Saturday, September 11, 2010

I'm a Geek Girl & I'm proud of it dammit!

The past couple of days on Twitter there has been a debate over what, or more specifically who, actually qualifies as a Geek Girl or Gamer Girl.  This was brought up when the ladies of Team Unicorn released the following video Geek And Gamer Girls.  Showing four amazingly hot women surrounded (and covered a la American Beauty) by comic books, light sabers and game controllers, they sang about their love of all things gamer & geek related.  One thing that was a little upsetting to some people was that it was a parody of the same Katy Perry song that was used in July by The Screen Team entitled Comic Con Girls.  For the record, several of the people who made or appeared in the Screen Team video have said that there is absolutely no plagiarism and that there is plenty of love to go around.

The real controversy happened when many Geek & Gamer Girls cried foul at the depiction of the women in these videos as hot, claiming they don't represent the average Geek Girl.  That leads to this question:

Who the hell is the average Geek Girl?

My Geek cred?  I grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek.  I played hours of Atari and Nintendo until I had finally won Pitfall and defeated Bowser (in Mario 1, 2, & 3!).  I didn't play D&D only because my cousins wouldn't let me create a new character.  Planet of the Apes?  Awesome!!  I read Tolkien before the movies came out & thought Gollum was the creepiest creature ever.  However, in junior high and high school, it was very uncool to be a geek.  You didn't want to be known as a Trekkie.  You didn't admit to playing video games.  If you wanted to be accepted, you conformed...so my geeky tendencies were hidden in the back of the closet.  I was finally able to release some pent up geekiness my senior year when I dated a guy as much into Star Trek, Star Wars, comics and movies as I was.  I was finally in a crowd of AV geeks who wanted to be filmmakers.  And I was happy.  Skip ahead a few years and I was back where I was in high school.  Conforming to fit in.  And I hated it.

After my daughter was born, it was just the two of us.  I decided that there was no point trying to please people that I didn't really like in order to have friends.  If they didn't like who I really was, then why the hell was I trying to make them happy at my expense?  Releasing my inner geek came slowly as it had been in hibernation for years and wasn't really fully released until I discovered World of Warcraft...and my love of gaming took over.  Now, I don't care who knows that I love Doctor Who, Buffy and Angel, or that I would love to learn both Klingon and Elvish.  The only reason I haven't been to Comic Con, DragonCon or Pax is because of a serious lack of funds.  I'm not a Rocky Horror virgin and wish we had local midnight showings again.  I will recite the entire Holy Grail script and think that we should definitely get a flash mob together that acts out the whole damn movie.  I am also proud to say that I'm helping pull together the first ever GeekGirlCon which will debut in Seattle next year. 

Am I blond?  Yes, even more so when I can afford the bleach.  Am I skinny?  Not quite but I'm getting there.  Am I pretty?  My man thinks so and apparently there are others in agreement so I'll take their word for it.  Does that mean I'm not qualified to call myself a geek?  Hell no.

Women as a group always put other women down.  There is always an "Us vs Them" the "Ugly Girls" vs "Pretty Girls".  What we need to realize and get over is that by segregating ourselves into specific cliques and shunning those that "don't belong" to a particular group that we are making it damn easy for others to stereotype us.  Can you game if you're pretty? Yes.  Can you dress up as Wonder Woman if you're overweight?  By all means, go for it.  We need to pull together and realize that our differences make us special and we should embrace that.  Otherwise, we're no different than the snotty high school bitches who told us we weren't good enough to sit at their lunch table.  We swore then that we would never be like that and that we'd never tell someone that they weren't good enough.  Then, given the chance, we're the snotty high school bitch, telling other girls that they can't claim the Geek Girl title because they don't meet the criteria that was established.

I hope that by bringing these issues out, people will talk about it and stop the cycle from repeating.  Otherwise, we're doomed to live our lives in little segregated groups when we really all love the same thing.
 

4 comments:

  1. Preach it. I have never understood the need to exclude people for obviously petty reasons. We need more geek lovin'.

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  2. Well said! and thanks!!!

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  3. The way I see it, geek guys have a tencendy to think a girl is INCREDIBLE if she's into geeky things, even if she's not super pretty. The geek scene has been male-dominated for so long that guys get excited when they meet girls who are involved. Now, if you're a HOT geeky girl, that pretty much puts you out of their league!! :P

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  4. P.S. Seth Green and Clare Grant make the CUTEST geek couple in history. He's so supafly, and she's drop-dead gorgeous, and they have all their geeky loves in common. *Sigh*

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