Geeks Who Make Women Hate Themselves

Food for thought ...
(All images/words above:  Thumbcramps.com)

My friend Leila has a great post up about women (and, really:  men) in geek-dom, which I hope gets a ton of traffic.  I've thought about this topic many times, and it even goes beyond the characters in comics with pneumatic breasts and legs four feet long ... it even goes into those feminine icons in the real world men are given permission to think they are superior for finding attractive.  Women who are supposed to be less threatening to real women but who, if we're honest, still conform to certain weights and other mainstream standards of attractiveness.

Hollywood's idea of the drab, workaday Real Woman
(All celebrity images:  IMDB)

Over the past twenty years, I can't begin to count the number of nerd guys who have congratulated themselves (they like to tell women about this; I've fielded so many of these conversations, and am sure most other nerdy and nerd-adjacent women do) for liking:  Allison Mack, Jeaneane Garofalo, Allyson Hannigan, Felicia Day, Amy Acker, and Tina Fey.  Not one of these women actually fails the Hollywood test of visual appeal - they simply aren't fully plastic bimbettes.  They're all of a certain petiteness - in Day's and Acker's cases, they're ever bit as thin as editorial models (slimmer by far than swimsuit models).  It's as if women are supposed to be grateful that a man can find a woman who is already physically striking attractive because she ALSO is intelligent and funny and Joss Whedon gets her to commit shocking violence.

Because, yes, it's no coincidence I listed three of Whedon's often-cast actresses.  It could have been significantly more.  Joss is one of those guys, I suspect, who thinks himself evolved because he finds women attractive who are not appearing in Playboy.  And he has done a bit, at least, to provide some interesting faces, especially in his work on the small screen.  But he's also got rather a thing about YOUNG women, (a whole different post but not in fact a completely different squick) - and, again, Allyson, Felicia, and so on are hardly ordinary to look at.

NONCONFORMITY IS NOT THE SAME THING AS OPEN-MINDEDNESS.


I can still recall a very old friend of mine, a sometime boyfriend - a boy whose first kiss I was, in fact - philosophizing with me in the early nineties, about the movie, "The Truth About Cats and Dogs", a movie starring Jeaneane Garofalo and Uma Thurman.  He was so proud of himself (a lot of guys were, I remember this movie's reception very well, at least amongst my lot of friends and acquaintances) for finding Jeannine SO much more attractive than Uma.

Well, the fact was, Jeaneane was (a) no uggo to begin with (she still is not, no matter the much-hammered themes of her standup and her own endorsement of the idea she might ever in her life have owned a cell of back fat), and (b) so luminously well styled, lit, scripted, and shot that she was both ethereal and completely lovely.  Add to this that the scripting on Uma was *nice* but not breathtaking, so the character had to lose out to the heroine we were following, along with Jeaneane's glossily dark locks.

At the time, I was still grateful enough for any sign of male attractiveness-egalitarianism, and deeply enough mired in my own sense of how attractive *I* was relative to Jeannine (I thought I was hotter), that I could accept that this guy's preferring her to Uma was some sort of a triumph.

As may be obvious:  over time, I have come to remember this ground-breaking example of male sensitivity in something of a different light.

Enough conversations about how "hot" Gabrielle was on Xena:  Warrior Princess, Mary Ann was, versus Ginger, Betty versus Wilma or even Betty versus Veronica later, and the theme became so obvious even to me that I stopped being impressed when men bragging that they had so generously found it in their libidos to find "UNATTRACTIVE" women attractive.  (My continued attempts to be a Veronica, even to this day, still don't negate how deadly boring a conversation this can be.)

If you can find "awkward" creature appealing - you're the hero ...
(All celebrity images:  IMDB)

Here is the Earth-shattering news, guys.

Glasses do not render a telegenic woman run of the mill.  A tinsey little scar on a lip does not destroy the luminous skin, figure, good hair, and large eyes of a television star.  Being SCRIPTED as "the girl next door" or a neurotic does nothing to diminish the requisite level of appeal a woman must maintain in order to be agented for television work, and cast as a regular.  This is how we get so many former models playing cops and private investigators, and always have.

In Hollywood, she's a second-banana ...
... but even she, eventually, will get an edit to a skimpy costume
so we can admire her exceedingly ordinary six-pack abs.
(All celebrity images:  IMDB)

Not the first beauty queen presented to American men as a girl next door ...
Not even the beginning of this issue, for American women ...
(All celebrity images:  IMDB)

Guys have bragged about finding all sorts of women they consider to be outside the beauty queen mold attractive, expecting this to make them more attractive to the women they brag about it to, and convincing themselves this makes them not only better than other "shallow" men but EXPECTING to be rewarded for their sensitivity.  By real women.  (Here's a thing:  the un-glamorous Mary Ann was a pageant princess.)  I can tell you, too - the woman who dares question a man showing off his crush on Willow, as actually perpetuating the standards held out to real women by an industry not in the business of promoting real women (don't get me started on Hollywood's long affair with increasingly dumpy leading men, at least not tonight ...), will get shrieked at in outrage by the guy who's cast himself as being Above the Whole Looks Thing.  They cannot take the idea they hold an entire gender to a standard they have trained themselves to think - and brag that - they don't believe in.  Hit that "Willow" link above and tell me how totally natural that shot is.

The actresses themselves ... I don't resent them much for making money off this conceit.  (A multi-layered term I'm loving right now.)  They're trading in an industry which, the older I get, the gladder I am I never found my way into, much less suffered success.  What this must do to someone I pity their having to endure.  May none of them suffer the decades of surgeries and ossifying expectations of self-image Joan Rivers and others who once traded on not-being-pretty (but still exemplifying it to such a degree that, past seventy, it's still such an imperative) have forced themselves to endure.  Even Phyllis Diller had some years in the eighties when she put off the fright wig and put out airbrushed photos to rehabilitate her "uggo" image.

I may suffer my own vanity issues - to be sure.  But I'm also grateful for every minute of my age, and the older I get the more I'm concerned about my HEALTH over my ability to make people think I look attractive.  Just today, I finally posted a nice, but not overly made-up image of myself as my avi on Twitter.  Baby steps.

Someone once said to me:  "You use your wit and intelligence as if your appearance had no power, and the effect is devastating."

That said a lot to me about my looks - which, with this person, even still matters to me.  But it also said something profound about what I have to back up the first impression.  I am so grateful mom and dad girded me with that power.

Side-eyeing the whole dadgum thing