The choice to target the same child and tween demographic that BMW once attracted, rather than the nostalgic millennial audience, is a smart and unsurprising choice for the Disney Channel. The swapping out of “boy” for “girl,” however, is a far greater change than the generational shift, and it is gender that truly separates the spin-off from its parent program. Unfortunately, from a feminist perspective, the execution of these gendered differences leaves much to be desired.

In BMW, protagonist Cory was the straitlaced, middle-class kid from a nuclear family; his best friend, Shawn, was the cocky daredevil from the trailer park. That dichotomy is replicated here in Riley and BFF Maya, but it’s not just Maya’s AC/DC t-shirt and refusal to do homework that mark her rebellion–it’s her sexuality. While Riley is barely starting to experiment with lip gloss, “cool” adult women in the subway remind Maya about the importance of walking provocatively. While Maya is willing to seduce a strange boy on the train as a game, Riley is left terrified and babbling when she trips and falls into the same boy’s lap.

The contrasts come up again and again in this middle school virgin/whore morality play, a theme made explicit when class nerd Farkle walks into the cafeteria with a slice each of angel food and devil’s food cake. And while Maya is never specifically reprimanded for the sexualized aspects of her behavior, the moral of the pilot is that Riley should “be herself” and keep her best friend out of trouble, not try to become her. The girl from the wrong side of the tracks is allowed to be the “whore” in need of saving, but Cory and Topanga’s baby girl must remain pure.

Aside from the virgin/whore themes, Farkle is the show’s biggest problem. His BMW counterpart was Minkus, the obnoxiously nerdy thorn in Cory and Shawn’s sides. But because Minkus was a boy on a heteronormative TV show, his annoying behavior toward the protagonists never veered into sexual territory. If Farkle’s archetype had been gender-flipped the same way Riley’s and Maya’s were, perhaps the character could have worked. Instead, viewers are treated to a character whose defining characteristic is his repeated and unproblematized sexual harassment of the main characters.

Then there’s the third problem: Cory himself, whose reaction to Riley’s interaction with boys is not so much paternal as paternalistic. When Riley is interested in a boy, Cory physically carries that boy out of the room. Yet when Farkle literally takes over Cory’s history class to rhapsodize on his “love” for both Riley and Maya, an affection the girls visibly do not share, Cory lets it proceed without complaint. As the parental and academic voice of reason and the primary nostalgic connection to the previous show (Topanga, sadly, has almost nothing to do in this pilot), Cory’s behavior is unconscionable; in just 22 minutes, he manages to deny his daughter sexual agency in two completely different ways.

BMW always had romantic elements; the characters who would become Riley’s parents first kissed in the fourth episode of season one. Yet the romance was never as all-encompassing in the pre-high school seasons as it is in GMW’s pilot, and it wasn’t confused with sexual harassment or the paternalistic determination of acceptable female sexual expression. In fact, one of BMW’s most triumphant episodes is season four’s “Chick Like Me,” in which Shawn and Cory pose as women and learn hard lessons about the kind of harassment women and girls deal with daily.

The change, however, is not surprising. BMW premiered at a time when “girl shows” were few and far between; most American children’s programming circa 1993 featured a male protagonist or a mixed-gender ensemble. The few girl-centric live-action shows that did exist, like Clarissa Explains it All, were in many ways feminist reactions against these boy-centric narratives. But in the two decades since, Disney and Nickelodeon have produced a slew of sitcoms with tween girl protagonists, creating the mold into which GMW is expected to fit itself.

This balancing of genders in children’s programming is a welcome step forward, but there are crevices of that mold that would be better left unfilled – like the prominent use of sexual harassment as humor in shows like Hannah Montana and iCarly. Though these problematic themes are by no means new (Steve Urkel from Family Matters and Roger from Sister, Sister existed contemporaneously with BMW), they have become codified elements of the tween girl sitcom as it exists today, and GMW is following that code.

Many of the elements that made BMW so charming are still present in GMW: tweens figuring out their place in the world, devoted best friends with opposite personalities, and the thematic tying together of school lessons and life lessons. I applaud the creators for bringing those tropes into an explicitly female space. But Girl Meets World is also burdened by the normalized sexism found in girls’ programming of the past two decades, and that may prove to be its creative and political downfall.

Booth babe or cosplayer? Gamer Jessica Nigri dresses up for E3.

What a year it was for female gamers, geeks and nerds. The Internet was ablaze, especially during the summer months, over ill-considered tweets, Facebook rants, opinion columns, and harassing flash games that policed women and girls’ participation in traditionally male popular culture. In case you missed it, I’m referring to controversies in game and comic book communities that marked 2012 as the year of misogyny in geek culture. Critical attention to this issue is coming from game and media studies scholars, as well as courageous members of these fan communities. In this post, I add my take on all this misogyny by considering how “the booth babe” contributed to a backlash against female fandom.

It all started long ago, though no one is sure exactly when and where. The brief history of booth babes appearing in The Atlantic, notes the first appearance of spokesmodels at the inaugural Consumer Electronics Show in 1967. However, the use of female promotional models to sell technology is linked to the mid-20^th century automobile show and became an international phenomenon, repeated at trade shows around the world. Promotional models are common at expositions for construction tools, audio equipment, guns, cycling paraphernalia, cell phones, cameras, video games, computers, and much more.

The stereotypical booth babe is a temporary employee, hired for event-specific work, which requires standing for hours handing out promotional material and encouraging attendees to approach the product booth. The promotional model is most often, though not exclusively, a woman, and she tends to wear revealing clothing. Or, as demonstrated at the HyperMac booth last week at CES, body paint.

Booth babes may also don costumes worn by characters from the fictional worlds of games, anime, and comics. And thus, like so many female characters from these worlds, often wears Spandex, plate-metal bikinis, or ripped shorts and torn tanks. Photos of booth babes are among the most popular images that emerge from trade show and convention coverage, particularly on fan sites and industry blogs.

During CES 2012, the BBC posted a video about booth babes, which brought the first wave of attention to the phenomenon last year. The video moved swiftly through the Internet, due, in part, to dismissive comments from the president of the Consumer Electronic Association.

In June, game designer and 30-year industry veteran, Brenda Braithwaite, called out Senior Vice President of the Electronic Software Association, Rich Taylor, when she tweeted her dismay at the continued presence of booth babes at the Electronic Entertainment Expo:

“I dread heading off to work at E3 today….It is as if I walked into a strip club w/o intending to. These are the policies of @e3expo and @RichatESA. I feel uncomfortable in an industry I helped found.”

Short-lived attempts to ban booth babes have been made before. The women tech writers appearing in the BBC video and Braithwaite’s tweets provided a much-needed critique of an industrial practice that perpetuates a “boys-only” culture in gaming and technology, and does little to assuage gendered employment and wage discrimination. These moments, and others from last year, reenergized a conversation that deserves sustained attention, organized response, and formal policy changes. However, as summer heated up, the conversation suffered a melt down.

Late one night in June, Destructiod writer Ryan Perez questioned Felicia “Queen Geek” Day’s credibility in a (supposedly alcohol-fueled) tweet: “Does Felicia Day matter at all? I mean does she actually contribute anything useful to this industry, besides retaining a geek persona?” Adding, “Could you [Day] be considered nothing more than a glorified booth babe? You don’t seem to add anything creative to the medium.”

Perez’s Twitter feed was flooded by furious Day supporters, including Wil “King Geek” Wheton, who called Perez an “ignorant misogynist” and demanded Destructiod fire him. They did.

A month after Perez lost his job, Joe Peacock wrote an opinion piece for CNN.com, titled “Booth Babes Need Not Apply,” in which he conflated hired promotional models with female cosplayers. Peacock was apparently disgusted by these “poachers,” claiming “they’re a pox on our culture.”

In November, comic book illustrator Tony Harris ranted on Facebook about “COSPLAY-Chicks” who, in his analysis, are only “quasi-pretty-NOT-hot” and know nothing about comic books. Central to Peacock and Harris’ comments, is the assumption that they have a super power to discern the real female fan from the fake female fan, and the booth babe from the cosplayer.

What these three moments (and many others from last year) reveal is a palatable anxiety from certain dark corners of geek culture. The increased presence of women at cons and expos has sparked a misogynistic backlash. Female cosplayers experience sexual harassment at cons, and are accused of being “attention whores” whose fan knowledge is questioned. Women working in games, comics, and technology attending trade shows are often presumed to be promotional models, and find their creative contributions to the industry dismissed. Standing in the center of this backlash is the booth babe, a misunderstood and misrepresented chimera. She has become a convenient amalgamation and target of many parts of geek culture’s gender problem. It is time to figure her out.