I was beyond thrilled to see this on Tumblr this morning! I can't quite tell what convention this was at, but I love whoever thought of this and I wish more conventions would post material like this.
Cosplayers deal with enough harassment going to a convention. I mean, unless you're staying in the official hotel or driving and parking in an adjoining garage, harassment is pretty likely for female cosplayers especially as they make their way to the convention center. I've definitely had to handle comments; I thought of taking a cab just so I could get to the Anime Boston in peace. But then I found a T pass at Shaws that was good for the whole weekend of the convention and I couldn't pass it up - no pun intended. So I took the green line, and only endured people staring at me on the train. The catcalls occurred going to the train stop. And at the convention hotel. Not sure if the guy was an attendee, but he kept hassling me to do a plie for him (seeing the tutu of my costume, and ignoring that I was clearly not in a good mood), and after he couldn't take "no" for an answer, I turned around and yelled "GO FUCK YOURSELF!" What really bothered me was that the people around me admonished me for not being nice. "That's not con-talk!" one person told me. Yeah, I was the bad guy.
About a year ago, someone started a thread on the Anime Boston forums called Female Cosplayer Safety. While it was good to hear tips on how women should handle sketchy situations, I wasn't pleased at the victim blaming attitude in the thread. It was all about how if you don't want unwanted sexual advances or attention, you should go out of your way to avoid it. And the thread received a lot of support, with people echoing the sentiment that if you wear a revealing outfit, you're just asking for harassment. Funny thing is, I haven't seen the same effort being invested in educating guys about how not to be creepers. I'm sure if I tried, I would be called out on being a misandrist feminazi bitch insinuating that all male nerds are sketchy.
I'm not saying that women shouldn't know how to protect themselves, but I have a problem when people are putting a lot of energy into threads like the one above and aren't even bothering to educate guys on appropriate convention behavior. While I don't think all nerds are socially inept, I do think a lot of them are - while a lucky few of us have social cliques and thriving social lives, we do in general have a tendency to keep to ourselves more than normal people, and that often results in not always knowing how to act around people, especially people you don't know, especially people you don't know and are attracted to. This in itself has sparked panels such as Creepers 2.0 and my friend's panel on how to talk to the opposite sex at ConnectiCon.
Unfortunately, while a lot of people know this is a problem and go about solving it by putting the onus on women to prevent it - which is a problem in our culture in general, not just nerd culture - more people don't think it's a problem. They acknowledge that there have been some isolated incidents, but most con-goers know better, so it's that big a deal. I don't know how to explain to them that yes, it's still a systematic problem because there are cultural norms in place to perpetuate the issue. People still think that women wearing skimpy cosplays are "asking for it;" that female cosplayers exist mostly for the male attendees to gawk at, photograph, and try to pick up; and as I've said before, that conventions have an "anything goes" environment that doesn't have a lot of clear limits on what is and is not acceptable. Walk around a convention and you'll have people running up to and glomping total strangers, something that's mostly only frowned upon because you might damage the costume.
I hope more conventions take action to educate attendees about unacceptable behaviors such as sexual harassment, and I hope more people understand that the power of common sense is not quite enough to make the problem go away.
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