“Geek girls” and the problem of self-objectification

Cross-posted at Geek Feminism.

There is a dif­fi­cult con­ver­sa­tion to be had about self-objectifying geeks. (I’m look­ing at you, slave Leias.) And while fem­i­nist geeks have been address­ing this issue for a while now, it seems that more main­stream geek cul­ture has caught up with us. Comic-Con actu­ally had a panel this year called “Oh, You Sexy Geek,” in which they were to dis­cuss the impli­ca­tions of “sexy women” in geek cul­ture. From the online pro­gram:

Does dis­play­ing the sex­i­ness of fan­girls ben­e­fit or demean them? When geek girls show off, are they lib­er­at­ing them­selves or pan­der­ing to men? Do some “fake fan­girls” blend sex appeal with nerdi­ness just to appeal to the grow­ing geek/nerd mar­ket, or is that ques­tion itself unfair? And what’s up with all the Slave Leias?

I’ve been research­ing and think­ing about cos­play for a while now, and one of the most dis­tress­ing trends I’ve been grap­pling with is how women will choose char­ac­ters, cos­tumes, or cos­tume con­struc­tions based on how “sexy” the cos­tume will appear on them. This is not just a cos­play prob­lem, but a geek prob­lem. And until we start hav­ing an intel­li­gent con­ver­sa­tion about it (prefer­ably a con­ver­sa­tion that starts with the assump­tion that it is a prob­lem), it’s not one that geek com­mu­ni­ties will ever be rid of. (A lit­tle unsur­pris­ingly, the Comic-Con panel was appar­ently sort of ter­ri­ble. We’ll get to that in a minute.)

As I’ve argued before, the sexisms that per­sist in geek com­mu­ni­ties are not spe­cial. They are not sep­a­ra­ble and inher­ently dif­fer­ent from sex­ist thoughts and behav­iors in the “real world.” They are part and par­cel of reg­u­lar ole sex­ism, not a spe­cial geek dude brand invented out­side of patri­archy. So with that in mind, it’s impor­tant to remem­ber that the sex­u­al­iza­tion of women is some­thing that women and men con­sume and inter­nal­ize all over the place. Though it does seem to be par­tic­u­larly bad in geek media. Video games, comics, sci­ence fic­tion, fantasy—these media forms are often at fault for pro­mot­ing unre­al­is­tic (and, pretty reg­u­larly, phys­i­cally impos­si­ble) stan­dards of beauty. They fash­ion their female hero­ines and vil­lains as sexy objects to be con­sumed, unlike their male coun­ter­parts.

As I said to Amanda Hess last year, being the sexy object is one of the places where geek women can find accep­tance in their com­mu­ni­ties. From the interview:

Too often, women in geek cul­tures are only wel­comed if they are dec­o­ra­tion, sexy ver­sions of the things geek men love, not equal par­tic­i­pants or fel­low fans. For­ever Geek […], for exam­ple, has, in just the past two months, posted with glee about female mod­els naked except for high heels and stormtrooper hel­mets grac­ing skate­boards, a car wash in which women dressed in sexy Princess Leia cos­tumes washed cars, and Star Wars corsets. Geek com­mu­ni­ties love women, as long as their mem­bers don’t have to think of those women as peo­ple.

When I was on the “Geek Girls in Pop­u­lar Cul­ture” panel at Apol­lo­Con, we talked about this non­sense for quite a while, because, as a cou­ple of the pan­elists pointed out, it seems like a geek woman can only get atten­tion if she’s con­ven­tion­ally beau­ti­ful and will­ing to objec­tify her­self. When geek women choose to self-objectify at geek events, they are not doing so in a vac­uum. So while I think it’s pos­si­ble that some of them are try­ing to feel empow­ered in their sex­u­al­ity, and reclaim their fem­i­nin­ity, they can­not escape the fact that this is a cul­ture that embraces female fans almost exclu­sively as sexy objects. In other words, a fem­i­nist can wear high heels, but she shouldn’t lie to her­self about what that means.

The prob­lem then, isn’t that women are objec­ti­fy­ing them­selves. That’s like hold­ing a panel ask­ing if women are “lib­er­at­ing them­selves or pan­der­ing to men” for wear­ing mascara/high heels/Spanx/bras, curl­ing or straight­en­ing their hair, or shav­ing their legs and under­arms. Because it’s easy to blame women, right? It’s easy to say that if women don’t want to be objec­ti­fied, they shouldn’t dress sexy or do the beauty work asked of them.

And it’s easy to get angry at “Team Uni­corn” for so obvi­ously pan­der­ing to the male gaze and fram­ing them­selves as sex objects for male geeks. It’s easy to hate Olivia Munn and point to her as every­thing that is wrong with geek women or geek cul­ture. It’s easy to roll your eyes at the ubiq­ui­tous sexy cos­play­ers, and blame them for the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of women in geek cultures.

A group of slave Leias with Jabba the Hut at a con­ven­tion. From Flickr.

But the actions of women are not the cause of their objec­ti­fi­ca­tion. Women have a lot of good rea­sons to per­form beauty work and to dress sexy, espe­cially in the sex­ist cul­tures rep­re­sented at your aver­age con. Women aren’t the prob­lem, whether they cross­play and eschew fem­i­nin­ity alto­gether or they pull out the sexy Leia cos­tume. The prob­lem is that women who dress sexy, who frame them­selves as sex objects, are rewarded by geek cul­ture for doing so. They get atten­tion, approval, and recog­ni­tion from the cul­ture when they dress as sexy Leia (or any sexy geek thing). They have pic­tures taken of them at cons, and they get posted and reposted on the inter­net. They are rec­og­nized as geeks (and gen­er­ally as some­what authen­tic geeks, even if they aren’t talked about that way) and wel­comed into the com­mu­nity (maybe not as full mem­bers, but at least as desir­able). There’s noth­ing wrong with want­ing atten­tion and approval in one’s com­mu­nity. What cos­player and geek wouldn’t want those things? What female geek doesn’t want to be wel­comed into the com­mu­nity with enthu­si­asm and excite­ment (instead of derided as a harpy fem­i­nist or annoy­ing squee­ing fan­girl)? The prob­lem, then, isn’t what women do, but a cul­ture in which the only way that women can be rec­og­nized as a desir­able part of the cul­ture is when they par­tic­i­pate by mak­ing them­selves con­sum­able sexy objects for geek men.

The panel at Comic-Con was framed poorly, and per­haps that’s why it turned into a god­damn mess, with pan­elists sug­gest­ing the women crit­i­ciz­ing sexy cos­play­ers were “just jeal­ous,” one pan­elist argu­ing the women are “all a bunch of bitches,” another claim­ing “I can’t help it that some of the char­ac­ters I like to cos­play are scant­ily clad,” and the only male pan­elist show­ing up 5 min­utes before the panel ended and mak­ing an inap­pro­pri­ate sex­ual joke (syn­op­sis from Fem­i­nist Fatale). Well, one of the rea­sons. Another rea­son is prob­a­bly that geek cul­tures tend to think we’re beyond fem­i­nism, and Suzanne Scott claims that the panel

devolved into a post­fem­i­nist panel, in which fem­i­nism was invoked and then dis­carded as no longer nec­es­sary (or too “old fash­ioned,” or some form of buz­zkillery we need to “get over”).

This is unsur­pris­ing, if dis­ap­point­ing. Because geek cul­tures often think of them­selves as coun­ter­cul­tural, they don’t usu­ally believe they are tainted by the sex­ism, racism, ableism, ageism, ad naseum that infect pop­u­lar cul­ture. And there are entireblogs that prove that non­sense untrue.

This whole con­ver­sa­tion needs to change focus. Indi­vid­ual geeks and cos­play­ers have their own rea­sons for dress­ing as they do or pre­sent­ing them­selves as they do. Those rea­sons can indeed involve their think­ing that dress­ing as sexy Leia is empow­er­ing, for what­ever rea­son. And we shouldn’t be dis­miss­ing those rea­sons. But the trend of sexy geek cos­play­ing, the trend of geek women objec­ti­fy­ing and sex­u­al­iz­ing them­selves, that’s a whole ‘nother ball­game. We need to be talk­ing about this as a prob­lem of our cul­ture, not a prob­lem that women bring upon themselves.