Women in Fandom

Women go to SF conventions.
Women have been going to conventions for a very long time - but over the past year, I've been hearing reports, mostly from the US, that women are not as welcome at conventions as they might be. The complaint, mostly from young white males, is that girls are "fake geeks" who only go to conventions and dress in skimpy costumes in order to get a boyfriend, and they don't actually know about the characters or the TV series or the comics.

This is an old refrain.
Thirty years ago, David Gerrold had a regular column in Starlog magazine, and in one of his columns he tackled the complaint that women were ruining fandom. Again, this was mostly in the US, and at that time it was mostly directed against Star Trek fans, who were overwhelmingly women. They weren't "real fans", and they were spoiling things for the true fans - who were all male, of course.
"Look, I'll tell you how women are 'ruining fandom'," David Gerrold said, and he filled the rest of his column with all the ways that women in fandom had improved things. It's a long time since I read the column (I kept it in a scrapbook for years, but all the scrapbooks had to go some years ago), but the main points I remember were that, because of women who were Star Trek fans, it had become normal for conventions to raise money for named charities, something that the old SF Cons had never thought of doing. They had also arranged blood donations in the US.
In that one column, he demolished any argument against women in fandom that existed at the time - and maybe someone should dig it out and repeat it, loudly, to this new generation of young men who don't like to see girls being interested in the same things as they are.

The "skimpy costumes" thing seems to be another problem for the complainers. But there's a point to be made here - right back into the dawn of SF history, costumes for women characters in comics and TV and film have overwhelmingly been designed by men, for men to look at. So the costumes available for women to dress up in are overwhelmingly skimpy and sexy if they want to portray certain characters. That doesn't mean that the women are making themselves available - it means that they are portraying that character, and that is all it means.
I remember going to Star Trek Cons in the 1980s, and the good thing about those Cons was that everybody felt safe. It was a place where a woman could wear what she liked, whether it was the green Orion slave girl or Starfleet Admiral, and she wouldn't be hassled. One man who tried to hassle girls, and took some girls in skimpy costumes to his room to "photograph" them, was quickly complained about, thrown out of the convention, and banned from all subsequent conventions that those organisers would put on. And the girls went up to his room, initially, because they felt safe - because that sort of thing wouldn't happen at a convention.
This is as far from "dressing up in skimpy costumes in order to get a boyfriend" as you can get.

Besides, do these men who are complaining really consider themselves to be so irresistible to women that they think a woman would spend quite a substantial amount of money to go to the convention, and time making a costume, just to get themselves a boyfriend? Could it not possibly be because they have an interest in SF, and want to have a good time, and meet other people with the same interests as they have? I'd like to know if any of these men doing the complaining have ever been approached by a girl in a sexy costume who wants him to be her boyfriend. I would suspect that it hasn't happened.

I grew up watching Doctor Who, and Classic Star Trek and Gerry Anderson. I've read SF and fantasy by many different authors. I've watched SF films. I've written Star Trek fan fiction and made costumes. I used to go to conventions, and I may go again in the future - and I went because I had an interest in the subject, and wanted to meet other people with the same interests, and talk to them, and have fun with them.
I don't want to hear any sexist idiots telling me I have no right to be there.