So I was wandering CNN again and stumbled across this blog post (here) about how hot non geek females use cons as an excuse to get male attention. The author thinks that these girls have no business being at any con if that’s all they are looking for.
I have to agree with that. Cons are about appreciating culture, whether it be Star Trek, anime, or more general. It’s not about showing off your body to get all the boys to stare at you. If you are a nerd girl with that rockin’ body, by all means cosplay as a character that flaunts it. But if you plan on showing up in a Pikachu bikini without doing your nerd homework, I think you might be better off flaunting at the beach.
While I think the writer meant well, I’m really, really tired of people feeling the need to delineate between “real” female geeks and “poser” female geeks. It’s condescending, and adds to the insecurity some “real” female geeks feel when they’re around male geeks, because for their whole lives they’ve been treated like they need to prove their geekiness due to their gender.
I agree with you. And while the author of the blog article focused on women pretending to be geeks, I’m sure if there was a hot guy who (for some reason) wanted to go to anime convention so he could show us what he’s got the author would also be against that.
While I imagine that’s probably true (unless this guy is a raving hypocrite), it’s just that a lot of rhetoric he uses really bothers me. Primarily the fact that he for some reason seems to think he knows who is and is not “truly” a geek, as though he can see inside everyone’s soul or hands out geek questionnaires to everyone he meets at a con. It smacks too much of the assumption, for example, that Mila Kunis lied about playing Wow. My D&D group seriously had an argument about whether or not she really plays, as though anyone there actually knows anything about the woman personally. The same night, Vin Diesel’s D&D past, equally as strange IMO, was accepted without question. The main difference is that Mila Kunis is an attractive woman and Vin Diesel is not. I guess I’m just not sure how the writer claims to know who is a “true” geek and who is not. (Also, the title is misleading. “Booth babes” aren’t really the women he goes on to criticize, since booth babes are hired by companies who think men are stupid. They aren’t attention whores for the sake of being attention whores, and blaming them for their presence at cons would be fallacious logic.)
Anyway, sorry to bust out all this negativity, it’s just that I think geeks can be really unproductively judgmental to one another, especially to women. Geeks tend to fall into an “us vs them” mentality, which too often harms women’s participation in geeky things, like cons. The geek community I hope to see is one that emphasizes acceptance, not booth-babe-baiting.
I agree with you, ladybacula. I’m sure some of these girls are nice, but I’ve met a couple who have said some disparaging things about the guys and the “geeky” women at such events. Along the lines of “Ha ha, it’s so easy to get these guys since they aren’t the types that get female attention and since they’re not used to being around pretty women.”