#google revolt

I was reading The New York Times’ cover on The Great Google Revolt, in which I learned that a Google software engineer circulated an essay he had written arguing that women were less suited biologically for careers in technology than men. Ridiculous as this Mr Misogynist may sound, sexism is more ubiquitous that we thought. 

This engineer forcefully reminds me of Professor von X, a character in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, who wrote an essay called The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex and is heavily cursed by the author. He is the 21st century version of Professor X - Professor X in real life. Woolf portrays Professor X as a “villain” of the book and effortlessly wrote quite a few pages to redicule (men like) him. Mean but right on the target.

This is one of my favourite paragraphs in the book. It’s really funny:

I had been drawing a face, a figure. It was the face and the figure of Professor von X engaged in writing his monumental work entitled The Mental, Moral, and Physical Inferiority of the Female Sex. He was not in my picture a man attractive to women. He was heavily built; he had a great jowl; to balance that he had very small eyes; he was very red in the face. His expression suggested that he was labouring under some emotion that made him jab his pen on the paper as if he were killing some noxious insect as he wrote, but even when he had killed it that did not satisfy him; he must go on killing it; and even so, some cause for anger and irritation remained. … Whatever the reason, the professor was made to look very angry and very ugly in my sketch, as he wrote his great book upon the mental, moral and physical inferiority of women.