Why the recent Top Twelve Hottest Geeks has me hot under the collar
Just before I packed up and left Vegas, I came across a post from Manolith about "The Top Twelve Hottest Geek Girls." Look I know it’s a bit of fun, but something about it left me a little cold. Do we really need lists like this? With all the talk about getting more women involved in technology across the board, from the speaker list and delegates at tech conferences to the take-up of sciences in schools and universities, is it any wonder that articles like this one are not helping?
And then my opinion swings the other way to point out the underbelly of reality. Given the competitive nature of blogging it’s probably only natural that other factors are going into play. Let’s be honest if you took an empty room and put Robert Scoble at one end and Pete Cashmore at the other there’s going to be a bias towards the Scottish half of the room.
Blogging and online writing is as much a performance art as it is journalism and hard facts. One of the analogies I heard at Blogworld (if it’s yours please let me know) was comparing bloggers to musicians. There are a few Stings and Madonnas out there, who will sit at the top of the tree with a dumper truck of income. But below them there are countless thousands of session musicians who might never get rock star name recognition; but are known in the industry, do solid work, and can make a living from their work. Making the jump from session to star requires a lot of dedication, some luck and using everything at your disposable – even if some of those methods are a touch underhand or not based on your writing.
Online is no different to a newsroom, casting session or politics. Not everyone can make the jump. There’s not enough space in the public conscious or in these eye candy lists. After all, there’s a reason I prefer audio podcasting…
One final thought: I hope that Manolith will put together a "Top Twleve Smokin’ Geek Boys"
Hey Ewan!
That list was equal parts flattering and embarrassing for me. While it’s always nice for pageviews to get any kind of attention, I’ll admit it’s not the kind of attention I normally try to attract. Some of the users that came our (ReadWriteWeb’s) way after that post were interested in the content I was creating, but the majority were engaging for all the wrong reasons.
As far as how this helps promote women in geekery, it doesn’t. What it does promote is the unfortunate practice of bypassing technical chops in favor of curling one’s eyelashes. There’s a reason I don’t associate with certain “girlie” groups, and there’s a reason I firmly believe that most of the traditionally beautiful women in technology are dumber than a sack of hammers. The list serves as a great example of my reasoning.
It’d be damned interesting to see an equally objectifying, dehumanizing look at the “Hot Geek Boys,” and what would be even more interesting to me would be the comments. There are generally a limited and predictable range of responses from the male geeks to hot-geek-girl posts:
1) The Jizz My Pants Response: The cruder commenters fall all over themselves praising the aforementioned hot geek girls for their ungeeky qualities.
2) The Fair and Balanced Response: The commenters praise the actually geeky aspects of the women listed in the post.
3) The Hot-But-Dumb Response: Olivia Munn gets this a lot. Based on the assumption that there’s an inverse relationship between beauty and intelligence, commenters praise a woman’s physical appearance while absolutely slamming her work product.
4) The Not-That-Smart Response: This is something I see people aim at Leah Culver a lot. Because she actually is technically oriented, commenters attack her programming skills. She gets a lot of “pretty smart for a girl” comments from the geekosphere, but far more often, her abilities are harshly criticized, much more than they would be if she were an off-the-general-radar geek guy.
5) The Pure Hate Response: In which commenters insist that not only is the geek lady in question an absolute dog in terms of looks; she’s also terrible at what she does. What these comments lack in logic, they make up for in bile.
Part of me wonders how women’s responses to hot geek guy lists would compare.
So, yeah. Sorry for writing a book on the subject, but geek guys almost never have to deal with this insidious type of discrimination. As a woman and as a professional, I wish my looks didn’t matter to the world at large; but since they do, I try to prepare myself to be as presentable as possible when in the public eye to defend myself and my publication from criticism. And this lands me on lists such as this one and opens me up to undue and invalid criticism of other aspects of my work.
Sheesh.
And of course any “hot male geek” list would get flamed as “some feminist clap-trap” by the same boys who make Beavis and Butthead look progressive. And given the current net landscape, would any website actually pick up such an article and run it with the same… delight as Manolith did here?
Don’t be sorry for writing a book, it’s probably the clearest guide for those of us who don’t have to put up with and modify what we do because of who we are.
PS: I’m just wondering which response of the five my post falls under!
You’re definitely fair & balanced, as always. ;)