1. Slave Leia – Who else was it going to be? A whole herd of nerddom had their tiny, insulated minds blown when in the third installment of the first Star Wars Trilogy, Return of the Jedi, decked out in metal bikini regalia, Carrie Fisher blew their collective cool. The movie went on to make a ton of money as I’m sure you’re already aware. Yet it has the awful reputation for being the movie that fell down on several storytelling levels that made the previous films stand out — aside from the controversial Ewoks, Leia was now an object of sexuality and submissiveness whereas in the previous movies she could stand on her own and fight. The idea that, in this first section, she is literally a pet on a chain was highly demeaning.
In later years however “Slave Leia” has become an object of fantasy, as evidenced by the cosplay world at comic book conventions and even immortalized on the sitcom Friends where Rachel (Jennifer Aniston) gives boyfriend Ross (David Schwimmer) the kinky dress-up he secretly dreamed of.
Which is to say that of course Lucas and company knew that’s what they were doing. There wasn’t much about it that was innocent. They were aiming to have high school and college lockers (along with centerfolds and Sports Illustrated swimsuit pictures) plastered with images of Carrie Fisher lounging about in platinum skivvies. That it has persisted for as long as it has as a cultural touchstone, for better or worse, says an awful lot about pop culture and its parallel relationship to sexuality.
Honorable mentions: Several characters that actually exemplify the “geek girl” aesthetic on TV and in the movies didn’t make the cut. They represented a more terrestrial version of the Nerd Sex Symbol classification and, somehow, couldn’t stand up to the more overt characters previously discussed. So add to the list these characters that somehow mixed attraction and introversion together.
Michelle Meyrink as the hyper Jordan in the 1985 movie Real Genius.
Melissa Rauch as the microbiologist Bernadette who is also Howard’s girlfriend/fiancÁ©e (and kind of a closeted freak) on the long-running series The Big Bang Theory.
Michelle Flaherty (as played by Alison Hannigan) in the American Pie movies who, as we come to find toward the end, has a unique way of playing a flute solo.
The sisters Deschanel, Emily and Zooey who, on the Fox TV series Bones and on New Girl (and the film adaptation of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy) respectively both slowly come to grapple with “this thing called life” while either solving murder mysteries or trying to figure out why roommates are so screwed up.
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