“Hot Girl”
By: Ariella Steinhorn
Tags: Startup, Muse, Technology, Women, Gender

Françoise Gilot, artist and muse who left Pablo Picasso

A few weeks ago, a Silicon Valley product manager tweeted: “Startup advice: don’t hire a hot girl before you find product-market fit.”

Employment lawyers ran to the rescue on Twitter, offering legal advice to any “hot girls” who’d encountered this ideology in the workplace. Unsurprising to any woman who has worked in tech, the mid-level manager and failed startup founder dug his heels in.

His manifesto continued: one should not hire a hot girl for “low value” roles like an office manager, because her beauty or body would be too tantalizing for the engineers, blunting their logic with blinding, nonsensical beauty. On the other hand, a hot girl may be acceptable for a “high value” position, maybe like a head of sales. Of course, if the hot girl were especially clever, she could dangle her hotness over the drooling engineers, incentivizing productivity, and rewarding the fastest workers (with I’m not sure what? maybe I’ll DM him to clarify.). However things turn out, the junior product manager concluded, management should not be afraid to fire her if she “ruins workplace dynamics.”

This tirade, as nauseous as it made many women feel, was not all that shocking to any so-called “hot girl” — or woman of any appearance, really. This man’s words reflect a belief that many cultures privately or subconsciously have held for a long time: some women’s looks are so potent that men simply cannot control their animal impulses around them. Beyond that, a belief that the most powerful value a beautiful woman can summon in the world is the feeling she arouses in a man.

Bring this version of reality to the workplace, and women are instruments: dangerous sirens, luring the men away from their mission-critical work toward rocky waters, or beacons of sexual energy, pushing the men to impress them with their programming prowess.

Imagine dealing with this job description, as you sit down at your desk with a coffee to log on to the network each morning.

At the risk of showing myself clever and dangling my “hotness” over this blog post, I’d like to digress for a moment. I am a young woman. I live among a generation of men who like to think of themselves as feminists. Who would never imagine themselves to be misogynists. Yet, many of them are. Why? It goes a long way back and an examination of the roots is not what I’m here for. Rather, what comes to mind for me is a framework the German philosopher Martin Buber spoke of, when he described our relationships with one another as occurring in either one of two forms: the I-it versus the I-thou. The I-it sees the other as an object, stripping the human of the whole to pieces or qualities. The I-thou sees the unity and context and wholeness of another person, their humanity.

I-it objectification supports the idea that one’s physical attractiveness, the simple act of existing as conventionally beautiful, will always dominate the substance of who one is (women: why invest in a skill or talent when you could simply use your power of seduction to arouse an engineer who has melded into his desk chair?)

It’s a quandary that’s been documented throughout women’s history: to succumb to objectification, or transcend it? Only recently did I learn, via an “untold story” type of documentary, that “bombshell” Hollywood actress Hedy LaMarr — a sex symbol of the 1940s — was a secret inventor whose scientific work laid the foundation for WiFi. Frequency hopping was a critical part of communicating messages without interception during World War II, and Hedy was a pioneer of this technology. Yet Hedy yielded to her identity as sex symbol, refusing later in her life to accept an award for her scientific accomplishments in-person, because she feared how people would only see an aging face.

Just this week, we heard the story of an emergency medical technician who, struggling to make ends meet on an EMT salary turned to the online sex work platform OnlyFans to increase her earning potential. When she spoke to the New York Post, they misled her, choosing to focus on her racy OnlyFans platform rather than the fact she provided medical care to other humans in the midst of the pandemic and was not paid enough to make ends meet. This is not to say there is anything wrong with sex work, which is empowering to many on both a financial and sexual level. But here she was stripped of her complete self to fit someone else’s story for her.

It’s difficult to reclaim your story from what society projects onto you, especially if you’re told over and over again by powerful forces that your value lies in your ability to be objectified.

Pablo Picasso was known to relate to his muses in the “I-it” fashion, and once said that women fell into two categories: doormats or goddesses. Last year, the memoir of one of Picasso’s “goddesses,” Francoise Gilot, resurfaced. Forty years Picasso’s junior, Gilot was a talented artist in her own right.

Gilot was the only “muse” to leave a romantic relationship with Picasso, ready to spend more time with people in her age range. Picasso turned bitter, and said: “Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately. And you’ll be left with only the taste of ashes in your mouth. For you, reality is finished; it ends right here. If you attempt to take a step outside my reality — which has become yours, inasmuch as I found you when you were young and unformed and I burned everything around you — you’re headed straight for the desert.”

(Picasso surely deserves more credit than our tech bro friend from Twitter, or your average Reddit incel. But while Picasso wasn’t around to be an Internet troll today, the sentiment is still the same: how dare a woman exist in a complex role?)

Anyway, Picasso’s story for Gilot completely missed the mark. She was not banished to a desert, but instead went on to have an admired career as an artist, ending up married to Jonas Salk, creator of the polio vaccine. (As The New Yorker writes, Salk was “doubtless secure enough in his own accomplishments to like her for reasons that had nothing to do with Picasso.”) Gilot is ninety-nine today, experiencing somewhat of a resurgence in pop culture.

A woman’s story does not start or end as the “hot girl” identified by a repressed technologist, or as an OnlyFans worker exploited by a male journalist for the New York Post, or as a “doormat” haunted by the ghost of Pablo Picasso. Sure, you can still be hot. You don’t have to wear a paper bag to dilute your looks, or eschew make-up to prove you’re more than your shell. The real beauty lies in the knowledge that your story is the one you write for yourself, that it need not be co-opted by anyone else.

I’m excited to report that no woman I know was banished to an arid desert when they stepped outside the reality of men who fear “hot girls.” At my new workplace, productivity is high, our features all get in quickly, and we actually all just got raises and reached product-market fit.

And we did it all by defying “startup advice” — coincidentally, my company is run by hot women.