I'll let Bob speak for me on this one.

[seiberwing]

Snagged this link off a comment on shortpacked and I have to admit, it's bothering me a little bit. Here's the disclaimer.

Imagine if you will. Girls that get just as upset as you do when that boss battle just isn't going well and you you've been hacking away at the bastard for hours! A Girl that can counter your obscure science fiction movie reference with one of her own. A Girl who can hand you your ass at Mario Kart. A Girl that, when you suggest watching a movie, will choose that kung fu flick or something rife with gun violence and explosions hands down every time. A Girl who thinks your obsession with giant robots is perfectly normal. A Girl who thinks sword fights are sexy. A Girl with opinions about console games. A Girl who spends more time in the graphic novel section of Barnes and Nobel than you do. A Girl who owns her own RPG dice...and thinks they're pretty.

They're out there. Fangirls.

Thats right lads, hands off your joysticks...We bring the best (and sometimes the worst) of our favorite fandoms to you with a refreshing (sometimes terrifying) female perspective.

I'm all for girls transcending traditional gender roles through fandom, but they make it out like this somehow makes them unique. On LJ alone there's dozens of comms for all of the above and I'm betting more than half of them are female dominated. I'm not even getting into the whole capital letter on Girl thing because I have no idea what that's about, but it bugs me anyway. A small disclaimer on your personal nature and identity is the norm for most bloggers, but

I prefer action movies to romantic comedies, think sword fights are intensely sexy and usually full of lovely sexual tension, get pissed off at that one boss that I can't seem to beat (I hate you Metroid: Fusion spider boss, I hate you so fucking much), and I'm pretty certain the girls writing the blog don't even know the depths of giant robot obsession that I have descended to. None of this makes me special. In the ranks of girl geeks, I'm actually pretty mediocre. If you're going to make your gender a selling point, I want to see you bring something new to the table instead of going "hey, boys! We like what you do and think you're cool, do you like us now?".

I took a quick skim of the content on the first page (after getting past the formatting and font, which is nigh unreadable), and bar a few offhanded references to their gender and a bit of gushing over Twilight, the entire thing could just have easily been written by a guy. There is no "female perspective", or at least not one that's noticeably female, there's just yet another fan perspective on which video games are good and how Frank Miller has lost his whore-loving mind. Girl-wonder.org, this is not. I'm not even sure it's girl_gamers or scans_daily. Definitely not mecha_erotica, although I don't think that's the kind of fangirling they're looking for. It's just gender-neutral commenting, and I'm not sure why they think that's a bad thing.

Ladies? I'm sorry, but you're not the geekiest girls I know. Not by a long shot.

Comments

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

A Girl who apparently uses "girl" as a title, hence the repeated capitalization, and who speaks in sentence fragments. How very.

The whole there-are-no-girl-geeks trope is about as old as the emo-is-cool trope. Yes, there are countless girl gamers. You probably don't even want to know how many female Transfans are out there. It's not exciting that someone who happens to have ovaries likes science fiction or plays WoW or whatever: it's commonplace. Get over it.

*sigh*

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Unless I've missed a few, nearly all of the Transformers communities on LJ are female dominated and even the fanboy boards have at least a few females roaming around them.

Five bucks says these Girls are sixteen or under and haven't gone to that many cons--do they think all those Princess Leia and Black Cat cosplayers are getting paid to do it?

[vivian-shaw.livejournal.com]

I expect they read Ctrl+Alt+Del.

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Most gaming webcomics seem to pull that one, really. The token Gamer Girl is somehow magical and unique.

[vani-nessa.livejournal.com]

I have nothing to say that hasn't already been said, apart from OMG ICON. ♥

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Context.

[happyyandere.livejournal.com]

I thought I was actually a little offended for a moment there but no, turns out it was just exasperation ( ._.)~ I'm willing to bet that these are the sort of people who use the mic all the time in TF2, feverishly hoping that someone will recognise their voice as female and smother them in attention and adoration.

Hey gaiz, I'm a ttly unique gurl who thinks robots are hot and gun movies are awesome, will you read my blog too? :'3c

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

They're too...I don't know, small and peppy for me to actually get offended at them. Like little yappy dogs wearing pink sweaters.

[cutiebirdgal.livejournal.com]

Eh, they only exist because the stereotype still exists. If they didn't get any attention for it, they'd quit. There are no girls on the intarwebz, remember? *rolls eyes*

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Pretty much. Which means that every time one of these teenage twits finds their way into the intertubes, they think they're the first ones there.

[dunmurderin.livejournal.com]

The whole blurb seems to be defining 'girl geeks' in terms of being safe and comforting for male geeks -- everything's about how these girl geeks like the same things boys do but nothing about them having different opinions about them, just 'female perspective'. They wouldn't want to go around having opinions that the boys wouldn't like!

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

Nailed it. Even the place where they might have had a chance at a female perspective--the Wonder Woman movie post--the writer backs off and doesn't even touch it because she thinks she'll come off too ranty. It's the sex minus the gender, really.

[chibikaijuu.livejournal.com]

Yes, precisely. I run into this occasionally in real life - guys are expecting that sort of girl geek (likes all the same things they like for all the same reasons) and instead get me, who likes to actually talk about my, female, perspective on thing X, and get this sort of "but but but" when I point out something problematic with thing X. Because clearly if they like something that has icky sexist/racist undertones, that makes them bad people (even though I, too, like thing X, for many reasons, I simply take issue with parts of it), and thus there are no icky issues/they should just be ignored/I don't know what I'm talking about.

I'm not here to reinforce your dominant paradigm, guys. I'm not a geek because I think it'll make boys like me, and I'm not interested in ingratiating myself to the geeky guys, even if it means not getting to play with their toys, if doing so means being unthreatening in my geekiness.

[miryamaris.livejournal.com]

Noting worth to be added to what's been already said. Just stating that there are kids that need attention- and the Internet is some-kind of Heaven for the purpose.

[kookaburra1701.livejournal.com]

Stuff like that really bothers me, because it just perpetuates the "othering" of women as a whole. :/ I'm not a girl geek. I'm just a geek. Not a different species.

[seiberwing.livejournal.com]

I get the feeling that people with this ideology want to preserve the othering, because it makes guys pay attention to them. I think if you're in a hobby for the guys rather than the hobby, you're doing it wrong.