Sexualized environment

Overview

A sexualized environment is one where sexual activity or sexy clothing or behaviour are prominent. This often occurs in geek environments and, by prominently displaying women as sexy, available for sex, or "other" than the predominantly male geek attendees, may make women uncomfortable.

Why sexualized enviroments are criticised

Geek feminists agree that consensual sex is fun. However, geek feminists criticise sexualised environments for many reasons:

• in geek contexts, they are usually a way for heterosexual men to bond over their common attraction to women. This is othering for anyone who is not a heterosexual man, including, obviously, women. This sensation is very visceral when in a small minority, as women can be in geek settings. (See also Grunch.)
• there is a long tradition of sexual images, suggestions and approaches being used to shame, scare, harrass or brutalise women. This is common enough that most women will have had personal experience of it. Therefore many women are unable to sensibly assume good faith on the part of unknown men seeking to make a situation sexual and feel mentally uncomfortable at best and physically intimidated often.
• while in many areas this restriction is loosening, women are stigmatised as well as celebrated for being too sexual. This traps women into a double-bind when responding to sexualized environments, because even by getting the joke they may reveal themselves as too sexual.
• the feminist idea of sexual freedom is where all parties freely consent to sexual situations. While legally consent is probably not required for, eg, having someone recount their sex life to you without permission, or showing you some pornographic issues, many of the same ethical arguments apply as to physically sexual situations.
• a substantial amount of sexy imagery plays into mainstream attraction stereotypes, and thus into Body image concerns for women.

There are some other criticisms, not specifically geek feminist, including:

• cultural concerns about welcoming members of cultures with different standards of expressing sexuality in public to geekdom
• concerns about having children present in environments where participants are expected to bond over sexual ideas
• sexualized environments are becoming fairly uncommon in some professional contexts (eg workplaces, partly due to feminist concerns) and may damage geek events which are seeking to be partly or entirely professional, such as technical conferences.

See also Sex is beautiful, used as an excuse for sexist incidents.

Examples of sexualized environments

• Many Technical conferences are inappropriately sexualized through the presence of booth babes, sexualized presentations, etc.
• Gaming is a highly sexualized environment
• Many companies have shirts with company slogans that double as innuendo, such as "(media company) I like to watch" and "(IT software company) do IT with me."
• In academic settings, students sometimes display sexualized wallpaper on their computers (either institution-owned or privately owned.) Employees in the workplace occasionally do the same thing.
• Geek technical and task-oriented communities often have overlapping work and play spaces (eg a project IRC channel will often contain both technical talk and social chat). The social element often includes members occasionally or regularly discussing their sexual interests, their desire or lack thereof to have sex with each other etc in the same space as where the on-task discussions take place.
• Mouse pads with wrist rests in the form of women's (round, perky) breasts.

Responses

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