Aaron Sorkin responded to a commenter on the blog of Ken Levine who basically blamed Sorkin for the groupie-esque portrayal of women in the film - as if that was Sorkin rather than his take on what he saw in the origins of Facebook.
Facebook was born during a night of incredibly misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard.More generally, I was writing about a very angry and deeply misogynistic group of people. These aren't the cuddly nerds we made movies about in the 80's. They're very angry that the cheerleader still wants to go out with the quarterback instead of the men (boys) who are running the universe right now. The women they surround themselves with aren't women who challenge them (and frankly, no woman who could challenge them would be interested in being anywhere near them.)
Read the rest but he makes terrific points and essentially defuses the reactionaries who think his portrayal of the Facebook creators is his personal belief about the fairer sex.
Is it Zuckerberg's belief today? Unlikely. He was a young guy in college and expressed sentiments young men in college sometimes do. But the public (and permanent, thanks to the Internet) beliefs of a famous college student will haunt him a lot more than a nameless quarterback who makes such statements in private.
And let's not deceive ourselves into thinking the women who spend time with those men don't have choices either.
