I for one can't stand those 'stand in' booth babes at cons who are just pretty girls given an outfit for the day who know nothing about gaming or their product and are basically there to flirt and make boys (and only the boys) feel important.
On the other hand I feel like we have a growing collection of nerd friendly women in the media who shouldn't feel scrutinized about their geek cred every time they represent a convention on TV. By these I mean the likes of Olivia Munn, Aisha Tyler and Felicia Day. Women who have shown time and again that they're gamer geeks who just happen to work on TV.
Have a read and see what you think:
'Fake Geek Girls': How Geek Gatekeeping Is Bad For Business
Yvonne Craig as Batgirl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
The presence of a “Geek Out” section on CNN.com, as established and establishment a media outlet as one could ask for, suggests that, at least when it comes to page views, geek has entered the mainstream. However, a recent opinion piece by the writer and designer Joe Peacock suggests that there is still some growing up to do – and it is going to have to be in public.
Peacock’s piece – titled “Booth Babes need not apply” – trots out the familiar trope of the “ fake geek girl” – the woman who is pretending to be a geek for reasons of her own. We’ve seen this device before, many times – indeed, we saw it here on Forbes.com, with Tara Tiger Brown‘s “Fake Geek Girls – Go Away!“. Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku – a real geek boy, to the best of my knowledge – said in response to that article:
Imagine: You meet a girl, and you get to talking. You talk about your jobs, your neighborhoods; you talk about your interests. As it turns out, the two of you are into a lot of the same things. This is cool! Wow, she likes the same obscure slasher flicks and retro video games that you do. How lucky for you both!Wait. Be careful. This could all be a ruse. She could be… a Fake Geek Girl.Oh no actually, false alarm. Turns out she’s just a person who is into stuff to varying degrees. There’s no such thing as a Fake Geek Girl.
Which is probably true, but conceals another point – the idea of the “fake geek girl”, and the self-appointed geekquisitors rooting them out, are bad for business.
