Tag Archives: sexualized geek women

Halloween: will you be a sexy witch, a sexy bee, or a sexy girl geek?

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Take Back Halloween! costume resources showed up in the linkspam recommendations.

We love Halloween. We really love Halloween. We think it’s cool that there’s one day a year when people can dress up as anything they want. What we don’t think is cool is that increasingly women are only supposed to dress up as one thing: Sexy _____

They focus on dressing as queens, goddesses and heroines. But there’s no reason women can’t be robots, right?

Robot costume

Image “Robot costume” by Rob Marquardt, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike

And there’s no reason to let men hog the Rubiks Cube:

solving the cube018

Image “solving the cube018″ by Fred Benenson, Creative Commons Attribution

And there’s no reason that a squid monster can’t have a feminine touch!

lady ika

Image “lady ika” by Hawken King, Creative Commons Attribution

Here’s your geek feminist costume planning thread. Are you going to any costume parties soon? Have you got any awesome costumes from the past to share, or inspirational links? Are you not sexy or geek sexy or don’t care for Halloween?

Feminist concerns about a project

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Thanks for your Ask a Geek Feminist questions. There are many many questions left, and selected questions will be appearing twice a week for quite a while for our commenters to have input into. Here’s the first one:

I’m currently working on an animated short film project with several other people (mostly guys), and I feel on fairly equal footing with everyone else (i.e. just because someone is a “director” or whatnot doesn’t make me feel like I can’t speak my mind). The main character of our short is female.

So here’s the problem.

I fear that the visual design of her character is sexualized. She’s not wearing bikini armor or anything like that, but she’s clearly designed to be particularly sexually attractive. I also feel like the story exploits the stereotype of women being maternal in not-so-sane ways.

I’ve been vocal on both of these points. I fought to keep the character design more down-to-earth. And during development of the story I pointed out things that I felt were problematic (though I was a bit timid on this point because the writer is a woman). And I continue to speak up about these things with the team when it seems reasonably relevant, and I’ve made it clear that I’m not happy about this.

I know I’ve made real impacts here, and particularly the director has said that the things I’ve talked about have really made him start looking at things differently. But I wonder if there’s more that I should do? Or should have done? At this point we can’t change the character design or story, because we’re too far into production, and deadlines are looming fast.

A feminist friend of mine believes really strongly that I should drop out of the project entirely, and is really upset with me for staying on. But dropping out is a really difficult proposition for me for a variety of reasons, including the typical “hurting relationships” and “endangering future employment” reasons. But I would also feel really bad abandoning people working long hours to meet deadlines when the team is so small.

I could really use some outside perspective on this.

How have other people dealt with working on projects where they’ve had feminist concerns about aspects of it but for other reasons haven’t walked away entirely?

That’s Ms Linkspammer to you (4th December, 2009)

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If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.

Hottest linkspam evar. Or something. (27th October, 2009)

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  • “Manolith” has a list of 12 hottest geek girls. I think you can gather from the name of the site how this list is meant to go, but I was surprised to find that the profiles of the women they chose were actually fairly interesting, and they included some serious geek credentials as part of their selection criteria. (No Women near tech for them?) But yeah, although that’s an interesting nugget, the list is a lot of drooling and scantily clad celebrity geeks — click at your own risk, and I’m guessing you should just skip the comments.
  • Shweta Narayan explains things to John Ottinger III after his post “For Those Who Cry Sexism or Racism in SF Anthologies, Shut Up”. Ottinger apologizes, Narayan tells him keep on speaking up.
  • In one of her other blog lives, our own Liz Henry hosted Disability Blog Carnival #59: Disability and Work. Without reposting the whole carnival, here are some of the posts of geek feminist interest:
    • Disability and Work: What I do, talking about work and play in the light of ideas in Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, together with disability and unemployment, together with women’s work (including fandom) not counting as real work.
    • Disability Employment Awareness Month, about working at an open source company (warning per Liz: “contain[s] some hatred expressed towards disabled scooter users who are fat”)
  • Pamela Fox was asked to prove her technical chops after giving a non-technical talk in a non-technical (apparently) outfit. She asks Should I Defend My Cred?
  • Kaliya Hamlin submitted a panel proposal to SXSW entitled “What Guys are Doing to Get More Girls in Tech!â€,  SXSW Panel Selected — now to find Panelists
  • Despite Elizabeth Blackburn’s Nobel win, women face battles, particularly presence in senior roles.
  • Apple’s iPhone App Store is hard on satire, but fine with “Asian Boobs” (note, several sexualized example photographs from the application in question will be displayed at the link)
  • A slashdot comment compared the Windows 7 launch to the return of a difficult ex-girlfriend, Decklin Foster parodies with the genders reversed. (Warning: there is ableist language in the original comment and it is not questioned by the parody.)

If you have links of interest, please share them in comments here, or if you’re a delicious user, tag them “geekfeminism†to bring them to our attention. Thanks to everyone who suggested links in comments and on delicious.