1) You’re embarrassing us, Tony.
Just for the record, as a professional comic book creator, a lifelong comics fan, and someone who attends comic book conventions, I am happy to be sharing a subculture with cosplayers. Cosplayers don’t have to prove they are “true nerds.” They don’t need admission to the club, because they’re already in it.
I’m also not embarrassed to be sharing my subculture with what Tony Harris calls “a LOT of average Comic Book Fans who either RARELY speak to, or NEVER speak to girls. Some Virgins, ALL unconfident when it comes to girls…” I don’t agree they’re the norm, but yeah, there are some guys like that at cons. They’ve got problems to overcome, but who doesn’t? Many of them are really nice, albeit socially clumsy.1
But do you know who I AM embarrassed to share my subculture with? Tony Harris. Because he wrote this.
Hey! Quasi-Pretty-NOT-Hot-Girl, you are more pathetic than the REAL Nerds, who YOU secretly think are REALLY PATHETIC. But we are onto you. Some of us are aware that you are ever so average on an everyday basis. But you have a couple of things going your way. You are willing to become almost completely Naked in public, and yer either skinny( Well, some or most of you, THINK you are ) or you have Big Boobies. Notice I didnt say GREAT Boobies? You are what I refer to as “CON-HOT”.
It is humiliating for me to read that and realize that I’m sharing a profession and a nerd culture with the author.
And unfortunately, Tony Harris doesn’t stand alone.
2) Which comic book culture do you want to be part of?
There’s the comic book culture in which women (and especially female cosplayers) are objects of suspicion.2 “What the hell are you doing here? Are you a real nerd or just pretending? Here, let me quiz you on Star Trek.” There’s the comic book culture in which a major artist posts in his public Facebook area that he finds most female cosplayers to be “quasi-Pretty-NOT-hot” and to have less than “great” “boobies,” and makes it clear that as a “rule” he considers most female cosplayers to be intruders in his space.
Or there’s the comic book culture in which we react to someone of either sex dressing up by saying “wow! You look really neat!” A culture that welcomes new people and assumes they belong there.
We can hang up a sign that says “Private, boys only, keep out!”3 A culture in which only the hardiest women will show their faces, because being treated like a suspicious outsider simply isn’t fun.
Or we can hang up a sign that says “We love our toys, and maybe you will too! Come in and share them!” A culture in which cosplayers keep on attending cons and making them more colorful and interesting for everyone. A culture in which everyone who loves nerd culture – even if they don’t love it in the exact way Tony Harris believes is the One Correct Way – can feel welcome.
Why would any thinking person want to live in the former culture, when the latter culture is an option?
3) A bit of fisking.
In a follow up comment, Tony Harris wrote:
So I am a Misogynist? Why?
Oh, has this not been made clear? Well, then, let me explain.
I’m not going to say you’re a misogynist, because I don’t know you, and I’m sure there are sides to you other than the ugly side you showed us yesterday. But I will say that your rant was very misogynistic.
Your rant was misogynistic because of the over-the-top display of bitter fury towards women you disapprove of; because of the sneering at women’s bodies and breasts that you deem insufficiently “GREAT” for your refined tastes; and because it was yet another attempt by a male nerd to play gatekeeper and declare which women are and aren’t True Nerds.
Because I frown upon Posers who are sad, needy fakers who use up all my air at Cons?
They’re not “sad, needy fakes.” They’re people having a good time while at a comic book convention, and for some reason that makes you furious.
And the air? Not yours. Everyone gets a share. (Jesus Christ, Tony, get a fucking grip.)
Sorry, while you Cos”Play” Im actually at work. Thats my office. Fuck you.
Hey, Tony, that’s my office too. So, speaking as an officemate, can I beg you to knock it the fuck off? Those people you’re sneering at are customers. Without them, neither of us will make a living.
Sure, most of the cosplayers aren’t there to buy my comics (or yours). But most of everyone at a con isn’t there to buy my comic (or yours). There are approximately a billion zillion comics available to buy at a con, and most fans aren’t going to buy more than a handful. We set up “office” for the chance to sift through thousands of fans to find the tiny percent who are looking for our stuff.4
By the way, cosplay is one of the very few things at comic book cons that little kids can enjoy. That’s my future customer base, officemate, so please don’t dis something that’s actually making comic book conventions fun for them.
I actually dont hate women, I dont fear them either. Nor do I mistrust them. I do not portray or Objectify half naked women in my work. I never have. I have always been VERY vocal about my dislike of that practice, and that my view is and has been that T&A in comics is a Pox.
I don’t think I agree that T&A is a pox, but I think the way that T&A predominates in comics is a pox.5 So we’re not far apart on that.
More importantly, it’s great that you’re working to avoid misogyny in your comics. Really, it is. (I work at the same thing in my comics). I also think it’s great that you love and respect your mom, your wife, and your daughters, as I saw you mention in another Facebook comment. However, you seem to think that these things are inoculations – that because you’ve created some non-misogynistic comics, and you love the women in your life, that means that you’re immune from ever saying anything misogynistic, and anyone criticizing your words for sexism must be wrong.
That’s not how it works, dude.
If you write a post saying that five times five is ten, then that’s wrong. And if a dozen people point out to you that “5×5=10” is wrong, it makes no sense to defend it by saying “but look at all these other times when I’ve done the math correctly!” Yes, it’s great that you did the math correctly all those other times. But that doesn’t magically mean that you didn’t mess up this time.
It would be better if you worked on understanding why everyone’s saying you screwed up, and learning not to screw up that way again, rather than just going on and on about how it’s completely unfair of us to say that “5×5=10” is wrong, don’t we even remember that time you said four times six is twenty-four?
UPDATE:
Just saw this comic drawn by sailorswayze on tumblr, and couldn’t resist including it here:
UPDATE 2: John Scalzi has an explanation for this bizarre phenomenon.
FOOTNOTES:
- I don’t deny, by the way, that there are some guys at cons who are really shy and socially clumsy, and who are also mean, misogynistic, and rude. But the problem there isn’t the shyness or clumsiness, it’s the other stuff. [↩]
- Cartoonist Colleen Doran tweeted, “Those kitty cat ears may be the end of comic book culture as we know it. Please keep wearing them. Thank you.” [↩]
- As comics writer Gail Simone tweeted, “Remember, kids, it’s very important that we do everything possible to make sure new people don’t try to become part our medium/hobby.” [↩]
- But what about cosplayers who just don’t buy comics at all? Well, so what? Some action figure collectors go to cons for the action figures, and don’t have much interest in comics. Oddly, no one questions their interest in comics, or their right to share the air. Because they’re mostly men. [↩]
- By the way, why are there so many T&A posters featuring zombies at comic cons? I know a lot of artists like drawing both boobs, and rotting corpses, and apparently they figure that drawing both at once will be twice the fun. But, speaking as a con-goer, it’s just gross. [↩]
Abso-freaking-lutely. I really like the line you draw between calling *him* a misogynist (we don’t know that, and it’s beside the point) and calling *the things he said* misogynist (which they really are).
I’ve just barely started dipping my toe into cos-play and want to go to more comic conventions, so this makes me twitch. I’m not really in the group he’s talking about, since I don’t do sexy costumes and if any guy thinks I’m teasing him when I’m walking around arm in arm with my husband, he’s more delusional than Tony. But the “you’re just here for our amusement/you’re not geeky enough to breathe our air” thing applies no matter what I’m dressed as. Not to mention the nice little dose of fat hate (you *think* you’re skinny) on top of the misogyny. (They just go hand in hand, don’t they?)
Hey, I went to school with some guys like this. If you’re at MIT you’ve pretty much got a life membership in geekdom. It didn’t help matters that when I was at the Institute the sex ratio was M:F::10:1. Lots of them didn’t relate well to women at all – and, frankly, didn’t relate to men all that well, either. Machines, yeah; those they got along with fine. As the Institute co-eds used to say, “The odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
Guys like this didn’t get much action, didn’t understand why, resentments built up and they got even worse. A classic negative feedback loop. The guys who joined fraternities tended to get that loop broken by upperclassmen and their girlfriends. First, they saw them relate to each other and were therefore provided with an example of how that worked. Second, either one or the other would give them advice. Advice from girlfriends (of which I confess I was the recipient of a couple of times) gave these guys an opportunity to actually talk to a girl, something they often didn’t have much experience with. The kids in the dorms didn’t get that nearly as much. There were a few dorms at the Institute where people went in, did the dorm/lecture/lab loop for 4 years, and barely talked to anyone from off-campus.
It’s too bad. It’s better there, now, as it’s now about M:F::54:46 (still unusual as colleges go). But still a fair share of guys like this. He needs help.
Wait, I thought he said something slightly different. I thought he said “When I realized I could never be judged a alpha by society’s standards, I thought I could at least demonstrate a little mastery and be the big fish in the small pond of comics–even though I knew it wouldn’t get me laid. But now mean girls (and some of them aren’t even my porn fantasy!) are trying to score points in my little pond and they didn’t do all the work I did to prove they were worthy! How can I feel special when they do this stuff?”
Love the Little Mermaid facepalm gif. :)
OK, what does someone have to do before you can call him a misogynist, then?
This sounds all too much like “he can’t be a rapist/an abuser, he’s such a nice guy” thinking. Or maybe “he only did it once, so it doesn’t really count.”
I love that comic. I’m a gamer, and I read SF. Several times I’ve had guys give me the third degree trying to catch me out as fake. Weirdly, they never seem happy when I pass their little test. It’s almost as if they don’t want to have to let me into their little club or something. Funny, that. One guy got downright irritated when I started discussing the relative merits of the combat systems in Final Fantasys IV – VIII.
On the other hand, geekdom has largely been a ‘safe space’ for outcast males who are used to being marginalized, dismissed, etc. Some level of defensiveness when the opposite sex shows up is bound to occur, just as it does when males enter a women’s “safe space.”
BECAUSE OF COURSE WOMEN HAVE NEVER BEEN MARGINALIZED OR DISMISSED FOR GEEKY INTERESTS AND ALSO THERE HAVE NOT BEEN WOMEN WORKING IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY SINCE THE BEGINNING OF THE WHOLE GODDAMN THING. Jesus.
Men DO NOT FUCKING OWN GEEKDOM.
Bite me.
“etc. Some level of defensiveness when the opposite sex shows up is bound to occur”
Like when they start voting! Or working! Or holding office! I mean, suspicion of female politicians is jut natural!
Male-dominated spaces are historical rarities! And DEFINITELY comparable to a knitting circle.
Where, by the by, men tend to be quite welcome! See also: Ravelry.
Copyleft, I agree that “some level of defensiveness” is to be expected, but why does that matter? Just because bad behavior isn’t unexpected doesn’t mean we shouldn’t object to it.
That said, I do find Harris’ extraordinary level of defensiveness, coming as it does from an established creator in his 40s known for his work on unusually smart superhero projects, a bit unexpected.
AMM: I assume that Barry, like a lot of people, likes to talk about misogynist acts rather than misogynist people. I see a lot of similar tactics in anti-racism. It’s a way of heading off arguments about what people “really mean” and “really feel.”
Ms. Sunlight: Oh lord I hate that shit. Also FFVI clearly has the best combat system.
Are you saying that he would never call a person a misogynist? Would he, for example, not call Rush Limbaugh (or the Catholic church) misogynist, but rather a person/organization who occasionally does misogynistic things?
For that matter, would he say that Hitler was not an anti-semite, but rather someone who did some anti-semitic things?
If not, where would he — or you — draw the line?
And this leaves no safe space for the outcast girls and women who are used to being marginalized, dismissed, etc. (In what may be the most pathetic teenage story ever, I let some boys copy my physics homework in the hopes that they might let me play Magic: the Gathering with them. They didn’t let me play.)
@Kai Jones: That sounds a lot like the explanation I came up with. I suspect he’s not making as much money as he’d like at cons (or generally)*, and he blamed Ye Olde Established Scapegoat.
*Sort of like how (this layman gets the impression that) a lot of wealthy people in America get annoyed when they don’t receive the admiration and social status that they’ve done nothing to seek. They could have chosen to go into acting or try to emulate Steve Jobs, chosen to look at what actually produces admiration and take practical steps to achieve what they desire. (I haven’t looked at the numbers, but I think the chance of people screaming your name if you go into acting or music exceeds the chance of never having to work again by the age of 40 if you go into ‘business’.) But perhaps society told them that if they ‘worked hard’ or did whatever they believe they’ve done with their lives, that by itself was supposed to make them happy. Ha, perhaps Tony Harris learned as a child that following your passion will make everything sunshine and roses.
AMM: Speaking not for Barry but for myself personally, I don’t really care whether Hitler was personally an anti-semite or simply stoked anti-semitism to political ends. In the end, the important thing is the holocaust, and it’s victims, not the soul of a narcissistic German politician.
yrs–
–Ben
Speaking for me, I’m sure Hitler was an anti-semite. (Someone who strokes anti-semitism for political ends IS an anti-semite, in my view.)
I can’t say, to the inch, where the line is drawn. But I am certain that there is a vast territory between “responsible for the Holocaust” and “wrote a misogynistic rant on Facebook,” and somewhere in that territory – and much closer to the “Facebook rant” pole – is where I’d draw the line.
AMM, there is also the issue of communication. You may absolutely believe that someone is a misogynist, but if you call them that they will stop listening so they can tell you that you’re wrong. You may have a better shot of them learning something if you don’t use the label, regardless of how well you think it fits. Jay Smooth gas a good video on this: http://www.illdoctrine.com/2008/07/how_to_tell_people_they_sound.html
Ah, Hitler. Let me throw in an analogy that might be helpful.
Hitler was bad. You’re not going to change Hitler’s mind with a rainbow banner and an appeal to his better nature, right?
Then there’s my stepson, who thinks Nazis and Communists were cool. (From what I gather at a distance, he thinks this because of the elite Nazi military apparatus, and the bravely patriotic Sovier one.) This is, frankly, an asshole set of beliefs to have. It’s an assholishness of a Hitlerian flavor, if not magnitude.
I would shoot Hitler, but I’m not shooting my stepson. Why? Well, he’s 17, and he’s just learning about the world. What’s more, I’m not yelling at my stepson or going off on rants about totalitarianism or guilting him about the Holocaust. I’m not doing these things because those are things you do once people get fairly far along the “Am I Hitler Yet?” track and you’ve given up on sweet reasonableness as a tactic.
If someone is in the range where sweet reasonableness may bring them around, it seems sensible to try that before posting their name and face on the Articles of Impeachment And Mob Murder. I don’t know if this guy is in range of the reasonabless cannons, but it’s worth firing a few volleys at him, isn’t it?
Assuming they were ever going to listen in the first place. Given that misogyny is mostly coddled and rewarded, it seems like a stretch.
If your goal is saving souls, this might be a reasonable (if not terribly successful) approach.
My goal is to eliminate at least overt misogyny, or at least to de-privilege it, so that it will be the misogynists who have to worry about being shunned and abhorred, rather than their victims.
I don’t think that persuasion and conversion is going to make enough of the people who share Tony Harris’s views change their hearts to change the atmosphere in our society. I think it has to go the other way: convince enough people that that sort of behavior is unacceptable (at least to others), so that people stop doing it. If we’re lucky, and our children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren grow up in a society that isn’t steeped in misogyny, maybe our great-grandchildren’s hearts will be (mostly) free of it.
IMHO, the first step is to make misogyny socially unacceptable. Misogynistic behavior has to have consequences, consistently. Maybe if people who do stuff like Tony Harris find that their friends give them the side-eye and don’t want to be seen with them, and that sales of their comic books or rap songs or whatever drop, they’ll decide to at least watch their words. Maybe then other people will stop getting the idea that blatant misogyny is the way to look K00L to their friends, and they’ll cut it out.
It won’t eliminate the hard core, but it will marginalize them. Which I see as a Good Thing(tm).
I think it’s okay to say “Right now, the subject of whether or not you personally are a misogynist isn’t what I want to discuss. The central issue here is the misogynist content of this article.”
That was the impression I got from what Barry said–not so much because it’s what’s in the text as because after having talked to him for a few years, it’s what I’d assume he’d believe. (FTR: I wasn’t fond of the wording he used either, and when I linked the article to a friend, I specifically pointed it out as a place where I differed with the written article.)
Based on the text, I find it pretty likely that dude’s a misogynist; I would be comfortable saying it. But I also think it’s reasonable to say “OK, that’s a can of worms that’s aside the point I’m trying to make — let’s focus on this part of the conversation so that we can explore it in more depth.”
I don’t usually do “me, too” posts, but when I’m in 100% accord with Mandolin I figure it’s worth noting. It’s a lot worse for girls than guys – at least, it used to be. My observation is that girls will ostracize a geek girl a lot more than boys will ostracize a geek boy. Add in that societial pressures means that a lot fewer girls than boys will express geek, if geek boys ostracize geek girls the geek girls are a lot more isolated.
hf:
Consider that if a wealthy person in America doesn’t get annoyed when they don’t get such admiration and social status it means you’ve probably never heard of them, so your observational sample is skewed.
Wow. I have to boggle at the kind of mentality that thinks geekdom was ever female-free or that it was established not as a community of shared interests, but as a ‘safe space’ where socially-challenged men could deliberately regroup away from the onslaught of female attention.
Who thinks that? Geekdom used to be a lot more boys-club, but there have always been girls involved; probably the first organized geeks were the Futurians, and they had some pretty impressive females on the roster. As for geekdom being a shared-interest space – yes, it is, and that was the motivation of Our Geeky Foreparents – but I think a lot of people (convex and concave wee-wees alike) have used it as a safe space, where orthodox gender conventions were still operating in the background, but where there was also tolerance for people not conforming to the norm or just needing a break from it. Tolerance for heterodoxy in its manifest flower seems to me one of the crowning glories of geek culture, even if that isn’t what Fred Pohl and Judy Del Rey meant to have happen.
I do feel bad for other cosplayers who try to compete with these cosplayers-cum-models that are the subject of all this ire. Most cosplayers are simply hobbyists that are making their own stuff from scratch.
Once a “celebrity” cosplayer gets her name recognized, professionals start making costumes for her. That’s really hard for the home-done DIY amateurs to compete with. So yeah, I have sympathy for those folks.
But no sympathy for the “He-Man Woman Haters Club” who want to hound the ladies out of fandom because they’re not “real” geeks.
Robert @24, I was referring to Copyleft’s comment at #7.
Silenced is foo @25, no, this isn’t ire directed at the purchased over the made-with-love; this is ire directed at women in revealing costumes, period. Harris was not ranting about the guy who bought his awesome electronically-operated Transformers costume off eBay or the cosplayer who spend five thousand bucks for someone to weld him a functional metal arm.
I like Amp’s approach because it keeps the focus on Misogynistic actions and not on if a given person is inherently good/bad.
There are 2 different conversations to have.
Conversation 1 is about how the hateful act is hateful and bad.
Conversation 2 is about the person. If you want to have conversation 2 you get to hear a lot of justifications, excuses and examples of things they’ve done that would not be done if they were a misogynist. You also get to hear from a lot of people who in some way identify with the hateful thing but don’t want to think of themselves as hateful.
It’s possible to hold contradictory ideas at the same time. Seems to me that it’s good to keep the conversation such that a decent human being can do or a say a sexist thing, but not automatically be a 100% sexist person. The alternative is that no one can ever admit that they did a sexist thing. Obviously there’s a point of no return. But I’m not sure that being a sexist asshole about women at comic book conventions is where that line is at. At least not in a world with Rick Santorum or the Taliban.