenerate, because I found the beginning rather funny. As long as these are consenting adults (save the creepy touching on that one date), what's wrong? I think it was on second thought that I found the whole idea a bit strange, all of this money spent just to give a few tech men dates?
I think it's the level of cynicism required to execute on something like this. Not that I think this is bad or wrong, just a very cynical view of dating.
Is it ok for a group of girls in City A to try to find a group of guys in City A? Like say through a speed dating meetup? But it is wrong if the girls are from City A and the guys are from City B? Especially when they claim City A has 2 girls for every guy, and City B has 3 guys for every 2 girls? What exactly is the issue?
February 3 [1849]: The Raleigh Register runs an advertisement for women to go to the Gold Rush and get a rich husband, titled "A Chance FOR A LADY." Other efforts to encourage women to go to California include Mrs. Eliza Farnham of New York's attempt to organize a ship of intelligent women over the age of 25 to sail to San Francisco to meet miners. Editors in the east praised her efforts, but the plan failed.
There was one that succeeded that I read about but I don't remember the details and don't have the time to look it up. It was either in The Barbary Coast or Rebecca Solnit's book about Muybridge.
On a weirdness scale of 1 to 10, I think it sounds like this idea is hitting a solid 6 or so. Possibly some extra points for the glorified prostitution model of "Pay a ton to fly NYC girls, selected for their desire to spend 5 days out of town meeting rich men, to SF to meet super-rich tech founders"
Sadly, this is just the next link in a long line of similar attempts every time there is a boom where the guys per girl ratio gets above 1. Read some articles about the oil boom in North Dakota, although they don't fly them in from NYC.
I hate to be that guy but if this is even close to satire it's a pity because sex trafficking is a serious issue (including in North Dakota and I'm sure in California as well).
Of course not, but taking the previous comment into account:
"On a weirdness scale of 1 to 10, I think it sounds like this idea is hitting a solid 6 or so. Possibly some extra points for the glorified prostitution model of "Pay a ton to fly NYC girls, selected for their desire to spend 5 days out of town meeting rich men, to SF to meet super-rich tech founders"
I just want to point out that where we can look at this situation and say "That's kind of sleezy" we can look at a circumstances that are very similar but involve a different class (and education level) of people and see some extremely problematic behavior.
So yes, it's not sex trafficking, but I feel like it in some ways makes light of truly exploitive sex trafficking that's going on in a first world country.
That said, I could argue that it may very well be "sex trafficking" in the sense that a company is moving people from point A to point B for the purposes of sex and their own profit. It may not be exploitive, but it would take very, very little to make it that way.
Like I said, I don't want to be that guy, but as I get older I find myself appreciating more and more people's sensitivity to topics that are close to them.
I suppose if you're being serious, yes, they are. Airlines exist for other reasons too, however. It's like saying that guns sales are murders: it's obviously not universal, but sometimes it's true.
I just want to be clear that I don't view prostitution as wrong per se. I don't know why it's OK to put out for a dinner or movie but apparently wrong for $100. What consenting adults do is their business.
That said, the line between "consensual" and "coerced" is very fine in the sex trade. The women in this article are engaged in a consensual business. They can walk away at any time. They presumably weren't tricked or lied to. But many in this thread find it uncomfortable and I presume we find it uncomfortable because you don't have to make very many changes to this scenario to make it go from "fun partying" to "pimping" to "sex trafficking". Hell, they've flown them cross country, all someone would have to say is "if you don't want to have sex, leave, but you get your own plane ticket" for it to go from a 6 to 9 on the scale the OP of this thread referred to.
Anyway, it's all beside the point. From the article it didn't seem like anything untoward happened. But make no mistake, something very similar is happening in Western North Dakota (women being flown in to "serve" a large population of single men) and it's sex trafficking all the way.
I completely agree that some people can find it uncomfortable. So what? It's not their business, unless they participate in it somehow. Nobody has an obligation to make them comfortable. Some people think seeing women wearing trousers or men having long hair or shaving facial hair make them uncomfortable. The only reasonable answer to them is "well, if you don't like it, don't look at it".
>>> all someone would have to say is "if you don't want to have sex, leave, but you get your own plane ticket"
If the implication was that the ticket is paid, that would be deception, unless explicitly agreed upfront that the sex is part of the deal (which it wasn't). However, nothing like that happened and nowhere in the article we can see that they were pressured to do anything they didn't want to do.
While it's a bit sleazy, I'd say that comparing it to sex trafficking is pushing it. Yeah, if you changed a few things one way, it'd be disturbingly exploitative. And if you changed a few things the other way, it'd be a perfectly ordinary vacation. It is what it is.
Look, whoever doesn't believe there is actual sex trafficking going on should look into the issue. Both North Dakota and South Dakota law makers are making quite a bit of noise to bring attention to this issue.
This story doesn't qualify as sex trafficking by the definition, but actual sex trafficking is occurring.
SF is nothing like this. The article is poorly written--little more than we-did-this-then-we-did-that. The author is painfully lacking in self-awareness or humility. The only insight to be gained from the article is about the author, a caricature of severe narcissism played out through speed dating the few men in San Francisco bored and desperate enough to participate. I think this paints a worse picture of New York than it does of San Francisco.
I think you are way to harsh on the author. Nobody expects "War and Peace" from a personal experience report. It's like a blog, it is supposed to be self-centered and we-did-this-then-we-did-that - that's the whole point. You could have guessed it's not a deep analysis of comparative dating scenes and societal mores of SF vs. NY just by looking at the title. For once, the title quite adequately represents content, a rarity in our days of linkbait.
I'm moving to SF in August, but reading articles like this makes me want to stay put. I know YC is just an incubator in the end, but I really wish they'd advise their companies against sleazy stunts like this.
I feel like all of these ridiculous startups are forgetting: just because you CAN do something, doesn't mean you SHOULD.
Why is this a sleazy stunt? What about this story is sleazy? A bunch of girls flew to SF to go out, socialize, and have a good time. Sounds like everyone involved had fun.
There are tons of bat shit crazy ideas everywhere. Despite all the sensationalized stories, SF is a great area, filled with great people (for the most part).
But you will be paying nearly $2k/mo to rent a bedroom; that much is true :-p
For all the stupid of the tech news cycle, BS companies, sleazy stunts, sleazier people etc. the Bay Area has awesome people of all kinds working in many different functions in the tech industry, many awesome people outside of the tech industry, a vibrant cultural scene across all types of art (east bay rap to SF opera to burning man), and beautiful nature.
Some investors are getting quite desperate to get 'ring-side-seats' (pun intended) to the YC classes:
"I meet an angel investor who admits he gave to the Crowdtilt to butter up CEO Lauren Kay so she’d accept his money. “With these Y Combinator companies, sometimes so many people want to invest that they end up turning down money,” he explained. He’d given money to the Dating Ring to secure the chance to give even more money to the Dating Ring. He wouldn’t tell me how much he invested, but did mention a desire to buy an airplane."
And how about this:
"Today’s daytime activity is a picnic in the park. I find Lisa and tell her it’s time to do as the San Franciscans have done since before the dawn of personal computing: get high. She goes to Dolores Park to seek weed from strangers, while I return to the hotel and initiate a texting phone tree. Twenty minutes later, as a white guy with dreadlocks is dumping vegan brownies onto the bed, there is a knock on the door and the Nightline film crew is standing there with a camera and a giant light. “Just a minute!” I shout through a crack in the door. When the dealer exits, I wonder if Nightline thinks I boned him."
It sounded fun, honestly. Props to her for getting her own medicine too. That's the one thing I always cringe at - when an SF date off craigslist, often an out of town person passing through like a stewardess, wants a hookup like that. I don't keep any on me, so it's always a pain in the ass catering to that need.
I see nothing wrong with this at all. In fact I have suggested to men that they will have an easier time dating and finding love in NYC and to women that they will have an easier time dating and finding love in SF or the Bay Area. Because of the ratios of men to women and vice versa. What's wrong with that exactly?
When I was dating myself years ago I had a trivially easy time getting really good looking women (that I would never meet locally) by driving a bit to NYC. I remember thinking "I need to move here even if this relationship (the women that I met doing this) breaks up".
The name for this is a "target rich environment". It's as much about supply and demand as it is about other issues.
it is also seems to be in line with the core business idea of the other startups frequenting HN - Uber, AirBNB, etc... - identifying and putting to use/brokering access to underutilized resources.
Though it is really an open question whether the underutilized resource like male techies of SV can be efficiently made into business inventory desirable by the potential customers. The article doesn't sound optimistic here.
To me it felt more like the underutilized resource was the hot women in NYC. But that would be too degrading to the women. So they couldn't possibly take that angle.
I have no problem with the ethics of any part of this, but this sounds like a great way to grab a bunch of self-selecting people with significant combinations of personality defects, poor interpersonal skills, and overly-high estimation of their own worth. No personal judgment of them here, I recognize such defects in myself, I'm just saying why the whole thing feels 'wrong'.
This is exactly my thought. It's the same thing with meeting someone on The Bachelor or something. I don't care if you want to date 25 people and winnow them down in a rose ceremony, or if you want to televise your rushed courtship, but I'm very nearly 100% sure that I would never want to date anyone willing to participate in that particular spectacle. Same thing here - I don't care if you want to marry someone for their money or their body if that's what you're into. I'm pretty damn sure I want no part in it.
This program is going to fail, for the reason outlined in a couple of sentences, that are possibly the most important sentences in this entire article.
"...which is a blessing, since gossiping about dates is more fun than actually going on them."
"We’re doing shots! This will be great B-roll!" I scream...
Arranged matches are fine and have been working out fairly well for hundreds of years. But when one of the parties is more interested in making some sort of production out of the experience than in finding an actual relationship, the program is going to fall flat. They would do much better getting female participants on a volunteer basis, preferably not from a large metropolis, who are more interested in finding a relationship than in making a "B-roll".
>> who are more interested in finding a relationship than in making a "B-roll".
^^ THIS. There must be some pretty lonely guys out there. I can only hope the more genuine ones learned their lesson after it ended.
Best example: The poor fellow who left early to work for Yahoo at 8:00 am. He may have only understood the ethics that he had bought into after it ended.
Women who try and make anything off this crap are selfish to the point of degrading those around them. They're really horrible people to be around, let alone to sleep with -- because they're too self-absorbed with the money and free ride to factor in the precedent they're setting for the kind of interaction that's socially acceptable around potential mates.
DO WE REALLY want a society where people who work hard, are forced to compete financially to have an attractive mate fly in, do B-rolls, get high, and to demonstrate what a cold and mechanical interaction they actually want?
Women: How would you like it if this was the kind of world you had to live in to find affection from a man? Pay $1,000 to have him come in and show you that your money, work, and desire for affection is just as worthless as anyone else's.
Because THAT is what your actions convey.
I think I'm with my grandparents on this one: These women need to learn to treat others exactly how they expect to be treated. Otherwise nobody can be their friend, foe, or lover.
Because when we start pretending that relationships and affection can be bought -- we won't be buying real affection.
OK, keeping an open mind, this sounds like a good idea for a startup: (i) try to solve an important problem that has bugged people for millennia and (ii) do so by exploiting inefficiencies of the system (different gender ratios in different geographical locations). The basic idea is nothing new, of course (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mail-order_bride).
Still, makes you think, why didn't it work out?
My simple explanation is that the organizers went for the dumb Big Bang Theory thing: brainacs paired with dashing beauties. I would hypothesize that if you were to select random 20 young women from NYC and paired them up with random men from SF (random within reason, of course) you would have had much less problems.
>(i) try to solve an important problem that has bugged people for millennia
1. it has bugged almost everybody else for uncountable millennia before people :) So if it were a problem, the evolution would have already solved it. Which brings us to the next point :
2. it isn't a problem really, it is the solution that evolution came up with to make sure that blobs of organic matter move their a&&es, tails, tentacles, ...
Marriage as an ironclad contract came about because of primogeniture - who inherits the (gol dern) paterfamilias' estate? Hence strong proscriptions against adultery, no divorce.... the consort of a King might be committing treason through sexual misconduct...
Robin Hanson has a forager-vs-farmer mores system useful for analyzing this sort of thing. Industrial systems bring back forager mores; high tech just blows it all to heck.
It makes me think more of the women headed by Frances Farmer's character (Strawberry Alice) in "Unforgiven." And therefore seems sad.
The plummeting birth rate is pretty much to be expected, one way or the other.
while i don't agree in part or in whole with your statements, it may very well happen that the way human race has been doing it is not viable in the long term and thus we'll be succeeded by the other species who would do it differently.
Those species that are assembled by humans need to hurry up and start assembling themselves. Or, they don't, depending on how you feel about our survival chances.
Seems like encouraging more females to go into tech jobs and making training for them more available like RailsBridge's workshops would be a far better use of money and time.
If you want to simply stay on the dating side of things you could make a site designed for remote dates through web cam chats, cooperative games (anything from web based mini-games to co-op on Call of Duty depending on the interests of the players), IMing and texting. You don't need to be in the same physical place to get to know someone, thinking you do seems very backwards for a startup.
What's the plan here if two people do click? The service isn't going to pay for them to fly over for every date. It's the same situation as meeting someone online except that the initial date is face to face.
Better for what? I'm not sure how training women to work in tech and helping people from remote to date each other is related. Unless "women in tech" are viewed as a commodity that "we need more of" and these are considered as alternative ways for getting more of that commodity - which would be kind of disgusting point of view to me. But if we ignore such point of view, I do not see any relation between the two and why they should be viewed as alternative ways of spending money instead of complimentary ways.
>>> You don't need to be in the same physical place to get to know someone, thinking you do seems very backwards for a startup.
Depends on your definition of "know", I guess. Ultimately, there are things between men and women that don't work well over chats ;)
> She goes to Dolores Park to seek weed from strangers, while I return to the hotel and initiate a texting phone tree. Twenty minutes later, as a white guy with dreadlocks is dumping vegan brownies onto the bed [...]
I'm not judging morally, even if stating that it's a good way "to evaluate men" makes me uncomfortable.
Interestingly, this only appears to be true in Manhattan. In New York City, single men aged 20-34 outnumber single women. And according to this site, single men aged 20-34 outnumber single women 20-34 in almost every city in the US:
http://jonathansoma.com/singles/
I have several hypotheses for Manhattan, but my best guess is that a major contributing factor is that the average age of marriage (and proportion of never-marrieds) is higher in Manhattan than outside.
http://nypost.com/2010/01/05/all-the-single-people-in-manhat...
I don't believe that was point of the article based on the first paragraph "An online start-up (tech) was crowdfunding a shipment of single women from New York to San Francisco".
Is that a requirement for every article? I'm sure a lot of articles don't help to encourage girls in technology, even those that include mentions of women and technology. It just wasn't the point.
Really no one thinks "I got shipped to California to date tech guys" affects women's view of the male dominated tech industry in a negative way? Weird.
Girls/women in technology is a totally separate issue. If the issue is with the women that flew to SF, then I think that there are a lot of different kinds of people and archetypes - these people's existence shouldn't discourage other people with different inclinations and/or ambitions. There isn't, or shouldn't be "one role model to rule them all".
If the issue is with the men that they met, then I guess women in technology shouldn't date them if those kinds of men put them off? Romance and work is separate, at least if you want it to be.
