I had a friend post on Facebook a link to an article about an incident at PAX East. It was a situation where a ‘reporter’ approached a group of Cosplay women dressed as Lara Croft from Tomb Raider fame and asked a number of sexually charged questions. In the article I learned a phrase that I never heard of; Cosplay is consent. Thinking about the phrase, the words made sense in the number of articles I have seen in the past year about female Cosplayers and the harassment they have received by some men at conventions.

I said men were harassing female Cosplayers but let me give an example of something I saw personally occur at the San Diego Comic Convention in 2011. There were quite a number of female Cosplayers dressed as Disney characters. There was a group of women dressed as Disney princesses and considering the costumes of some at the convention, to my mind they were modestly dressed. A couple of little girls wanted to get their pictures taken with the group of them. I took some photos of them also, but I heard people in the crowd, and I’m going to assume they were mothers by the tone of their conversations and they weren’t pleased by the costumes. They whispered that the clothing was too skimpy and wondered why a mother would allow their child to be photographed with them. Some who saw the pictures I took of the incident had similar comments about the style of dress the women wore. Those comments were from women.

Because I’m mentioning the comments of the women I encountered in this I’m not excluding the men. The men who had comments at that photo session thought the women were ‘hot.’ Yes, it is a little weird to hear Disney characters described as being hot, but if you take either the men or women in that particular incident, no one went up and assaulted the women, made derogatory comments at the women; the only thing I heard were whispers. Are those bad? I would say possibly, but it wasn’t up to the harassment the Tomb Raider Cosplayers met.

I’m going to get on my geek purist high horse and say I think the problem with the female Cosplay harassment stems from the Twilight-ification of conventions. What do I mean by that phrase? As long as there have been conventions there have been Cosplayers. Yes, even back in the 70s and 80s there were female Cosplayers. Maybe there was harassment going on, but in the 30+ years I’ve attended conventions it has only been the past five years that Cosplayers, especially female Cosplayers, have gotten attention by the press. That attention has grown as conventions like San Diego have moved from geek attendees to media attendees. It used to be that convention goers flocked to conventions to see Carmine Infantino or an anniversary reunion of the cast of Babylon 5. I would dare say if William Shatner and Hugh Jackman were to attend the San Diego Comic Con, Jackman would get the larger crowd. Last year there was a panel on Glee, just as there was for two years running. In the late 80s, a show like Glee wouldn’t have a panel at Comic Con. People are supposed to wait in long lines for tickets to see a comic creator like Ed Brubaker, not to see the cast of Twilight.

With the change in convention going more regular folks rather than geek folks, newspapers, television and magazines are sending more reporters to conventions to report on events. I’ve seen the coverage of local San Diego stations change as Comic Con became more mainstream. Local stations used to cover the wacky costume people; the fat man with the underarm stains in his tights, the guy who looked like a poor version of Prince in the Superman costume. Those were the people the local press would show in the mid to late 90s when they covered the convention. Now, press coverage of conventions across the country will look for the sexy female Cosplayer and have many pictures of them in their coverage. Sure, if someone has an intricate Iron Man costume or a cool battlesuit from a videogame, they will get a photo taken, but the vast bit of coverage will be of the sexy women in costume. To confirm this, I went to the website of the San Diego Union and when through their photo and photo gallery section about Comic Con. While there was minor coverage before 2010, their site had listing from 2010 to 2012. Sadly to fat man with underarm stains or Prince Superman, but they had hundreds of pictures of women in all sorts of sexy costume. From pirate women, to super heroines, to Slave Leia, steampunk women and anime characters.

So here’s a situation you have set up at conventions which is leading to the increase in harassment of female Cosplayers in my opinion. The past five years there has been a lot more press given to conventions, especially the San Diego Comic Con. What used to be a handful of reporters now is in the hundreds. The public doesn’t think of comic conventions as geek fests anymore because the conventions are catering to a wider media audience. C’mon, last year the San Diego Comic Con had a panel with the woman who wrote 50 Shades of Grey. With old school comic book folks complaining a few years ago with the arrival of the Twilight squad, that protest seems trivial when you think about 50 Shades of Grey being represented at a comic book convention. The bigger press coverage means the press wants to have eyeballs heading to their shows and publications. While weird is good, sexy is better. A guy looking like Prince dressed as Superman isn’t going to get as many views as a well-proportioned woman as Tinkerbell or the Disney Princesses on a media website. I took a lot of pictures from the 2011 San Diego Comic Con and I think I’m evenly divided between sexy, good costumes, weird, men, women and groups. I think I even threw in a few Cosplay don’t. I know I have a mix of pictures because I’ve been part of the geek world since I was a kid. While I can see the ‘hotness’ of a costume, I know the person who built the costume took a long time to put it together. That should be respected.

With reporters covering the ‘sexier’ side of conventions, it mean a wider crowd will attend a convention. Unfortunately a lot of them won’t be there looking for Watchmen #5 or waiting to see a panel with Joe Turkel. The people attending conventions have, in my opinion, become more frat party in their attitude. An example of this would be a recent TV story I saw on the Coachella music festival. I’ve heard of the concert for a number of years. The story I saw talked about all the party people showing up for the convention, how hotels were at a premium and how the locals tolerated the influx because of the huge amount of money spent by the fans. The fans they showed weren’t cerebral individuals talking about bands they wanted to see. They talked about all the beer they were going to drink, punctuated with wild cheers and peace signs flashed by people passing by behind them. I cannot tell you any of the performers at the music festival, but I know many stars like Kristen Stewart and Lindsay Lohan will be in the crowd.

Comic conventions are becoming like Coachella and the people attending conventions are being just as rude as the Coachella people. In the late 80s, and this is something I’m sure official San Diego Comic Con people would like to forget, there was a time when porn stars had booths at the convention. It was when the black and white comic book explosion hit and a few people who wanted to make big bucks in comics put out porn profile comics. The porn stars showed up to promote the books. Yes, near the porn star booths there were large crowds of men, just as you had with the scream queens at their booths, the car show models at their booths and the former Playmates at their booths. You also had female Cosplayers roaming the floor. See, this was a time when you had a majority of real geeks attending the convention. Yes, porn stars and bikini women are things men crave, but if there is a raffle for tickets to see William Shatner talk, believe me the crowd is going to gravitate to that rather than the porn stars. I know because I was there when it happened.

The point I’m trying to make is that unfortunately, as conventions have moved to showcase regular culture, the things associated with regular culture are seeping into the convention. Cosplay is an important part of social makeup of a convention, but with more Twilight type people attending conventions, with no history or respect of the traditions of the conventions, the possibility of more sexist remarks and reactions to Cosplayers will continue. The more unfortunate possibility of the results of incidents that occurred at PAX East is that when more mainstream media gets hold of it, it will be exploited for sensationalism and their own culpability in the escalation of the problem will be ignored.

When you ask someone for a picture and they do ‘their pose’ it’s like watching old Soul Train dance line footage where you know the dancers have a routine just for that moment on camera. You have to admire that and give them that moment in the spotlight. To disrespect someone to the point of asking sexist questions because they have on a sexy outfit is wrong. If the action is being done by geeks or jerky fratboy reporters, they need to be pointed out and stopped.