The Problem With ‘Booth Babes’
While these jobs may provide lucrative networking opportunities, being a hot chick in a roomful of mostly geeky men is sure to promote misunderstandings.
The article discusses the problems booth babes face while doing their job. No surprise, it’s a shitty job. The article talks also about dudes at the con, but does not mention the women attendees at all. Because apparently women who attend Comic Con are invisible.
To say anything about women and men without marking oneself as either feminist or anti-feminist, male-basher or apologist for men seems as impossible for a woman as trying to get dressed in the morning without inviting interpretations of her character. Sitting at the conference table musing on these matters, I felt sad to think that we women didn’t have the freedom to be unmarked that the men sitting next to us had. Some days you just want to get dressed and go about your business. But if you’re a woman, you can’t, because there is no unmarked woman.
The slutwalk protests have done some good work starting discussions about how women are judged for the way they dress. The slutwalkers address the (apparently radical) notion that rape is not an appropriate punishment for looking too sexy.
Marked Women, Unmarked Men makes the point that there is no neutral clothing for women. While being too sexy will get you victim-blamed for street harassment and rape, if you don’t appear feminine enough (a moving target) at work it can also be detrimental to your career. No matter what a woman wears at work, it’s never neutral.
Today A Man Touched Me On The Subway And So I Hit Him
Ive been sexually harassed so many times since my adolescence that I’ve lost count, but I’ve never reacted like that before. Normally I think, process, choose my words. There was no brain power that went into the decision to smack this asshole; it was pure instinct.
Read the comments, too. There’s some pretty good discussion about why women have to come together to fight street harassment, and that when men get involved, even with good intentions, it doesn’t have the same effect on the problem. In other words, solidarity and sisterhood do more than male White Knights.