Ick

Why do male VCs think anyone wants to cold plunge with them?

Tim Draper is a wealthy and well known venture capitalist. He recently posted this:

I saw this and thought: ick. But others liked it, shared it. Business Insider even wrote a piece on it.

So let’s talk about what this means. Because it is not harmless. And it is not new.

When a man who controls access to capital decides that the conditions for receiving your pitch include freezing water, shirtless bodies, and sustained physical discomfort, he has built a filter. Not a random one. Not a meritocratic one. A selection mechanism dressed up as toughness, one that reliably selects for men who already know how to move through rooms like that one.

Women receive roughly 2% of all venture capital.¹ Not because their ideas are worse. Because access to capital still runs through networks, rituals, and social codes built by and for a specific kind of person. Draper's cold plunge is just a more visible version of that filter. Usually the filter is less photogenic: the partner meeting where one voice keeps getting talked over; the poker night that starts at 10 p.m. with a $10,000 buy-in; the group chat where the real decisions happen and you were never added.

What makes this moment different from every previous Silicon Valley bro cycle is the degree to which these men now have state power, and the degree to which they are using it to formalize what used to be informal.

Helen Lewis published a piece in The Atlanticin May entitled “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet Her argument is direct and important: misogyny has become the single most important ideological force holding together the American right. Not economic policy. Not immigration. Not trade. The thing that unites pastors, senators, podcasters, venture capitalists, and influencers across an otherwise fractured coalition is a shared conviction that feminism went too far and women need to be walked back.²

The names are not subtle. Peter Thiel wrote in 2009 that women’s suffrage had made capitalist democracy an oxymoron.³ He has direct access to the highest levels of the federal government. David Sacks, his co-author on a book that dismissed date rape as “seductions later regretted,”⁴ is now the White House AI and Crypto Czar. Marc Andreessen, who controls one of the most powerful pools of capital in the country, has called employees who raise harassment concerns “professional activists trying to destroy companies from the inside.”⁵ Mark Zuckerberg went on Joe Rogan and complained that corporate culture had become too “neutered” and “emasculated.”⁶ Elon Musk responded to Senator Elizabeth Warren’s criticism of his taxes by calling her “Senator Karen” and comparing her to an angry mom.⁷ Pete Hegseth runs the Pentagon despite a sexual assault allegation from 2017 that required a nondisclosure agreement.⁸ The president who appointed him was found civilly liable for sexual abuse⁹ and was recorded bragging about grabbing women without consent.¹⁰

To understand the scale of what that means, consider this: the combined net worth of the men I just mentioned, Thiel, Sacks, Andreessen, Zuckerberg, Musk, and Trump, sits at roughly $400 billion. The total annual venture capital flowing to women-only founding teams in the United States runs between $5 and $10 billion a year. That means these six men together hold somewhere between 40 and 80 times more wealth than the entire annual VC funding pool available to women founders. Not 40% more. Not double. Forty to eighty times more. For people who think this conversation is overwrought, that is not a cultural grievance. That is a structural fact. And it does not happen by accident in a actual meritocracy.

This is also not, as some maintain, a collection of unrelated incidents. It is a coalition with a shared worldview, and Lewis names it precisely: masculinism. The organized political belief that women’s advances have gone too far, that men are the aggrieved party, and that the project of returning women to a more constrained public role is not fringe but urgent. Douglas Wilson, a pastor whose denomination counts Hegseth as a member and who was invited to lead a prayer service at the Pentagon in February, wants to repeal the Nineteenth Amendment. He told Lewis it was not his top priority right now. Just something he sees happening in perhaps 200 years. He seemed relaxed about it.¹¹

What Lewis documents, and what Draper’s tweet illustrates in miniature, is that this movement operates on two tracks simultaneously. On one track are the shock troops: the online provocateurs, the podcast hosts, the men who say the quiet part loud and loud part louder. On the other track are the sober institutionalists: the think tank fellows, the policy architects, the venture capitalists who would never say what Nick Fuentes says but who build systems that produce the same results. The cold plunge is the institutionalist version. No slurs required. Just a room that certain people will never be comfortable entering, run by a man who never had to think about that.

My daughter is thirteen. She graduated from middle school last week. Four days before that ceremony, the head of her school sent a letter home to every parent in the eighth grade. A group of boys had been overheard making derogatory sexual remarks about another student. The head of school named it for what it was: sexual harassment, a major violation, subject to significant consequences. She told the students that harmful cultures are not built only by the people making the comments. They are sustained by the laughter, the encouragement, the silence, and the standing by. She asked them: when have you laughed along, or stayed silent, when something felt wrong?

That question does not stop being relevant at graduation. It is the question of this entire moment.

Imagine if that standard reached Washington. Imagine if the Senate had applied it to Hegseth. Imagine if the men who nod along in those rooms, who laugh at the right moments and say nothing at the wrong ones, were asked to account for their silence the way a head of school asked eighth graders to account for theirs. We hold thirteen-year-olds to a standard of moral accountability that we have not applied to a single member of this cabinet.

The policy damage is not theoretical. The National Women’s Law Center has documented how the administration has moved aggressively to weaken workplace protections, gut DEI programs, and undermine harassment enforcement.¹² Black women lost a net 113,000 jobs in 2025, representing 54.7% of female job losses while making up just 14.1% of the female workforce.¹³ Women lead investigators represent 34% of active NSF grants but 58% of the grants terminated under this administration’s budget cuts.¹⁴ The same administration cutting women’s health research is simultaneously proposing a $5,000 baby bonus to encourage more births. Endometriosis received $43 million in federal research funding during the same period that erectile dysfunction received $1.5 billion.¹⁵ The contradiction is not accidental. It is the architecture.

Draper’s ice bath is a small, almost comic entry point into that larger architecture. But small entry points are worth naming, because the architecture gets built one normalized ritual at a time. One cold plunge. One pitch meeting that quietly signals who belongs. One group chat. One budget memo that cuts women’s research at twice the rate of everyone else’s. One confirmation vote for a man with a nondisclosure agreement.

The head of my daughter’s school asked her students what kind of person they want to be. What reputation they want to build. What responsibilities come with greater freedom. Those are not small questions. They are the questions a functioning culture asks of people who hold power within it.

I was going to end this by telling the VCs and the Trumpists to stop acting like adolescent boys. But I can’t. Because the boys in my daughter’s eighth grade class did something the men in this piece have never managed: they apologized. Genuinely. They sat with what they had done, heard what it cost someone else, and said so out loud. They did the thing that integrity actually requires, which is not the absence of mistakes but the willingness to reckon with them.

So I will not ask the Thiels and the Drapers and the Hegseths to be better than teenagers. I will ask them to be as good as them. To do what thirteen-year-olds in a middle school last week somehow found the courage to do: stop, look at the filter you have built, understand who it is costing, and say so. Out loud. With your name on it.

That is not a high bar. It just requires deciding that other people’s dignity is worth more than your comfort.

Apparently that is easier at thirteen than it is with a billion dollars and a cabinet seat. But the kids proved it is not impossible.

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Footnotes

¹ Crunchbase, “The Crunchbase Women in Venture Capital Report,” 2023.

² Helen Lewis, “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” The Atlantic, May 14, 2026.

³ Peter Thiel, “The Education of a Libertarian,” Cato Unbound, 2009.

⁴ Peter Thiel and David Sacks, “The Diversity Myth,” Independent Institute, 1995. Both authors later issued public apologies for specific passages.

⁵ Marc Andreessen, remarks cited in “Silicon Valley’s Deal with the Devil,” Ms. Magazine, February 5, 2025.

⁶ Mark Zuckerberg, interview with Joe Rogan, The Joe Rogan Experience, January 2025.

⁷ Elon Musk, post on X, December 2023, cited in Lexi Reese, “The Emperor’s New Code,” February 28, 2025.

⁸ “A Running List of the Allegations Against Pete Hegseth,” Mother Jones, December 2024; “Pete Hegseth to Release Woman from Nondisclosure Agreement,” Yahoo News, 2024.

⁹ E. Jean Carroll v. Donald J. Trump, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, May 2023.

¹⁰ “Transcript: Donald Trump’s Taped Comments About Women,” The New York Times, October 8, 2016.

¹¹ Helen Lewis, “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet,” The Atlantic, May 14, 2026.

¹² National Women’s Law Center, “Trump’s War on Working Women,” 2025.

¹³ Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “Black Women Disproportionately Sidelined in Year One of Trump’s Second Term,” 2025.

¹⁴ Lexi Reese, “USA, LLC: Silicon Valley’s Corporate Takeover Fantasy,” May 16, 2025, citing NSF grant termination data.

¹⁵ Research funding disparity cited in Lexi Reese, “USA, LLC: Silicon Valley’s Corporate Takeover Fantasy,” May 16, 2025.