So over at Rants of a feminist engineer I just read about a “Girls of Engineering” cheesecake calendar depicting several women enrolled in the engineering school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Supposedly the makers of the calendar wanted to convey the notion that women in engineering don’t just study all the time.
Well, no duh. We know that women in engineering, and female geeks of all stripes, don’t just geek out all the time. People all have their needs for love, intimacy, and sex, regardless of what they choose to do for a career.
But I also don’t think that posing in lingerie in front of a camera is the best way to communicate the message that women can be multidimensional. Instead, it just replaces the stereotype of the geeky woman with the stereotype of the woman who is there for men’s sexual pleasure. I doubt that anyone who buys this calendar is going to be reading the information on the women’s majors. That’s probably written in much smaller print than those images of skin and lingerie splashed across the page.
Hey, I’m sure the modeling sessions were fun, and it’s people’s right to pose for a cheesecake calendar if they want to. But aren’t “tongue-in-cheek” pin-up calendars way overdone, anyway? And if people really want to see how female geekery and sex mix, the written word can put a far more nuanced point on the matter anyway—as SSAG contributors Violet Blue, Suzanne Franks, and Quinn Norton do in their essays!
UPDATE: Zuska just wrote about this calendar, too—and reminded me that there have been others like it just within the past year. People, how about a different calendar that tries to show how original and creative y’all can be, for a change? This pinup stuff really is sooooo boring on top of all the other things wrong with it!
Cheesecake calendars are so cliche…
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Why oh why do women not pose for calendars that engage other women???
A man who puts up some sexy calendar on his wall couldn’t care less about whether the woman is a scientist or a model. She’s just there to be looked at and fantacised over, not looked up to for the cool person she probably is.
It is all about men.
It would be much cooler to do something like a She’s Such a Geek! calendar that has tips on how to make a more equitable workplace in the male-dominated professions, or show what cool things women have done in the sci/tech area. And celebrate birthdays or anniversaries of achievements by women in these fields that haven’t gotten much recognition.
[...] A few days ago I vented about a pin-up calendar featuring a bunch of female engineering students in the near-nude. But everyone’s a critic, right? How does one put forward a different image of women in science, engineering and other geeky areas beyond the hoary misguided stereotype of unattractive, unnatural misfit? [...]