Google Gets Spanked. Literally.
Pornography is a form of entertainment created for the purpose of arousal, but in many cases, in can serve also as a way of looking at our evolving preoccupations. Very often, when we look back at pornographic works in the context of history, we can see reflected in them changing social, economic, and gender attitudes. In a sense, pornography is an artifact as tangible as a culture’s earthenware, and never has this been more clear to me than in a recent clip released by Girl Bullies.
The clip opens with Andre Shakti and Chelsea Poe chilling out on a couch, when Poe’s neighbor (played by Sam Solo) arrives. Solo proceeds to show off, talking about his work at Google, the nice shuttle he takes to work, and generally treating the women with whom he’s talking as though they’re completely technologically illiterate based only on their gender. Annoyed, the women’s minds wander, leading them to fantasize about ways they’d put the mansplaining “techbro” in his place. Poe imagines him begging for a spanking. Shakti sees him stripped naked and hitting the mat to wrestle with her. Then things start to happen for real.
This is the first time that tensions among Bay Area residents toward technology professionals have entered the realm of porn, but it is unlikely that it will be the last. A number of issues have collided to create a nasty housing shortage in the Bay and surrounding Silicon Valley, leaving the poor and the elderly of San Francisco most vulnerable to homelessness and eviction. Simultaneously, the boom in technology has brought a number of young professionals to the area, causing a number of businesses to pop up, leading to concerns about gentrification.
Protests so far have targeted tech giants — it is people in the tech sector who are altering the city by coming into it, protesters say, both by driving up rental prices due to increased demand for housing and by incentivizing the types of businesses that are showing up and changing the face of the much-beloved city. Outside of a few people who have had Google Glass ripped off their faces, these protests have so far not been violent: shuttles that take employees from the city to work in Silicon Valley have been blocked, high-profile executives have had their homes picketed, and a group has demanded $3 billion from Google to build “autonomous, anti-capitalist, and anti-racist communities throughout the Bay Area and Northern California.”
SFist has a trailer, for anyone interested in watching a Google employee in briefs get spanked.
Header image via Girl Bullies.
