No matter how much I think about it, I don’t think I will ever understand the desire some men have to keep women out of so-called geek communities.

Who cares if a woman shows up at an sf convention cosplaying as the Scarlet Witch just because she read half of one comic and liked the costume?

And just looking, there is no way to tell, anyway.

Besides, do you think that anyone was born knowing all the history and trivia of geekdom? People have to start somewhere.

Funny, I’ve never read an entire comic book. Never will. My brain – not being visual at all – just can’t process them. Yet if I showed up at a convention dressed as The Joker, no one would question it one bit even though I’ve never even held in my hand a single Batman comic book.

And the aforementioned cosplaying Scarlet Witch might teach you something you don’t know – about rock climbing, or nin jitsu, or cooking, or a non-geek movie you’d never considered watching. Or she might be the biggest comic book or sf nerd in the world and tell you about some Romanian sf translations you’d never even heard of.

I just don’t understand the purity urge, especially when it is so senseless.

Here’s a particularly funny example of gatekeeping gone wrong.