Tuesday, June 24, 2008

A Late Beginning

First off, I'm going to apologize for having my first blog be about two weeks after I was introduced by Laura. I am a shame to the geek world as I have yet to get the internet tubes hooked up in my new apartment, so I'm blogging this from the public library, ie: where I would live if they let me. Now, on with the actual blog topic...

I'm a geek. I'm a girl. This can be a problem, and this has been considered a myth for a great deal of my life. On the other hand, this is becoming more and more accepted, common, and generally wonderful to actually live with. I find that half the geek things out there have been pretty feminist minded for a lot longer than you would think. For instance, Star Trek The Next Generation has long been regarded as the first TV show to really break racial stereotypes, partly by creating something else that was long considered unrealistic, a black geek. The show creators certainly did not stop there. I'm not going to say the show was perfect, Riker was a bit of a womanizer, but I am quickly reminded of episodes where gender bias was mocked and condemned. One of my favourites being when the crew of the Starship Enterprise went to a world where men were seen as stupid sex objects, and only women could participate in government. They showed them the error of there ways and explained that they got over such idiocy centuries ago. Another favourite involves a character whom I generally refer to as 'Warf's Girlfriend.' She was half clingon, half human, constantly conflicted, and an altogether powerful and well fleshed out character. Actually, she is the basis for my D&D character, but thats the basis for a later blog.

To move on from Star Trek and get into some other great geekery, Joss Whedon most be mentioned. He is the writer of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly, and enough other quick witted paranormal shows to fill a geek ladies DVD shelf. People who never really watched the shows tend to have a bad impression of Buffy in particular. Whedon actually created this character and many others like her specifically because he had no strong, independent, intelligent female rolemodels growing up. He has said before that he was a fan of horror movies and couldn't understand why every woman was a damsel in distress that happened to really love mini skirts. So he created Buffy, and Willow, and Zoe, and a ton of other brilliant women to kick-ass and let us know that we can do the same.

In later blogs I plan on exploring more comic book feminism (Friends of Lulu anyone?), but since this is mostly a TV themed look at geekery, I would like to touch on Batman the Animated Series. To be brief, there was once an episode where Harley Quinn, the Joker's side kick, was kicked out after severe emotional and physical abuse, and teamed up with Poison Ivy. Ivy spent the episode trying to explain to Harley how she was smarter and stronger than this, how she deserved her own life and respect. Keep in mind this was a children's cartoon that aired in the early 90's. Other episodes have centered around a young girl's struggle into the role of Robin, female supervillians that the viewer can't help but root for, and the debunking of racial, economic, and age stereotypes, to name a few.

So, to sum up an overly drawn out post, the geek world has a lot to offer anyone. Women, feminists in particular, are certainly no exception to this rule. You will find a lot of geeks out there who will be bastards to you because of what's between your legs, but I've certainly found an equal number that will be more willing to accept you as an equal because you, too, know the power that 20 sided dice can bring.

Until I do get internet I probably won't be blogging much, but I will certainly be back with blogs of geekery. I'm planning on doing a comic book/graphic novel blog, a D&D blog, a gamer blog, and an OS blog at some point. The OS blog is purely selfish, I can't stand Vista and haven't ever tried Linux. If there's anything else you want considered, geeked out, or added to the list, let me know! Comment away!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Nice job.

Can't wait to read all the things you have lined up.

And aww..vista isn't AS bad as it's made out to be. I mean, it sucks but that's windows in general.

You should try Linux Ubuntu though. Have that installed on my computer as well. Other than a few compatibility issues it's very nice.

-Dave-

Yahappynow said...

girl geeks ftw, many a hot pocket has been dropped upon a keyboard at the unexpected female voice of one's raid's tank...

but you've never tried even ubuntu? oh noes... when you have a veritable farm of pcs slowly edging you out of your own room, you cant afford windows licenses for them all and ubuntu gives them a soul

And no Vista is terrible; if I wanted my desktop to take this much of my RAM, I would have just run 3 games and a virus scan in background on good old XP. Hell, I still rock 98

Get them interwebz hooked up and keep posting

>>[Kevin)>

Anonymous said...

Meh.. Vista works just as well for me as XP ever did. If not better. Windows has always been buggy as hell.

Not a windows fan at all but sadly I can't run all the video editing stuff I have to use on Linux.

Maybe one day.

Cait said...

I think the free-ware aspect of anything Linux is the biggest reason why I want to use it, actually. I don't like people saying they own something I bought, it creates too many little pockets of legal douche-baggery. Like how you can make whatever Linux you want and distribute it, if you really feel like it. That's reasonable. Threatening to sue customers because they created some neat mod that works better than whatever your company made - not so much. Ok, so I'm pretty much talking about xboxes here rather than computers, but still...