Women and ‘geek culture’

As noted last week, the Incomparable is an excellent, albeit niche, podcast, and one that for all its focus on popular culture has been aware of issues of gender and representation. A particularly interesting example was The Incomparable 198, “A Critical Mass of Lady Geeks” which explored the experience of Lisa Schmeiser, Erika Ensign and Brianna Wu, all of whom are involved in gaming, development and commentary and are also into SF and Fantasy and how isolated they felt in their interest and how marginalised they were sometimes made to feel was dispiriting. Of course ‘geek culture’ is – if one looks at it in its broadest sense, an area where sexism is often manifest.

As one contributor, I think of Brianna Wu of the all woman Giant Spacekat developers team, noted, ‘I definitely think it’s become more accepted but I also think there are all kinds of things around geek culture that are real no girls allowed signs that are really invisible to guys – they don’t understand it, and it’s sometimes in big ways you know like a Comicon will have a girl with her chest hanging out on one of the advertisements, in ways SF tends to typically sexualise the lead female characters – Star Trek has been tremendously guilty of that – it’s all these things about the culture, that it’s a thousand little things but at the end of the day it’s men standing there saying this is our space, this is our culture and it pushes you away and I think the women that push back and stay in the field and stand up to their interest and I think we kind of develop thick skin necessarily.’

This is what really irritates me about the response from those who see red at the very mention of the word ‘feminism’, a sort of willing blindness (as it were) on their part and an inability to recognise how heavily stacked the structures are against women in not necessarily obvious ways, and how when combined all too often operate as barriers against them. And this is in what is meant to be a reasonably relaxed space, an informal shared interest sort of area of ‘geek culture’, which merely underlines how bad things can be elsewhere in the society.

One contributor noted the performative ‘alpha male’ aspect of parts of geek culture, which genuinely shocked her, hoping for something better (I’ve seen that in political activity too – no doubt many others have as well – and it shocked me too).

She continued talking about how – and again I could identify strongly with this – SF had attracted her because it was all thought experiments, how would different societies operate if definitions of majorities were flipped or whatever, ‘and I had assumed that there was this questioning of current societal mores and this reexamination of social interactions was something that everyone shared in fandom. I hadn’t realised that everyone brought in these external expectations about gender roles or what women could or shouldn’t do…it was a huge shock to me…’

I had a not entirely dissimilar experience when getting involved at a very low level with some SF organisations and coming to the rapid conclusion that being an SF fan didn’t mean in the slightest necessarily that one had any particularly openness to radicalism of any sort, that the imaginative and in parts progressive aspects of it simply didn’t seem to translate into an appreciation of radicalism or progressivism in a concrete form whether socialist, feminist, lgbt, ecological or whatever – indeed for some those elements just sailed right over their heads.

Anyhow, disappointment apart, there’s a fascinating discussion about geek culture and how this all functions commercially, how SF toys – for example – are pushed into the boys toys sections in toy shops… and as one contributor noted ‘this is incredibly dangerous’ when they’re so gendered, so determining of future roles.

They discussed for example how at young kids outings happy meals for boys have one sort of toy – say a Spiderman tie-in something active, and the girls one’s are ‘notebooks’, the obvious message being that boys ‘do something’ and girls ‘sit’ (yeah, yeah, I know, it’s follows the tropes of Spiderman, but… fundamentally that is the dynamic beneath it). I’ve seen precisely that dynamic at work in the last number of years and it’s again dispiriting.

But that aside, this is well worth a listen. And one concluding thought from a contributor, just on toys and tie-ins with films…

It’s not just the gendered aspect, it’s this message that women are inculcated even before women can think straight [due to their being very young] that keeps us out of geek culture.

And so many other parts of the society.