On the Subject of Being a Lady-Type-Person and Also a Geek
From about five days ago...
Chad: Hey, what do you make of this:
Can You Be a Hot Girl and a Nerd?
JoJo: Augh. Yeah...I've been reading about that little kerfluffle earlier this week. Um...Yeah. This kind of bickering is going to help no-one.
It's a weird situation, because it's actually a couple different problems getting all mushed up together in the discourse, and the strong feelings only get exacerbated as people misunderstand one another for that reason.
It's, um...Well, I'm sure you're aware of how all our pop-culture narratives are so strongly divided into a really rigid gender binary, and it starts right at the beginning of our lives. Over on one side, everything is in pastels, especially pink, and there are images of princesses in big ballroom gowns, and ballerinas, and kittens, and tea parties, and long blonde hair, and GEEZ there is SO much emphasis on making yourself look beautiful. And on the side the colors are bolder, and there are trucks and sports and dinosaurs and robots and rocket ships and superheroes.
So when you're female, there's a certain degree of (perceived) gender non-conformity that goes along with that. (It's only a perceived non-conformity, because the entire "girls and boys, they are totally different" concept is an entirely artificial one, divorced from what the actual interests of actual people are, in order to keep us all so flippin' insecure about whether or not we conform to proper standards, so we'll be easily manipulated into, say, buying certain products in order to ensure that we have the proper image of femininity or masculinity.)
And IN this atmosphere of extreme gender difference, the interests of the men are socially prioritized in, like...absolutely every way. And women are socially rewarded for conforming more to a (perceived, because individuals have wildly divergent tastes) physical ideal, for the benefit of men. And there's an expectation, in our popular narratives, that women are always in competition with one another for the attention of men; in some ways, this is a reflection of how it works in real life, because real women really DO get rewarded for being prettier than others. And there IS a real resentment held by the "less attractive" women against the more privileged "more attractive" ones. Sometimes it's because the more privileged ones will be cruel to the less privileged ones. (I know I spent a lot of time in junior high crying in bathroom stalls. It can be absolutely awful!)
So that's where some of this "pretty women can't be real geeks" thing is coming from. Resentment held by some women who were in some ways less privileged (geeky girls, who have had to endure a hard time for having those gender non-conformist interests) against some women who are in some ways more privileged (pretty girls.) What you look like and what kinds of movies you like to watch are not necessarily mutually exclusive groups, though. So it's a conflation of different aspects of life: being ranked according to your looks, and being ranked according to your interests.
And there's a real anger that can be held when you're one of those nerdy girls who has been teased for it, and then you see a pretty actress talking about how she likes "Star Wars", for example. Someone who has maybe not had to undergo the same sort of harassment, because of the priviledges afforded to the beautiful--that degree of gender non-conformity is mitigated by being otherwise extra-gender-conformist in aligning more closely to the "ideal" of the image of femininity.
And such an actress may or may not actually have nerd interests; it doesn't really matter. She's rewarded just the same. And if they're gonna be on a talk show to promote the movie that they're in, they have to say something positive about the project, don't they? So of course she'll say that she likes the material she's working with. How could she be expected to say otherwise?
"Less attractive" geek women have done a lot in recent years to make themselves more visible--to others, and to each other. Creating safe spaces where they don't have to apologize for liking science fiction, or worry about their bra cup size being wrong. Where they can find some popularity because they have good ideas or great skills...in the same kind of way that men can hang out together. When geeky guys are hanging out, they don't have to worry about which of them is the most handsome, right? But when pretty, famous actresses start to say "I'm a part of this geek group, too", the other women have a fear that they're gonna be marginalized again; that any attention or worth they've managed to garnish is going to be removed when these prettier women are privileged over them once again.
But, of course, pretty women SHOULD never be punished for having nerd interests, no more than anyone else should! They shouldn't have to defend it. The REAL problem is not that sometimes pretty women wear the trappings of geekdom as a kind of fetish costume. The REAL problem is that we have this madhouse social system where a woman's physical appearance is made to be so important in the first place, pitting women into an artificial competition for social privilege based on looks, all in terms that are dictated by a need to keep men in a position of relative power.
...Geez, I hope all of that that I just typed made sense.
.
Chad: Hey, what do you make of this:
Can You Be a Hot Girl and a Nerd?
JoJo: Augh. Yeah...I've been reading about that little kerfluffle earlier this week. Um...Yeah. This kind of bickering is going to help no-one.
It's a weird situation, because it's actually a couple different problems getting all mushed up together in the discourse, and the strong feelings only get exacerbated as people misunderstand one another for that reason.
It's, um...Well, I'm sure you're aware of how all our pop-culture narratives are so strongly divided into a really rigid gender binary, and it starts right at the beginning of our lives. Over on one side, everything is in pastels, especially pink, and there are images of princesses in big ballroom gowns, and ballerinas, and kittens, and tea parties, and long blonde hair, and GEEZ there is SO much emphasis on making yourself look beautiful. And on the side the colors are bolder, and there are trucks and sports and dinosaurs and robots and rocket ships and superheroes.
So when you're female, there's a certain degree of (perceived) gender non-conformity that goes along with that. (It's only a perceived non-conformity, because the entire "girls and boys, they are totally different" concept is an entirely artificial one, divorced from what the actual interests of actual people are, in order to keep us all so flippin' insecure about whether or not we conform to proper standards, so we'll be easily manipulated into, say, buying certain products in order to ensure that we have the proper image of femininity or masculinity.)
And IN this atmosphere of extreme gender difference, the interests of the men are socially prioritized in, like...absolutely every way. And women are socially rewarded for conforming more to a (perceived, because individuals have wildly divergent tastes) physical ideal, for the benefit of men. And there's an expectation, in our popular narratives, that women are always in competition with one another for the attention of men; in some ways, this is a reflection of how it works in real life, because real women really DO get rewarded for being prettier than others. And there IS a real resentment held by the "less attractive" women against the more privileged "more attractive" ones. Sometimes it's because the more privileged ones will be cruel to the less privileged ones. (I know I spent a lot of time in junior high crying in bathroom stalls. It can be absolutely awful!)
So that's where some of this "pretty women can't be real geeks" thing is coming from. Resentment held by some women who were in some ways less privileged (geeky girls, who have had to endure a hard time for having those gender non-conformist interests) against some women who are in some ways more privileged (pretty girls.) What you look like and what kinds of movies you like to watch are not necessarily mutually exclusive groups, though. So it's a conflation of different aspects of life: being ranked according to your looks, and being ranked according to your interests.
And there's a real anger that can be held when you're one of those nerdy girls who has been teased for it, and then you see a pretty actress talking about how she likes "Star Wars", for example. Someone who has maybe not had to undergo the same sort of harassment, because of the priviledges afforded to the beautiful--that degree of gender non-conformity is mitigated by being otherwise extra-gender-conformist in aligning more closely to the "ideal" of the image of femininity.
And such an actress may or may not actually have nerd interests; it doesn't really matter. She's rewarded just the same. And if they're gonna be on a talk show to promote the movie that they're in, they have to say something positive about the project, don't they? So of course she'll say that she likes the material she's working with. How could she be expected to say otherwise?
"Less attractive" geek women have done a lot in recent years to make themselves more visible--to others, and to each other. Creating safe spaces where they don't have to apologize for liking science fiction, or worry about their bra cup size being wrong. Where they can find some popularity because they have good ideas or great skills...in the same kind of way that men can hang out together. When geeky guys are hanging out, they don't have to worry about which of them is the most handsome, right? But when pretty, famous actresses start to say "I'm a part of this geek group, too", the other women have a fear that they're gonna be marginalized again; that any attention or worth they've managed to garnish is going to be removed when these prettier women are privileged over them once again.
But, of course, pretty women SHOULD never be punished for having nerd interests, no more than anyone else should! They shouldn't have to defend it. The REAL problem is not that sometimes pretty women wear the trappings of geekdom as a kind of fetish costume. The REAL problem is that we have this madhouse social system where a woman's physical appearance is made to be so important in the first place, pitting women into an artificial competition for social privilege based on looks, all in terms that are dictated by a need to keep men in a position of relative power.
...Geez, I hope all of that that I just typed made sense.
.