When I first went to Comic-Con, almost a decade ago, it was purely as a girlfriend. My then-love interest and I had gone to our respective home towns for the summer, and one day he called and asked for my measurements––he was making me an Uhura dress.

I understood then that part of my job at Comic-Con was partially to avoid saying anything too cynical or aggressive to his friends from back home (including the girlfriend of his best friend, who went every year in full Slave Leia regalia). But mainly, my job was to look good. I was young, and I went along with it because I was flattered that anyone would actually want to put me on display. Still, I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it, and if memory serves, I wasn’t very good at it. I am a girl of varied talents, but that summer I learned that being passive, high-concept arm candy doesn’t make use of any of them.

Which is not to say that I had a terrible time; when we got to San Diego, I ditched the boyfriend and found my own niche. I remember there being a fair number of a girlfriends, floating around at various levels of excitement or reluctance, but there were also women who were there because they were active members of one of the communities represented, either as educated consumers or as makers, or both, and across generations, they seemed to be talking to one another. My memory could be fuzzy, but I don’t remember a single booth babe. I do remember a lot of preteens in Sailor Moon suits, but that’s another matter.

But blah, blah, blah — times change. From 2000 to 2007, Comic-Con attendance tripled. Studios started to swoop in in earnest around 2001, after X-Men and the ascendancy of sites like Ain’t it Cool taught them the power of the permanent adolescent male market. As long as we’re on the subject of adolescence, if my experience at Comic-Con 2008 is any indication, the options for young girls here have, on the surface, become quite a bit more varied than the either/or between mannequin and active consumer/producer; at the same time, most of these new options seem to amount to little more than one side of that old binary split.

Take the two biggest hype magnets of this year’s Con, Twilight and The Watchmen. The former, Catherine Hardwicke’s upcoming fantasy based on the series of vampire novels for young adults, is a phenomenon that may have been represented at the Con eight or ten years ago, but it’s unlikely it would have been given a prime, opening-day slot in Comic-Con’s largest arena before the first film was even released. Certainly, ten years ago, it would have been unthinkable that a session of such prominence would devolve, as this one did, into full-day teen girl swoon fest.

Pre-teen femmes (often accompanied by moms) began lining up the night before. They sat through several panels in Hall H before Twilight even began, and practiced their cat calls and shrieks on grown-up hunks like Keanu Reeves and Mark Wahlberg (the latter compared his reception to touring Japan in his days as Marky Mark: “You don’t really say anything and they’re like ‘Oooh’,” he said. “It makes you feel warm in the pants.”) When Twilight time finally came round, the fans didn’t so much ask questions as make mild sexual propositions to the film’s pretty-boy stars, Robert Pattinson and Cam Gigandet, couched in between en masse squeals of barely-pubescent lust. A glance at Kevin’s live blog reveals that the takeaway from the panel came not from the panelists but from the audience: “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

And then there was Watchmen. The footage shown from Zach Snyder’s film on Day Two––almost surely the most buzzed about minutes of Comic-Con 2008––provided one of many opportunities for female actresses to play willingly into their own objectification. That all eyes on were Watchmen may have put a larger spotlight on actresses Carla Gugino and Malin Ackerman than their statements about their characters deserved. Still, it seemed notable that Gugino had virtually nothing to say about Sally Jupiter other than to note her resemblance to a “1940s Vargas girl pinup,” whilst Ackerman bragged that her Laurie Juspeczyk was just like “a real woman, besides the fact that she can kick ass and fight crime.” I honestly can’t figure out if that latter statement was meant as a bubble-burster––”Sorry, boys, but ‘real women’ don’t kill bad guys whilst dressed as strippers”––or if it’s actually an insult to the “real women” who do fight crime for a living.

But linguistic clumsiness aside, panel after panel featured actresses, who should have better things to do, endlessly discussing their own physical attributes, as the young men in the audience continually made it clear that this was all they were interested in. When asked how playing the girlfriend role in the third Mummy film differed from her usual day at the office, Maria Bello answered, “Well, I’m not naked in this film!” Cue the smirking slur from a young gentleman in the crowd: “Wow, that was the wrong thing to say. They just lost my ticket.”

Even as the changing nature of the action/sci-fi/nerdbait landscape may be opening up more opportunities for a Mila Kunis to take a tertiary role in a film like Max Payne (which allows her to “kick some ass in 5 inch heels,” as she crowed to auto-hoots on Day One), protagonist roles for women in such films have become virtually non-existent. There seem to be just enough to keep Angelina Jolie busy every three years or so in between her persistent stabs at a second Oscar.

This is one of the reasons why I was particularly looking forward to the Scream Like a Girl panel. Spike TV sponsored the smaller-than-it-should-have-been event as promo for their new Scream Awards, which moderator Kevin Smith subtitled, “the awards show for people who don’t get laid.” In addition to appearances from comic artist Pia Guerra (prototype of a small sub-sect of Comic-Con lady who should be considered in this conversation but was very peripheral to my experience this year: the Asexual Genius) and actress Lucy Lawless (an even smaller sub-sect: the Indifferent MILF-aged Goddess), the panel hosted two women on polar opposite ends of the Women at Comic-Con problem. At one end of the table sat Gale Ann Hurd, who began her career creating and producing movies like Terminator and Aliens–genre films built around independent women, movies that pretty much aren’t getting made anymore. At the other end: Jamie King, the blonde, willowy former model whose lovely but undeniably unempowered presence graced Sin City and will be part of Frank Miller’s The Spirit.

“It was a sneak attack,” Hurd said on that panel, of the first Terminator film. “It starred a woman, but people don’t read scripts, so they thought it didn’t.” here was nothing like an old-school Gale Hurd production at this year’s Comic-Con – in Terminator Salvation, Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays John Connor’s wife, is sixth billed. As far as I’m concerned, the fact that Hurd has not produced a female-fronted film since 2005’s box office disaster Aeon Flux (which Hurd insisted over the weekend she is “still very proud of”) is directly related to the rise of a kind of starlet like King in these kinds of films. The respective talents and accomplishments of these two women are simply not compatible with each other. What we’re seeing is the ghettoization of the female action star to below-the-title, near-disposable status. Even as eye candy, the sex appeal that many of these girls bring to a given film are just one element of an overall production design designed to keep aural erections intact for the duration. The idea of making a film where women actually look sexy, fight crime and are given the agency of real human beings isn’t even on the minds of those filmmakers who have done it before. At his Terminator press conference, McG recalled that his first film, Charlie’s Angels, was about “breaking down the glass ceiling” to prove that women could front a successful action film. “But I’m a different filmmaker now.” Because that mission was accomplished, or because your incompetent sequel convinced all around that there was no future in it?

This paucity of roles for a certain kind of actress became a big theme of Robert Rodrigeuz and Rose McGowan’s panel to announce the production of Red Sonja. The filmmaker and actress, who are famously a couple in real life, both bemoaned the number of “girlfriend roles” McGowan was offered after playing an iconic machine gun-legged, zombie-fighting stripper in Rodriguez’ Planet Terror. In order to help McGowan, the director had to figure out projects to build around her. You want to root for anything that even attempts to breaks out of the sorry mold, but does Rodriguez’ admission that it’s “a geek’s dream to immerse her in this world that I’ve been collecting secretly since adolescence” really do anything to empower McGowan as anything other than hot and pliable to the fantasies sprung from her boyfriend’s arrested development? Does it really make a dent in the wider girlfriend role glass ceiling to get a role by virtue of the fact that you *are* somebody’s girlfriend?

Maybe it’s best not to dwell on the complicated messages being broadcast from Comic-Con’s stages. After all, all evidence suggests that impressionable young women don’t come to Comic-Con anymore looking for role models––they come to scream and swoon and enact their own version of objectification. After six days in the shit, so to speak, I don’t know if this should make me proud, or if it should make me cry.