On Fake Geek Girls, and the Nerd Hierarchy
July 8, 2013 2 Comments
At a recent convention (the Rooster Teeth Expo, if sources are to be believed), an attendee allegedly went around the convention floor attaching one of these labels to various female attendees. I always reflexively cringe whenever I see the term “Fake Geek Girl”, because the discussion it invites is almost universally appalling, even among the typically progressive-minded. Penny Arcade’s take on the subject was to firmly declare non-participation (not an unwise move, actually). Tara Tiger Brown, who works with the Born This Way Foundation, wrote a piece titled Dear Fake Geek Girls: Please Go Away, in which the entirety of her criticism of geek culture could easily be levied against geeks of any gender, but with her title and a cursory paragraph or two, targets women specifically because of Reasons. Daniel Floyd of Extra Credits, in his early episode about women and games, takes time to specifically admonish fake gamer girls for exploiting the hobby for sexual attention. That’s not to say that there isn’t a lot of positive discussion about the topic as well, but even the positive is weighed down by a reminder that the negative is far more prevalent.
And yes, I AM aware of the hypocrisy of that last statement.
Now, the inherent misogyny in the entire concept of Fake Geek Girls is something that’s ubiquitous in all male-dominated hobbies and activities. Ask any woman you know who’s into cars, and she’ll tell you she has hundreds of stories of men explaining to her what a carburetor is as if she were five years old. One of Hollywood’s favorite tropes is the Girl Who Is Good At Sports, treating the idea that a woman might actually enjoy and excel at football/hockey/basketball/pretty much any sport that isn’t ringette, field hockey, or volleyball as startling and novel. Have a conversation with a female engineering student, and you’ll hear no end of stories of being coddled and belittled for having the gall to be mechanically inclined and also a woman. The stories are all variations on the same narrative, the Boy’s Club and the Interloper.
With Geek Culture, however, there’s a marked note of hostility that accompanies the usual sexism that transcends mere patronizing. It’s something touched upon by Floyd in my earlier example, and that is the idea that these Fake Geek Girls are putting on the act, as it were, for sexual attention. The idea follows that a woman of above-average beauty, sensing easy prey among the stereotypically socially awkward nerd community, puts her cleavage on display in a Power Girl outfit and waits for all the innocent, hapless nerd boys to lavish her with attention, for which she is assuredly starved. So not only is she an interloper, but she’s a predatory poseur poised to palpate the perpetually un-personable (and perhaps somewhat portly) patrons of popular culture, purely for personal pleasure, and purposely perfidious in this pursuit.
The thing about geek culture in particular, however, is that it tends to behave in this manner with ANY manner of perceived interloper. Let’s take gamers, for instance: in spite of standing head and shoulders above its competitors in the past console generation, the Nintendo Wii is one of the most contentious gaming devices in recent history, due in no small part to its library of games, the vast majority of which are marketed towards a younger, less gaming-oriented crowd. The sort of people that bought Wiis, many argued, aren’t “real gamers” and had no place in that particular corner of geekdom. Meanwhile, many PS3 and Xbox owners look down on those who exclusively play Call of Duty games, who, in turn, scoff at those who purchase each annual installment of EA Sports’ lineup. The whole lot of these folks are viewed as interlopers by a subset of people for whom gaming began and will forever live on their PCs.
This extends to all corners of geek culture. Comics, movies, TV shows, books, music, anything that has a “fandom” lends itself to this sort of hierarchy. Of course, this phenomenon is not exclusive to geeks, it’s just that we tend to be most sensitive to it.
A tangent, if I may: I am hesitant to count myself among geeks, because I personally score very low on the hierarchy. I’ve neither read nor watched The Lord Of The Rings all the way through. Minecraft looks dreadfully dull to me. My comic book reading career began and ended with Archie Comics’ Sonic The Hedgehog, which I am astonished to discover is still running. I stopped playing Magic: The Gathering before they introduced Planeswalker cards, and the most-sided dice I own is the d10 that came with Cranium. While I love Doctor Who, I’ve only seen one pre-Ninth Doctor episode and it put me right to sleep (Pyramids of Mars, if you’re curious). I’ve never cosplayed in my life. And on top of it all, I’m a girl. My credentials are severely lacking, and I am keenly aware of this.
What distinguishes geeks among other people is that we’re the folks whose hobbies have, until recently, been dumped on by most of popular society. And now that these hobbies have become more socially acceptable and prevalent in modern society, the term “geek” paints with a much broader brush than it has in the past. It’s understandable, given the personal history of a lot of geeks, many of whom have spent their lives dealing with people putting them down and attempting to take advantage of them, that they’d be wary of people taking a sudden, unexpected interest in their pastimes.
Understandable, but not justified. Simply put, the lived experiences of geeks makes it so that we, above all others, should be understanding of how it feels to be socially outcast. Us geeks should celebrate when other people share in our bizarre interests, not shun them because they don’t share in them enough. I know for my part, I love Andrew Hussie’s Homestuck, and am usually thrilled to learn that one of my friends has begun reading it, even if they haven’t reached the point of drafting a literary dissertation about it. While they may not have strong feelings about the thematic significance of the architecture of the Land of Heat and Clockwork, I’m just happy to have some one else to talk to about it. Too often, I see geeks regard each other as rivals in an unspoken competition, rather than as comrades sharing in their mutual interest.
With that attitude firmly in mind, the misogyny becomes that much more pointed. A lot of people have already written about how insulting the notion is that Fake Geek Girls are basing their actions entirely around the responses of men rather than for any personal reasons, so I’ll not be rehashing that point further. Instead, let’s give this argument the benefit of the doubt. Let’s say that there are women who, with full awareness and malicious intent, dress for the sole and express purpose of preying upon heterosexual male sexuality (because the people making these arguments tend to conveniently ignore homosexual men and women, we’ll be doing the same for the sake of argument). What’s really happening here? The women would be taking advantage of the cultural norms that dictate that they are nothing more than objects for male titillation, and exploiting this standard for personal or professional gain. Do we blame the person who is typically victimized by such an institution for capitalizing on her inherently weakened position, or do we blame the system for creating the imbalance of power that she was able to exploit in the first place? And who came up with this institution, that tells men that it is acceptable for men to ogle and leer at a woman based on how much skin she’s showing, that tells women that in order to be deemed worthy of male attention, they must wear these outfits that show off this skin and provoke these feelings?
I’ll give you a hint: It wasn’t women.
That, essentially, is what it all boils down to. If you feel victimized by Fake Geek Girls, then you have no one to blame but yourself, and the culture that created you. Your inability to function as a fully capable human being in the presence of an attractive woman can only be the product of your buying into the culture that dictates that such behaviour is socially acceptable for men. If you feel threatened by the potential existence of Fake Geek Girls, then you need to ask yourself what it is you feel they are trying to prove, and in turn, what you feel you need to prove in retaliation.
That’s about all that I have to say on this for now. Next I’ll be talking about the media’s obsession with blaming my generation (colloquially referred to as ‘the millennials’) for all of modern society’s woes. Stay tuned!
~Joselyn