You don’t get to 500 million friends without making a few stereotypes

On screen, “The Social Network,” the story of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and this weekend’s biggest movie, is a masculine drama about loyalty and honor—you know, Homeric stuff—but it’s clear that women are the primary motivators in the background. According to the film, “The Facebook” wasn’t about creating the global community of taggers and pokers it is today, but simply about getting laid. The fraternities Zuckerberg so desperately wants to join are defined not by any sense of brotherhood, but by the beautiful women that attend their parties. Facebook’s rival, Harvard Connection, begins as a dating site for Harvard students. The concept of relationship statuses—broadcasting one’s availability and amenability—is portrayed as a major breakthrough in Facebook’s design and purpose.

Still, if “The Social Network” is an epic, a vast majority of the film’s women (except only Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend and the female law associate representing him) are by no means goddess-muses offering advice and inspiration. Rather, they are objects and tools for self-gratification. They, including Zuckerberg’s ex-girlfriend, are the victims of vindictive, sexist, public blog posts. They’re nonconsenting objects of ridicule and humiliation, as are the college women whose photographs Zuckerberg hacks in order to create the Hot-or-Not prototype, facemash.com. They’re vain narcissists who take buses to Harvard parties in the hopes of snagging a Harvard guy. They’re opportunistic groupies who sleep with Zuckerberg and his friend after Facebook’s moderate success, or crazy and paranoid stage-five clingers, or mindless, laughing status symbols playing strip poker and snorting coke—all while their men build technological empires and make millions.

The point here is not to decry “The Social Network” for misogyny or sexism—that’s a quick debate with nothing to gain—but rather to question why this misogyny and sexism feels so real. In actuality, the objectification happening in “The Social Network” is simply a precursor to the objectification that stems from Facebook itself—a tidy reminder of the consequences of living life on a computer screen.

Before, there were billboard ads and unrealistically thin movie stars, but Facebook opened the doors to an irresistible form of objectification that vested power in the most unlikely of places. Now, the war isn’t being waged on a magazine cover, but on one’s very own profile page—not by Hollywood powers-that-be, but by our very own peers. With a historically unparalleled opportunity of self-expression comes, paradoxically, a historically unparalleled opportunity for objectification. The desperate need to be beautiful, alluring, fun, and exciting may not be new, but the expectations and pressures to achieve those ideals are, constantly roused by digital cameras and wall posts.

And so, Facebook is filled with pictures of college women in various moments of indiscretion, acting as blithely and recklessly as the women adorning the movie’s party scenes—in some sort of self-conscious effort to appear beautiful, alluring, fun, and exciting to whatever strangers may be looking. Women post perfectly posed, airbrushed profile pictures that evoke the same shallow and hypercritical mind-set as facemash.com. These pictures, in turn, serve as evidence that makes it that much easier to fall under scrutiny. This is how it has become so easy to create mental shortcuts between people and judgments, to label others disrespectful slurs, based on disparate pictures and words on a computer screen. A simple Google search confirms the unfortunate but obvious. The words “college girl” have become so inextricably and crudely sexualized that it takes effort to pick the words apart, to find out what they really mean—a female student attending an institution of higher learning.

“The Social Network” has been called the movie to define a generation—our generation—and it seems that this is how the women of our generation are to be defined. It’s upsetting and disappointing to see such a realistic context for men as brilliant innovators and engineers, raking in the money and fighting major legal battles, and women as sexual objects and background props.

But the great thing about definitions is that, sometimes, they’re as easy to change as a Facebook profile. Zuckerberg may have considered Facebook a way of touting privilege or climbing the social ladder or finding potential partners, yet in reality, Facebook’s meaning does not derive from its creators’ intentions, but is defined by its users. Untag some photos, resist the urge to pose in others, and use wall posts and comments as a supplement to your social life, not a surrogate. By subverting the value of these tools of objectification, we’ll find that we have subverted the objectification itself.

Aarti Iyer is a Columbia College senior majoring in creative writing. She is the editor-in-chief of The Fed. Culture Vulture runs alternate Tuesdays.