It’s no big news flash that a lot more women have been joining the geek party lately.
The old cliché about how geeks who are obsessed with Star Wars, Star Trek and comic books couldn’t get a woman in a million years probably still stands, but again, there’s a lot more women that are into comics, horror films, video games, and all other geek stuff these days, maybe more than ever.
So now that Comic Con has come and gone, The Wrap just did a story on the power of women at Comic Con, or “kick-ass women” as Sharon Waxman puts it, an as Michelle Rodriguez said of Resident Evil director Paul Anderson, “it’s rare than an American [male] director would have that open-mindedness to have a female lead and pull that off.”
Actually, we’ve had female lead action films for quite some time now, and there was a whole plethora of ’em back at the beginning of the millennium with Tomb Raider and all that.
When Alien Resurrection came out, it was probably the first time I heard of the first Alien being a revolutionary film in having a female action lead, and actually Ridley Scott himself never gave it much thought. As the late Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon told me, there were women on Star Trek for years, and he didn’t think of Ripley being a woman as being revolutionary then or now.
And of course, as we mentioned earlier, there’s more women getting into geek stuff these days, and I’m sure they were out in force at Comic Con. (And not just as booth babes either.) In fact, at Quentin Tarantino’s panel, he hit on a member of the audience who he thought was pretty hot, where Comic Con back in the day was probably like going to see an Iron Maiden gig in the eighties: If there were any chicks there, they probably looked like men.
As Waxman reports, “Granted, most of the Comic Con fanboy movies are targeted at the male geek crowd – from the new Superman to Pacific Rim to Godzilla and Iron Man 3. But the female fans are showing up in great numbers to cheer on those storytellers who want to place women at the center of their narratives.”
Yes, being a geek can be a very isolating experience, but it’s certainly not elitist. Anybody who wants to come in and revel in the joys of Star Trek, comics, gore movies, and classic sci-fi TV shows is certainly welcome to do so.
