Brotopia

by Emily Chang

  HACKING MONOGAMY

  Remember Susan Fowler, the former Uber engineer who blogged that her manager brought up his nonmonogamous relationship as a way to make a pass at her over the internal company chat system? It’s worth repeating what she wrote in her viral essay: “He was in an open relationship, he said, and his girlfriend was having an easy time finding new partners but he wasn’t.” Open and polyamorous relationships—like the one Fowler’s manager described—are on the rise among many tech workers in Silicon Valley but not working out to everyone’s satisfaction. As Fowler experienced, this new landscape of nonmonogamous dating can infect the workplace with varying results. Uber’s response seemed to suggest that the manager’s invitation to be part of his open sex life was not a big deal. The company, according to Fowler, told her that it “wouldn’t be comfortable punishing [the manager] for what was probably just an innocent mistake.”

  That tepid response from HR may not be surprising, given that open relationships were being explored at the highest levels of the Uber organization. At the time, then-CEO Travis Kalanick was dating Gabi Holzwarth, a violinist. Holzwarth entered the Silicon Valley scene when Uber investor Shervin Pishevar hired her to play at a fundraiser at his home for soon-to-be senator Cory Booker in 2013. That’s where Holzwarth first met Kalanick. Sparks flew—but what she says she didn’t realize is that Kalanick didn’t want a traditional relationship.

  Over a year after the pair broke up, Holzwarth shared with me details of their years together, including moments when Kalanick mixed business with pleasure. She shed light on a story that originally broke in The Information of the night when Kalanick joined a group of Uber executives that included the company’s head of business, Emil Michael, on a visit to an escort-karaoke bar in Seoul. “The girls were sitting in the center of this ring, shivering in miniskirts,” Holzwarth recalled. Each woman had a numbered tag so they could be chosen by the men in the group for a more personal encounter. A female Uber executive who was also in the group at the time later reported it to HR and said the incident made her “feel horrible.”

  Holzwarth said that Michael called her to ask her not to discuss the night publicly—although Michael has countered that he was only calling “to let her know that reporters may try to contact her directly,” as a series of post-Fowler stories about Uber began to break in the news. Feeling he was trying to bully her into silence, she instead became the whistle-blower. It was not the only story she told. In October 2017, she posted on Facebook: “For all the women who are trying to fit in . . . you don’t have to hunt for women to bring back for them to fool around with. No, you don’t have to rate other women’s bodies, call them too ugly or fat to hang around with. No, you don’t have to sit around as you hear them compare the number of women they have slept with at one time.” When I called Holzwarth to ask what she was referring to, she said that Kalanick regularly encouraged her to find other women to bring into threesomes. She also told me that Kalanick and Michael talked openly in her presence about their sexual adventures. “Travis surrounded himself with men who liked that lifestyle; it was easier for them to get close to him,” Holzwarth told me.

  A company culture is formed by what people at that company actually say and do together—the norms, standards, and values they collectively uphold. When the two most senior and important leaders of a company are a party to women being treated as objects—as Kalanick and Michael were in that bar in Seoul—it is not hard to imagine how this might poison company culture and lead cases like Susan Fowler’s to be overlooked. Again, an external investigation documented forty-seven claims of sexual harassment at Uber.

  I reached out to Emil Michael about five months after he had left Uber, on the heels of Holder’s investigation. In a statement, he was both defensive and apologetic, clearly affected by the public reaction to Uber’s cultural unraveling and his role in it. He told me that he worked hard to build a diverse team, including women, at Uber, and said he deeply regretted “attending and failing to prevent” the visit to the South Korean bar. “My lack of judgment on that evening did not represent [my] values,” he told me. “I have learned a lot since those early days about the obligations that I and all leaders have to lead by example in situations like this and the lasting impact that decisions, both good and bad, can have on any organization.”

  • • •

  THE SPECTRUM OF OPEN relationships in Silicon Valley is broad. “Polyamory,” on one extreme, is defined as the state of being in love with, or romantically involved with, more than one person at the same time. Polyamory shares the same Latin root as “polygamy,” the practice of having more than one mate at the same time. But while polygamy is generally rejected in the Western world, polyamory has become a widely accepted social trend, at least in the Bay Area. There are no hard numbers on how many local residents have adopted, often loosely, the tenets of polyamory, but experts I’ve talked to feel safe to say that a significant majority of those who do are tech workers.

  Sociologist Elisabeth Sheff has been studying polyamory since long before it was trendy in Silicon Valley. She says that most polyamorists, nationwide, are highly educated, middle- and upper-middle-class white people who have the freedom to experiment and the means to hire a good lawyer if things end badly. “In the tech industry, specifically, I think people think a lot about what is possible,” Sheff says. “If your mind is constantly like, ‘Things don’t have to be this way’ or ‘It could be any way at all, let me think of a new way,’ then you also start questioning not just binary code but binary relationships, heterosexual relationships, and marriage.”

  “Polyamory is a hack,” says Twitter co-founder Evan Williams (to be clear, not his kind of hack). “It’s trying to solve the problem of love and security and excitement and novelty. It’s popular here because people see it as a smarter way to live.”

  Candace Locklear is a partner at the tech public relations firm Mighty, which counts Facebook, Twitter, and Pandora among its clients. When I met her in 2016, she and her husband had been dating another couple for two years. She was sleeping with the other man. Her husband was sleeping with that guy’s wife.

  “We’re all on WhatsApp. There’s a lot of coordination. We have date nights where we swap houses,” Locklear told me. The rule when they started was “Don’t fall in love.” “Well, fuck,” she said, “everybody fell in love.” Locklear asserted that the experience had only made her marriage stronger, because she fell in love with her husband all over again by seeing him through another woman’s eyes. Yes, they do have kids, and their kids (six and twelve years old at the time) are in on what’s happening, to the extent they can understand. Locklear does worry about how this unconventional love quadrangle may affect her preteen daughter (the younger child belongs to the other couple), but said she is constantly trying to explain and give her as much attention as possible.

  To clarify: There is an important distinction between polyamory and everything else that falls under the nonmonogamy umbrella. For example, you and your partner might be “monogamish” (like Crawford and Messina), meaning the two of you agree you can see other people but there are certain rules. For one couple, the rule might be that it’s fine to get a little handsy if you stay above the belt. Another couple might countenance one-off hookups or casual side relationships with third parties.

  Polyamory is different, in that it involves deep emotional connections, as in Locklear’s situation, rather than simply sex with multiple partners. Adherents believe that love is infinite and that you can feel love for multiple people at the same time; they call it “committed nonmonogamy.” For these reasons, most polyamorists don’t like being compared to 1970s swingers. Advocates describe what they are doing as a brave experiment in human connection. But what happens when the workplace becomes the lab they’re experimenting in?

  Though the tech community didn’t invent polyamory, it has certainly adopted it. There’s reportedly even a poly meet-up group at
Google. But Susan Fowler’s case is just one example of how the “we’re so cool about sex” culture can create confusion that can bleed into the workplace and foster an uncomfortable power dynamic.

  Chris Messina was still working at Uber when Fowler’s blog post hit. “After it happened, I had people ask me about it and I’m like, ‘Whoa, whoa, I’m not condoning the rest of this stuff because I’ve chosen this lifestyle,’” Messina told me. “I see a lot of people looking for excuses for bad behavior—Oh, I can fuck whoever I want whenever I want. No, it’s not okay to do this at work; all the same rules apply. What I’m concerned about is the whole trend around nonmonogamy becomes another justification for not being responsible for yourself and that’s not the point. It’s not a get-out-of-jail-free card. And it creates an environment where, specifically as a woman, you can’t get a break.”

  Elisabeth Sheff says the rise of polyamory and other forms of nonmonogamy can have especially dangerous professional consequences for women if their workplace is already dominated by men. “You can’t assume that people will understand that you’re off the market because you’re married” or in a relationship, she says. “Navigating that, being on the market, even though you’re married, can be exhausting, especially for women, who don’t have as much power in the workplace. Now it takes more effort to patrol that boundary. Being on the market never stops.”

  There is often a social cost to refusing the endless offers or expressing more traditional views that sexual relationships should be monogamous. “It comes across as parochial and prudish in certain settings,” says Sheff.

  The Uber example, for Sheff, represents how this evolution in various types of relationships can lend cover for a new type of sexual harassment. “That’s not polyamory; that’s fucked up,” she told me when we discussed Fowler’s story. “It’s just inappropriate to put people in that position in the workplace. You may think you’re Steve Jobs, but really you’re Roger Ailes or Bill O’Reilly with a Bernie Sanders tattoo.”

  Even a woman who is nonmonogamous herself could have problems. “If a woman is known to be polyamorous, then there is this assumption, like, of course she’ll date,” Sheff says. “And if she won’t engage, then she’s a frigid bitch. Women can be at a double disadvantage around this because they still get the sideways looks from other women and from men who think, ‘Well, you’re slutty—why don’t you fuck me?’” One female tech worker who is open-minded told me that her go-to excuse to gently fend off unwanted advances from male colleagues is to tell them she prefers to date women, which is only half true.

  Finally, even when all parties consent to some sort of open arrangement, Sheff says, men are more frequently the instigators. “If they are an established couple and one of them says, ‘Let’s become polyamorous,’ very frequently it’s the man. Definitely that’s a dynamic where the man is like, ‘Oh, come on, honey, let’s do this,’” she says. “But sometimes it doesn’t work out quite the way the man expected. Once couples finally start, it’s often easier for the woman to get dates.” That appears to have been the situation of the manager who harassed Fowler.

  Sheff is no prude. She believes that the modern form of polyamory in fact gives women more power, and that some women are the instigators in their relationships. “Every traditional society that we know of, wealthy men get as many women as they want. I’m talking China, France, Mongolia, Peru, Canada, everywhere; if you’re a rich guy in 300 B.C. or 2075, you get multiple women. The huge difference now is that women can also have multiple partners. Not all polyamorous relationships are empowering for women, but they are certainly not all exploitative.”

  Finding love and keeping love has puzzled humans through the ages, and one might be a little impressed by the bravery and innovation that this generation of tech workers brings to the challenge. But there is so little separation in tech offices between social life and work life and the power dynamics at play that the romantic confusion created by polyamory and nonmonogamy is seeping into the office, increasing tension and opportunities for misunderstandings.

  CONFERENCE ROOM G

  San Francisco has long been a place of sexual norm breaking. It was a club in the city’s North Beach district that is credited in the 1960s with pioneering topless dancing. That style of entertainment, now with the added titillation of private lap dances, seems somewhat old-fashioned. Still, when I heard there was a downtown strip club that was often packed midday with young men from the tech industry, I threw on a pair of sunglasses and decided to make a visit myself.

  My trip to the Gold Club on San Francisco’s Howard Street began at 11:45 a.m. on a Friday. The place is already hopping, and by noon there’s not a seat left in the joint and the buffet line wraps around the perimeter of the room. One reason is that this may well be the cheapest lunch in San Francisco. Just pay the $5 cover charge and the rest is free—all-you-can-eat mountains of meaty fried chicken, thick juicy ribs, chicken taquitos, and a generous dessert tray. The other reason the Gold Club is packed: unlimited topless entertainment.

  I take a seat at a table near the back with a female colleague I have coerced into joining me on this awkward reporting excursion, feeling more than a little naive and dumbstruck. The Gold Club is the lone strip joint in the tech-heavy SoMa district, just a block from the Moscone Center, which hosts the biggest technology conferences in the world (Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference, Salesforce’s Dreamforce, and Oracle OpenWorld). Yelp is just blocks away, as is LinkedIn’s brand-new twenty-six-story skyscraper.

  One step into the Gold Club, and you feel as if you’ve been transported to a Las Vegas nightclub, LED lights and all. But this isn’t your usual late-night casino crowd. Construction workers on their lunch breaks sit next to men in suits and tech engineers in hoodies and T-shirts. In some of these groups, a woman or two has tagged along. At the center of it all, a half-naked dancer shimmies up and down a fifteen-foot pole on the main stage.

  Around noon, the hostesses start weaving through the tables, catching the eyes of customers who might want something more intimate than the fried chicken. The Gold Club appears to be staffed so there’s a woman for everyone—black, blond, Asian, Latina, tall and short, big- and small-bosomed, tattooed and au naturel.

  When a dancer wearing a gleaming-white bra and underwear approaches our table, I introduce myself and confess that I am there to do some reporting. She introduces herself with her stage name, Zorah Rose, and tells me she is a teacher at a public middle school in Berkeley, doing summer day shifts at the club to help pay bills. She says she has met patrons from all of the brand-name tech companies nearby, specifically mentioning Uber, Dropbox, Twitter, and Airbnb. “Salesforce is big here,” she adds. “Yelp employees call this place Conference Room G.”

  I ask Rose what exactly is on the menu, besides the dancing and buffet. She tells me that most of the place clears out after lunch, so “you know that the people who are still here want something more.” Besides lunch, nothing’s cheap at the Gold Club. (It costs $10 just to withdraw money from the on-premise ATM.) A lap dance costs $20, $60, or $100, depending on how long it runs and how naked the dancer gets. Or you can just go all out and book thirty minutes in a back room for $375.

  “Every girl decides how far they want to go back there,” one dancer told me. “I’m sure there’s all kinds of things going on.” Another dancer confirmed that sex is available for those with the cash.

  Rose says she definitely attracts a particular type of man. “I get all the mid-forties, white, married tech execs,” she explains. Compared with Chicago, where she used to perform for mostly lawyers, doctors, and salesmen, her tech clients in San Francisco are much more interested in having a conversation, in addition to all the other stuff. “Basically, they just want a stripper girlfriend for a few hours,” Rose says. “I call it therapy in a sexy outfit.”

  Another dancer, Nikki Darling, agreed to chat with me later by phone. She too estimates that mal
e tech workers are the predominant clientele. “Sometimes a group will come in, and guys are like, ‘Oh yeah, that’s my boss that I’m with.’” Business deals happen here all day long, she says. After all, it’s much easier to close a sale when everyone’s in a really, really good mood.

  Darling tells me she has two regulars whom she sees outside the club, including a Google employee who’s single and a venture capitalist who’s married. While some of her tech clientele are nice guys, she has also encountered her share of Silicon Valley jerks. “They’re younger, came into money early, and it makes them act kind of douchey, kind of a bit entitled,” Darling says. “They have money or power and know you want their money, and they use that power dynamic in a not-so-nice way.”

  In case it isn’t clear from the description above, going to strip clubs isn’t something just a couple of guys in the office are doing once in a while. In certain companies, it rises to the level of a corporate culture that is, in some cases, approved by the men at the very top, with strip club fees being charged back to the company.

  Strip clubs are nothing new to business, and they have been part of hard-charging tech culture since at least Trilogy’s heyday in the 1990s. The CEO, Joe Liemandt, a.k.a. Hundred-Dollar Joe, led young, impressionable employees on pilgrimages to Las Vegas, where gambling and naked women were the main event.

  Christa Quarles, now the CEO of OpenTable, was taken to the Gold Club at the end of an interview—a job interview!—with another tech company. “It was more like, ‘Hey, everyone, let’s go out and see if this person is a social fit,’” Quarles remembers. She felt it was clearly part of the interview, a sort of test to see if she could, as she puts it, “hang with the bro culture.”

  Despite feeling uncomfortable, Quarles didn’t complain. “I felt like what I needed to be successful was being one of the boys,” she says. Quarles ultimately took herself out of the running for that job and kept looking.