The Sexual (and Racial) Politics of Nerd Culture: A Dialogue*
* “A Dialogue” sounds really official, like we sat across from each other in our finery while sipping from mugs of coffee inscribed with our logo, but really it was a GChat conversation. It has been lightly edited for clarity.
Ezekiel Kweku (Shrill): Hi, Priya.
Priya Alika Elias (Wordy): Hi!
S: Against my better judgment, and because I wanted to understand nerds better, I revisited an ancient and seminal nerd text: the 1984 teen comedy Revenge of the Nerds. And it was…uncomfortable.
W: That movie is the Ur-text: it still informs the way that we think about nerds today. The funny thing is, I thought it was about the persecution of nerds until I went back and watched it again. Then it didn’t seem so much like a cool revenge comedy.
S: Yeah, I realized about fifteen minutes in that my memory of the movie was much different from the actual movie. The basic structure is pretty simple. Nerds come to campus; they are mistreated by the alpha jock fraternity and associated sorority; they fight back, and eventually win. Oh, and they get the girl. It’s the basic nerd narrative.
W: Which is meant to be heartwarming: it’s about the triumph of the underdog and his romantic success. But how that plays out in the movie is more complex. If we’re going to ask “Who is being persecuted?” and “Who is being harassed?” the answers might not be restricted to the male nerds.
S: Exactly.
W: For one thing, there are female nerds in the universe of the movie, but we don’t see them being rewarded.
S: Right. So there are two central male nerd protagonists, Lewis and Gilbert. Gilbert falls for one of the jocks’ girlfriends, Betty, a classic “hot mean girl” type. And by “falls for her,” I mean he lusts after her in as superficial a way as you can imagine. She’s hot, and besides that, there’s nothing appealing about her character at all. Whereas Lewis “falls” for a nerd girl, and they get together almost immediately when he teaches her how to use a computer.
W: It’s interesting that the girls that these geeks go for are always hot, but not portrayed as their intellectual equals.
S: Yes, that’s one thing that’s interesting about Lewis. Not only does he “win” her immediately, she’s presented as inferior to him in intelligence, even though she’s his female analog.
W: What’s prized in the man, intelligence, is not assigned equal value in the girl. So if the female nerd is intelligent but not physically attractive, that’s lower in the hierarchy than the place Betty occupies. Betty represents the classic “out of your league” story that we’re meant to root for. But yes, the way that story comes to a head is particularly disturbing to me.
S: The thing is, this is supposed to be a teen sex comedy, but there is only one scene in the film of consensual sex. Ironically, that’s a one-night stand between Gilbert and a nerd girl who he immediately discards in his pursuit of the ideal of Betty. All of the scenes of nudity are non-consensual, in fact.
W: These nerds are spying on the women in the movie, committing sex crimes and passing around nude photos that they’ve obtained through illegal surveillance. This is glossed over so much in the film. I read the Wikipedia description of the non-consensual sex scene in the movie, and it says “Lewis tricks Betty into having sex with him” — which I think is how we’re supposed to see it in the movie. It’s this benign act that we can forgive because it’s done in pursuit of a romantic goal. But that’s not the reality of it: the reality is that a nerd has sex with Betty while he’s dressed in the mask and clothes her boyfriend wore, so she thought it was her boyfriend.
S: And if that’s not terrible enough, there’s zero romantic tension between them. This is not a case in which she needs to “get past” the fact that he’s a nerd. These are two people who are enemies in a way that has no chemistry or playful sexual tension at all, unless you wanna count sexual predation as chemistry. But let’s go back a bit to the panty raid/surveillance. The nerds pass around nude photos. They break into the sorority house and catch the girls naked. They steal their underwear, and install cameras which they use to watch the girls all night. Then they distribute stills from the videos to the public. All these actions are presented as valid retaliation for the girls essentially “being teases.”
W: There’s a cluster of nice-guy stereotypes around the nerd. The idea is that nerds are people who are nice to women, who treat them with respect, in contrast to the stark misogyny of the jock crew. But these actions, which are justified in the movie, are misogynistic and abusive through and through.
S: If you wanna talk rape culture, “you deny me, so I will violate you” is about as clean an example of it as you can get.
W: Yes. It’s a culture of entitlement.
S: Yeah. They deserve the women, basically, because they are “not jocks.”
W: I was thinking, what does the nerd have to offer, other than himself? At least the jock offers a certain social status. Being a jock’s girlfriend in this context comes with a social reward. Oh, but I’m leaving out sex. Remember when Betty asks “Are all nerds this good [at sex]?” The answer is yes, because the jock stereotype is that they don’t care about sex or their partner’s pleasure.
S: Yes, Gilbert’s line of explanation as to why all nerds are good at sex was “All jocks do is think about sports. All nerds do is think about sex.” This is probably one of the more dated lines in the movie, coming as it does before the prevalence of ubiquitous free internet porn. When you say “all nerds think about is sex” in 2014, you’re basically imagining them watching a lot of porn. And you can tell me if you think mainlining porn constantly makes dudes better at sex.
W: You probably know my answer but for clarity’s sake, absolutely not. It makes them much worse.
Tags: Ezekiel Kweku, fandom, feminism, folklore, nerds, politics, priya alika elias, racism, ruining things
Related Posts
Movie Yelling With Shrill And Mallory: Welcome To Your Steampunk Future, Sorry There’s No Water But We Did Put Skulls On Everything
Sometimes Fandom Is Better: Head Canons Versus The Real Thing
Scare Yourself Silly: “The Noise Coming from Inside Children” and the Lost Works of Ed Kann
How To Survive Your Family Reunion
Misfits: Reflections on Identity, Race, and Prejudice
How I Learned to Love My Skin Colour
About Author
by Priya Alika Elias and Ezekiel Kweku
You can find Priya Alika Elias and Ezekiel Kweku holding down Twitter at all hours: dropping hot takes, telling bad jokes, and dunking on fools.
W: There’s so much talk about women believing in fairy tales or being ruined by fairy tales, but it holds true for many, many men.
S: At least most women recognize it as a “fairy tale.” Men don’t even recognize it as a construction; they think that narrative is their right.
I had a "DAMN STRAIGHT" fist-pumping moment after reading these two lines. This is such a great discussion all around.
And they will continue to see that narrative as their right until it's no longer a sign of weakness, of being a wimp/wuss/pussy if you don't get the girls. So, in other words, approximately never. It's not just women who suffer from unrealistic cultural expectations. The nerds (read: non-popular boys) get treated like complete losers by everyone, especially women, who hold them in contempt driven by their own insecurities. When you're 15, 16, and you get treated like that (e.g. getting your face flushed down the toilet daily because you do well academically or you dared speak to one of the 'popular' girls), you tend to harbor anger and resentment towards those who treated you poorly.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not condoning the objectification of women or other poor behavior, just attempting to articulate some of the possible circumstances that can lead to that mindset.
I loved alllllll of this! Also Revenge of the Nerds sounds straight up disgusting.
Yeah, I'd kind of like to see it just for the context and because people in power have designated it a cultural touchstone, but on the other hand, I don't even have enough time to consume all the media I know I would enjoy.
It's probably worth reading a summary and maybe watching that one nerd's final speech where they play "We Are the Champions" if you want to know how Nerd Culture thinks of itself, but on the other hand, if you really want to know how Nerd Culture thinks of itself, there's no shortage of jackasses who are ready to tell you.
It's terrible. And it was made worse for me by an experience in high school in the 80s, after the movie had gone to video/cable. My parents were hosting our extended family and we were watching TV, my dad flipping channels. He came across Revenge of the Nerds, right when the guys are spying on the naked women, and one of the men says something like, "Forget the boobs, I WANT TO SEE SOME BUSH!"
This scene was terrible enough on its own, but as a 15-year-old seeing it in the presence of my grandparents, it was traumatizing…and still kind of is, decades later.
This is such an interesting and truthful discussion, and every single 'nerd' or 'geek' guy could stand to read it, but unfortunately most of them will have a kneejerk rejection of the things you bring up, because their self-identity relies on 'not being like those people who bullied us'
Given the whole GamerGate bullshit, they are the bullies now too.
I think we shied away from explicitly drawing parallels to contemporary situations and making it too topical, but yeah – not only are the nerds the bullies NOW, but they've always had the mindset of bullies. All that's different now is that they have more power.
Yeah, there's an unfortunate tendency amongst self-identified nerds that makes me want to dash around yelling "Nerds are NOT a protected class." Like the narrative that many of the cis het white dudes construct is that they are the MOST put-upon and trampled over.
Not even close, duder, for real.
I'm a nerd, I guess, and I loved this discussion and thought it was right on.
For me not much has changed in how my brain works nor what I’m interested in, either. But now I’m completely uninterested in associating myself with the larger set of people that identify themselves as nerds. It’s almost like looking in the DSM and seeing all these symptoms for nerddom and deciding it doesn’t fit.
This right here is basically how I feel about labeling myself a "nerd" as well. My interests and the way my mind works haven't changed, but I do not identify at all with the types of people who wear "nerd" as a badge with which to define themselves primarily. It's part of who I am, but if I were to describe myself it'd be pretty far down the list of words I use.
I relate to this a whole lot.
Plus there's so so much hair-splitting and unofficial ranking that goes on and I find it all just incredibly tiresome. If you're not super interested in computers/games/math/science and are instead all about history/art/literature/cultural studies you will never be acknowledged as a "true" nerd.
In my case, I split the baby by doubling… the baby…? I'll use "geeky" or "nerdy" in a one-sentence description of myself/my friends, but I'll also use "feminist" or "social justice" in the same breath. Which tends to get me a pretty strong and immediate facial expression one way or the other.
I feel like this about the word "geek" – something I didn't realise until a colleague called me a "multisensory perception geek" (that's what I do research on) and it upset me even though she meant it as a compliment.
Unfairly, it reminds me of Richard Dawkins-level atheists (i.e. rude people who really love science to the exclusion of considering other ways of understanding the world to be valid).
More fairly, it has connotations of very strong identification, perhaps over-identification, with one particular aspect of my being, and I am far more than just that one aspect. I am many overlapping, sometimes contradictory things, and that is a large part of how I have kept myself from being swept away by the pressures of academia, where over-identification with your research is often lauded. A friend and I have developed the mantra, "You are not your research!" and we say it to each other when things are getting too much.
I think now as an adult I use nerd as an adjective rather than a noun. I have nerdy interests, I'm a nerdy person but it doesn't define me as much as describe me.
W: It’s interesting that the girls that these geeks go for are always hot, but not portrayed as their intellectual equals.
S: Yes, that’s one thing that’s interesting about Lewis. Not only does he “win” her immediately, she’s presented as inferior to him in intelligence, even though she’s his female analog.
Revenge-of-the-Nerds-1984-revenge-of-the-nerds-11733853-950-534W: What’s prized in the man, intelligence, is not assigned equal value in the girl. So if the female nerd is intelligent but not physically attractive, that’s lower in the hierarchy than the place Betty occupies. Betty represents the classic “out of your league” story that we’re meant to root for
So, does The Big Bang Theory ever do anything cleverer than this? I've tried to watch it about half a dozen times because I know a few people who really rate it, but it always always seems to be "male nerds/geeks [sorry Americans, I don't totally understand your taxonomy] > hot non-nerd girls and not-hot nerd girls", which, no. Does it ever turn the tables?
I guess I didn't take Big Bang Theory quite that way. Penny is portrayed to have a completely different kind of intelligence; she wasn't a PhD or super into Star Trek or what have you, but she was very, very able to deal with Life Things and moved very easily in social situations. The guys, overwhelmingly, are portrayed as book-smart and mostly well-meaning (if tone-deaf), but completely unable to deal with things that aren't their lab work or chosen Geek Cred Things. The point being that Penny's also portrayed as smart, just a very different kind of smart, and as having completely different priorities than the guys, which I don't really find to be that problematic–it's pretty typical for neighbors/friends/partners to have that kind of dichotomy.*
*disclaimer that I haven't watched BBT in at least three years so this all might have changed in the interim.
Is that right, though? I kind of remember Penny as being basically incompetent. She's a terrible actress, she doesn't know how to take her car in for maintenance, she's still a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory (I don't watch the show regularly, so I don't know, maybe she was considered for management at some point? She's been there a long time.). I guess she's good in social situations, but it seems like it's less that she's superlative than it is that those other guys are just terrible at them.
I don't know, what am I doing, I shouldn't talk about Big Bang Theory.
Me either. :)
Yeah, they're definitely jumping back on the dumb blonde train with her characterization. They talked about how she wasn't even a good waitress. BUT she is portrayed regularly as more "manly" than all the guys, teaching them to gut fish and so on, even with her hyper-feminine dress. It's a weird straddling of that.
But Howard married Bernadette who is just as smart as him and has more degrees and a better job than him.
Sheldon is dating Amy who is not characterized as traditionally attractive (though he is also seemingly asexual), but certainly his intellectual equal, though he will in no way admit it.
Sorry that I know so much about this embarrassing show.
All I know about this show comes from clips that were embedded in a Powerpoint on working with students on the autism spectrum, which made me uncomfortable because they were all people trying to "fix" Sheldon – including a scene that seemed, out of context, to be Amy trying to "fix" his asexuality. Is he aromantic, too?
He occasionally shows signs of real romantic feelings towards Amy, but yeah definitely on the aromantic spectrum. Mostly though, Sheldon's apparent asexuality and Amy's healthy (and frustrated) sex drive are played off each other for laughs.
That just feels like such a missed opportunity.
Yeah that bugged me. I think TBBT is the type of show where there's a lot of potential for representation of things like asexuality, social anxiety, nerd girls who are both successful in their chosen careers and have men who are interested in them, messing with gender stereotypes, etc., but so often it goes for the cheap joke, and that kind of ruins it for me. Because Sheldon doesn't need to be fixed, and Amy doesn't need to make jokes about how she's so unattractive that at a party once, she passed out and people put even more clothes on her (har har, Chuck Lorre). So yeah, I have TBBT feelings.
Okay, yuck. I vote we make a new version and call it String Theory: the zany antics of a neuroatypical guy named Keldon and his neighbor Jenny and their diverse group of friends. It seems like such a rich comedic vein; someone should mine it better.
It certainly sounds like it got better. I was on vacation once and had nothing to watch but TV and the decentest thing I could find was BBT so I watched a bunch of episodes from a couple of years ago and I was SO DISTURBED by how the Howard character. In one of them he was stalking a house that was a location of a reality show with models with plans to lurk outside to console them when they got kicked off. It was played for laughs but what he was planning was sexual abuse.
I complained about this to a friend who told me it got better and Howard has a girlfriend now, yadda yadda. (Sorry, rapists have girlfriends sometime, that doesn't preclude them from being rapists.) So not interested in ever watching it though.
In every episode I've seen, Howard has remained vile. Having a girlfriend just makes him a nebbish who no longer whines about how he doesn't get laid, but instead reminds everyone that he's getting laid.
I have no reason to break my current BBT ban then, good to know!
I would actually say it has gotten worse. I used to watch it (sorry!) and there would be the occasional thing I found problematic. For example, there were these ideas at the beginning that hot geek girls didn't exist. I remember a joke about making a strip version of some chess-based game, and the punchline was that any girl who could play the game would not be a girl you would want to see naked. That idea was eventually turned around some, and portrayed as the ignorance of the boys, not as fact. Bernadette came along and was great. Amy came along and was great.
BUT- while Penny's character has been allowed to grow some (though she still doesn't have a LAST NAME, as far as I know) the characters of Amy and Bernadette have deteriorated. Bernadette became a stereotypical shrew, and Amy is a sad, desperate, lovelorn type, her intellect rarely coming into play, and sometimes she is a flat out sexual predator (of Penny more than Sheldon) and it's supposed to be funny. She's like a female Howard a lot of the time.
And while it used to be funny when Sheldon spouted silly evo-psych theories about gender, the joke being how out-of-touch he was, when last I watched, those jokes were just flat out sexist. They weren't funny. They seemed written for shock value and a cheap laugh. I just cannot anymore with that show.
I think Penny's a good example of Strong Female Character in the sense not of "this female character is Strong!" but "this is strong characterization of a female." She *is* kind of a mess, but I think the show encourages you to identify with her and root for her — she's a bit lost wrt life direction, can't seem to find her calling, needs a glass of wine or seven to deal with her simmering bitterness at life — but she's funny and honest and just genuinely someone you'd want to know. She's the only character who is perfectly fearless in confronting Sheldon when he's being pushy; she just straight-up has no fucks to give and so can't be intimidated by his weapon of choice, which is making you want to do whatever just to shut up his whining. Penny is definitely not some kind of omnicompetent badass, but I really like her. She just comes across as flaky and flawed in the way that people often are, which has moved her away from "unattainable blank who's desirable because she's a Non-Nerd Girl" and into "someone Leonard loves and admires and sometimes just gets fed the fuck up with," aka a reasonable tv-facsimile of a real relationship.
BBT in general I'm kind of eh, whatever about — but I'm very much pro-Penny.
Well, I am happy to believe you, since I think that the show is the kind of thing I am just never going to be into. I am definitely super-glad that people have adopted the language distinguishing Strong Female Characters from Female Charaters, Strongly Characterized. Hooray for everything today I guess!
I am currently really bothered by people talking about Strong Women in real life, as in, "Oh, I love Strong Women!" Really. I am more interested in hearing about these Weak Women who are apparently beneath your notice.
Yeah, I have a coworker who, in one of our early discussions on feminism (I just have to talk about it everywhere, apparently), mentioned she's so strict about what female characters she likes and that most of them are horrible she said it like that was somehow proof of what a staunch feminist she was, and I was just ??? Because I understand that there are a lot of female characters that are underdeveloped, not written well, etc., but she claimed to dislike a bunch because they weren't 'Strong Female Character' types or that they were 'annoying,' etc. And I don't get how having ridiculously high standards for female characters (especially compared to male characters, who get love because they exist at all on a show and bonus points if they're sociopaths) = feminism. Not to say that my coworker's not a feminist, but I don't get how ascribing characteristics like 'annoying' to female characters rather than male characters is in any way a claim to your feminist tv-watching skills. /end my petty coworker-related grumbling
I think that the next movement in cultural criticism is going to be a much more rigorous of how and why we relate to fictional characters, because I got to say, I've heard all the reasons people say they like characters, and frankly, I'm not sure I believe a word of it.
I definitely feel like it's moving in that direction, or at least I hope it is. I love analyzing gender dynamics and tropes in pop culture and one of my favorite concepts to work with is rule 63- I'm not really sure of its origin but from what I understand it refers to switching the gender of a certain character. It's a very simple idea, but gender-flipping characters and imagining how that behavior would look (how would the audience react if a female character tried to pull half the crap most male characters pull in most shows? etc.) has been an easy tool for me to examine how different genders are treated in pop culture.
I don't watch the show anymore, but the first 3 or 4 seasons, Penny is shown to be smart, but she chooses to ignore things that don't seem important to her. I think the car maintenance is one of those examples. She knows that the car needs to be worked on, but she does not mark it as a high priority until the car quits working. And yes, do I know many, many people, including those who would identify as Very Smart nerds, who have done the same thing. She is not as interested in the intellectual goals of the nerdy males, but she is perfectly capable of pursuing similar goals, if she wants to, but she wants to be an actor.
She is not any more of a mess than the male characters; they may have 'good' jobs and college degrees, but are floundering just as much as Penny, in different ways. (Example: all the episodes where Sheldon breaks the timing belt in his brain when his intellectual superiority is challenged, ha!) I really like Penny, too, and I agree with Hththe1st. Plus, I hope they do eventually give Penny a break and let her succeed in her chosen field. It's fiction, after all!
Well, the car maintenance I just remember because the joke was that Sheldon asked her what was wrong with it, and she said that the light wouldn't go off.
I have definitely ignored the check engine light in my time, don't get me wrong, but I have never been confused about whether or not it meant I need to check my engine.
I have always interpreted Penny's responses about her check engine light having always been on as indicative of the fact that she needs the car which is currently functioning and cannot afford either the maintenance costs of having it checked or the loss of her means of transportation for the time it would take to be checked. It is not that she doesn't understand what the light means or how it works, but that it is a risk she has to take in order to make ends meet.
I haven't seen the episode in a long time, so maybe I am remembering it wrong, but I interpreted her reaction to the engine light as frustration at having to deal with it on one of those days where everything is going wrong. I could certainly see me yelling 'I don't know, the light won't go off', which would not mean that I didn't know what the check engine light meant, just that I have no idea what is actually wrong and I don't want to deal with it even though now there is no choice.
I've always seen Penny as a smart person who is not interested in the same things the guys are interested in, but she likes them and they like her, with some friction, plus all the characters are exaggerations, as sitcom chars usually are. Actually, the female character I can't stand in the show is Leonard's mother. It's often funny, but it's always mean and is the standard 'mean, unfeeling woman who chose career instead of her family' char.
I'm in favor of your commentary here. :)
I feel like it's kind of bullshit when someone says, "She dresses like a girl but she's more manly than the guys are!" like it's a… bad thing? Like, isn't that what we want? Someone on TV who shows us that you can be into very girly things and wear only lumberjack clothing, or who can get gussied up and walk out of the apartment looking like a goddamned model who also happens to be able to gut a fish without blinking and is the first to stride out of the bedroom with a baseball bat in the middle of the night when you think there might be an intruder? (It's your cat; it's always your goddamned cat, but you don't KNOW until you look.) Why is it BAD that she's more than just The Token Girl? I know there's the flip side of it showing nerd men as incompetent, but just focusing on Penny here.
This is why, despite the show's flaws, I desperately love Robin from "How I Met Your Mother."
I think the fact that Penny is actually funny is a big thing already – she's not just the clueless blonde everyone laughs about, she can dish out, too.
BBT in general I'm kind of eh, whatever about — but I'm very much pro-Penny.
Super late comment but yes, THIS, you perfectly summed up how I feel about Penny. She is such a fantastic, REAL character, more than any of the others, and I would love to be her friend. Why the fuck Kaley Cuoco hasn't gotten an Emmy nomination for that role, I couldn't tell you. "Hair too golden? Laugh too musical? World too much a better place for her mere presence in it?"
Thank you for answering! I guess that sounds better than the RotN, though I still don't feel great about the gender politics of "men are useless at Life Stuff, women are useless at Science Stuff".
Well there are two main female characters (and one more minor recurring one) who are NOT useless at Science Stuff.
I think the show pulls weirdly and interestingly in both directions. It sometimes manages to be reactionary and progresssive in the the same scene. In the same LINE. There's a weird tension running right through its gender politics, and sometimes the implications of various jokes are revolting. But I don't think that's all there is.
I think one thing it does which, from an amoral standpoint, is quite clever, is set up situations where you CAN laugh at, say, Amy for being sexually demanding yet not conventionally attractive, or at Raj for having feminine tastes, or Penny for her combination of girly and masculine interests — and yet, the joke is rarely actually sounded out, everyone on the screen treats this as normal and unremarkable. The characters are treated as overall loveable and deserving. So on the one hand, there's this hovering sense of mockery and cruelty that occasionally STRIKES — and yet, at the same time, you have an unusually high number of characters who repeatedly flout or subvert gender roles and just keep on doing it, sometimes happily, sometimes not, as part of their lives.
It helps that early on they had Leslie Winkle (a female scientist) around, who was implied to be smarter than Sheldon (eg, "I just casually solved that problem you've been working on for ages"), and now have Amy and Bernadette, who are both very accomplished in their fields. Not saying TBBT is great about this, just that it's not as bad as it looks on that aspect.
Nope.
The term you're looking for is obviously post-nerd.
I really wanted to make some sort of X-Men type pun but couldn't make it work. X-Nerds or something. :(
Nerd-men: Days of future past?
So I mentioned a while ago that I joined to comment on this site mostly to go "YAY GAY RUGBY" since it was mentioned as one of the daily links. It was sometime after I became more athletic and playing rugby in particular (and befriended straight and gay men and women ruggers and other athletes) that I realized I was through the looking glass and that the people I thought as jocks were actually much nicer and the people who labeled themselves as nerds were awful. Granted, there's nuance all over the place — there are terrible and wonderful people and everyone in between — but it just hammered across the fact that being a nerd doesn't automatically make you a Good Person.
Maybe both sides kind of envy each other? Like the jocks are everything a nerdy guy might want to be, popular and attractive and so on, and the nerds are good at things that might be hard to grasp for other people, like, idk, advanced math or something, so everyone spreads their own nasty stereotypes about the other party and they're both just normal people basically. Am I making sense? I'm half asleep already, so sorry if it's just gibberish.
In my life there has never been a clear nerd/jock dichotomy (at least among girls and women). I ran track and cross country in high school, and I remember that most of the girls on the varsity teams were also honors students. I think in the US we tend to view nerds and jocks as antitheses because our endemic strain of toxic masculinity is so damn anti-intellectual. (But apparently its not like this everywhere? Example: Harry Potter was a Quidditch star but not a "jock" by any definition.)
By the by: I loved this post!
Same here actually, and I was friends with a number of people who played sports. I still had that mentality that they probably didn't like me, which was likely because of my hometown environment more than anything. I'm just glad that I managed to get out of that mindset.
I guess I just don't understand why there's this huge, imaginary wall set up between the life of the body and the life of the mind. I mean, I GET it because blah blah Aristotle and the whole vita activa and vita contemplativa, but we can actually be at LEAST two things at once.
S: I think what it boils down to is an inferiority complex. A girl will “go geek” because she knows it will get her attention from thirsty geeks, and they resent that idea. They’re threatened by the idea of a girl being their equal intellectually.
… Or a girl will "go geek" because those are her interests, which aren't inherently a response to men? You had me until this bit and the next quote. Ugh.
Yeah, that part really bothered me in what was otherwise an excellent essay.
They're saying that's the perception among male nerds, I think it's pretty clear that they're rejecting that concept.
Yeah, they're elucidating the thought process behind the "fake geek girl" accusations, not supporting it.
Thanks – I read it as "this is a thing that happens and geeks get disproporationally mad about it," not "this is a thing that doesn't really happen, yet geeks still get disproportionally mad about it."
right. I get how it could read like we were accepting the frame (like, how could you have a "disproportionate" response to a phenomena that's imaginary in the first place), but what we were trying to say is that even if it were a real thing, the response would still be an overreaction.
I appreciate the clarification! But that passage and the next one still read super weird to me.
W: For so long, certain things have been the domain of geek guys: gaming, comics, so on. And with a lowering of the barriers to entry, women may enter. That stresses geek guys out, because for so long the idea was, “let me pick you up by telling you about these things.” But now girls know that Wonder Woman’s first appearance was in such-and-such year, in this issue.
These things have been male "domains" only in the public sense. Women have always liked comics and gaming and whatever — it was just not an interest you could share with people and bond over, because you were (and still are, mostly) excluded from being able to participate in the community around these interests. I feel like there's a huge distinction between women trying to join a largely-male (& already existing) community around interests they already have, and picking these interests up from men. & I think that distinction is pretty important.
I think that's a valid criticism. I'll let Priya speak for herself, but I don't think she intended to give the impression that women picked up their "nerdy interests" from men, but that it's easier for them to explore their interest in them without entering the male-dominated spaces that formerly were a huge part of mediating knowledge, and also easier for them to enter those very spaces. The erosion of these barriers is not exclusive to women – it's easier for anyone to immerse themselves in nerddom than ever before – but I think Priya's point was that it has affected their access in particular. But yes, this is an important distinction to make.
Soooo, nerderfly? Mothra?
More seriously, I strongly identify with the "used to be a nerd" thing though I purposely distanced myself from nerd culture in college when I started seeing how toxic it was towards women, people of color, "non-normative" nerds, etc. The pressure to be the token Geek Girl was too gross and I nopetopussed right out of that scene. I'm watching my sister navigate the same situation now, almost a decade later and it makes me sad. It's 2014, for goodness sake! Why is this still an issue?!
Mothra is the most badass of the traditional kaiju so I vote for Mothra.
And yes, entirely! This was one of the reasons I stopped hanging with the anime/gamer crowds in college, because there was so much of that "holy crap a girl's here let's put her on a pedestal because clearly she can't have any idea what's going on" when I just wanted to play some damn Fluxx. I've noticed lately that a lot of my old acquaintances from those groups are starting to realize that hey, this shit's fucked, and what can we do to stop/change that?
And then there are others that are entirely incorrigible and I'm so glad I'm not friends with them anymore. (We're almost 30 and you still don't get it??) It's unfortunately still prevalent in so-called "nerd circles" and ugh.
Yes, I liked the image of flying around and destroying EVERYTHING, so I'm in!
I think maybe the best thing about getting older is that I now know I don't have to put up with any of that crap anymore and can just tell people that they're assholes and be done. I hear you on the "ugh."
A friend and I met some guys once who were super excited and surprised that we were both nerds and women; my response was pretty much 'Have you actually met any other women? Or been on the internet?'. I feel like at this point it has to take effort to not notice that there are women with nerd interests.
This was so, so damn good. I also caught RotN on TV a few years ago and was struck by how anti-feminist it was. I first saw it as a nerdy kid and remember thinking, "Damn straight! Nerds rule!" I don't think I even caught onto the sexual nature of the movie, really. I was so invested in defending my self-identity as a nerd that most other things fell by the wayside, including, I imagine, notions of gender equality as well as sex itself.
I think in some ways that informs the mechanical notions of sex this article talks about. When you inhabit the mindset of a RotN male nerd, sex is a byproduct of being cool and respectable. It's just one more perk of being a Redeemed Cool Nerd, in addition to not getting made fun of and being able to openly play Magic: The Gathering in the lunch room. I think I wanted to tell people I'd had sex more than I actually wanted to have sex.
A better, although certainly far from perfect, nerd redemption narrative is, I think, Real Genius. The female nerds have far more agency, although they still are second-fiddle to the male protagonists. And it's just a lot less misanthropic of a movie in general.
Real Genius forever. Definitely needed more women, but a far, far superior movie. I also liked that it broke down the stereotype that nerds are inherently less physically attractive, by putting Val Kilmer in the lead role.
On a side note, remember when Val Kilmer was funny? Good times, good times.
If the opportunity ever arises to put a giant jiffy pop in someone's house and then heat it with a space laser, you best bet I'm gonna take it. Thanks Real Genius!
I dunno if I agree about the race stuff. My friends who identify as nerds who are also POC pretty much all have stories about being called "the whitest brown person they know" at some point in their lives. Just cuz they like Pokemon.
Yeah, I was thinking about this in terms of Family Matters. Steve Urkel was such a touchstone for the nerd stereotype in the 90s.
I was surprised he wasn't mentioned actually, because that is one of the first images that comes to mind whenever I think of the classic idea of the nerd (I was born in 85 so for me classic is apparently Family Matters).
we didn't talk about the racial aspect too much, partially because the construction of the "black nerd" basically didn't exist yet… Urkel and LaForge didn't come until a bit later.
Gotcha. I didn't see RotN 'til the 90s (as I did with many 80s movies), so I often conflate the two time periods.
yeah, but who denied their identity? was it their fellow PoC, or was it white people? in my own experience, the identity policing came almost exclusively from white people, not from other black people. and from talking to other black nerds, that is not unusual or uncommon.
Yeah it was white people. But Indian kids didn't get it any less. If you aren't white or Asian it's "weird."
My husband and another friend of mine–who can both identify as black nerds–have definitely gotten that policing from other black folks. I don't know if it has anything to do with them, their personalities, or where we live (Baltimore metro area) but it's really frustrating to hear about it, and occasionally hear it. I don't know why, but occasionally people also like to tell me (Viet Am nerd to boot) that my husband or friend is one of the whiter black people they know. It's sometimes white people, sometimes non-white POC.
ETA: I wish it was just white people who did the identity policing bc then I know how to put them in their place ("oh, so somehow you're an authority on what it means to be Black then??"), but when it's a black person or even another POC I'm just like "uhh, all I can do here is side-eye" because suddenly I feel like there's just too much to unpack there.
that's too bad. the academic literature on the costs of "acting white" and where the pressures and policing come from is mixed, I think. In a weird coincidence, there's some discussion on twitter going on about "talking white" right now which is a variant on the idea, if you look at Jamelle Bouie's feed: https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/517016334811815… (even more weirdly, he ends up linking back to, and quoting me in this very piece: https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/517027683914747…)
I agree w/r/t to the academic literature. I don't really know why the dynamics vary so much, to be honest; I used to read TNC's writing religiously and he often writes about how he didn't get that kind of identity policing growing up in West Bmore. Neither my husband or my friend didn't grow up in neighborhoods that were nearly as economically isolated (for lack of a better phrase) but they grew up in working class families and neighborhoods and it's just.. weird. Sometimes I wonder if the policing is harsher in a more mixed race environment but at best that's just speculation.
> yeah, but who denied their identity? was it their fellow PoC, or was it white people?
http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/original/1111…
(Apologies for the necro – I'm just now seeing this article.)
I think that at this point there are kind of two different nerd cultures, and one of those cultures is made up mostly of people who actually really suffered some kind of institutional oppression, and the other one is basically white male nerds who — having an expectation of receiving the rewards of patriarchy — instead of rejecting the entire notion of those hierarchies and social currency, just made our own culture that had all the same rules but in which we got to be assholes at the top of the mountain.
I don't mean to trivialize serious social problems like violence or abuse, but I think there is a quality of desiring to inflict on others what white male nerds perceive that they experienced — that's why so many of these stories are revenge stories instead of reconciliation stories. We're not trying to make common cause with the jocks and be friends, we're trying to supplant them.
I keep not being sure how I should include myself in the white-male-nerd group, since I definitely was a part of it (and even bought into a lot of the underpinning ideology for a long time), but subsequently categorically reject it. I guess I am just trying to say that I acknowledge my responsibility for it, and simultaneously repudiate it.
Sorry, everyone.
Almost no one admits when they've been wrong about anything, so you get an enthusiastic high five from me. I know I have a history of fucking up and being inadvertently shitty too, and I can only hope it was mostly down to immaturity and my attempts to be better will stick. Also I think you're 100% correct about self-identified nerdom being a horrible fractal of jockdom. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss, etc.
Less a nerd revolution, more of a coup, I think. This is part of what it makes it so hard to get the Nerd Old Guard on the side of feminism — “feminism” was only ever a signifier that they used to indicate how they were better than the jocks. They don't really WANT feminism, they want women as prizes and trophies and eye candy just the way the jocks did.
Yeah, the cynic in me says this is just how people are when they find themselves to suddenly be the beneficiary of a power disparity, especially if they were once on the low end of it, and they rationalize this in a million different ways. (“I paid my dues” is a favorite, for me.) I think there are actual Reasons for this having to do with the zero sum allotment of power within a hierarchy and a natural aversion to loss and a powerful cognitive need to perceive one's current privilege as consistent with one's past suffering, but fuck that, it's also just horrible.I just keep remembering stories about how hippie dudes in the late 60s were all for women's lib as long as that meant women were putting out but still shutting up, and how shitty white feminists have been to WOC through out the history of feminism. I suppose the shit always does flow downhill.This does sometimes make me wonder who we, as members of this emerging internet feminist tidal wave, might be screwing over, since I'm not *quite* arrogant enough to think that we'd be totally immune to the foibles of human frailty, but this community is so inclusive that no candidates suggest themselves out of hand. (I apologize now if this inspires a bunch of impassioned, deleted comments from Aggrieved Men who think they are being victimized. No. You are still at the top of the pyramid and shit does not flow uphill. Sit down.)
Yeah, I don't think it's impossible for a radical re-envisioning of your cultural group into a non-hierarchical one. I think a key part of it is to remember that it's not enough to reject your place in the hierarchy, you've got to reject the notion of hierarchy itself, so I am optimistic that we're going to sort this one out. (Hahah, how ludicrous is that, though? “Yeah, yeah, I know that the struggle for human equality has literally been going on for ten thousand years, ever since we realized that we could start pushing each other around, but I think we're really close to getting it right!”) (Nevertheless.)
It's like Dr. Frankenstein on loop. THIS time we've got it right!
But no we really do.
I think the simple answer to your insightful question is, "people without Internet access." Just here in North America, there are still a lot of people who don't have access, either because they live in rural areas where it doesn't pay the phone companies to put in upgraded lines to carry DSL (my mother had only dial-up access in rural Vermont until earlier this year, and let me tell you, trying to do anything on dial-up these days is a case study in please-can-I-just-kill-myself-now) or because they can't afford access in the cities and nobody has bothered to show them how they can use, for instance, libraries–assuming they even have access to libraries in these days of decimated public services. If they don't know there's a conversation out there waiting for their input, we'll never get it. (Smartphone Internet access only takes you so far, especially if you have to pay data charges.)
Welp, THERE IT IS. I do think this community naturally organizes itself into a hierarchy, like all communities, but then there's the people who can't even join in. BARGLE.
I think your first point about different nerd cultures is really spot on; I mean, I'm pretty horrified reading this takedown of RotN myself but it doesn't have any significant or personal weight for me because I never watched or identified with the movie in the first place. I still do quietly think of myself as a socially conscious POC nerd in the vein of Bao Phi and Junot Diaz, and tend to think of my husband the same way, so I'm a little surprised given their interests (but not really given the internet drama) at reading fellow Toasties say they think of themselves as former nerds.
My husband and I straddle whatever nerd/jock dichotomy that remains by actually being pretty active too, so that doesn't help things. There's a lot of food for thought here..
I find I have to think of at least some dichotomy, because when you see the other culture — that's all based on knitting star wars tea cozies or dressing up like anime characters or making comics about obscure characters from history — and how open and inclusive it CAN be, then it's actually kind of hard to imagine that they've been built by the same people.
Yes! Exactly! Like I love the parts that involve making a giant Companion Cube, or say, all of the Mary Sue, or people dressing up like Totoro. I guess I've start delving so far into one side that when shit like GamerGate rears its head I'm like "oh, those are assholes, not People Like Me."
Oscar in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Was has some of the entitlement towards women that this analysis gives. Other than his sister, I never think that Oscar sees women as people. But that's part of the story, in a way that it doesn't appear to be in Revenge of the Nerds
Definitely. I was debating mentioning Junot Diaz at all because I think some of his characters' relationships with women (and stories of Junot interacting with women) seem to be all like "HEEEEEEY LADIES" but his larger perspective on people telling their stories, particularly women telling their own stories, is pretty compelling.
Junot Diaz's treatment of women in his stories is so interesting. Roxane Gay gets at this in Bad Feminist when she discusses "This is How You Lose Her," but he strives for a depiction of a misogynistic man that shows the downside to that attitude and how it really hurts the main guy in his relationships and life. Still, it gets a bit tiresome. I liked Oscar Wao more, particularly because I thought Lola was a good character.
> (and stories of Junot interacting with women)
Can confirm, personally.
And part of that, it can also be argued, is cultural. But that's a long discussion I'm not sure I have the spoons for today.
(Apologies for the necro-comment; I'm just finding this article.)
Ah man, when I was like 13 my Dad showed me this movie. He raised me as a second generation geek and thought it was an important cultural touchstone. I was too young to really get the nuance of a lot of it but pretty much went nopenopenope at the sorority girl/nerd sex scene. Internet validation for my teenage self!
Yeah, I'm trying and failing not to feel insufferably hipster, because — yeah, I was never under the impression that any of this was okay. I saw it as a young teenager and thought it was *horrifying,* because these empty shells of women were just being passed back and forth between two competing groups of predatory assholes. Welcome to the party, rest of the world! Revenge of the Nerds is some toxic bullshit and always was.
I guess I could be considered a "former nerd" but mostly because I feel like the goalposts got moved on me. In highschool I was an unathletic bookworm who wanted to be a scientist and spent her free time volunteering at science camps and hanging out on my computer and reading fantasy books, and I would have called myself a nerd or a geek. Then I went to university and suddenly it wasn't enough to be an uncool scientist, nerds were supposed to watch anime and read comic books and play video games and dress in a particular way. As a scientist, it feels a bit weird that "our" label got co-opted so completely that I can really only think of one or two scientists I know who would fit it, while I can think of at least a dozen that would fit in better with the "jock" crowd.
I feel the same way. I still identify as a nerd, but that mostly comes from years and years of other people labeling me as such. In high school, I was a music nerd- part of both band and choir (through a couple of years anyway), a complete bookworm with a LOVE of grammar and history (yes, I said grammar, come at me haters), and someone who loved and was raised on science fiction. But going to college made it clear that I wasn't *enough* of a nerd. Among my friends I was still considered one, and was always "The Nerdy One" if we were classifying our friends according to high school tropes, but I think in public I resorted to what I call "Closet Nerddom" – I don't really blast it in public, but if you hang around me long enough, all my little quirks and loves come piling out to the point that you'll have to move or get squished by the avalanche. It's…weird. Female nerds have always been there, but we're still outside the gates in a lot of ways, so sometimes it seems easier to classify ourselves as "former nerds" than deal with changing nerd culture from the inside out.
Yeah, that's pretty much how I feel, too. I was totally an indoor kid who loved to read and did well academically, but I was never much of a gamer or all that into comic books or anime or what have you. I was definitely a nerd, though! I am a scientist now, and for that reason I still describe myself as a nerd to some extent. My experience as a nerd, both past and present, is so different from the nerd culture being described here and more generally in popular culture that I feel more and more distanced from the label.
Yeah, I was most definitely a nerd in high school because I was hugely into history and not really keyed in to the pop culture most of my classmates were consuming. But then I got to university, and it turned out that nerds have to be into Neil Gaiman and Attack on Titan and Doctor Who and . . . I don't like any of those things!
I really do think that nerd culture is just as strict and structural as non-nerd culture- just with different markers of being "on the inside." Mainstream culture accepts you if you wear certain brands; nerd culture rewards you if you can quote Firefly.
Nerd culture straight-up scares me, because it's so incredibly, self-rewardingly xenophobic. I really don't like fundamentalists.
I say this as a professional software developer.
I blame capitalism.
Seriously
Ugh so many people don't get that a lot of this movie is gross and sexist and slut-shamey and rapey in the same way that they don't get how it's pretty much rape when the nerd gets the hot mean girl in Sixteen Candles, too. It may not be as overt, but nice guy syndrome that dictates nerds should get hot chicks solely for not being bullies in high school is alive and well today.
Also, after reading this wonderful dialogue, go read this! http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/27/…
"Nerds come to campus; they are mistreated by the alpha jock fraternity and associated sorority; they fight back, and eventually win. Oh, and they get the girl. It’s the basic nerd narrative."
and
"All these actions are presented as valid retaliation for the girls essentially “being teases.”"
Okay, so I have no reference to discuss Revenge of the Nerds, but I did re-watch Mean Girls over the weekend, and I ended up loathing Janis and Damian. Like the Nerds, they get away with every act of cruelty because they're "different" slash "better." That's the whole point here; they're meant to be read as "better" from the opening scene, so they have every right to do whatever they want simply because their classmates don't realize how much "better" they are.
They also get the girl at the end (Cady) even though they don't ever treat her like a real person.
A good counterpoint to that though is, remember that episode of 30 Rock, where Liz Lemon goes to her high school reunion thinking that she had been a poor, oppressed nerd during that whole time, but actually it turns out that she was just a terrible asshole? Hahahah.
Narbonic did the same thing, except replace "terrible asshole" with "terrifying budding mad genius."
Ahhh, thank you! I could never quite put my finger on why Janis and Damian made me feel so squicky while watching that movie, but you've really summed it up nicely. They treat Cady horribly, too, just in a different way! They mock her just like the popular girls do, but because they aren't popular, it's okay to act like jerks. :( I really really want to like Mean Girls, but that's my sticking point every time. Now I know why!
I think Mean Girls would be perfect if there were an alternate ending where Cady makes new friends. They could just change that final shot to Cady eating lunch with people who aren't Janis and Damian, and it would be great.
I really wondered when watching Mean Girls (recently, not when it came out) if that was the underlying point–that just because someone says they are your friend doesn't mean they are, regardless of whether they are popular or unpopular or treat you well or poorly. Because it's true that Janis and Damian are super bullies and treat Cady horribly, as do the Plastics–but that point seems to be wholly glossed over because they're different i.e., better i.e., don't need to treat people nicely.
Really, an argument can be made that there are two major villain groups in that movie preying on a girl who doesn't quite understand what's going on and gets caught between them without fully realizing the social strata where she is.
Wait, this is how I've always read Mean Girls. Janis and Damian are also terrible; everyone in high school is terrible. Was that not the moral?
I'm not entirely sure–I alwayts thought Janis and Damian weren't intended to be villains since they have a "happy ending" ish (in that they go to the dance/prom/whatever and enjoy themselves somewhat), and the Plastics are "punished" for their misdeeds–I always interpreted it as a sort of "The popular kids get punished for what they did wrong and Cady realizes who her true friends are [not]" but I could certainly be wrong.
This. This this this THIS. I watched Mean Girls this weekend and had the same realization, but not so eloquent.
Yes yes YES. This is why I didn't like Mean Girls, even though everyone treats it like some kind of feminist bible. I felt like it had some really questionable conclusions and that Cady never really was treated justly by anyone.
Which, I feel like THAT message was something that Heathers stuck the landing on SO MUCH BETTER because Veronica ultimately rejects both the tyranny of the Heathers and JD's amoral and chaotic worldview.
I remember hating this movie when my friends and I rented it as 13-year-olds (remember nothing else other than disliking it). I'm glad my loathing is justified.
My best friend and I also rented this when we were in our early teens, expecting it to be something we could identify with….and NOPE. NOPE NOPE NOPE.
It's Porky's + nerds.
I hated Porky's with a BURNING PASSION, and all of my high school friends loved it. Gross me out.
I had a college prof make us watch Porky's for a comedy film class. He was SUPER confused as to why none of us were laughing. It should also be noted that this was a white guy prof who thought of himself as young, hip, and feminist.
I've never even seen this movie because I had heard it was so rapey. Really appreciate this discussion.
So I haven't seen this movie in probably 20 years, and my memory of it was something along the lines of, parts of it were funny, and other than that it was sort of fine but nothing special. It's interesting to see it revisited so much later and to have it pointed out how terrible it actually is (and how much of an unaware 13 year old I was, but that's a thing that happens).
For a long time I (an overweight, half-white straight dude) have identified myself as a nerd. I have all the standard symptoms of it – I play video games and role playing games, I read comics and sci-fi/fantasy, I like computers and I'm pretty smart (my wife is at least as smart as me, probably smarter, though admittedly she does not have my faculty for remembering the most ridiculous minutiae of every little goddamn thing she absorbs… ). But more and more, I find that all these groups I used to identify with – nerds in general, gamers, comic book nerds, etc., etc., etc., are really just pissing me off and making me want to just destroy the all those labels with a flaming crowbar.
So I guess i'm trying to say, I'm all for figuring out what the post-nerd, or the ex-nerd, or the artist-formerly-called-nerd is, and making it open to everyone, and finding anybody who wants to make it an exclusive club for self-pitying assholes and beating them with a flaming crowbar because they just end up ruining all the shit that I love.
Anyway, this article was great, and sorry for rage-vomiting all over the comments. Sometimes my peers really piss me off.
Also, sorry for having been part of the problem. I mean, I probably still am, but I'm trying to get better about it.
Don't apologize – it's an excellent rage-vomit!
For me, this has been the hidden best part of comics, SF/F, videogames, etc. suddenly becoming part of "mainstream" culture. Not only is there more stuff, bit it also means that I can enjoy these awesome things while divorcing them from the cesspool that is modern nerd culture. I can have conversations about these things with people who haven't bought into the weird insular geek narrative, such as so many of the lovely folks here on the Toast. Nerd stuff is amazing, and it'd be squandered if only Nerds (in the article's sense) were allowed to enjoy it.
I completely agree. I love that I can just talk to random ass people about Rocket Raccoon, and they know what the hell I am talking about and also love the character! It's been quite a while since it mattered to me whether someone loved something in the same way I did. A point of connection is a point of connection, and I don't care whether someone who loves that furry little criminal ALSO knows who the Badoon are, or who Star Lord's dad is, or what an Eternal is, or any of the many various other things. And the best part is, maybe I can introduce them to that stuff!
"Also, sorry for having been part of the problem. I mean, I probably still am, but I'm trying to get better about it."
I'm going to write this on a piece of paper and fold it up and put it in my back pocket and read it when I'm feeling down on humanity.
Also this is timely after seeing a friend comment on a post where someone was justifying online harassment because "the Internet is /b/, so everything goes."
1) no
2) no it isn't
3) go away
This is one the parts of 4chan that irritates me the most – the belief that everyone acts this way, and that /b/ reveals people at their most true. No, you are not that fucking special. You are just being an asshole, and other folks (who are not all assholes) know that you are being an asshole.
and then research comes out that suggests that trolls are just "prototypical everyday sadists" and all the non-sadists feel justified
Good commentary on the sexual politics of this movie! I watched it for the first time a few years ago and was just shocked at how vile it was. I also identified with Ezekiel's aside about being tracked into gifted programs in high school, and ending up among students who assume as a baseline that everyone is interested in academic achievement, so the "nerd" archetype is less present.
As I recall, the black nerd in this movie is very stereotypically gay. I don't feel qualified to judge if he's a regressive, offensive gay stereotype, although that was definitely my reaction when I watched it (I remember some scene in which he wins a discus or javelin throwing competition because of his incredibly limp wrist), but it's kind of interesting in relation to the discussion of how black people are coded as inherently not nerds; this character doesn't have the signifiers of "black cool" that Priya alludes to, mostly because he's gay.
Also, the ending of the movie trades on the notion that a group of black men is inherently intimidating.
They actually invent a special javelin that flies farther because of his limp-wristed throwing style.
but yeah, I think there's an interesting element about masculinity that underpins that — there's a stereotypical model of black man as hyper-masculine, which is antithetical to the nerd's kind of anti-masculinity, so the black guy in the nerd group has to be not just gay, but very flamboyantly gay.
yep, I think this is totally on the money, braak. and your memory of the end of the movie is right, anon. the idea of the "black nerd" was still foreign (geordi laforge was still 3-4 years away at this point), so I guess this is the only way they could think of to really deal with it.
It makes for an interesting racial charge to that ending, where the Tri-Lamda bruisers come in and protect the nerds from the jocks. It's present, of course, as People Who Know Oppression reocgnizing the plight of the nerds, and solidarity, &c. But really what's happening is that the Nerds and the Jocks are sort of fighting over the top of the pyramid here, and they're essentially being annointed by the keepers of "authentic" masculinity.
I read a good article on Salon awhile ago about nerd culture and its relationship with black culture, and how it simultaneously derides it as "niche", while using it as a foundation for coolness in general and masculinity in particular. Maybe I can find it.
(Maybe I will even try to find it.)
(Later.)
I wish there was a way to talk about grade school bullying of "weird" kids (which, for me, got to the point where I was suicidal) without contributing to the persecution complex of grown-ups who can't handle that their precious comic books are now mainstream. Because I do think the former is a real problem, and I wish it could be addressed without adding all the nasty sexual and racial prejudice of "nerd culture."
Right there with you. Former nerd, I guess, except…not like this movie and certainly not part of nerd culture. Former member of an outcast group who people felt free to hit and mock and torment and, in one memorable incident, have girls in the locker room singe one nerd girl's hair off with a lighter.
Some nerds actually are persecuted.
And that STILL doesn't entitle you to anyone or anything or make you magically better in some way. But it's a real thing. And an important conversation. But then it somehow wends its way into this really ugly place.
I agree with this. In my experience there was a difference between having the label "nerd" imposed on you and being told how you're supposed to be/what your limits were and the later phenomenon of qualifying people as "not nerdy enough".
I'm totally smiling that creepy smile you do when you see two of your favorites talking to each other and saying great things 8D
Okay, back to reading!
Between this and Roxane Gay, it's the best goddamn Toast day evarrrrrrr.
I agree with the complaints about the movie, but I think that saying nerds don't get picked on in school is belying a certain kind of privilege — the ability to be a school, or a community, where you can find other smart people, or where certain kinds of successes (academic, non-sport) are celebrated. And the belief that being bullied in high school is something you can get over is pretty closely tied to the idea that you get to go somewhere after high school that isn't the same community you're in — that you can go to college, or that it's easy to move, or whatever. But there are kids that are bullied mercilessly in high school, and feel like they can't get out.
This is particularly true for those communities that don't have great learning-disability support systems. So you have a kid who is on the spectrum and gets bullied because (s)he doesn't understand the rules, and then finds that certain parts of him/herself — obsessive interests, for example — are celebrated. Repeat for a whole bunch of other social disorders. Self-identifying as "nerd" is often a way for those young people to find communities that support them.
A second defense of nerds, though, is that they're often the *most* diverse group of young people — walk into any school cafeteria and the table where the kids are playing Magic is one of the only places you'll find POC and white (boys) sitting together.
But yes completely to that movie sucking, and it's legacy sucking.
I don't know if I would agree that nerds are among the most diverse group of young people you'd find. It's been a long time since I've been in school, and I doubt that there's going to be a sociological study of this any time soon, but I feel like student councils, sports teams, student religious groups, etc. can often be more racially/ethnically inclusive depending on context and larger pop. I've seen and known people who've experienced both inclusion and exclusion in any of those sorts of settings.
ETA: I was never involved in any of those groups when I was in HS, but it's something that occured to me when reading your comment and thinking about the other extracurricular groups in my HS.
I'm not particularly nerdy, and I'm also a lady who has dealt with the exclusionary aspects of nerd culture, but I also teach comic book workshops to teens, and have spent some time amongst the nerds (my brother, a self-identified nerd, would maybe argue that I am particularly nerdy, I guess). Anime and some card games (Magic, Pokemon) have hardcore, super (racially + socioeconomically) diverse followings. But my experience is also entirely urban, midwest and east coast (I went to an urban public school and when I teach, it's usually in urban environments) so it may be different in other places.
I went to a mix of urban and (diverse) suburban public schools in the Baltimore Metro area, so that's been my frame of reference. The more I think about it, the more I agree that Pokemon, Dragonball Z (whoooo boy was that popular among young black boys when I was tutoring in college), and Yuugioh (and maybe Inuyasha in the early 2000s?) had a lot of multiracial and socioeconomic appeal. I guess I just never saw it with Magic.. but I'm not a big Magic follower either. I just think that some team sports–football in particular, maaaaaybe soccer–can bring together integrated groups of kids too. Then again my husband and his sister got a lot of shit for being one of the few POC on their teams, but I think that was a larger issue for their school. o_O
re. Anime: I think anime occupies a really strange part of our culture and imagination at a time when so much else of "nerd" cultures–fantasy, sci fi, comic books–have become really mainstream. I like anime, I've talked about it on here a lot recently in the Open Threads, but I think it can be really polarizing in that it feels like it hasn't gone fully mainstream yet (outside of Pokemon). On one hand Adult Swim and Toonami has really popularized shows like Sailor Moon, Inuyasha, Attack on Titan, and many other shows that I honestly like, but then I think I talk to many people of the general pop and they think it's all pervy white dudes lusting after girls in short skirts and tentacle porn. But that's a conversation for another time, I guess. ^^;
Yeah, the part about how it's only temporary and easy to get over really rubbed me the wrong way.
Me too. Even if you do get away from the place you went to high school in, bullying can leave wounds that last a long time. I don't consider myself to be part of nerd culture now, but I was a nerd in high school and bullied very badly – it isn't easy to get over at all.
I know I'm really late to this thread but I just wanted to chime in with my emphatic agreement. For me, the bullying contributed to the development of an eating disorder that I still struggle with (I mean, I'm not directly blaming high school bullies for my eating disorder because that would be hugely reductive and ignores tons of other factors, but they are definitely related issues).
I don't think either of us intended to imply that nerds don't get picked on or ostracized in high school, and I agree that both of us probably have a privilege-enabled blind-spot when it comes to nerds that don't leave town/go to college, since Priya and I both did. Can't speak for Priya, but I wasn't thinking too deeply about the conflation of social disorders like autism and the category of the nerd. And I'd have to think about that a bit more to have much substantive to say about it. Thanks you for the comment/corrective.
I personally haven't found nerds to be more welcoming in general to POC than other subcultures, and there's probably a whole other conversation to be had about the new nerd racism radiating from places like 4chan.
In my experience, nerds pride themselves on being more enlightened about race and gender than mainstream culture, but I haven't really seen it play out that way in real life beyond "not using the kind of slurs that are banned from television." (O, the Tumblr posts I have on the gender topic…)
With regard to autists specifically, I believe that we might be more susceptible to what Baudrillard termed "hyperreality", that is, distorted representations of things supplanting the things reflected. Like when I was a kid I didn't know shit about how to talk to people, they were baffling to me. So I watched sitcoms and thought "oh, this is how friends and acquaintances talk to one another", and really that just made me an off-putting little boy, which further confused me. Turns out sitcom characters are written to talk in a way that people in reality don't actually talk! But I accepted the simulacra, the distorted reflection of speech, as the real thing.
I guess it would be my contention that RotN is, like many other things, a hyperreal reflection of what the geek is, what he does, and what he's been cruelly deprived of. These are things that are inherited rather than experienced. Kids on the spectrum who know jack shit about people and how they operate, how they interface, how they relate, must see the homecoming queens and christian athlete leaders and instinctively perceive their superior abilities. You make a very basic and axiomatic observation that they are capable of things you aren't and may never be. What nerd culture, from RotN on, provides is an outlet to transmute the (largely unearned) shame over being a social invalid into righteous resentment toward those who you imagine walk through life without difficulty. The community you foster then becomes one of shared struggle that was unreal and then made real by acceptance.
It also happens to manifest in strident libertarian conservatism / atheism, anarchism, grotesquely archaic views of gender, etc. There an antipathy is developed toward people who supposedly have it easy, who are given everything, who represent nerd marginalization and in many cases maliciously deprive the nerds of what they need, who have leaned on crutches like affirmative action or faith or hate crime law. They see themselves as having suffered to build an Island of Misfit Toys community that grew to encompass products and culture that they own. Then women and vocal POC waltz in and make demands for diversity or call out spiteful bigotry and they're treated as interlopers (especially the former, the cause of so much going-without), because they don't know the struggle.
Whoa, this is so so thoughtful and smart, thank you for sharing. I'm going to be thinking about this for a while.
Revenge of the Nerd is awful, but my goal is to work to improve my corners of being a nerd. Though I would be totally ok with a new term.
I really like this post going up on the same day as the one by Meghan McCarron.
To quote from Meghan's excellent post,
"I also wasn’t the only queer in a suit. Science fiction has its fair share of conservative grandpas; I had maddening conversations with several of them. But it also has its fair share of gay, queer, and trans* writers and fans, drawn to the genre’s long tradition of imagining worlds far outside our current gender binary."
My goal as a nerd is in my own very small way make sure science fiction/ fantasy celebrates and respects all who want to write it and read it, not just the same white guys. More stories like Meghan's, and John Chu's excellent Hugo winning short story, "The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere", to name a couple.
God, that story by John Chu was excellent. I snapped it up when Tor released all of their Hugo-winning short stories for free.
Did anyone ever see one of the later, direct-to-DVD American Pie films* where they flipped this idea on its head? Like the successful frat were these Google/Steve Jobs-style rich nerds on Segways, and the jocks were the uncool beaten-down underdogs? Awful, awful movie but I remember the concept actually got me thinking.
*what can I say, they were hugely popular in the former Soviet Union and I had limited access to anything in English
I have not seen these movies but I love that you are referencing them and this was a core concept for them.
For one of them at least! It was called like "American Pie 8" or something but it actually could have also been an unrelated movie that some Russian guy printed that name on so it would sell better, who even knows? I vaguely recall it had at least one of the same actors in it.
Nerd culture has become much more mainstream in recent years, but I don't think self-identified nerds quite realize it- or want to realize it. Because if being a nerd is normal, then where are they going to put their persecution complexes? These days I usually identify myself as a geek, with adjectives tacked in fromt ("history geek," "theatre geek,") because it identifies me as someone who has interests outside what's considered the mainstream without putting me in with the GamerGate assholes.
(Part of the mainstreaming of nerd culture probably has to do with the success of John Green, which I find irritating/unnerving for any number of reasons. One, his whole schtick seems to be "we're nerds and that makes us better because we're smarter!" Which is a line that appeals when you're in high school and isolated, but it's not really one I think adults should be encouraging, especially since "smarter" is usually a pretty classist, ableist way of classifying people. And while women are accepted into "Nerdfighteria," there's still a split between them and nerdy guys- see also Green's infamous reference to "nerd girls" as an "underutilised romantic resource." Nerds are ostensibly better than jocks, but it's an improvement in name only.)
While I totally agree with the problems of that "We're better because we're smarter!" shtick, I want to point out that Nerdfighteria is mostly women–it's not a case of "women are accepted into Nerdfighteria" at all, women are the ones doing the accepting (I think the stats for vlogbrothers viewers, pre-TFIOS buzz, were something like 75% female, and I imagine that it's only become more heavily female with TFIOS). John Green has repeatedly apologized for the "underutilized resource" comment.
Mmm, he's apologized, but I don't see anything in his persona/public statements that bely the notion behind it- not that nerd girls are a commodity, but that girls who adhere to his/nerdy standards of behaviour are better because that's what Green (and most definitely the characters he writes) finds attractive. There's a bit in An Abundance of Katherines where the narrator makes fun of girls with- I think it's eating disorders and spray tans?- for being the main character's "least favourite kind of being hot," the "they love their hair because they're not smart enough to love anything more interesting" line in one of his other books, etc. Nerdfighteria is probably one of the less toxic nerd spaces out there (god knows it's better than 4chan) but it's still plagued with the same problems as the rest of the nerd community- namely, casual sexism against girls who "deserve it."
Thank you for putting into much better words my biggest problem with John Green that so many people seem to be missing as everything else he writes receives such fawning praise.
Yes, the "more intelligent" thing has particularly began to grate on me now that I'm working with people with disabilities. I realize it's partly just me being sensitive, but uggggh. For people who regularly think about dragons, spacecrafts, and dragons on spacecrafts, there is a significant amount of nerddom that is composed of narrow-minded jerks.
This had me vigorously nodding in agreement so many times! It reminded me of Zeynep Tufekci's piece about nerd culture and cultural capital.
Oh, this was so great. Thank you for this.
I've been following various SFF writers for the past couple of years and wow, the dominant voices in that group are still white Western straight dudes with money. Their creative output is predictably shit. On the internet they will not hesitate to troll the fuck out of creators who aren't exactly as white and cis/het normatively male as them.
In person, these dudes sexually and/or racially harass women at conventions, turning what should be an exciting, inclusive event into a deeply unsafe space. It's gone on for years. It's only recently that organisers have actually understood the problem and implemented anti-harassment policies. Even now people are still willing to defend these shitlords, minimising it as mere drama while sneering about "allegations".
When called out, these men act so wounded. They genuinely believe being a nerd is an axis of oppression, rather than a teenage clique which lingers in adulthood as a mode of cultural consumption.
"They genuinely believe being a nerd is an axis of oppression, rather than a teenage clique which lingers in adulthood as a mode of cultural consumption. "
Ooof I have been trying to figure out how to say that for hours now, thanks.
When called out, these men act so wounded. They genuinely believe being a nerd is an axis of oppression, rather than a teenage clique which lingers in adulthood as a mode of cultural consumption.
I love this. I also feel like the recent outcry about the "Social Justice Warriors" of Tumblr by 4chan and some redditors really speak to this as well.
I, on the other hand, just introduced myself to someone at a social networking event as a SJW, while a speaker at the event referenced superhero capes and the Social Justice League so.. yeah guys, good job trying to make social justice a derogatory phrase.
My dearest friend and I were kind of the two token nerd girls (she straight, I queer) in a group of tabletop and video gamers, also spurned out of a gifted program, and there have been moments lately where I've been walking down the street thinking about something one of our friends said to me a decade ago and I realize I was being "neg'd" in order to be made more vulnerable to his advances. In the same day the same dude would tell me how deeply he loved me, and I think that bizarre juxtaposition in a culture where I otherwise felt more comfortable than in other high school contexts fucked up my understanding of relationships with men for a long time. To this day I am 100% unsure if this was unique to nerd culture or if I would have experienced the same thing outside of it.
I think nerd culture is basically a microexample of one of the ways patriarchy hurts all. It creates a hierarchy of masculinity where women are commodities to be competed for, tokens of victory and manhood. Obviously white men are not being subjugated in any real way within it, but the exclusion they feel is very real and it has real effects on the women and POC around them. I guess I'm saying one way I see in terms of how to amend the shitty things associated with nerd culture (which, now at 25, I am still experiencing amidst friend groups) is to take up space anyway? I speak avidly about my ongoing interest in video games and start shouting now, thanks to feminism, when I am still ostracized for showing an interest in these things that have now been coded as masculine — shooters, science fiction — with any kind of passion. It is not much different from how I shout about my right to take up space in any other context.
I am really interested that both authors identified themselves as former nerds, too. I get why stepping out of the culture is a great idea sometimes. I totally recognize that I've started liking things differently to avoid the sorts of nerds this film showcases. Navigating a nerd identity requires the same skills I need as a woman or queer person in any part of society. I see the same advocacy needed both within and without nerdy environments. Do we expect straight white men to be inexplicably better within nerd society? They are not outside patriarchy &c either. I guess I'm walking away from this with a lot of questions about how we identify ourselves as part or not part of a 'nerd culture' as though we had different expectations for it, in spite that the culture has been invented under kyriarchical pressures as any aspect of society has.
Thank you for this! Those last two paragraphs said a lot of things that I wasn't sure how to articulate reading this piece, but waaay more eloquently/thoughtfully than I would have said them.
This was made for me. I have a TON of feelings about this dialogue, but I'll keep it to one realization I had along these lines. Many other women in my life (mother, girl friends, etc.) kept saying things like, "oh, you need a nerd to date" or "you should date someone who likes the same geeky things as you" and back then, I couldn't understand why I cringed at the thought.
It sounded straightforward enough… 'Date someone with the same interests' is common advice and not bad advice, either. But I couldn't stand the thought of dating a guy who called himself a nerd. And I couldn't articulate why. I wasn't about to get into an argument with a friend who said some well-meaning thing like, "oh, there's this guy at work you'll get along with GREAT, he's a huge nerd, you'll hit it off". And I just didn't know how to explain to them this… intuition that we would NOT get along.
So recently I had this revelation that nerd men are often very difficult to get along with… to say it as kindly as I know how. Even back when I was young and foolish and proud to call myself an anti-feminist, I knew that I didn't want to be with a nerd. Because the nerds I run into are self-centered, eager to hear themselves talk and explain things to me, and I expected that my interests and knowledge would be railroaded into making him feel smart. At the expense of making me feel dumb.
And I know "jocks". I know guys who played quote-unquote manly sports and have ZERO interest in video games or comic books or whatever, but! This is an important but! They respected me. These "jocks" respected me. They listened to me. They listened to me even when I was talking about the nerd stuff, and admitted they had no idea what I was talking about; and they were very kind and not condescending when we watched sports and I admitted I had no idea what was going on. (Now, I never ended up dating any of these guys, but I felt safe and respected around them, MUCH more so than around guys who proclaimed their geekdom to the world.)
Instead of "jocks" and "not-jocks/nerds" it should be the other way around. Nerds and not-nerds.
Am I the only person who grew up with mostly female nerds? My friends and I were excessively nerdy growing up, and I only had one guy friend up until high school. In high school, I added a couple more excessively nerdy guys, who fit the standard white nerd boy archetype, but the only time I've experienced being a nerd and a gender minority was when I hung out with my boyfriend's friends in college. So I don't want to stop calling myself a nerd in deference to the stereotypical, terrible nerd guys–I don't think they have any more right to the "nerd" label than I do. Of course, there's some defiance in me holding on to that label too, like, "You think I can't be a nerd, huh, random guy on the internet? Take THAT." (That aside, agreed 100% on the nerd sense of entitlement–I remember in elementary and middle school, I had a distinct sense that I was somehow one of "the good guys" as opposed to the "popular" kids, even though they never did anything mean to me. Thankfully, I don't think I ever acted on that cringe-worthy belief.)
This article basically explains why I greatly prefer bros in LA over nerds in SF. One group is indifferent to the feelings of women, while the other can be actively hostile. Give me the dude in a neon tank over the guy in the hoodie any day.
Good lord, are those the only choices?
THANK GOD, NO. They just happen to be the worst groups in their geographical areas, haha.
I'm actually very fond of the NorCal bro, tbh. They like camping and rock climbing and carrying their Nalgenes everywhere. They are both harmless and occasionally delightful.
Okay, I get that. My sister is probably going to marry one of those dudes; I can see their appeal. And maybe he will hook me up with things to smoke!
They always, always, have something for you to smoke, or ingest!, if that's your thing :).
There's also the perception that Girl Geeks are enjoying geeky things incorrectly. It's not just that we're also playing in the sandbox, it's that we're Doing It Wrong. This isn't always true but the general trend is that men collect and memorize so they are the ones who own every issue and know all the writers and issue numbers of important events. Women annotate or add to, they are the vast majority of fanfic writers and fan artists. Which, to some, is of course not real writing or real art. (To some, not me.) There are of course female collectors and male fanfic authors but they seem to be rarer and it seems clear why. Women feel the need to change or comment on things because we don't see ourselves represented the way we want so we have to do it ourselves. Men are fine with the status quo. It also makes it easier for them to police fandom since they can say someone isn't a real fan just by rattling off a quiz of stats. If being a geek was the SATs, they'd ace the multiple choice and bomb the written portion. (Kids these days are telling me there's an essay now.)
I think that's in large part because the hobbies of Nerd Culture are less about enjoying them for their own sake, and more about using familiarity with them (and information in general) as a currency to establish your position in the social hierarchy. The whole point of Nerd Culture is that it's a culture in which knowing which Batman issue is which is the thing that makes you important and gets you chicks — women have to be constantly derided for the way they participate in that culture, because otherwise they'd occupy a an equal position in the hierarchy, which is not what the nerds are here for.
Because what do girls like more than being lectured to about something? Anything. If we care about the thing we probably already know. If we don't care about it, there's a reason for that. Conversation is great! But so often it comes down to "I am so smart, let me demonstrate loudly and at length."
Well, I agree that it's a dumb strategy. Weirdly, despite loudly and often talking about how they're the smartest guys in the room, nerds don't seem to realize that this system isn't really making them appreciably happier.
I know that there is so much wrong with this movie but I still bust out my Tri-Lam baseball hat on sunny days. With "ΔΔΔ – ΩΜ Fall Mixer 1984" printed on the back.
Also it's appalling how much of contemporary nerd culture is based on buying and enjoying consumer goods.
killallnerds.exe
byeeeee
That is definitely how it seems to me. Being a nerd isn't about what you know or how smart you are, it is about how much money you are willing to shell out for innate shit. It seems all "counter-cultures" come down to buying a specific set of goods.
Which I think is more a feature than a bug because the capitalist system is incredibly skillful when it comes to absorbing countercultures, processing them, and packaging the trappings as signifiers unmoored from sign. It's old at this point, but I definitely enjoyed The Rebel Sell for a more in-depth look at the phenomenon.
Well, long before that the Situationist talked about it. I thought "On the Poverty of Student Life" explained it well. "The 'young thug' despises work but accepts the goods. He wants what the spectacle offers him– but now, with no down payment. This is the essential contradiction of the delinquent's existence."
And now it's popular inane shit, too. People are congratulating themselves for liking popular inane shit.
I agreed with this entire post up until I read this: "I think what it boils down to is an inferiority complex. A girl will “go geek” because she knows it will get her attention from thirsty geeks, and they resent that idea. They’re threatened by the idea of a girl being their equal intellectually."
Because, what? Geek girls go geek to get attention? Are you KIDDING me with this? So my entire existence within this "culture" is invalidated because if I like comic books and tabletop gaming, I'm just some thirsty girl wanting to prey on some geek guys? No. No, no, no. Honestly, this article has summed up every single reason why I go out of my way to AVOID "thirsty geeks". And added some new ones. I'm not a geek to "get the D", I'm a geek because I grew up watching Star Wars and Star Trek with my dad. I'm a geek because I read every comic book I could rent from the library as a kid. I'm a geek because I love the stuff that society calls geeky, not because I'm some desperate, attention craving little girl that will do anything for a guy.
I would have heralded the commentary on the movie in this article, but since it was followed up by this, I'm just going to leave a little more disgusted with "nerd culture" than I already am.
There's discussion of this upstream in the comment section (http://the-toast.net/2014/09/30/sexual-racial-politics-nerd-culture-dialogue/view-all/#IDComment882798528), but lemme repeat: we entirely reject the male-centered and misogynistic idea of the "fake nerd girl". We're not agreeing with the mindset, we're just explaining what it is. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear.
However the narrative that women have only recently discovered and embraced nerd texts does appear to be reinforced, unfortunately.
Yes to all of this, though for the record I thought Kevin G had pretty good game for a high school boy.
How timely–today was "Nerd Day" at the high school I work at as part of Homecoming Theme Days. Unlike, say "Hula Day" or "Movie Star Day" for which kids put on grass skirts or tuxedo tshirts, it seems "nerd" is more substantively who you are, or who others perceive you to be, than whether or not you're wearing knee socks and put tape on your glasses.
Can we all agree to bar the phrase "gets the girl" from our vocabulary?
I hear this phrase all the time in my industry, and I have to bite my tongue.
"Fake geek girl" really offends me. I'm not a girl who "went geek", I've always been a geek. I like science, literature, and history. I loved Star Trek, comics and video games long before I knew there was a difference between boys and girls beyond one of us can pee standing up.
The fact that as a grown up I have added a fondness for beer, dancing to loud music in clubs, and writing smutty stories really hasn't changed. I'm just a geeky grown woman now.
First of all, this post is fascinating and smart and I love it. But ALSO, I just want to say that the comments are just as great, and pretty much anywhere else on the internet the comments section on a post like this would be a horrifying misogynist sewer. So thank you, Nicole(s), for a moderation policy that makes your comments section a community.
There is one response comment upthread where an unregistered dude is trying to mansplain the plausible roots of nerd angst, and it's sitting there like a turd in the desert, slowly shriveling without a single upvote or response. Truly beautiful.
I finally had to make an account to comment, because Mary Bucholtz! She's so smart, and the classes I took with her in college were incredibly important in helping me figure out how to see the world as an intersectional feminist and a linguist, and just wow. *heart eyes*
Soooo late to this party but I'm a longterm fan of Alika's writing and I loved Ezekiel's The Parable of the Unjust Judge or: Fear of a Nigger Nation so it's super exciting to see you guys gchat. This was amazing. This: "S: Right. I think that ties into “the nerd” as the archetype of the persecuted minority for white people," is so spot on. Also super interesting re: "model minorities" and nerdness (also model minorities is the best description of what it is I've ever come across). I was also so interested in the whole jock verses nerd thing. I'm guessing a jock is a young alpha male? In Britainland I don't know if we have an equivalent for jock but my friend once made a kind of list of different misogynists, and 2 of the categories were geek misogynist and alpha and we've always kind of had this idea that alphas are better to be around than geek misogynists because they are practical around the house and they don't have boxes of feelings about how women did not have sex with them enough when they were young (or contemporarily).
> "all the movies featuring a girl nerd have some sort of makeover"
I don't remember one for Jordan in Real Genius.
DAMN STRAIGHT.
She was who she was, owned it, and "won her prize" (bad phrasing but Hollywood-appropriate) by being who she was.
As a dude, I always thought Jordan was "hot". As an adult, she might be my favorite character in the movie at this point.
Well, I'm a nerd and I'm proud of it. But I'm well past the pubescent PUA-stage of it with much help from family and friends.
Thirteen years ago, I was called a rapist in fifth grade (my PUA period peaked there and antidotes was implemented), became interested in counter culture (feminism etc.) in sixth and came out of various closets during the span of the following three years. Everything was fine and dandy 'till obnoxious Hipsters in my communities ran out of things to be cool at and started throwing around rape jokes they quoted from Family Guy and such. I guess I didn't knew what "trigger warnings" was back then and started found them funny in a state of regression. Luckily some well-mannered bronies brought me back to my senses.
Everyone can be both a nerd and a jock at the same time these days. It isn't so hard.
And to nerds that read this and still think it's okay to view sexual pursuit as a game; you need a better walkthrough and consider game over being six feet under instead of being rejected. You ruin the fun in the game if you think a simple rejection is game over. Consider that a definitive cul-de-sac that expects you to backtrack rather than a hurdle you think you can jump over.
Off-topic:
I met Tim Metcalfe, one of the screenwriters of RotN, at a screenwriting seminar (which by the second day had become a bitter rant about Hollywood's callous evil, with the final message being that if you the write a screenplay, the best thing you can do with it is put it in a desk and show it to NOBODY).
Apparently, the first draft of RotN that Metcalfe submitted was an inspired-by-real-events story about the prankster culture of MIT (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacks_at_the_Massachusetts_Institute_of_Technology).
I loved this article and the comments on it, but I need to speak up about something that is really bothering me. A few comments on this thread have seemed to be saying “but nerds really are bullied, and we shouldn’t belittle the effect of this bullying.” Frankly, I don’t believe this is grounded in reality, in any way. I went to high school in the early 80s. I have two children in high school now who identify as nerds/geeks. None of us suffered or are suffering from bullying. The bullied nerd stereotype may have had some germ of reality in the 1950s or 1960s, but I personally have never known anyone who actually had his or her face stuffed in a toilet.
I believe we really need to pause and consider whether our ideas about nerd bullying have any current foundation in reality or whether they are story-based myth that the horrifying 4chan and reddit “nerd” culture are trying to capitalize on. In fact, I worry that we are allowing the most horrific brand of sexist, racist nerds, the very ones for whom Revenge of the Nerds would be an edifying kind of rallying cry about their unearned rewards in terms of “hot chicks,” to entirely appropriate bullying for themselves and deny the experiences of those who truly are most bullied.
I also worry that a lot of the comments here about nerd bullying are conflating ASD and nerddom. I do believe that children and teenagers with ASD are vulnerable to bullying. I do not believe that the self-proclaimed nerds who have never really experienced bullying, and yet want to appropriate the suffering of the bullied through identification as nerds, give a damn about people on the spectrum. I believe they will be happy to let people on the spectrum identify as “nerds” as long as they can use their experiences of being bullied to validate “nerd bullying,” right up until it becomes more advantageous to disidentify with any perceived “disability.”
I also think it’s vital to distinguish between actual physical and emotional harm bullying here and the “popular kids don’t invite me to their parties” and “the hawt chicks won’t go out with me.” Especially the last, because it’s entirely male-centric and based on the whole “pretty women are my just desserts (and women aren’t actually people)” concept of modern nerd culture.
I know it’s entirely apocryphal and may be geographically based, to boot, but in my observations, you are most likely to get bullied in school if you commit the crimes of being:
1. Not very hygienic (i.e., you smell)
2. Obese
3. Nonconformative with standard perceptions of beauty (labeled as ugly)
4. Not rich enough, or at least willing to make efforts to conform to standards of beauty and fashion within the outermost stretches of your budget
5. Nonconformative with standard perceptions of gender
6. Perceived as queer
7. Disabled
8. Nonconformative with standard perceptions of race
9. Any minority POC
Obviously, there are intersections of race, class, gender, and ability in all of the above. I’d like to put a disclaimer here by stating that I am white and have always lived in a very white state. I’m sure my observations may be limited. In addition, the fact that a lot of disabled people may not be bullied out of “pity” makes their placement on the list suspect from a critical theory standpoint, too.
In summary, though, I truly believe the entire idea of “nerd bullying” on which narratives like Revenge of the Nerds is based is mythical and has no foundation in reality. We should stop buying into it in any way, shape, or form.
That said, as a woman who has identified as a gamer and a geek for about 30 years now, I am saddened that the assholes are claiming the identities of “nerd,” “geek,” and even “gamer” for themselves. For example, with the advent of gamergate, I have heard all kinds of journalists proclaiming that gamers are dead and irrelevant. I’m not sure how to reconcile that fact with the fact that I’ve been a “gamer” for 30 years, have despised the sexism in games for just as long, and have fought back against the “you’re not a real gamer” accusations. At this point, am I supposed to just concede the point? Am I supposed to say, “You’re right. You assholes are the “real” nerds and gamers.” We’ll just make the terms a vilification and call ourselves something else. Why are we letting these guys have these words instead of denying them the authority to define them for the rest of us?
Hi, I know I'm late to comment, but I wanted to address this because I was definitely bullied for "nerdiness" from late elementary through mid high school (so, late 90's, early 2000's). I was bullied because I carried around books and liked to read, because I raised my hand often and contributed in class, because I liked Harry Potter, etc. I was also bullied for my weight/body type, but this was definitely related to the "nerdiness" bullying, because, while I believed I was quite fat in middle/high school, looking back I've realized that I was actually of average size and there were many "popular" girls who were the same size or even larger than me. However, at the time the bullying contributed to my developing an eating disorder that I still struggle with.
My boyfriend also remembers being bullied specifically because of his "nerdy" interests in school (for him, comics and anime).
So, while it's great that you/your kids were never bullied for being nerdy, it's definitely a thing that happened to me, my boyfriend, and, I'm sure, to many other people.
WHAT. Come on. Kevin Gnapoor TOTALLY has game! "HOW YOU LIKE ME NOW? GET SOME, GET SOME!" LOL, Kevin. (That character was originally supposed to be Chinese American, actually.)
For so long, certain things have been the domain of geek guys: gaming, comics, so on. And with a lowering of the barriers to entry, women may enter.
I agree with so much of this discussion, but this line really rubbed me the wrong way. Games and comics were both initially unisex hobbies where men and women (or girls and boys) could participate on equal footing. It was the advent of modern marketing theory and audience segmentation that meant companies started aggressively targeting young men, who were perceived to be the most lucrative market for new gadgets and cheesecake superheroines.
From a more personal perspective, there was no "lowering" of the barriers of entry for women. There was no magical moment where the gatekeepers relaxed their guard and women started flooding into Comic Con or whatever. We were always here. Even with the proliferation of ad campaigns blaring NOT FOR GIRLS at us and communities growing hostile and resentful of our presence, we were here, doggedly pursuing hobbies and interests that made us happy, often in complete isolation. I was here, I have literally been right here this whole time, but because I was never conventionally hot, I was invisible. And we're still there, still pushing past those barriers and demanding to be included in the wider discussion of things we have loved since we were small children – and if anything, a subsection of aggrieved male nerds have closed ranks and the barriers have grown even higher.
So yeah, in conclusion, I long for the day when "female" is no longer a necessary qualifier in front of "nerd" or "geek".
I remember reading about some ladies who were writing K/S fanfiction in the 80s. And they were citing their sources from the 60s.
I honestly think some geeks/nerds are so preoccupied with the future (and their own place in it, of course) that they seem to completely forget there was this thing called "history).
(Sorry about the necro-commenting; I'm actually just finding this article – which clearly means I should read here more often. :-))
This is a really good read, especially for anyone who has come out of the teenage social constructs and taken their first steps into their twenties. Let go of the fairy tale – real magic is waiting outside :-)
More of the "woe is me", "first world white girl" problems. Are there any actual people on this site who aren't privileged white girls? Why are white girls the first to stand up when even the most minor of things affect them, but they are the last to stand up for other people who have actual important problems?
"Oh, my white male nerd friends don't accept me. Woe is me." – Privileged white girl problem.
"I'm unfairly judged everyday because I'm not a white male or female." – The problem of everybody else who isn't white.
"I can't play video games because people will harass me because I'm a girl." – Privileged white girl problem.
"I can't leave my house because I will be shot at." – Real problem.
"
Nerds who are are also women of color/mixed-race women do in fact have that last problem, along with all the other problems you listed … if that makes you feel any better.
:-/