Aaron Sorkin Responds to 'Misogyny' Claims Over 'Social Network' Script

After award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was basking in the back-to-back box-office success of 'The Social Network,' nay-sayers swooped in to rain on his parade, calling the movie misogynistic. With critics on the web arguing the movie portrays women unfairly, Sorkin had enough and addressed a specific commenter named Tarazza on Ken Levine's blog.

"With the exception of 1 or 2 of them (Rashida Jones included), [the women] were basically sex objects/stupid groupies," Tarazza wrote. "[It] kinda makes me think that Aaron Sorkin (though I love his writing) failed the women in this script."

Three days later, Sorkin responded via blog to Tarazza's claims in a candid, essay-like manner to put the misogyny talk to bed. Sorkin starts off by arguing in-depth that the so-called misogyny is directly related to Mark Zuckerberg's perception.

Portions of Sorkin's post read:

"This is Aaron Sorkin and I wanted to address Taraza's comment. (Ken, I'll get to you in and your very generous blog post in just a moment.

Tarazza--believe me, I get it. It's not hard to understand how bright women could be appalled by what they saw in the movie but you have to understand that that was the very specific world I was writing about. Women are both prizes an equal. Mark's blogging that we hear in voiceover as he drinks, hacks, creates Facemash and dreams of the kind of party he's sure he's missing, came directly from Mark's blog. With the exception of doing some cuts and tightening (and I can promise you that nothing that I cut would have changed your perception of the people or the trajectory of the story by even an inch) I used Mark's blog verbatim. Mark said, "Erica Albright's a bitch" (Erica isn't her real name--I changed three names in the movie when there was no need to embarrass anyone further), "Do you think that's because all B.U. girls are bitches?" Facebook was born during a night of incredibly misogyny. The idea of comparing women to farm animals, and then to each other, based on their looks and then publicly ranking them. It was a revenge stunt, aimed first at the woman who'd most recently broke his heart (who should get some kind of medal for not breaking his head) and then at the entire female population of Harvard."

Sorkin goes on to insist the college girls in 'The Social Network' do exist in real life.

"These women--whether it's the girls who are happy to take their clothes off and dance for the boys or Eduardo's psycho-girlfriend are real. I mean REALLY real. (In the case of Christy, Eduardo's girlfriend so beautifully played by Brenda Song, I conflated two characters--again I hope you'll trust me that doing that did nothing to alter our take on the events. Christy was the second of three characters whose name I changed.)"