This document summarizes a presentation titled "Oh, You Sexy Geek!: 'Geek Girls' and the Problem of Self-Objectification" which explores how female geeks' choices in geek culture are limited by pressures to conform to standards of beauty and sexuality. It discusses the trend of "sexy cosplay" wherein some female geeks dress and pose in ways that appeal to heterosexual male fantasies. While this can signal resistance to the culture's hostility towards women, it also risks pandering to objectification. The presentation argues that blame should not be placed solely on individual women, but that the culture itself promotes the sexualization and unequal treatment of women.
Geek Girls and the Problem of Self-Objectification
1. “Oh, You Sexy Geek!”: “Geek Girls” and the Problem of Self-Objectification
PCA/ACA 2012, Courtney Stoker
In July of last year at Comic-Con (the largest media convention in the country), a panel
titled “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” purported to address the trend of female geeks dressing “sexy.”
From the panel description:
Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? When geek
girls show off, are they liberating themselves or pandering to men? Do some
"fake fangirls" blend sex appeal with nerdiness just to appeal to the growing
geek/nerd market, or is that question itself unfair? And what's up with all the
Slave Leias?
The discussion at Comic-Con was framed in terms of individual choices, not structural
influences, and this limited the conclusions the panel could come to. The dichotomous choice
offered—“Does displaying the sexiness of fangirls benefit or demean them? […] are they
liberating themselves or pandering to men?”—fails to take into account the complexities of
women’s positions in geek culture, the politics of cosplay, or how cultural ideals of beauty
influence women’s fashion decisions and choices.
Geek cultures—centered on video games, science fiction and fantasy, and comic
books—are traditionally thought of as boys’ clubs. Even though women often make up half of
geek populations, their roles in geek culture(s) are limited by the perceptions and actions of
advertisers, producers, designers, marketers, and fans. Women are considered valuable
additions to many geek cultures, but usually as decoration. Which means that most of the
women “celebrated” in geek cultures are conventionally beautiful, thin, white, abled cis women
who position themselves as sexy objects for male geek consumption, usually via cosplay. For
the uninitiated, the term cosplay is a combination of “costume” and “roleplay” or “play,” and
refers to when fans costume as characters or objects from their favorite media (like video
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games, movies, and TV shows). Cosplayers usually wear their costumes to conventions, and
the “roleplay” aspect of cosplaying is often minimal in North America, and limited to the poses
struck for photos or occasional interactions in the convention hallways.
This presentation will explore the ways in which female geeks’ choices are limited by
geek cultures, how the trend of self-objectification among geek women can signal both a
hostility towards women as equal participants and a resistance to that hostility, and how
blaming women’s performances is a hand-waving exercise intended to gloss over the
culture(s)’ problems.
The sexism that persists in geek communities is not special. It is not separable and
inherently different than sexist institutions and behaviors in the “real world.” This means that
the sexualization and objectification of women is not unique to geek cultures, though it is
particularly severe in geek media. Video games, comics, science fiction, fantasy—these media
forms are often at fault for promoting unrealistic (and, pretty regularly, physically impossible)
standards of beauty for women. They fashion their female heroines and villains as sexy objects
to be consumed, unlike male counterparts. Further, geek industries bring the objectification of
women into the real world, hiring, for example, booth babes for conventions. Booth babes are
conventionally attractive models hired by media companies to wear skimpy clothing and entice
convention-goers to their respective booths. Geek women exist within this culture, which
devalues their contributions as producers of media and meaning, but values their contributions
as adornment.
This project is about self-objectification, not objectification by others, but the two are not
wholly separable, any more separable than my putting on makeup and high heels this morning
and the objectification of women in advertising and fashion magazines. Just as media
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representations of women influence women’s decisions to diet, wear cosmetics, get plastic
surgery, lighten their skin, relax their hair, shave their legs, and wax their bikini lines, geek
media representations of women influence geek women’s decisions to dress in “sexy” cosplay.
By “sexy” cosplay, I mean cosplay that appeals to heterosexual male fantasies,
participates in the objectification of the cosplayer, and (purposefully or not) positions the
cosplayer as an object for consumption by male geeks. There are two ways to participate in
sexy cosplay; one is to choose a character whose costume is already sexy, and another to
alter a character’s costume in order to make it sexy.
First, let’s look at cosplayers who do not alter their costumes. A rather visible example
of this kind of sexy cosplay is women who costume as “slave Leia.” The Star Wars character
has two main costumes that cosplayers choose from. [click] The first, and least popular, is the
costume from A New Hope. This is the costume with the iconic buns. [click] The second, and
more popular, Leia costume is “slave Leia,” the bikini-style costume worn by Leia in Return of
the Jedi when she is the prisoner of Jabba the Hutt. At major science fiction media
conventions, like Comic-Con and Dragon*Con, it is common to have an official group slave
Leia picture, because of the popularity of this costume with cosplayers and other convention-
goers. In the slave Leia cosplay, we see a classic example of sexy cosplay in which the
costumer chooses a costume that is already heteronormatively “sexy.”
Next, let’s look at an example of a cosplayer who alters their costume to make them
sexy. [click picture] This is LeeAnna Vamp as Chewbacca from Star Wars, who is on the left.
This cosplay was featured on IGN, a website about gaming and entertainment. Notice how
Vamp positions herself compared with the actual Chewbacca. Chewbacca stands firmly and
aggressively, feet apart to keep him stable. LeeAnna, on the other hand, stands off-center,
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with her legs together and crossed: a passive position. In the kneeling photo, her position
suggests sexual availability and exposure (not sexual aggression), with a slightly open mouth
and legs parted. These positions, along with her revealing costume, position LeeAnna as a
sexual object for consumption. [click]
In both altered and unaltered sexy cosplay, we thus see a desire to be seen as
attractive by straight men. These women visually signal to a viewer (there’s always a viewer for
cosplayers) that they are conforming to heteronormative beauty standards. They do this by
positioning themselves as sexually receptive and passive; by wearing costumes that
emphasize body parts that our culture associates with sex appeal, like breasts, hips, buttocks,
and navels; and by emphasizing their femininity and conformity to beauty standards.
As Naomi Wolf points out The Beauty Myth, women in the U.S. are rewarded for
capitulating to narrow and often impossible beauty standards. She claims that beauty is a
currency, with which “women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have
appropriated for themselves” (12). Ariel Levy’s exploration of raunch culture in Female
Chauvinist Pigs demonstrates, however, that women must often do more than merely perform
beauty work. She argues that “hotness doesn’t just yield approval. Proof that a woman actively
seeks approval is a crucial criterion for hotness in the first place.” In a world of booth babes
and sexy cosplay, this is apparent. What makes the sexy cosplay sexy is not merely that the
cosplayers are thin, young, and buxom, but that they are performing and actively seeking male
approval. [click] For a particularly egregious example of this, I’m going to show you the video
created by some geek women, mostly actresses, who formed a group called Team Unicorn.
[play to 1:28] The video is very repetitive, so we can stop it there.
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Almost everything about this video marks it as a performance in the service of geek
men. Of course, the participants in the video, Team Unicorn, consist of young, thin, light-
skinned women who conform to cultural beauty standards. There are a number of particularly
porn-like shots, in which the young women are naked, strategically covered by light sabers,
video game controllers, or DVDs, and on piles of geek toys, movies, or comic books.
Meanwhile, the men in the intermittent shots do not match cultural standards of male beauty or
masculinity. They wear cheap costumes and dance in awkward or silly ways. The women in
the video wear sexy and high-quality costumes, and their dances mimic those of pop stars,
which is to say, their dances are meant to appeal to straight male viewers. The video is also
framed by Seth Green saying, “Hello friends. Don’t you want to meet a nice girl?,” positioning
the video as an introduction to women as dating partners or sex objects. The video is not
meant for geek women to view, and feel empowered by seeing representations of other geek
women. It is meant to be viewed by men who wish to believe that, despite their own inability to
meet cultural standards of masculinity, there are geek women available to them who are “sexy”
in two ways: 1. These women do fit a physical standard of beauty, and 2. These women want
to please men, want to be sexually appealing to them.
The video’s YouTube description claims, “This music video parody proves Geek and
Gamer Girls really do exist.” Since, at the time, there had been multiple headlines proclaiming
that women make up 50% of gamers and Comic-Con attendees, this description seems
disingenuous. This is because geek women who are not “hot” are routinely ignored or erased
in geek culture. This video would more accurately describe itself as “proof that conventionally
sexy women who are also geeks want to have sex with you, presumed straight geek male
viewer.”
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Because geek women are often clearly aiming their performances at geek men, geek
men and women often place blame on the women who dress this way. [click] A comment on
Geek Tyrant, written by a blogger who is posting a collection of “cosplay cleavage,” is
illustrative. Venkman writes, “And ladies, maybe some of you will find these images offensive,
but these are women that are dressing like this. We didn’t ask them to, they do it on their own,
and if women dress like this, the fact of the matter is...guys are going to stare [sic].” This
sentiment lands the blame for the objectification of geek women squarely on the shoulders of
women, and characterizes men’s responses to these women as inevitable, natural, and
uncontrollable. [click] Needless to say, however, the images included in the blog post make it
clear that these geek men feel they have nothing to apologize for. The blogger is not
suggesting that men do not objectify women (after all, they go to cons to see “cleavage,” not to
meet women or fellow geeks), but he refuses to accept responsibility for this. Rather, he
suggests that women need to just accept that “guys are going to stare” at women who perform
a certain version of “sexy.” It is thus women’s responsibility to prevent their own objectification.
[click]
There are some obvious problems in this kind of hand-waving exercise, but the most
important one for us today is that one of the reasons geek women seek the approval of geek
men is that geek men have positions of power and privilege in both geek industries and in
geek fan communities. While women understand that sexy cosplay won’t get them respect, per
se, they also know that it is most likely to get them positive attention, recognition, and limited
acceptance in geek communities. Women who do not or cannot seek sexual approval from the
male geek community are more likely to be ignored, derided, or dismissed. They are more
likely to be called harpy feminists or annoying squeeing fangirls than to get approval and
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acceptance. Team Unicorn, for example, was rewarded generously for their performance with
relative fame and funding for a slick new website. They also managed to buy legitimacy in this
video with the inclusion of Seth Green and Stan Lee. One has to wonder, would Seth Green
have agreed to a video proving the existence of female geeks if those geeks had been fat,
queer, or disabled?
The pressure is on for geek women to position themselves as sexy consumable objects
for geek men. When they do so, their decision is framed as a freely-made choice. On the other
hand, men’s behavior in reaction to sexy cosplay, like leering, sexual harassment, or other
forms of objectification, is usually framed as inevitable and natural. The pressure women feel
to perform “sexy” for their fellow geeks is usually ignored or dismissed, and the conversation
becomes similar to the “Oh, You Sexy Geek!” panel at Comic-Con, in which the problem is
framed as about geek women, not geek culture. Are women selling out, or being empowered?
The answer to that question is that it’s more complicated. While women performing sexy
for their fellow geeks are unquestionably doing so within a culture that encourages this
performance and values women merely as decoration, they may also be using sexy cosplay to
subvert that culture’s objectification of women.
In John Fiske’s Understanding Popular Culture, he describes jeans as objects of
popular culture that can embody contradictory meanings. Jeans, he argues, have multiple
meanings given to us by jean producers, such as associations with heteronormative femininity,
youth, toughness, and/or hard work. These meanings come from the top, and represent the
interests of those in power. People can tear their jeans (or write on them, or bleach them, or
cut them off) to subvert and resist those meanings, but this doesn’t mean that the original
meanings just go away. Rather, both meanings coexist in the garment simultaneously.
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According to Fiske, this means that popular culture objects, like jeans, “can entail the
expression of both domination and subordination, of both power and resistance. So torn jeans
signify both a set of dominant American values and a degree of resistance to them” (4). Sexy
cosplay works in the same way. There are ways in which individual sexy cosplayers
incorporate meanings resistant to the culture’s demand that they proffer themselves as
consumable objects.
[click] Olivia Waite, a geek and erotica writer, wrote about her personal experience with
the slave Leia cosplay, after I had blogged a version of this essay at the Geek Feminism blog.
Waite was a big fan of Star Wars when she was a child, and her favorite character was Leia,
who she describes as “badass, intelligent, and passionate.”
She writes that when watching Return of the Jedi,
as soon as [Leia] shows up in the gold bikini, with the high ponytail and
the neck-chain, every cell in my being went, She must be so pissed about that.
Because what people forget, when they talk about Slave Leia outfits, is
that it’s the one costume she doesn’t choose for herself. She’s forced into it,
compelled to wear that bikini for Jabba’s dubious and slobbery pleasure. And I
can see why people are upset that this happens—because if there’s one thing we
do not need to gratify so much, it’s the male gaze in film—but at the same time, I
think it’s important that this happens to Leia, because it happens to plenty of
women, all the time, every day, around the world, with or without help from a gold
bikini.
And here is what Leia does, when you force her into a scanty outfit and
choke-chain: she takes that chain, and she kills you with it. She doesn’t let her
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clothing get in her way or limit her more than she can help—she waits for her
moment to strike, and then she conquers her would-be conqueror and saves the
day.
And I was a little kid, not yet desensitized to violence [...] Jabba’s death
scene freaked the hell out of me. It wasn’t a clean blaster shot to the chest or a
slice from a lightsaber that sent sparks flying or made you turn invisible. There
were struggles, and flailing, and twitching limbs. The shots are close-ups, and
very dark—it’s vicious, and vengeful, and physical, and very very personal.
So for me, wearing that gold bikini does not mean Here I am, a sexy toy
for your amusement and gratification.
To me, that gold bikini says, If you fuck with me, I will end you.
It says, What I wear is not the same as who I am.
Waite’s is a particularly powerful example of how women can create subversive
meanings in their sexy cosplay. Hers doesn’t even require an alteration in the costume, though
it may include a more aggressive stance for pictures, or even a performance of the chain
choking. But it is, all the same, resistant to the cultural meanings put onto the costume by the
producers of Star Wars and by the powers that be in fan communities. In Waite’s cosplay, the
gold bikini is a symbol of female power and resistance to objectification. At the same time, it
holds those dominant meanings as well. It contains the raunch culture assumption that women
are primarily valuable for their performance of “sexy” and a resistance to that gross
objectification. It symbolizes the titillation of women in sexual slavery and a challenge to
women’s subordinate status as the sex class. From my own experiences in geek fan cultures, I
don’t believe Waite is an anomaly, a pioneering feminist geek who uses sexy cosplay to
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challenge the messages found in geek media and geek culture. There are others like her,
whose sexy cosplays are also challenges to the status quo.
It is also important to note that not all cosplay (sexy or not) is progressive or
oppositional, either. As Henry Jenkins points out in Textual Poachers,
To say that fans promote their own meanings over those of producers is not
to suggest that the meanings fans produce are always oppositional ones or that
those meanings are made in isolation from other social factors. Fans have chosen
these media products from the total range of available texts precisely because they
seem to hold special potential as vehicles for expressing the fans’ pre-existing social
commitments and cultural interests; there is already some degree of compatibility
between the ideological construction of the text and the ideological commitments of
the fans and therefore, some degree of affinity will exist between the meanings fans
produces and those which might be located through a critical analysis of the original
story. [...] Readers are not always resistant; all resistant readings are not necessarily
progressive readings; the ‘people’ do not always recognize their conditions of
alienation and subordination. (34)
That is to say, not all geek women recognize their conditions as alienated and subordinated
members of geek cultures. Not all sexy cosplay is (or can be) oppositional or progressive, as
Waite’s reading of the costume is. However, this does not mean that geek women are
somehow to blame for their objectification. As Jenkins notes, fans make their choices in the
context of their cultures, and not in isolation of social factors. The beauty myth, raunch culture,
and the male domination of geek culture(s) all contribute to female fans’ choice in sexy
cosplay, even if they choose to resist the meanings handed down from those in power. In order
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to fix the culture of objectification in geek culture, we cannot look to individual women and
cosplayers, but rather to those in power, whether they be content creators (like George Lucas,
Stan Lee, Felicia Day), influential commentators (like Chris Hardwick, Jerry Holkins, Mike
Krahulik), convention organizers, or forum moderators. The problem here is not “self-
objectification,” as my essay title suggests, but the pressure to perform sexy (or be ignored,
derided, or dismissed). The fact is, “sexy” is not the only way that geek women represent
themselves; it is merely the representation recognized and rewarded by geek culture at large.
That has to change before the position of women in these culture(s) can change.
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Works Cited
Fiske, John. Understanding Popular Culture. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2010. Print.
Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York:
Routledge, 1992. Print.
Levy, Ariel. Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Kindle ed. New
York: Free Press, 2005. AZW file.
“Oh, You Sexy Geek!” Panel at Comic-Con, 21 July 2011, 10:45 AM. My Comic-Con 2011
Sched*. Comic-Con, n.d. Web. 25 September 2011. < http://mysched.comic-
con.org/event/c31518fe1aa3bb6b788ba63757b84fba>
Venkman. “Collection of Cosplay Cleavage.” Geek Tyrant. Geektyrant, 15 July 2011. Web. 9
April 2012.
Waite, Olivia. “In Defense of Slave Leia.” Olivia Waite. Olivia Waite, 29 August 2011. Web. 8
April 2012.
Wolf, Naomi. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women. New York:
William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1991. Print.
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