carnivaloftherandom’s full post is here; I just wanted to highlight a couple of things I thought were important.

Filmdrunk’s piece questioning Star Wars as a, “Geeky,” thing, might have provoked an interesting discussion on the topic of cultural validation and subculture, had the author not chosen to dismiss women as geeks.

Salon.com picked up on this, and Mary Elizabeth Williams proceeded to heap derision on, “Starlets,” who are somehow, “Pandering.” 

First of all, an aside: In case anyone directed at the site through this debate is not a regular FilmDrunk reader like myself, here’s a sample piece on vanners that might shed some light on how serious Vince, the guy who runs the site, usually is.

Two relevant quotes from the FilmDrunk piece that summarize the points I felt Vince was trying to make:
- “ It’s not so much that we doubt these women are actually into the ‘nerdy’ stuff they say they’re into, more a question of why that’s always the first thing that comes up in an interview.”
- “I’d say the interviewers, the interviewees, publicists, lame press tours as a whole, and the ever-predictable internet nerds (yes, us) are all equally to blame.”

carnivaloftherandom says (truncated), “The fact is, guys aren’t called to defend their geek cred, because people will believe [them]. It’s only women whose geek cred is called into question, time and again,” which is both true and the point, in my estimation, that FilmDrunk is trying to make.

The (biased) perception of the media is that girls don’t like nerdy things, and by playing on that, it’s the interviewers who are pandering to their audiences by making a big deal out of it when they have a chance to. The real question is, why are we asking Rosario Dawson if she’s a nerd or not? Shouldn’t basic research on Dawson as an interview subject turn up the fact that she, say, created her own comic book? Conversely, Natalie Portman’s character in Thorreportedly studies wormholes, but interviewers don’t ask her if she liked wormholes as a kid, and if she hadn’t, that doesn’t make one lick of difference whether she’s qualified to study them in a movie.

To me, this is a “Women in Horror Month”-esque debate. Britt Hayes of Brutal as Hell rejects the notion of “Women in Horror Month,” because she feels the same way The Onion does: that, underneath a shield of positivity, such a celebration is a sly way to marginalize that very same audience for the rest of the year. The Salon article, as far as I’m concerned, is less a criticism of women pretending to be nerds and more a criticism of Hollywood’s routine phoniness, but it points out a distressingly self-reflexive angle: if the world at large also believes Hollywood actors (of either gender) will say whatever will get asses in seats, then those same people who “aren’t being fooled” can totally write off any genuine nerdery the women in question are expressing. That’s like an Inception of pandering right there — it panders to two sides of the argument without requiring anyone to be completely in on it!

Ultimately, the only real answer is to just be absolute in whichever side of the nerd fence you fall on. Don’t wait for the equivalent of a potentially leading question to spotlight whatever you want to spotlight. Which, again, is in Vince’s original piece: “if a pretty girl is into geek stuff, let’s stop demanding that they prove it.”