Via io9, I found a photo gallery article about Comic Con. The title? “The Girls’ Guide to Comic Con 2009“. Yeah. It just get’s worse from there. And even though this article claims “we’ve got a pretty good idea of what eager girls can expect”, I really don’t think they do. Especially when they start off by saying:

Women will be rushing the stage, offering to do star Jake Gyllenhaal’s laundry on those washboard abs that he acquired for the film [Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time], since he spends much of it fighting, shirtless or both.

Wow, seriously? How very sexist and condescending to say. Because obviously all I’d want to do is offer to wash his clothes. That’s what chicks do when they see a hot guy, right? Their domestic instincts just take over! Harumph.

From there it just goes on describing different movie projects and the male stars attached to them. I guess the writers didn’t think “eager girls” would want to attend a comic convention for, oh I don’t know, COMICS. Here and there they would compare a movie to one that had a large female audience, like saying Time Traveler’s Wife has the “wonderful sappiness of The Notebook, but for the most part they don’t go into much detail about the movies themselves, except to say how “hot” the male actors are. Apparently I don’t go to see movies for the plot or story; I only go to see the hot guy. Unless of course it’s a movie with a lot of women, then it falls into The Notebook or soap opera territory.

Their comments on The Wolfman put me over the edge:

Vampire-lovers have it all wrong. Werewolves can keep you warm, sympathize with your monthly curse, sniff out where you lost your keys and not thirst for your sweet, sweet blood.

Monthly curse? Oh ha ha, let’s make a joke about menstruation! You see, women get all moody and turn crazy once a month, so it’s totally like turning into a wolf. AmIright or amIright? Harumph indeed.

I really can’t pick out even one summary that was good. Even when talking about the ABC series version of The Witches of Eastwick it goes from saying “female empowerment” to talking about how their wardrobes will give the Desperate Housewives a run for their money. Or when they talk about Dollhouse, it’s “girls who kick butt”, even though Echo is “sometimes a bit airheady”.

Really, LA Times, could you have avoided the misogyny? It’s bad enough you’re marginalizing female Comic Con attendees who don’t go just to ogle hot guys (to say nothing about those of them who aren’t heterosexual), but you’re also playing on the same old geek stereotypes. FAIL LA Times.

Technorati tags: la times, sexism, misogyny, comic con, geeks