Today I visited the Post Office.

Early this month when I discovered every Target in the city had sold out of it, I ordered the Transformers Arcee movie tie-in toy over the internet. The other day I received a package with my receipt and a toy. But instead of my little blue motorcycle (the Autobot Arcee) there was a green dinosaur (the Decepticon Undermine). I emailed the lady who sold me the toy about the mix up, she apologized, provided the address of the customer who bought Undermine and assured me that she was already told to forward Arcee to my address. It occurred to me on the way to the post office that I was one of three women in three different states involved in the buying and selling of Transformer toys. (It was especially interesting that I was only involved because toy companies wrote the female Transformer out of the movie, and under produced her toy.)

Of course, the other two could have been nonfans, one selling her son’s toys to one buying for her son or boyfriend, but the day I was looking for Arcee in stores the only other people I saw looking at Transformers toys were a middle-aged woman at one store, and two little girls who played with them in the aisle at another.

Yesterday I got a message from my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, asking if I was coming to a scifi convention in Tulsa this weekend. We met a couple of months ago at SoonerCon (and got along, which is another one of those things conventional wisdom tells me women aren’t supposed to do), which was hardly hurting for female attendees and attendants. Not booth babes or girlfriends who were dragged along, but real attendees who were looking at back issues and action figures and talking to everyone else. I didn’t attend many panels, but I attended more than one with mostly female panelists. They even had a “Girls Read Comics Too” panel (which I nearly took over, but none of the panelists were upset about that) attended by mostly women. Come to think of it, the very first people I saw at Soonercon were two female con organizers, and the three of us discussed how women were drawn in comic books.

Last year at WizardWorld: Chicago four women (my sister, Melissa, Melissa’s roommate and I) sat in the front row of both DC panels and were the loudest, most obnoxious fans in the room both days. We wandered the dealer’s floor and there was never a moment we were the only women in sight (and again, I’m not talking arm-candy or eye-candy, I’m talking active participants who were buying, selling, and talking comics). Because an editor at a major company had just said that women were probably not interested in writing comics (based on how few female writers submitted to his company which wasn’t accepting unsolicited submissions at the time), my sister did a gender-count in one of the writing workshops. Half of the aspiring writers in that room were women.

My sister was the one who introduced me to comic books, not my father or my brother.

When Heroes premiered, it won the “adults 18-49″ demographic, which is both men and women.

When I went to technical training (after basic training) in the Air Force, the first thing I found when I got off-base privileges was the comic book store. It was within walking distance of the back gate, and was run by a grandmotherly lady and someone I think was her daughter. I remember one incident where I was picking up my books and I saw my MTL (one of the NCOs who made sure the students walked the line and didn’t lose their heads with the sudden influx of post-Basic Training freedom.) I ducked behind the rack to avoid running into her (yes, her.)

At my first duty station, I got the only Airman in my training group with a car to take me to the comic book store on Wednesdays. She started collecting Witchblade, Meridian, and Tarot. We found a nice store and every Wednesday we got our books and took them to Subway to read. The guy who worked at Subway was shocked, absolutely shocked, to see two women reading comic books even though he worked right down the street from a store with a mixed customer base and more than one female clerk (who knew her stuff when it came to Marvel.)

When I went back to technical training for my second job, I was in an electronics principles class that had only one other comic book reader. She was one of only two other women in the class.

This week I attended a leadership seminar with people from all over the company. I sat next to a woman from plans and scheduling. We talked about Marvel Comics during breaks, because she reads Punisher.

Yesterday I saw a blog post to the effect of “Geeky girls do exist.” It was probably written because we keep seeing comments on blogs and message boards saying that its okay for comic books to alienate half of the population, because that half of the population by nature doesn’t like superhero comics/science fiction/sequential art/giant robots/take your pick of “boy” things. Its hardwired in there, they explain, and say that I am somehow special because they have never seen a girl who likes that stuff. Every once in a while I hear from a woman who says that she was surprised to find that other women were into this stuff.

And I have to wonder where these people are looking, because I see women with the same interests as me everywhere. I mean, I know from one perspective we’ve seen a spike in the number of female voices in superhero fandom over the past couple years, and it seems like they came out of some secret Amazon community that hides in the corners and crevices of geekdom, but seriously, we are everywhere. I see women in the comic book store, in the trade paperback aisle, in the line for the movies, at the convention. I see them online, oh boy do I see them online. They’re at the websites, they’re at the blogs, they’re selling and buying merchandise, they’re writing and reading fanfiction and polishing their artwork for their portfolios. Judging by the number of wannabe writers and artists I’ve seen out there, women are quite literally plotting the takeover of the industry. (Granted, these are comic book fans and only a small percentage will ever actually see their name on a cover, but I’d say there’s at least as many with designs on the industry as there is in a mostly-male community.)

There are still a lot of people out there who claim that seeing a woman interested in comic books is unusual. There are far too many people who think that collection and geekiness is a man thing and that they don’t see women because women aren’t inclined to those interests. Of course, that’s based on anecdotal evidence. “I’ve never seen one, so it doesn’t exist.”

I have a lifetime of anecdotal evidence that tells me the exact opposite that they argue.

Not only that, the “women aren’t interested” argument insists that my experiences never happened, but my argument that they are allows for the possibility that someone has gone through their entire geeky life without ever seeing a female geek. It suggests that there may be something wrong with them (if women will not approach you, or you are unable to see women when they approach you, you probably have some sort of problem that should be looked ) or where they hang out (if women will not approach an area, or they disappear from view once inside even from other people who are inside the area, you probably have some sort of problem that should be looked at), it rules the conclusion, but it doesn’t contradict their experiences at all.

I always figure that if you have two arguments based on genuine personal experiences, and Conclusion A says that Experience A is true and Experience B is not, but Conclusion B says that both Experience A and Experience B can be true, it would be best to go with Conclusion B.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 20th, 2007 at 5:06 pm and is filed under Just Past the Horizon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.