In an email to potential donors (below) first discussed by The Frisky's Jessica Wakeman, Fiorina's campaign manager touts a video (above) of her opponent Sen. Barbara Boxer talking to a general during congressional testimony. The brief conversation seems to have offended no one who was actually involved in it, but Fiorina's campaign calls the video "shocking" and said Boxer "disrespectfully demanded" to be called "senator." Her exact words:

Do me a favor, could you say 'senator' instead of 'm'aam?' It's just a thing. (Laughter.) I worked so hard to get that title. Thank you.

This "shocking" moment of terrible rudeness is obviously the most important issue in California right now. It's a good thing voters have a tough businesswoman like Fiorina to help them identify women who espouse feminist ideals only when it advances their own ego and political interests.

Certain, that is, if you judge from recent history. Here's a roundup of tech chauvinism flare-ups from just the last couple of months:

• "Booth babes" were explicitly discouraged at the TechCrunch 50; some people still hired the attractive spokesgirls.
  
• On stage at the same event, Penn Jilette promoted his iPhone magic app by explaining how it helped a stripper increase her tips. Oy, said Twitter
  
• When the fit, female co-founder of the startup TotalTrainer gave a presentation at VentureBeat's Demo conference, some male geeks in the audience got snarky about her body on Twitter, provoking a backlash against their "sexist tweets."
  
• Attendees at TechCrunch had to be warned not to mock the accents of speakers from foreign countries, according to co-organizer Jason Calacanis.

What's more, the girls who danced on stage at this year's Yahoo Hack Day were merely a sequel to the gyrating women who appeared on stage last year, notes Kara Swisher at All Things D. That's despite the fact that an all-woman team won the top prize at Yahoo's first Hack Day, in 2006, and that Yahoo has a tough-as-nails female CEO.

Chalk it up as evidence that, whether a woman calls the shots or not, the tech world remains heavily male dominated. It goes beyond that, though: Human relationships, across the gender divide or not, get severely twisted in Silicon Valley's intense startup culture, where they're all too often pushed aside to make way for technical achievements (think marathon coding sessions) or business success. The Hack Day incident is as much about interpersonal awkwardness as sexism (does this guy look like he's enjoying himself?).

Images from this year's event are below, via simonwillison.net and CocaChou on Flickr. It's a well-stocked gallery, purely so you can fully appreciate how, uh, deplorable this whole scene was.

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

via CocaChou on Flickr

Reveling in over-concentration of males in Silicon Valley tech companies, TechCrunch's startup conference kicked off earlier this month with talk about strippers. Penn Jilette regaled the crowd with the story about how one made a ton of money off his magic app, and is set to publish a "Stripper's Guide" to the software, which helped her increase her tips. Twitter groaned. Then came the booth babes, despite organizers' advice against using the scantily-clad female models as a promotional gimmick.

Conference co-host Jason Calacanis also has to admonish attendees not to mock the accents of some presenters, whom he makes a point of culling from around the world. In response to our email, he wrote,

I've asked folks to be tolerant about language issues for three years because 15-year olds in chat rooms can say so horrible things about folks outside of our country. It's frankly embarrassing that I have to do that. When I speak in China, France or Japan they don't give me a hard time and I'm not even attempting to speak their language.

Over at VentureBeat's Demo conference, which ran the week following TechCrunch 50, some male participants freaked out about a presentation from a female fitness entrepreneur with well-toned arms and visible muscles (pictured left, via VentureBeat). "Whoa, presenter on stage has bigger deltoids and biceps than me, and she's wearing a red dress," wrote one participant. "The TotalTrainer presenters scare me," tweeted another. "Those muscles don't belng at Demo." VentureBeat's Kim-Mai Cutler blasted back in a post entitled, Internet spreads sexist tweets faster than ever: "You guys need to shut up."

Demo also featured complains about foreign accents; one columnist, CNET's Rafe Needleman, went so far as to suggest people with "a noticeably weak command of English shouldn't be allowed on stage," a native-language requirement that would see American entrepreneurs like Calacanis, along with their translators, banned from many global stages.

Calacanis said there's only so much an organizer can do about any of these issues:

I love these idiots who blame conference producers for social issues. In related news, terrorism is driven by action films! ...Sexism exists, sure, but a conference producer can't change the statistical conundrum that most of the CEOs in our industry are male (like 90%+ I would guess).

Of course, an organizer can at least set the tone, for example by imploring tolerance of accents, as Calacanis has done, or by avoiding inviting women reporters to serve as "cocktail waitress"es at their poker games, as Calacanis has apparently not done (he insists men get the same treatment and often have to serve drinks to join his games). And Valley geeks can use the tools they've invented, like Twitter, to shame the worst offenders. It would appear that process is, if not in full gear, at least underway.

She lists off some recent stories from the site's "Entertainment" section to give you some flavor.

This one-sided liberal hate site has one fatal weakness-boobs. Let's check out some recent stories from the Huffington Post's entertainment section:

• Here are some photos of Natalie Portman's nipple.
• Here are some photos of Beyonce's nipple, complete with HuffPo-provided "NSFW zoom."
• Here are some photos of Pamela Anderson's nipple (hardly news, but a boob's a boob).
• Here is an entire page devoted to recently naked women (and Barack Obama).
• Here is a collection of zoomed-in photos of 23 celebrities' breasts, made into a fun game called "Guess the Celebrity Breast Implants?"

Pretty standard entertainment-section blog fare here-though HuffPo does go above and beyond with the "NSFW zoom." You don't see a Beyonce nipple that close just anywhere.

While Amanda's examples aren't all from the same day, it's a rare day that some coverage of a salacious story about an attractive woman doesn't make HuffPo's "Top Stories." An example, from today:
So, there's an auto-erotic asphyxiation story and Heather Graham opining about her love of Tantric sex. Gotcha. And on the day after Sarah Palin told Sean Hannity that she'd like to tell Obama voters, "I told you so," about America becoming a Socialist nation yet not being permitted to speak to a Republican audience, their front page story about her isn't atypical.
Not atypical, if one is running a gossip site.

Amanda acknowledges that the nip slip/hot chick page views are part of Huffington Post's business model, regardless of its politics. But she notes that the entertainment coverage often does have a liberal bent — it's just not often sensitive to women.

But look past the nipples, if you can, and you will find a clear liberal bent in HuffPo's non-boob Entertainment stories. Yesterday, the top three links on the Entertainment page could be considered GLBT interest stories: "Adam Lambert Confirms Rolling Stone To Address His Sexuality"; "WATCH: Neil Patrick Harris' FANTASTIC Tonys Closing Song"; "Gordon Ramsay Shocks Audience With ‘Lesbian' Rant About Journalist." Also on the page yesterday was blogger Jackson Katz's post directly addressing the objectification of women in entertainment, titled "Eminem, Misogyny and the Sounds of Silence."

Notably, most of HuffPo's bloggers aren't paid — and their coverage isn't highlighted with splash page retail space in the same way that the stories about sex and nipples are.

And while some people might call looking at nip slips a little mindless fun to drive in the viewers HuffPo desires to influence politically, Amanda isn't having it.

The problem is that people really do care about nipples. They care so much about nipples that the Huffington Post devotes pages and pages of photographs to them when women accidentally (or, you know, against their will) reveal them to the public. In that way, there's no difference between the religious conservative who is scandalized by a bare breast popping up in the middle of his football game and a liberal Web site which devotes its resources to naked chicks. A woman's body part is a priority. Real women's issues, not so much.

Somehow, "Come for the nipples, stay for the feminism" doesn't seem quite right to us either.

Huffington Post: Liberal Politics, Sexist Entertainment [Washington City Paper]

Okay, ha ha ha, right? But like, who'd wear these shirts? My first inclination is to say your mom, if you were an investor in VC Wear! Unless venture capitalists are really this cheesy? In which case, is that a boy's club in which you'd want to be a member no matter how great the pay/desperate the dudes were? Also, this one:
Okay, even as I knew that Sand Hill Road was like the Wall Street of Silicon Valley, I still did not quite get the non-blowjob entendre of this joke until Owen of Valleywag explained it to me.

And, VC dudes of the world: Coed naked lacrosse and "I may be drunk but you're ugly" shirts are probs better bets.

Benchmark has said publicly that they will never fund a woman-founded company. They've never had a woman partner. And the mood seems to be like a frat party (a real turnoff to women).

We're wondering, when and where did any Benchmark partner really make such a claim? (Seriously, can anyone help me find it? I've been looking all day with no luck.) Secondly, well, i'ts not really true, right? Benchmark-backed E-Loan was cofounded by Janina Pawlowski. And Sarah Leary, pictured here, just joined Benchmark, along with Nirav Tolia, as an entrpreneur-in-residence — the surest way for a startup founder to get backing for a new venture.

Update A spokesperson for Benchmark writes in:

What follows are 4 more examples of Benchmark funding/recruiting women CEOs of public companies.

* Meg Whitman/eBay
* Donna Dubinsky/Handspring
* Lorrie Norrington/Shopping.com
* Maggie Wilderotter/Wink Communications

Call me if you need clarification. My cell is [REDACTED]. And no, I have no idea where that ridiculous quote came from. Certainly not one of the Benchmark partners!

Slate writer Troy Patterson makes Amanda's chest a running gag throughout its latest Rocketboom story: "Her main mandate was to jiggle." "Over time, Congdon became more confident, more polished, more thoughtful about how to deploy her chest." He even says Amanda "redefined the role of the bimbo."

Troy says this got her past the show's bad writing and her awkward presentation style. So he's not being sexist — just calling it like he sees it.

On the other side are Amanda's supporters, like blogger Robert Scoble, who earnestly believes that her skill as a presenter earned Rocketboom its 250,000 views-per-episode. He's not saying Amanda isn't pretty — just that she's actually a great presenter, and that thousands of Internet geek-boys wouldn't be swayed by a busty woman talking about technology.

So who's right? The cynics or the idealists?

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All the News That's Fit To Vlog [Slate]
Photo: Rocketboom [archives]