Interesting article about Sexism in Geek Communities

[NuSoardGraphite]

This isolation of the various fandoms though has only really been a thing since the turn of the millennium though. Its a relatively new paradigm. One that many old school geeks are still getting used to.

 

And within geekery, there has always been specialization and area of expertise, but i would say that through their association with other geeks, most geeks were at least periphially aware of most of the other fandoms. That is not so much of a thing anymore.

 

For example, I am a Star Wars geeks. I am not big into Star Trek. I have seen some of the series and most of the movies, but Star Trek is not really my thing. However, through my associations with other geeks who are Trekkies, I could probably answer Trek trivia pretty well. I would wager that most of the older geek generation is similar in their knowledge of general geekery.

 

Not so much with the new generations.

 

Maybe on second thought, its less a case of "real vs fake", but simply a geeky version of "those consarned whippersnappers"

[Pattern Ghost]

Not sure if this one has been posted, heard about it on radio today:

 

http://metro.co.uk/2015/08/07/ilooklikeanengineer-people-shame-advert-of-attractive-female-engineer-5331306/

[薔薇語]

So I am confused by the issue, PG. A female engineer appeared on a poster with a hashtag to express that she is an engineer. And then people got upset because she was an attractive white woman?

 

Foreign Orchid.

[NuSoardGraphite]

Agreed. The whole idea that there is such a thing as a "real geek" and a "fake geek" is so precious as to be laughable. There's a crapton of fandoms/hobbies out there, and people are immersed to a greater or lesser degree in some/many of them. There are also many geekdoms that have nothing to do with gaming or fantasy at all. There doesn't exist some platonic ideal ubergeek who masters every geekdom in depth.

 

I like scifi and fantasy, medieval music, play RPGs and videogames. Have done since long, long before any of those things were cool. But I'm otherwise pretty straight-up: I also like most of the the things that white middle class males are supposed to like. Does that make me a "real" geek? Or not? I'm pretty sure some people would say yes, and some would say no, but the smart ones would say such a question is, at base so asinine as to not waste any time worrying about it.

 

Personally, when I check my give-a-**** meter, it's not registering this question at all.

 

cheers, Mark

I look at it like this:

 

I played baseball for most of my childhood and I enjoyed watching the early UFC fights in the mid 90s, but I would never call myself a sports fan. If I walked up to an actual sports fan and claimed to be such, but only knew the very basics of baseball and could only remember a few details from some early Hoyce Gracie bouts, I would fully expect the actual sports fan to dismiss me as an imposter.

[Pattern Ghost]

So I am confused by the issue, PG. A female engineer appeared on a poster with a hashtag to express that she is an engineer. And then people got upset because she was an attractive white woman?

 

Foreign Orchid.

 

The hashtag came after. It was a response to the negative response the poster unexpectedly garnished. I suppose there were a bunch of turds who didn't think an attractive young woman could really be an engineer who got a bit too rowdy for her tastes with online commentary, so she got annoyed and started up the hashtag. Don't blame her.

[wcw43921]

Agreed. The whole idea that there is such a thing as a "real geek" and a "fake geek" is so precious as to be laughable. There's a crapton of fandoms/hobbies out there, and people are immersed to a greater or lesser degree in some/many of them. There are also many geekdoms that have nothing to do with gaming or fantasy at all. There doesn't exist some platonic ideal  ubergeek who masters every geekdom in depth.

 

I like scifi and fantasy, medieval music, play RPGs and videogames. Have done since long, long before any of those things were cool. But I'm otherwise pretty straight-up: I also like most of the the things that white middle class males are supposed to like.  Does that make me a "real" geek? Or not? I'm pretty sure some people would say yes, and some would say no, but the smart ones would say such a question is, at base so asinine as to not waste any time worrying about it.

 

Personally, when I check my give-a-**** meter, it's not registering this question at all.

 

cheers, Mark

 

I encountered some of the "fake-nerd vs. real-nerd" nonsense when I posted about the King Of The Nerds TV series at another message board. I was so thoroughly disappointed by people commenting that they couldn't be actual nerds because they were "too pretty" or by the simple fact that they were reality TV contestants.  They (the posters) would rather watch The Big Bang Theory--which is actually about actors pretending to be scientists (Danica McKellar to the contrary) and to my mind seems like a show about how stupid smart people can be--than a show about actual science fiction-fantasy fans/tabletop gamers/smart people.

 

(At least the show generated some discussion on the other board.  When I posted about the show here, nobody said anything. )

[Pattern Ghost]

 

They (the posters) would rather watch The Big Bang Theory--which is actually about actors pretending to be scientists (Danica McKellar to the contrary)

 

 

You've confused Danica McKellar (who's a mathematician with an excellent series of math books) with Mayim Bialik (neuroscientist, and BBT co-star.) I like 'em both.

 

 

(At least the show generated some discussion on the other board.  When I posted about the show here, nobody said anything. [] )

 

I remember a thread on it. IIRC, the show got a lot of hate here. I like it, though.

[wcw43921]

Bialik is a scientist?  Okay, Thank You for letting me know that?  But isn't math a science as well?

 

And as far as I know, there wasn't a thread here for King Of The Nerds.  Now I'll have to look for it.

[Pattern Ghost]

Ahh . . . I thought you were talking about BBT! Didn't know McKeller was involved in the other show. The missing thread I was talking about was the BBT one started by Steve Long. Sorry about the confusion. =)

 

 

[Markdoc]

I look at it like this:

 

I played baseball for most of my childhood and I enjoyed watching the early UFC fights in the mid 90s, but I would never call myself a sports fan. If I walked up to an actual sports fan and claimed to be such, but only knew the very basics of baseball and could only remember a few details from some early Hoyce Gracie bouts, I would fully expect the actual sports fan to dismiss me as an imposter.

 

What the heck is an "actual sports fan"? Is there an exam? Some kind of certificate? Are you still allowed to attend sports events if you don't have the certificate? I've known plenty of sports fans who meet exactly the same criteria that you fulfill yourself. It doesn't seem to stop them  - or other people - identifying them as sports fans.

 

This makes the point that it's a ridiculous argument to start with. I know that there are people who actually feel that if you are not expert in their particular hobby, then you are not worth talking to - heck, I've met a few. But just as there is no such thing as an actual sports fan, there's no such thing as an actual geek. People have a gradient of interest (in sports, in games, in electronics, in whatever) - just like they have always had a gradient of interest, and frankly anyone who suggests that maybe you shouldn't take part because you know, you aren't an expert (as defined by a totally arbitrary personal scale) deserves a repeated slapping in the face with a well-aged fish. They're not fans and they're not geeks - they're just d***s.

 

There is no fast line defining a fan, or a geek, and there never has been. In reality, there never will be, because of course every fan started out with a less than comprehensive knowledge of their area of interest.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

So I am confused by the issue, PG. A female engineer appeared on a poster with a hashtag to express that she is an engineer. And then people got upset because she was an attractive white woman?

 

Foreign Orchid.

 

White-ish woman , but yes. She was asked to pose for the picture and comment about her job by her company, who is doing a recruiting drive. Her image (but none of the others from the same campaign) attracted a lot of negative comments online because some dropwads apparently thought that engineers can't look like that. Just like the "fake geek" stupidity, they were claiming online that she was a "fake engineer". 

 

The whole hashtag thing came in response to the online trolling.

 

This is - unfortunately - not an isolated incident. One of our gaming group is a very attractive female electronics engineer: she's bumped into exactly this attitude in the past - both in regard to geekery, and in regard to engineering.

 

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

This isolation of the various fandoms though has only really been a thing since the turn of the millennium though. Its a relatively new paradigm. One that many old school geeks are still getting used to.

 

And within geekery, there has always been specialization and area of expertise, but i would say that through their association with other geeks, most geeks were at least periphially aware of most of the other fandoms. That is not so much of a thing anymore.

 

For example, I am a Star Wars geeks. I am not big into Star Trek. I have seen some of the series and most of the movies, but Star Trek is not really my thing. However, through my associations with other geeks who are Trekkies, I could probably answer Trek trivia pretty well. I would wager that most of the older geek generation is similar in their knowledge of general geekery.

 

Not so much with the new generations.

 

Maybe on second thought, its less a case of "real vs fake", but simply a geeky version of "those consarned whippersnappers"

 

 

Get off my fandom, you darn kids!

 

I get the point you're making, but I absolutely don't buy it.

 

Star wars fandom, Star trek fandom - they're each a teeny-tiny piece of a very big universe. Geekery is far bigger (and far older) than that. When I was a kid geek, I was into (as well as fantasy/SF) medieval music. It was incredibly hard to actually get hold of, since the internet didn't exist and accessible catalogues were tiny. What mailing lists existed were, you know, actual mailing lists that were made on paper and  - well, they were mailed. We used to exchange cassette tapes, that we had made of material found wherever. Mailing someone a recording of a recording of a recording of a recording of a concert someone somebody knew had recorded at some castle in Wales ... that's pretty damn geeky right there.  And it's a geekdom that had virtually no overlap with my other music geekdom at the time - which was African music - despite the fact that it operated in precisely the same way. Divisions in geekdom have a long and dishonourable history.

 

On the comics/movie side of things, there were fandoms built around different comics (especially anime, but also eurocomics and British comics) complete with conventions and cosplay dating back decades. The earliest big comic cons started in the UK and the US in the '60's. Movies and books were the same, as were gaming cons. Fandoms have not become more isolated since the turn of the millennium - speaking as someone who has experienced it up close and personal, I can promise you that the exact reverse is true. As comics and movie geekery has been mainstreamed (and profitable!), the fandoms have become more accessible (and also much bigger) - and also broader in their range. It's a lot easier to be a geek in multiple fandoms when it's readily accessible online.

 

I think you are right that the "real geek/fake geek" thing is a grognard attitude (not all grognards are old) - it's a desire to have a little area all of your own where the other kids can't play. That's not new. I met people like that in fandom 30 years ago, and I don't doubt that the attitude is much more ancient. But that attitude didn't define or determine fandom back then and it doesn't today either. Because of course, real fans - like real geeks - by which I mean people who are really interested in some kind of fandom - welcome people with an interest in their pet topic, even though not all of them are (or will become) hardcore. They always have, in my experience.

 

cheers, Mark

[Roter Baron]

Agreed. The whole idea that there is such a thing as a "real geek" and a "fake geek" is so precious as to be laughable. There's a crapton of fandoms/hobbies out there, and people are immersed to a greater or lesser degree in some/many of them. There are also many geekdoms that have nothing to do with gaming or fantasy at all. There doesn't exist some platonic ideal  ubergeek who masters every geekdom in depth.

 

I like scifi and fantasy, medieval music, play RPGs and videogames. Have done since long, long before any of those things were cool. But I'm otherwise pretty straight-up: I also like most of the the things that white middle class males are supposed to like.  Does that make me a "real" geek? Or not? I'm pretty sure some people would say yes, and some would say no, but the smart ones would say such a question is, at base so asinine as to not waste any time worrying about it.

 

Personally, when I check my give-a-**** meter, it's not registering this question at all.

 

cheers, Mark

 

As I (and Popeye) always say: "I yam what I yam an’ tha’s all I yam!“

 

BTW: What makes it so fantastic to be a "geek"? Especailly  if everybody and his dog is "geeky"? Doesn't that make the un-geeky the real geeks? And why isn't that a fantastic goal to achieve? _ "I am totally normal." - "Wow! What a geek you are!"

 

NUTS! The world is NUTS!

[Lawnmower Boy]

 We used to exchange cassette tapes. . . 

 

Hee. You're old, Herbert. 

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pNQYHvhnms

[Markdoc]

Hee. You're old, Herbert.

 

Ain't that the truth.

 

Cheers, Mark

[Cancer]

Warning: I can't decide if this is serious or not, and I am writing it

 

The present day meanings of "geek" and "nerd" have drifted so far from their origins that only in an etymological sense are the as-used-now words related to their meanings Long Ago (and I am choosing 40-50 years as Long Ago).

 

First, I never heard the word "nerd" until after getting to college (if I recall the situation correctly, it was probably early 1975). It wasn't hard to see what the meaning was, even in an overheard conversation between two young women. It went strictly on the basis of a lack of social awareness and skills. There was no implication of any sort of aptitude, knowledge, abilities, etc.; merely that the labeled person was someone Women Wanted Nothing To Do With.

 

"Geek" was always a nominally human being but one so removed from social norms as to be shunned and marginalized even by those closest to him (and yes, I am intentionally using the masculine pronoun there). I have read that "geek" originally was term for the circus sideshow guy who bit off the heads of live chickens, which is certainly bizarre enough to be worth shunning, even in the first third of the 20th Century.

 

So that's the meanings at the time I became aware of the words, circa 1975. To be carry either of these labels meant that the amount of overlap between your life and any female besides your mother was something women desperately hoped was zero. It was absolutely nothing but a pejorative, and one I, at least, never saw applied to anything but men, and no one ever applied it to themself. And if you were among the people to whom label was applied, it was very, very easy to view the people applying the label as persecutors or even oppressors (independent of whether the application was deserved) and build up a decade or so of pent-up resentment. Hence, the misogynism all too frequently seen from that segment of the population.

 

Association between either "nerd" or "geek" label and actual knowledge, skill, intelligence or ability at something (other than biting heads off live chickens) wasn't something I saw for several years … the movie "Revenge of the Nerds" in 1984 may have been the first time I heard any suggestion of sympathy for people thus labeled. The PBS documentary "Triumph of the Nerds" in 1996 completed the transformation of the term into something that had clearly implied upside (since there's nothing like becoming a billionaire to demonstrate upside).

 

After the mid-1990s, both terms continued mutating to imply deeper-than-common knowledge or skill, initially at the price of weakness in social skills, but for at least a decade now even that weak negative connotation has just about vanished.

 

Now … those called nerds during the 1970s could, and sometimes did, look on those trying to accumulate the latter-day upside of the label and consider them vacuous callow upstarts. And they would have a point.

 

But now? What Markdoc said. It's merely aggressive noise by someone who needs to get off the write-only memory of social media and spend a decade soaking his head in a rigorous undergrad degree program and graduate school, and emerge having lost 75 pounds, earned a PhD and a couple of other degrees, learned bathing habits and a bit of perspective, and come out with a career paying more than national median income.

 

Trust me on this one.

 

And Roter Baron makes an excellent point as well. To pervert the well-known quote: "When everyone can claim to be geeky … no one is."

[Cygnia]

http://carriecuinn.com/2015/08/10/a-statement-about-lou-antonelli-lakeside-circus-harassment-and-safety/

[NuSoardGraphite]

 

 

And Roter Baron makes an excellent point as well. To pervert the well-known quote: "When everyone can claim to be geeky … no one is."

I think this is the root of the problem us grognards have.

[Markdoc]

Warning: I can't decide if this is serious or not, and I am writing it

 

The present day meanings of "geek" and "nerd" have drifted so far from their origins that only in an etymological sense are the as-used-now words related to their meanings Long Ago (and I am choosing 40-50 years as Long Ago).

 

SNIP ....

 

And Roter Baron makes an excellent point as well. To pervert the well-known quote: "When everyone can claim to be geeky … no one is."

 

Right - nerd and geek (or its English and Japanese analogues "anorak" and "otaku") were all undeniably negative when I was at university. "Anorak" seems to have dropped out of use, but the remaining words have lost most (not all, but most) of their negative sting. This changeover - in my part of the world - happened in the late 80's to 90's and (not surprisingly) was tied to the rise of computers - at least among people I knew. To be into computers in the early 90's you either had to be an engineer or a nerd (scientists fall into the latter group in the public mind, pretty much by definition). But by the mid-90's computers were going public - and so did computer nerds, a few of whom became mindbogglingly wealthy. And among the university grads I knew, being able to help with computer problems in the late 80's was an instant social in. It was absolutely not cool to hand in a  thesis  written in longhand and then typed, no matter your major or gender.

 

And during this switchover period, I noticed a few people started to use the term geek or nerd interchangeably, and also occasionally self-referentially.  And of course a few people tried to claim it, I guess the same way the gay community claimed "queer" as a way of destigmatising it and shaping an identity. I suppose the obsession with "fake nerds" comes from this last group. Maybe the idea that anyone can be a geek threatens their idea of community ... but the way they have responded online portrays exactly why they were stigmatised in the first place. Not for being geeks. But for being dropwads.

 

cheers, Mark

[Cygnia]

 

Wikipedia Hates Women: 4 Dark Sides of The Site We All Use

 

[Cygnia]

 

No girl wins: three ways women unlearn their love of video games

 

[mhd]

Wikipedia Hates Women: 4 Dark Sides of The Site We All Use

I wonder whether it's the author or whether Cracked's infantile format is forcing this, but that headline is bad. If it's a chronicle of one woman's experience in four sections, you can't really claim that it's "4 sides" nor "women".

[NuSoardGraphite]

Right - nerd and geek (or its English and Japanese analogues "anorak" and "otaku") were all undeniably negative when I was at university. "Anorak" seems to have dropped out of use, but the remaining words have lost most (not all, but most) of their negative sting. This changeover - in my part of the world - happened in the late 80's to 90's and (not surprisingly) was tied to the rise of computers - at least among people I knew. To be into computers in the early 90's you either had to be an engineer or a nerd (scientists fall into the latter group in the public mind, pretty much by definition). But by the mid-90's computers were going public - and so did computer nerds, a few of whom became mindbogglingly wealthy. And among the university grads I knew, being able to help with computer problems in the late 80's was an instant social in. It was absolutely not cool to hand in a thesis written in longhand and then typed, no matter your major or gender.

 

And during this switchover period, I noticed a few people started to use the term geek or nerd interchangeably, and also occasionally self-referentially. And of course a few people tried to claim it, I guess the same way the gay community claimed "queer" as a way of destigmatising it and shaping an identity. I suppose the obsession with "fake nerds" comes from this last group. Maybe the idea that anyone can be a geek threatens their idea of community ... but the way they have responded online portrays exactly why they were stigmatised in the first place. Not for being geeks. But for being dropwads.

 

cheers, Mark

I have known a lot of guys growing up who were ashamed or embarrassed by their geekiness precisely because of the stigma against it. Thus, those who did not feel said shame or embarrassment decided to embrace the terminology to remove its power to do those things.

 

I remember one day when I was in the navy and I was hanging out with a gamer buddy of mine and we were disscussing our last roleplaying session. We were in public at the time. We had a guy walk up to us and ask us about roleplaying. He was also from the base, so we invited him to our next roleplaying session. We became pretty good friends and one day he confessed to me that he was utterly shocked that he heard us talking about roleplaying in public, around other non-roleplayers. He said he had NEVER seen anyone do that before and he thought all geeks hid their hobbies from others.

 

Basically, claiming the word geek removes the stigma from it. Others can use it negatively, but if you see the word in a positive light, it shouldnt have a negative effect on ones psyche.

 

Today, we dont have this issue, which is great. Thats the best and most important aspect of "geek culture" going mainstream. Its just us grognards who were the ones who went through the abuse, stood strong in the face of it and took the lable for ourselves and through it forged strong bonds with our friends with that lable as our common ground who take issue with geek culture going mainstream. Somehow it doesnt feel as special as it once did. Which is ridiculous, I know, yet the feeling persists.

[SKJAM!]

I wonder whether it's the author or whether Cracked's infantile format is forcing this, but that headline is bad. If it's a chronicle of one woman's experience in four sections, you can't really claim that it's "4 sides" nor "women".

 

Apparently Cracked.com has someone known as "Headline Guy" who picks the titles for all the articles and comes in for a lot of stick for badly chosen headlines.

[Pattern Ghost]

I just found this. I'll let it speak for itself. Spoilering b/c it's slightly NSFW due to cleavage and language.