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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
#ifdef (BABE_QUOTIENT < PAM_ALEXANDER)
Regardless of where you come from, in the valley you are confronted with the specter of Kelli the surfer-girl/marketing manager: Her "exotic other" favors are so much more compelling than those of the less buffed and gleaming traditional women of one's homeland. Images from American pop culture have turned out to be globally addictive and appealing in every imaginable circumstance. But geeks, never known for intuiting the moves in the best of circumstances, are at an even bigger disadvantage if they come from elsewhere. How can you be culturally competent in two alien cultures simultaneously: that of Northern California, and that of Dating the Appropriate Sex? Whether the object of your desire is heterosex/homosex/ both/neither, it's just all so difficult.
But there's a model to dream toward, along with the =business porn= desires of appearing in the Kleiner Perkins portfolio and being profiled in Red Herring. Many Silicon Valley execs =marry= their good-looking, modern career-gal publicists -- what could be better than to have your woman be part of the family business? Or maybe you're just so glad to be here, to have the opportunity to work in the Golden Land, that you can't be bothered with psyche or eros. Maybe you've left your family behind in India or China. Techno-coolies -- newly-arrived immigrant technologists performing long hours of unglamorous geek grunt work -- contribute much to make SilVal's engines of commerce rev.
Work Will Make You Free.
#endif
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It's been said that guest workers on temporary visas can be blackmailed into working ungodly hours for fear of being sent home -- it makes sex lower down on life's priorities.
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#if (SEXRATIO != 0.5)
In Silicon Valley, males outnumber females and money comes easier than time, but the valley is not like its closest analogues (Wall Street in the '80s, Hollywood any time) where conspicuous consumption as marked by high-class call girls is comme il faut. SUVs and teardowns and other signs of crass materialism have arrived in the valley, but showing off by buying females has not. Though the evidence is purely anecdotal and the data sketchy and hard to come by, sex workers say
#endif
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I talked to a fantasy-maker from the East Bay, an outcall worker from the South Bay
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their clients from the valley tend to be =less= in high tech than other walks of life -- and that their geek clients tend to be so much nicer, smarter, richer, shyer -- and more thankful. As the vice cops who work on the Peninsula say, nah, you gotta go to San Francisco for that, we're mostly the suburbs here.
#ifdef CUBE_FARM
Which is sort of true and sort of not. Yes the valley is hectare after hectare of creepy sprawl with no redeeming urban center anywhere, filled with strip malls and cul de sacs that would do the San Fernando Valley proud. But so many of those yucko-stucco ranchers are =geek= houses, where a pet iguana may get placed in the refrigerator for safe hibernation when her owner goes on vacation, and a DSL line is shared by all housemates. The bedroom communities of San Mateo, Mountain View and Los Altos are not necessarily home to those cohabiting with mates and offspring.
horny>
horny>
horny> make -t love < money
Make: Don't know how to make love. Stop.
horny>
The "Sex in high tech? Isn't that an oxymoron?" Weltanschauung seems to show up in the way law enforcement in San Jose, the closest thing Silicon Valley has to a city center, has made a =point= of busting sex workers -- even if they were outside San Jose when answering outcalls, and not walking the streets of the city's newly-revived downtown core. The SJPD doesn't want that sort of thing in their city. San Francisco's own historically sex-positive/sex-worker-tolerant culture hasn't percolated out to the valley, even though theoretically San Francisco sets the tone for the entire Bay Area.
#endif
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When I kept on asking a very nice police officer working vice in San Jose, "But why?" he came back with the standard answers that make sense but don't answer the question. It's not good for the city. It's not good for the women. It's the law. All true, but still no answer for the importance of the hooker crackdown, so different from what goes on in the City. What I think is that when a belief system is embedded in you, you don't even see it. Something about San Jose's sense of self (An ambitious D.A.? A zealous police chief? Something in the aquifers contaminated by the byproducts of microprocessor manufacture?) makes this moral crusade unremarkable within its own context, but slightly loopy in the context of the greater Bay Area.
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#ifndef CYPHERPUNK_PORN_MOVIE
And just as sexuality reflects the larger society in which it is embedded, the libertarianism and union-loathing rife throughout the valley seem to have been reflected in the fact that sex workers in the valley aren't =organized=, as they are in San Francisco through COYOTE (Cast Out Your Old Tired Ethic), the long-standing sex workers' political organization, and the Cyprian Guild -- a support group/professional cadre for sex workers. So close, yet so far away.
#endif
