It’s interesting how people keep suggesting that women who are geeky and NOT attractive are somehow exempt from sexism. Well, the world isn’t kind to women who are plain or homely either.
Thinking back to my teen years, no one ever told me I was too pretty to like X or be good at Y, but I was explicitly told again and again that being a girl meant I couldn’t like/be good at things…and that if I claimed otherwise, I was lying to impress a guy. The term “fake geek girl” wasn’t used back then, but dismissing girls/women as being stupid, dishonest sluts who’ll never be as good as boys/men is a lot older than that specific term.
For this, though, mileage definitely varies. When I was in high school I was a tomboy, didn’t dress at all girly, and wasn’t exactly a raving beauty (not much has changed since then, either). I was into games and science fiction and fantasy books, and nobody ever accused me of being a fake or being in it to impress anyone. I think the thought of me trying to impress a guy was pretty laughable, since I made it clear I didn’t give a damn about that. But the only flak I ever took in high school was mean teasing from three loser girls who needed somebody to look down on and I was a convenient target (and that was more for my style (or lack thereof) of dress rather than my geeky interests). Everybody else I wasn’t specifically friends with was either civil to me or ignored me, which was fine with me.
Well I think everyone has a certain expectation in their mind of what things “should” look like and stereotypes accordingly. It’s intellectually lazy but stereotyping is just how the brain follows the path of least resistance to process information.
Seeing a regular girl at a con vs a hot girl at a con raises eyebrows and there’s nothing to be done about that. The human brain will notice it. Acting on it, on the other hand, is the inexcusable behavior. It starts at rude and grows more severe from there. I find it shocking that someone would say outright, explicitly, that girls couldn’t like/be good at things, and that they were stupid, dishonest sluts who’ll never be as good as boys/men. I wouldn’t even know how to react to someone saying a thing like that.
What do you think this “fake geek girl” stuff is really about? We’ve seen in this very thread descriptions of girls/women who allegedly don’t really know about/aren’t any good at X (stupid), but pretend to be (dishonest) in order to get attention from men (slut). Those are the crimes of the fake geek girl. It’s rare to hear this expressed as bluntly as “stupid, dishonest slut”, but that particular phrase is not what I said I’d been told explicitly again and again.
It’s “girls don’t like/aren’t good at” that I heard in those exact words growing up. The list of things I was explicitly told I couldn’t like or be good at because I was a girl ranges from roleplaying games to rock music to the manly pursuit of drawing. The “lying to impress a guy” bit applied to some but not all of the things a girl wasn’t supposed to like/be good at. A lot of this is just garden variety sexism and not specific to geeks. But while I had plenty of unpleasant encounters with jocks, “mean girls”, etc., they weren’t the ones trying to police who was allowed to like roleplaying games. That kind of thing came solely from a certain subset of geek guys.
My husband and I were just talking about this (brought up because of the current WorldCon kurfluffle)…
For a LONG time, the concerns of women who this happened to were brushed off by both men and women who hadn’t experienced this with “it couldn’t have happened, we aren’t like that.” Some geeks like to think of the community as a whole as some sort of Star Trek utopia that has moved beyond sexism, or gay bashing, or fat bashing, or dissing of the disabled - or whatever - and into a world where those things don’t happen. After all, who has spent time in fandom without running into some group marriage, or some other fringe behavior that is accepted - even embraced. If it DID happen - it was obviously a simple misunderstanding…you are overreacting. Or everyone knows he is like that, but he is harmless.
At least now enough of this sort of bullshit has come out that people can’t ignore it happened.
This isn’t a response to anyone in particular, but I’ve been thinking about this thread. I also think it’s worth remembering that it’s not men that are sexist, it’s society, and women often, I think, perpetuated some of this–which then reinforces the lesson to men that these sorts of attitudes are okay, even the girls agree, after all.
For a great many women, male attention/approval is worth more than the same attention/approval from other women. We’re raised in a culture that values male opinions more than women. Social status among women is often closely linked to the quality of man that is attracted to you/approves of you. All this is changing, has been changing, continues to change in a positive direction, but these problems within geek culture are not new, and were shaped by attitudes that were common 30 years ago.
So for 30 years you had a handful of geeky women who enjoyed being told “you aren’t like other girls” “you aren’t one of them” “you’re different”. When you’ve internalized the idea that being a girl is basically a bad thing, that’s a compliment. In that kind of culture, you go out of your way to exaggerate and insult the flaws of “normal” girls–silly, stupid, don’t get it, not funny, not serious, not One Of Us. In that sort of situation, The One Girl bites her tongue instead of calling guys on shit, accepts certain basic preconceptions about both real life women and the role of women in narrative, and basically doesn’t challenge the paradigm.
I think it’s important to remember that it isn’t as simple as men vs women: it’s a shift within both groups.