Tales of a Meh Girl

There was a viral vid released a while ago of a parody of Katy Perry's "California Girls" by Team Unicorn called "G33k and G4m3r Girls". You can download the song here or watch the video here. I loved it when I first saw it, and I still do. It's witty, geeky, and utterly up my alley. So what's this long post about, you ask? While searching for it, I ran into a series of links which discussed the controversy surrounding the video, namely how the women in it used their sexuality to promote geek girls. Ignoring the basic youtube commenters who think they're still being funny when they ask why any woman is "out of the kitchen", there's actually a pretty serious debate on the subject, which naturally I'm going to throw my two cents into, because, well, why not.

I am a geek. I am a girl. These two things are not mutually exclusive, and quite frankly, I find it insulting and somewhat unbelievable that there are still people who think it is (again, outside of YouTube commenters). I have a Crown Royal bag full of D20s, I regularly post about gaming night, and I get psyched when I unlock an achievement on WoW. I am able to quote Firefly and Buffy extensively, I grew up watching all of the Star Trek series, and I have an entire bookcase full of comic books. I am given to understand that these are not things which normal people do, so I guess that makes me a geek.

So let's break this down. One of the main problems people are having with this video is that it's not representing the vast majority of geek girls, who do not have cheekbones that could cut diamonds and body dimensions that make Psylocke's costume look anatomically feasible. But that doesn't really explain why this music video is being singled out and held guilty; I don't go to the movies expecting the heroine to look like myself or watch sitcoms and cry foul that the main female lead is gorgeous. Granted, I would love to see more variety in women's roles in these mediums, but I think collectively our gender has resigned ourselves to not ever seeing that come true. Yet, people want it here. Why?

For one, geeks are not likely to be stunning specimens of the human form. We're not the jock types--I can go out and toss a football and slam a baseball into far left field, but I'm not likely to be joining the local sports team anytime soon. Part of this is because we prefer to spend our time leveling up our characters rather than spending time at the gym or going to the park. Also, I don't speak for everyone, but I know that I certainly went through an awkward phase back in my teenage years, which is when I really started getting into video games. Video games never had the chance to turn me down for a date, or stand me up, or tell me that I was ugly. Who needs outward validation when you have a game telling you that you're amazing and can slay 40 bad guys at a time without ever getting below Critical Health? Not me, that was for certain.

And, for better or for worse, most of us are used to being the center of attention for being a girl who games. Tabletop RPGs are a great example of this--there's an entire comic called Knights of the Dinner Table which shows how "the girl" of the group becomes automatically hot, because any girl is rare in these situations. Even though we may not be able to strut our stuff around a pool in a bikini, flirting with the boys, and playing volleyball, we can still pwn your ass at Halo--which to some guys, makes us automatically hot. We've staked our claim, and hot girls coming into our territory strikes us as unfair. This is our turf, you've got your own, you can't come in here!

That's not to say that there aren't attractive gamer women out there, it's just that they're the minority--we're used to Booth Babes who don't know all the shortcuts of Mario Nintendo. We're still top dog compared to them, we think smugly. We're used to not being able to compete in the swimsuit competition, but in this arena, we are goddesses.

In general, we're getting fed up with representations of the female gender in media, but it cuts especially deep now because these--to our mind--unfair representations are now crawling into our territory.

Another reason that there's been an outcry is because of the nature of the gaming industry itself. Women's sexuality has always been used as a tool for marketing, but the gaming industry is egregiously shameless about doing so. There's an excellent video which talks about video game heroines being turned into pin-ups, as well as addresses the various problems the gaming industry has in general with attracting women audiences. Seriously, go check it out--it's well worth the watch.

The video also talks about the ways the gaming industry is trying to change this; before, they felt fine about offering up characters who looked like a 14-year-old boy's wet dream, because they were confident that women weren't going to be playing, and they felt no need to expand their marketing to include them, so why not actively exclude them? Now, they're trying to broaden their consumer base, but in the utterly wrong way. Most systems offer controllers in pink now--you know, for girls! Because that's totally what attracts women to games, right? Pretty colors? Why don't you add jewels onto them, because we're pretty much magpies, am I right, ladies?

There's specialized games out there where you can play My Littlest Pony and Fashion Model!* that rely on the most absurdly outdated gender stereotypes that I'm halfway convinced it's an elaborate hoax. What the industry should be doing is focusing on what games are already popular with women and seeing what it is about those that make them appealing. WoW is very popular with men and woman; I don't know anyone who doesn't like the variations of Mario; Rock Band is one of those games that everyone seems to enjoy. These are all very different platforms, use different gameplay, and yet everyone seems to love them. What's so universal about these games?

Women aren't some specialized breed who must be catered to on the basis of a 1930s handbook on etiquette for ladies; we're human beings just like everyone else. We like the rush of beating a boss battle, we have fun trash-talking playfully with our teammates, and we enjoy seeing our characters improve as we progress through the game. I don't know about you, but changing clothes on an avatar sounds torturous. Even as a little girl, if someone had given me a choice between... that and Mortal Kombat, I would have gone with the latter without even stopping to think about it.

That video I linked to brings up a good point about video gaming being a "boy's club", but again, we're not looking at this in the right way. Most hardcore gamers, including women, have been playing since they got their very first Sega system and made Sonic spin his way through that first level. We just never really stopped playing as we grew up. So why aren't we looking at what attracts some girls to gaming in the first place, instead of what kind of games girls are attracted to. For me, it's not the game itself which matters as much; I can always find a game that caters to my tastes, but I probably would never start looking in the first place if I hadn't grown up gaming.

Instead of hacking away at the leaves and fruits of the gaming tree, as this controversy about the Team Unicorn video does, why don't we start looking at the root of the problem?




*I made these examples up. They probably exist in some form, and if they do, I don't want to know about them.

Cornell is being called "the suicide school" because of six suicides in six months; UT recently was ranked among the top most stressful colleges in the USA. One of our school officials said this:

"She said despite competitiveness at the University, she doesn’t think the stress levels are abnormally high.

With a higher-performing group of students present at UT, students place more stress on themselves to perform well academically".

Today there were puppies outside of the FAC, because petting animals has been shown to lower stress levels. My guess? The ranking combined with the deaths at Cornell and the subsequent bad PR it's getting made UT officials start implementing measures to counteract this. Interestingly, and somewhat horrifyingly, I couldn't find any statistics on the suicide rate of UT.

What does this all add up to?

(A) Suicide has been shown to be highest among older people and people 20-24. It's also the second leading cause of death for college students.

(B) Instead of addressing the problem that maybe, just maybe, there's something wrong with the system that actively encourages stress by making GRE's, tests, and grades the ultimate goal, we're going to place the blame on the students themselves and...

(C) Put up measures that lower stress already there, instead of evaluating why there's so much stress in the first place.

While the measures Cornell and UT are taking are admirable, I feel like they're addressing the symptoms of a problem instead of attacking the problem itself.

I know everyone has been having more than a rough time this semester; it's been the semester from hell. I know it, trust me. I feel like everyone told me, "Oh, take as much time as you need!", "There's no deadline for getting over things like this!", but the pressure put on me by teachers to do well and take tests and show up for class when I wasn't ready was monumental. I had to force myself to start going again because one of my teachers, who seemed really understanding, apparently was only ready to be understanding for a few weeks, then it turned into, "Well, why aren't you over this already?"

So I know. It's monumentally hard for everyone right now and it feels like the pressure's mounting instead of going away. Call your mom (seriously, a study showed it lowers stress levels as much as a hug from her), pet some puppies, drink herbal tea, do something that relaxes you, but if it's still bad, please see someone or talk to someone. I know what it's like to be there, and though mine was more of an internal thing than external stress amplifying this problem, it's awful, and I'm worried about everyone. Some of you have work issues, some have family problems, some have both.

So really: be cool, be safe, be alive.

( Fat Rant )

People continue to amaze me--and not in a good way, either.

The Chinese yellow river dolphin is now extinct, leaving only four freshwater dolphin species in the world. All of them are critically endangered.

I am not normally a politically active or environmentally concerned person; the extent of my contributions include switching to vegetarianism and donating $10 when I can afford it to the WWF (World Wildlife Fund), but this upsets me. My brother once asked what would happen if a species disappeared. He used the giant panda as an example, seeing as how it's one of the most visible of the endangered animals.

Truthfully, I was unable to give him a reason why it should bother me so much. If you think about it logically, it probably wouldn't make a difference. There'd be more plants, less oxygen being taken up, and unless it's a keystone species--which very few large animal species are--then the rest of the environment would not suffer. Moreso, one could point out that it is simply a matter of natural selection. The panda, relying on one major food source, and requiring large amounts of that food, would naturally die out faster than others who can easily adapt.

So why does it bother us? Pushing aside the alarmist nature of most environmentalists, what is there that we should worry about? Sure, future generations should be able to enjoy animals as we do, but have you, personally, suffered from the lack of the dodo? Have you felt a pang of remorse at not having ever seen a wooly mammoth?

The answer is that there really is no rational reason why endangered animals should be so important to us; why the preservation of seemingly inconsequential species should rile us. The final answer to the question of is there any lasting consequences to the loss of most endangered species is simply no.

When people ask me what good the liberal arts are, I have to explain that though they may seem inconsequential, the liberal arts are the key to civilization. Science would never advance if there existed no means of recording results and applying them to future situations. Taken on an individual basis, survival itself is dependent upon the written word. Observations are made about smallpox; tests are made, results recorded; a cure is made. A person who at some point might have died from smallpox is cured. Without the ability to write, that person would have died.

In the same way, the seemingly inconsequential loss of a species is monumentally important to the human race. If not for anything else, the loss of a species shows our own inability to maintain the survival of a thing we deem important. The baiji died because of pollution, overfishing, and boating that interfered with the almost totally blind dolphin's ability to hunt.

So why does this matter? Why do we care, when rationally, we shouldn't?

I don't have an answer. I can't figure out logically any serious social or economic ramifications--besides the potential loss of any number of medicines and scientific advances--of losing a species.

But it still makes me overwhelmingly sad to think that there is one less species on Earth that I am going to study when I perform my graduate research, one less dolphin species swimming and hunting in a river.

1. Fanfiction:

It is definitely, not defiantly. If you have trouble remembering the difference, pronounce them phonetically.

I'll help you out. Definitely begins like "deaf", whereas defiantly begins "deef".

And also they mean absolutely different things.

Now, I'm struggling to accept "loose" and "lose", but this one I'm not backing down on.

2. Simon and Simon. AJ and Rick break into a building in the middle of the night and the phone rings.

Rick reaches for it.

AJ stops him. "What the hell are you doing?" he asks incredulously.

"No one calls a real estate agency in the middle of the night," he replies. "It could be something."

So he answers and it's their police contact, Downtown Brown.

"What are you calling for?" Rick says. "One does not get calls in the middle of a black-bag job. It just isn't done!"

They have a chat.

"Oh, and guys?" Downtown Brown says before he hangs up. "Get out of the there!"

I love this show.

Speaking of which--

3. The ubiquitous "real estate" plot of '80s detective shows. If at least 3/4 of the plots don't include real estate companies throwing their muscle out to clear out poor homeowners so they may build their strip mall, then clearly the writers are suffering from creative bouts and should be silenced immediately.

There is a war going on.

No, not the big one in Iraq with the guns and sand--I'm talking about the one at home, between fat people and skinny people.

You're right, I said it: fat. Skinny. When did these become curse words anyway?

Now, hold your horses--fat people are getting ready for a rallying cheer of, "Hell, yeah, I'm curvy and beautiful!" and skinny people are bracing themselves for a slew of skinny-hate and thinking up their own retorts ("You call that healthy? Curves, not entire other worlds.")

Neither.

You heard me, neither. I'm sick of this, all of it. All the self-hate, all the hate to others. Do you realize how much hate there is in the world? We hate Republicans, we hate Democrats. We hate Americans, we hate other countries. We hate fat people, we hate skinny people, we hate telemarketers, we hate people who don't agree with us, we hate hate hate hate. Yeah, it seems innocuous enough, you're just using a word, right? I'm an English major. I can tell you the power of one word.

Real women have curves. Real women are stick-thin. Real women are women. They're real and beautiful, no matter what they look like. There is beauty in everything, and everybody.

So, celebrating women--( Pictures of Women, of All Sizes, All Shapes, All Colors, All Beautiful )