I’ve always found the controversy over so-called Fake Geek Girls more than a little preposterous, given the variety inherent in geekdom. My midichlorian count may be off the scales when it comes to Star Wars, but I’ll freely admit that my favorite Star Trek movie is the one with the whales, in part for its SDS references. I haven’t read the Wheel of Time, but I’m probably the mainstream feminist critic who’s spent the most time over the last few years writing about A Song Of Ice And Fire. And for anyone who doesn’t want to stamp my geek card until I’ve satisfied his or her knowledge of his favorite franchise, I’ll show you mine as soon as you break down the treatment of social inequality in Tamora Pierce’s Tortall novels. There is no Grand High Geek Council issuing citizenship papers, no border fence, and that’s one of my favorite things about joining the particular voluntary communities that have been so important to me over the years.

But it’s become clear that there are a lot of people who would like there to be. And the debate over whether there are women who are “fake geeks” or not has become a proxy for the conversation. The thing is, though, at the root of this conversation isn’t really about the inclusion of women, or certain kinds of women, in geekdom. It’s about a slow and uneven shift in which some geeks and some kinds of geekdom have accumulated an enormous amount of social capital. And that shift has revealed that we don’t always know how to spend it wisely, magnanimously, or in ways that don’t repeat the ugly marginalization of geeks that came before.

In a post on io9, Rachel Edidin, who is an associate editor at Dark Horse Comics explains why some geeks, like those who complain that female cosplayers only want attention—by which, of course, they mean those women only want certain kinds of attention and want to draw certain boundaries about how they’re treated in costume—explains why fandoms and geek communities can be so resistant to change:

Geek culture is a haven for guys who can’t or don’t want to fall in step with the set of cultural trappings and priorities of traditional manhood in America. At least in theory, geek culture fosters a more cerebral and less violent model of masculinity, supported by a complementary range of alternative values. But the social cost of that alternative model—chosen or imposed—is high, and it’s often extorted violently—socially or physically. The fringe is a scary place to live, and it leaves you raw and defensive, eager to create your own approximation of a center. Instead of rejecting the rigid duality of the culture they’re nominally breaking from, geek communities intensify it, distilled through the defensive bitterness that comes with marginalization. And so masculinity is policed incredibly aggressively in geek communities, as much as in any locker room or frat house.

It’s tremendously difficult to make the transition from being culturally powerless to being culturally powerful. And it’s even harder when a societal shift happens, when Steve Jobs is everyone’s favorite CEO, J.J. Abrams can do whatever he wants in film and television, when hackers become heroes and supervillians, and those social inversions don’t actually filter all the way down. Just because lots of geeky traits, like knowledge about technology, obsessive interest, and superheroes, have become assets doesn’t mean that, say, our preferred male body types have radically shifted, or that, movies like 21 Jump Street aside, high school’s shrugged off the quarterback of the football team for the captain of the Mathletes, or that on OkCupid, a figurine collection is suddenly more valuable than a job on Wall Street. Geeks are getting asked to be magnanimous, to be self-reflected, to open up communities as if they possess privilege that it may not always feel like they do. Of course, the question of whether you feel like you have privilege isn’t solely determinative of whether you do, and whether it’s acknowledged or not, having your cultural fantasies catered to is a kind of privilege. But the point remains: the range of how much social capital and privilege individual geeks have is gigantic. And that makes it very hard to move a community as a whole.
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Blogger Molly McIsaac has a post up about her experiences cosplaying as superheroines at San Diego Comic Con and elsewhere, and what it feels like to discover that people—including those who later ask you to pose for them—have been taking pictures of your rear end and trading them on the internet that’s helped me clarify some of my thinking about sexual harassment at conventions. Specifically, these paragraphs stood out to me:

Several people have tried to make this argument to me: If you didn’t want people photographing your butt, you shouldn’t wear the costumes that you wear.

FUCK. THAT. That’s like telling women not to wear short skirts if she doesn’t want to be raped. These characters are drawn in very little clothing due to art direction and wanting to make sales – and I love them and want to portray them despite what they are drawn wearing. I don’t want to be burka Wonder Woman – I want to be Wonder Woman in all her sexy hot pants glory.

We as a geek community have some of the most rampant sexism and misogyny I have ever seen. Women in cosplay are treated as pieces of meat, on display to satisfy a man’s fantasy of that character. We are without personality or interests, and there’s no way people will believe that we actually know ANYTHING about the character we’re dressed up as (especially if we are hot). I don’t know the reasons for this – I have theories, but that’s for another time entirely. But the behavior I have witnessed over the years is abysmal. And it’s not okay.

For some people, like McIsaac, cosplaying may be about claiming the sexual and physical power of the character she’s portraying. For some people, the fact that a character is sexually appealing or wears revealing clothes may be a secondary impact. But whether cosplaying is a sexual act or not, engaging sexually with someone still requires their consent. They’re a person, not an image, with the right to set their own terms of your interaction with them. And taking pictures of someone’s ass, specifically, rather than of their whole costume from the front, is a sexual act. The fact that folks are doing so furtively, attempting to avoid an interaction that might lead to their being denied permission for their actions, suggests that they’re pretty aware they’re doing so without consent. And if you know you’re sneaking around, and also want to be a decent person, that should probably make you think. As she puts it, cosplay is not a permission slip. There isn’t a lower level of scrutiny for people who take furtive shots of a woman’s behind at a convention or while she’s at school. A creepshot is still a creepshot, no matter where it’s taken and what a woman is wearing.

Alli Thresher, a video game designer at Harmonix, has a fantastic meditation up at XOJane on how booth babes change the dynamics at conventions. She argues that the presence of women who are hired purely to be attractive—even in cases where they’re knowledgeable about the products and franchises they’re selling—underrates women’s expertise and passion for gaming and sets up situations where women who are conventions for other purposes are at greater risk for sexual harassment because they’re assumed to be booth babes and therefore sexually available:

At last year’s PAX East I spoke to TWO women whose companies were using them as “booth babes” (literally advertising, “take photos with our booth babes”). One of them told me that she was actually the company’s office manager and she had been invited to the convention specifically to dress up and help the company subvert the policy.**

To PAX’s credit, they have been known to reprimand companies who do this sort of thing and have even, in some cases, escorted groups of babes and their product from the con. But still, how uncool to be asked, by your boss, to wear a tube top and miniskirt and pose for pictures with strangers? (The booth in question was run by a community outlet and not a development studio). I certainly don’t blame the women hired to work as booth babes for the bad behavior of a few select assholes I’ve encountered.*** I do, however, blame the culture and attitudes that promote their use.

As Lesley pointed out in her GDC diaries, when the bulk of the women one sees in a male dominated space are there as nothing more than human props or marketing tools, it’s easy to make the leap that all women staffing booths are there for the same purpose. For women like me, who are present to discuss the games we’ve worked on, this provides several challenges and also makes the convention floor an unwelcome space for us.

Thresher also makes what I think is a critically important point, and one that I’ve reiterated in other contexts: that treating men as if they’re dumb creatures who can’t process anything besides boobs and couldn’t possibly enjoy talking to an actual woman is awfully condescending. Thresher writes that for a number of male commentators, interactions with women who are presented to them strictly for visual consumption have been disappointing because they’re at conventions to talk about games and gaming. Seeing awesome cosplayers, or getting your picture taken with an attractive woman, may be part of the convention experience. But it’s a promotional device that doesn’t actually get to the core of why people come to conventions, which is to get more information about products that they love and to have conversations with other people who are as invested as they are in those products and experiences. The lowest common denominator, whether you’re setting up a stall at a convention, or marketing a movie like John Carter as if its core demographic still thinks girls have cooties, is not always actually the most profitable and engaged one.

It’s always nice to see powerful pop culture figures use their drawing power for good, so I get a kick out of the fact that the Beatles apparently included routine desegregation clauses in their concert contracts. Something like this could actually be a good way to force conventions to start adopting good sexual harassment policies. If Hall H participants, for example, said they wouldn’t agree to screen movies unless San Diego Comic Con got it together to create and enforce a sexual harassment policy, I imagine that would come together fairly quickly. Similarly, if a critical mass of much sought-after panelists set the same condition — and it would have to be a really large group of people, composed of both men and woman — they could probably make quality sexual harassment policies an industry standard fairly quickly. The key is just getting momentum going, maybe with the enlistment of a big name in nerddom like Joss Whedon.