The Costumer

Today I am writing in response to a recent post on the Convention Fans blog regarding weight loss and dieting for costumes.

 Costumes are actually my main motivations for staying at a healthy weight/losing weight (I say this as I eat a cookie). I like wearing costumes to display my love for particular eras’ style and to show my allegiance to fandoms. I actually reward myself with costumes when I make or maintain my fitness and dieting goals in a healthy way!

 I do know a female who had surgery to look more like a comic book character. The augmentation was somewhat related to her job and she did carefully weigh the options, work out, eat right, and do her research before undergoing surgery, but it reminded me that surviving even as a very attractive female in the geek subculture (are we even a subculture anymore?) involves at least as many pressures as mainstream culture. For some reason, some geek guys tend to have very unrealistic perceptions of what women should look like. A lot of said geek guys are also single into their forties and living in their parents’ basements, partially due to holding such expectations, I imagine.

 On the other hand, a healthy sum of geeky guys are just crazy about the Kaylee (from Firefly) type, and in my personal experience, I find that some of them tend to approve of ‘hot’ geek female archetypes mostly for the approval of their male friends.

I’m kind of average looking, but a lot of my geek friends consider themselves “alpha nerds.” Sometimes I feel like a few of them only accept me because there IS a place for the Kaylee brand of lady in geek subculture.

I do see the “alpha nerd” pressure for men to be muscular, roguish, and handy with a light saber, but at the end of the day or movie in question, it’s perfectly acceptable for the nerd to get the hot chick. Anyone who has seen Transformers knows that. It’s a theme omnipresent in geek culture, from Spiderman to Smallville.

I feel like the recent incursion of vampire-related media has tipped the scales in the opposite direction somewhat. Twilight and True Blood certainly seem to highlight the need for some hunky male vampires, complete with the bad boy potential for full fang penetration.

All in all, it pisses me off that this double standard has permeated geek subculture in general and the fun of costuming specifically. Looking back at early season Star Trek: The Next Generation uniforms (including the episode during which a male wore one of the short skirt type uniforms), I’d like to see a future more like that: I’m all for more skin, but only with a heavy serving of equality to go along with it!

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