Geek men’s appearance, and related issues

These are Ask a Geek Feminist questions, to the best of my knowledge this concludes posts answering questions from rounds 1 and 2. Round 3 will be in a few months.

We got a couple of questions from the same person about how comments about judging (geek) women’s appearances relates to judging geek men’s appearances, so I thought I’d bundle them together. Since they’re so lengthy, you might want to directly quote the part you are replying to, as well, if it’s going to be at all unclear.

The first question was submitted late for the previous round:

I can understand women (probably, particularly geek women) not liking comments / compliments about appearance. That fits well with my own geeky worldview: that substance is more important than style.

But I also sometimes see comments from geek women suggesting that geek men should take more care over their own appearance / presentation. That one I can follow as far as “don’t be smelly” and “don’t be scary”, but beyond that, I myself go back to the “substance, not style” viewpoint.

I don’t think that the combined message is “Men’s appearance matters to women, but women’s appearance should not matter to men”, but I’m a bit confused as to how these two strands fit together. Perhaps the unwelcome comments about women’s appearance are about intrinsic appearance (body shape etc) but what some women are suggesting male geeks should pay more attention to is non-intrinsic appearance (the clothes over the body)?

I’ll admit that as I’ve got older (and my ASD aspects have been diluted) I’ve upgraded my habitual appearance from “don’t-care geek” to “somewhat shabby provincial academic”; I think it’s partly so I can pass as non-geek when it’s useful to do so.

There also seems to be a less frequently-asked question going around, about mostly-male geeky groups being more accepting of female newcomers who dress more geekily or gender-neutrally; I get the impression that this is sometimes an issue for women who don’t normally dress gender-neutrally. (My own, privileged, take on this is that it’s a good tactic to make allowance for the group you’d like to join, typically by presenting a view that suggests that your presentation isn’t a big deal to you, is a good idea for the stage when they’re forming their impression of you, and once you’re “in” you can dress as you like and no-one will think of you as an outsider; the geeks I know are pretty loyal once they’ve decided that a newcomer is genuinely a geek. But I’m worried, venturing into feminist home territory, of putting that forward as a suggestion (even though it’s only about tactics, not ethics), as it might seem

quite oppressive to some.)

I do understand (or get an impression, I hope not a sexist one) that this may tie in with women’s self-esteem / self-efficacy being typically lower than men’s, and competence in managing appearance / presentation may be involved with counteracting this.

And a flippant end part to this question, as I try reversing “men” and “women” in the original question: On the few occasions when I do wear a suit etc, women compliment me on my appearance. Is it OK that I’m not offended? ;-)

This round’s question:

This isn’t really one specific question, but I’d be interested to hear what Geek Feminists have to say about geeks, gender, and personal appearance.

I can understand about women often not liking compliments about their attractiveness from male obvious geeks, particularly as such comments are usually part of a clumsy attempt at picking up a woman, just any woman even if almost a stranger.

But then, I’ve seen observations (and even an experiment [Cheryan 2009]) about geekiness of computer geeks and their stereotypical environment putting women off from entering computing. (Now I’m not convinced that the stereotype Cheryan used is actually representative; I’ve been in a lot of computing environments and none of them had any Trekkie stuff in them!) Victoria Kirst also has a different take on this study.

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