The Creeps at Comic Con

Ryan Broderick and Ellie Hall from BuzzFeed spent time at New York Comic Con in 2013 asking women to write down the worst things men had said to them while cosplaying. The results were photographed as a series—each woman holding a sign with her particular piece of received filth—and the overall effect landed somewhere between enraging and deeply depressing.

The logic these guys apparently operate on is that a revealing costume is an open invitation. It isn’t. It’s a costume. The women at NYCC dressed as their favorite characters for the same reason anyone does anything at a convention: because they wanted to, because it’s fun, because it’s one of the few places you’re supposed to be able to go full nerd without apology. The fact that some of them look good doing it is not a request for commentary from strangers with the social instincts of a parking lot.

This isn’t unique to NYCC. It happens at every event with a cosplay element—games expos, anime conventions, the lot. The same entitled assumption that women in public space are performing for an audience that gets to respond however it likes. They’re not. And the gap between knowing that intellectually and actually behaving accordingly seems, for a frustratingly large number of men, completely unbridgeable. Makes me want to scream. Pathetic.