A Heartwarming Gamer Story About Sexy Gender-Swapped Mechanics

We've discussed The Hawkeye Initiative before, a Tumblr where fans and artists recontextualize the costumes and poses of female characters in comic books by replacing the oft-ignored Avenger, Hawkeye. Yesterday, one employee of the videogame publisher Meteor Entertainment (who chose to remain anonymous) shared her own story, which is fantastic not only because it took an exercise intended to demonstrate double standards in entertainment and implemented it in real life at an actual company that creates entertainment, but also because it has a happy ending. As the Meteor employee explained:

I love my job. Our company in particular is great. Firstly, our game (HAWKEN) is beautiful and people love it. Secondly, half of our executive branch is female. Half of them are punk rock, and all of them are badassed. Our gender awareness standards, compared to the industry at large, are top shelf. We are talking Amelia Earhart in Atlantis, at a five star resort, getting a mani-pedi from Jensen Ackles. I have it good. For the last six months of my tenure at Meteor Entertainment, there has been only one thing I did not love about my job. This picture:

After seeing the pin-up pic day in and day out for six months, she had a revelation: what if she created the male equivalent of the sexy Hawken mechanic, Hawkeye Initiative style, and swapped the picture in her CEO's office with it as a prank? She enlisted the help of her co-worker Sam Kirk, an artist who illustrated an image of a similarly underdressed male mechanic that she titled "Bro-sie the Riveter."

After quietly swapping out the picture one morning, she watched with amusement as coworkers noticed the switch and reacted with surprise and guffaws. And then her CEO, Mark Long, came in.

We hear a loud: “What the hell is this?!” And then all goes quiet. Ten minutes pass. We panic. We are both suddenly and painfully aware that we have, in fact, just punked the CEO of our company. He is by all accounts an awesome dude. He is also a late-50s ex-army guy who happens to determine our employment futures in an at-will state. Meep.

After several nail-biting minutes, she says Long came by her desk and said, “That was a brilliant prank. You called me on exactly the bullshit I need to be called on. I put up pictures of half-naked girls around the office all the time and I never think about it. I’m taking you and Sam to lunch. And after that, we’re going to hang both prints, side by side.”

And that's exactly what they did.

As women make more and more in-roads into the videogame industry, it's a valuable and optimistic anecdote, and one that she says has taught her some important lessons. First, that a lot of men--like Kirk, her partner in gender-swapping art crime--are already sympathetic to the issues women face in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) industries.

Second, "many of the guys who are behind that stupid, constant crap are totally decent, open-minded human beings who just don’t realize they’re doing it. You know how sometimes you don’t realize how much you and your girlfriend are talking about shoes or menstruation until some dude walks into the room? Well sometimes guys don’t realize how much they’re talking about titties. We just haven’t been around enough for them to notice."

The Hawkeye Initiative is now asking people to share their "Brosie moments," when they moved beyond gender-swapping pictures on the internet to taking steps in real life--and in the industries they care about--to effect change.

Update 5/15/13 6 PM EST: Welovefine.com told Wired that it is now selling Kirk's Bro-sie the Riveter posters in their store starting today for $45. And for another $45 you can buy both and hang them side-by-side in your office or home to replicate Meteor's tableau of sexy, sexy equality.