This blog isn't ever going to be too political. It's not because I feel no such desire to indulge in more political angles nor out of fear of controversy, as I like a good bitch fight as much as the next guy. But this is a point that I have to weigh in on, a point lacking distinctly in sexyness and fun-lovingness. It includes a lot of topics that my readership may find philosophically and psychologically intimidating, including "girls", "social responsibility", and Sephiroth manporn. However, we're here, we're geeky, and we're on an internet nerd blog, so I think we can all competently view ourselves as inquisitive and intellectually adventurous people. Or trolls. Whatevs.
That said, I know that the things I am proposing are a little heavy, so to ease any hurt feelings and high blood pressure, I have thoroughly saturated this blog post with adorable pictures of little kitties to sooth any wounded psyches.
Now to the topic at hand: the treatment and portrayal of female nerds.
Let's start first with a little sense of context. Yes yes, you got me. I am a feminist.
Put your guns down for a second guys. What I am not, and I stress again, am not is an overbearing female supremacist. Nor am I a frigid lesbian who hates any object that's longer than it is wide. Nor am I an ugly internet mofo seething with jealousy over buxom superheroines and anime girls with chronic inability to competently use braziers (in fact, I have it on supreme authority that I am drop dead sexy, but that's neither here nor there). Nor am I an extremely competent male troll (an easy mistake to make). Nor am I some sort of Jason Voorheez, drill carrying psychopath waiting for the right opportunity to jump out of the computer and put my wares straight into your nethers. I'm just a normal girl who wants people to treat each other kindly and nonjudgmentally regardless of which set of chromosome their particular fertilizing sperm had in the glove compartment.
Further more in the "you got me" department is, well, I am a nerd, and I have at least some semblance of sexual attraction to women. So it would be easy to point out a lot of points I present in hypocrisy, especially when I bring home the point of this post that I've been skating around somewhat before this point.
Female nerds are treated with casual disregard at kindness and an unfair double standard at worst, despite their behaviors, origins, and motivations being almost identical to their male counterparts.
I know that whether your reaction to this is "well no freaking duh, potato-face" or "this is one crappy-ass reason to put your School Days reviews on hold", this is a pretty blunt claim to make. But we really have to look this one in the face here, guys. I will be the first to agree, and understand, and to a certain degree respect, that a majority of geek culture, including cartoons, comic books, video games, and many old-school cartoons, are traditionally catered to the male demographic. And I will concede that this not a trait that should be immediately damned.
It goes without saying that even if the original demographics of these genres, or even most medias, were by males for males, they're rich in literary merit, speak to the universal human condition, and are enjoyable and enriching (the not awful ones anyway). Not to mention that if its original creators and intended audience did not exist, a lot of the elements of the culture we prize wouldn't exist as well, even the material that's reactionary to it. But keeping this in mind, it all leads up to a very strong and very uncomfortable question:
Just how many narrative and artistic mediums are targeted specifically to the female demographic, let alone exclusively?
The only real genre I can think of is romance, and even that is a genre that's treated with little respect and seriousness of artistic merit, unless its a subplot to a more sprawling storylline. Mystery too, sometimes, but even that's treated in the "lower" mediums. So what about other genres, or indeed, what about other media outlets in general? Pretty much every medium, be it books, television, movies, radio, mainstream internet blogs and webcomics, games, graphic novels, and the like tend to be written for a male demographic, or at least with the male demographic taking some semblance of precedence.
The good news in all this, if you're looking for it, is that the geek industry seems to be no better or worse than mainstream culture in general. The bad news is...the geek industry seems to be no better or worse than mainstream culture in general. One could infer that this is because a majority of writers and directors of any of these mediums tend to be men themselves, but that whole issue brings back the elephant-in-the-room societal feminism thing.
A lot of geeks counter that Anime and Manga and JRPG boom of the nineties and naughts brought the girl geeks into the mix, so they consider it the token "girly" expression of media. But let's be real here. Both in JRPGs and Animanga, the target demographic, or at least the most notable examples in the genre, still got their male on. If we were to ratio iconic JRPG male protagonists to iconic female protagonists, especially if we discount those who became iconic by virtue of their sex appeal, I think we both know who'd get the larger number in the ratio.
Same goes for Anime and Manga. The big names of the genre, such as Cowboy Bebop, Neon Genesis Evangelion, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, and others claim to be more gender neutral with their inclusion of a lot of girls, and a lot of kickass girls at that, but the main thematics of all series, most notably the male protagonist against the male antagonists, and the disproportionate attention given to the sex appeal of the female cast of all of the above, I think we can safely say that it's target audience is still very much dude.
In the few Animes that have managed to gain popularity despite it's female-targeted audience, such as Sailor Moon and Revolutionary Girl Utena, there still is a utilization of ample cheesecake from the female protagonists to, oddly, keep the periphery male demographic appeased, even when both have male representation in their works (alright Sailor Moon was kind of sketchy with its dudes, but so was Cowboy Bebop with its chicks, so thar ya go).
Which only raises more uncomfortable questions, such as why do we need to appease this particular demographic and not girls? Girls are still a minority in a lot of geeky things, but their demographic is numerous none the less. Most counts are at least 40% in most mediums. That's a lot. To put things in perspective, 40% accounts for the percentage of our planet's landmass. And especially in America, we need as many geeks as we can get, n'est pas? Moreover, why does this hyper-extend into other medias? Do we think that girls just don't watch TV, or movies, or read at all? What do we think girls do all day? Knit? Anyone?
I'm getting a little off topic here, so let's get back to the girl geeks themselves. I will NOT say that nerds are sexist, because for all my snarling, I don't believe that's true in the slightest bit. If anything, I've think Nerds tend to have racked themselves into a neo-Knight in Shining Armor mentality, which is a fault I will explain later. But I will go as far as to say that a lot of Nerds are generally uncomfortable around women.
The pedigree of the Nerd is the outcast, the beat around, the kid who had to create their own subculture of which they could be properly appreciated and interact with their fellow Nerds. They're already social awkward, abused, mistrusted, and misrepresented. And one of the big reasons the nerds broke off from the mainstream, or had a hard time synchronizing with it, is an acute awkwardness around women. It's a marked difference between the nerd and the jock.
Hence the problem of the introduction of the girl nerd. It can be intimidating to be in a demographic that is not your own, yes, but it can be just as disconcerting when things are the other way around. Those unfamiliar with the finner nuances and manners in the community they try to establish themselves in can be shocking at kindest, bafoonish at worst. No one likes the Leeroy Jenkins on your MMO team. We know this.
We have come a really long way. We're no longer in the era where girls will be sneered at and harassed just for using the internet. Yet there is still a definite discomfort when girls get into the geeky mix, especially if these girls are making any expressions of their own femininity or heterosexuality. Fact is, the same awkward-around-the-opposite-sex, not-conventionally-appealing reasons a lot of guys raise the geek flag to begin with is the exact same reason a lot of girl geeks do the same thing. And when you have two groups of people who are, I would argue, both high on hormones and massively sexual repressed, things are going to explode.
Take, for instance, the Draco in Leather Pants cliche. A TV Tropes term, it basically refers to a softness to the point of sympathetic fetishism toward a fictional character due to his or her sex appeal despite being a conventionally evil or dangerous person. As one can expect, this trope is usually seen in pretty negative regard, and as suggested by the title, is often a stereotype attached to female practitioners. To put things in lamens terms, if miss geek thinks Sephiroth is a sexy muffin cakes, makes fan comics of him, and keeps a ninety-five dollar statue of him on her dresser, she's often seen as a giggling, drooling fangirl and don't you get he wants nothing more than to slice you in half. If mister nerd thinks that Bayonetta is a damn fox, draws fanart of her to various degrees of titillation, and has a life sized body pillow her, conventional wisdom indicates the dude's just being smart.
Another manifestation is the treatment of Yaoi Fangirls. Note that even the producers of media frequently in question are above throwing a little girl-on-girl cuddling to get the viewership's attention, plausibility to actual characterization notwithstanding. But girl geeks who do the same with any popular male characters in fanwork, especially if said characters have a sizable male fanbase, are delusional, perverted, and sometimes downright sick, or at the very least going too far.
It tends to be assumed that expressions of sexuality in geeky media are acceptable, and strangely, fanservice catered to females seems to be more publicaly sympathized to that of males. Yet there's still a slight frowning upon, or at least confusion or questioning of, women who actively seize these opportunities for themselves, despite their male counterparts doing such long before the conventional regard of their resistance. Putting the debate of the necessity of fanservice to appease these expressions aside, female and male geeks that tend to view the other sides sexual expressions as degrading or irrational seems to contain more than a modicum of hypocrisy, as both sides are more or less engaging in the exact same behavior, with the only difference being that one has had more time to establish it as a norm within the circle.
Last, and most controversially, we look at the difference between the courtship expectancies of the male nerd versus that of the female nerd. The first is the concept of what the internet likes to call "Nice Guy Syndrome". The "well meaning and thus deserving nice guy" mantra is as old as dirt, and while most people realize that things tend to be a bit more complicated than that, it's still a mindset that easily pervades the geekdom.
The basic philosophy is thus: "Jocks and bros are total assholes, yet they get all the girls. Girls should not want total assholes. Thus, they should give me a chance, for I am distinctly not an asshole." On the surface, this makes perfect sense. I'm a woman, and I don't want to date an asshole, so I can certainly relate. But here's the thing--nice, while being a critical reason to enter a relationship, is a reason. Sadly, just like you want a girl who's more than "nice" and "hot", we want a guy who's more than...well, just nice.
Getting out Interpersonal Relationships 101, yes, it's important to be a good person and to have good intentions with a person, and most people grasp that concept pretty easily, especially nerds like us, who have been pushed around as much as anyone. And bro, I am not knocking dating nerds. I am a girl dating a nerd, and I can vouch for them being highly underrated romantic partners. That being said, being nice alone does not entitlement make. Having anyone, male or female, date anyone else because they aren't beaten and abused isn't nice-that is what we call Stockholm Syndrome. And if you're taking a women's study class and cursing it for giving you the edge to pick up chicks to appreciate your sensitivity, well, you're a different breed entirely my friend.
That being said, the "Give Geeks a Chance" mentality is still alive and well in the community. And it appears everywhere. Revenge of the Nerds really kicked this trend off, to be followed by various others, including Back to the Future, Spider Man, Seinfeld, Kim Possible, pretty much every Woody Allen movie, so on and so forth.
And that's all well and good, because hey, geeks deserve a chance. Though this process is oddly reversed when it comes to a female geek. If a female geek wants to get the hot guy, then by the powers that be woman, brush your frizzball head, ditch the glasses, and get yourself a form-fitting tube top. We can see this in Grease, The Breakfast Club, Carrie (it didn't end too spectacularly, but...), The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (Yuki may be the most unnecessary glasses-pull character in all of media), about 83% of chick flicks (ironically), so on and so forth.
So to wrap this all up, geeks deserve a chance. Understandable. Male geeks deserve a chance. Understandable. But here's yet another million dollar question-if we're coded to think that male geeks deserved to have their feelings considered beyond their outward appearances by really hot women, why don't girls get the same thing? If we're trying to push the idea that geeks deserve to be accepted despite outward appearances, then giving the implicit task of half of the geek population to change themselves to fit a conventional standard of presentation, then what exactly does that say about the group itself, let alone the overarching societal implications?
To quote Oscar Wilde, "The only thing easier than solving all of societies ills is to bitch about them on a generic internet blog". We know the why, but what about the elusive how? Well, like I said, at heart, this is a deeply entrenched social issue, and the jury's still out on how good or bad the problem is, even among the feminists.
And frankly, the how isn't altogether pleasant. Even on a personal level, it's going to be a lot of hard work. It's going to take girls admitting that men aren't all that different from us in regards to having kinks for fictional characters, and revoking our rights to play the "men are pigs" card whenever we spot an inch of cleavage. It's going to take guys losing their rights to roll their eyes every time "feminism" appears on the internet, and willing to concede some points that the girls bring up are reasonable. Its going to take both sides being fair-minded and sympathetic to the plights of the other, and, when it's our turn to take up the writing and creating of the media that we ourselves adored, we're going to need to find ways to broaden demographics and tweak tropes and concepts that are throughly embedded in said mediums, even though it's going to take more than a little more creativity and will probably be the victim to more than a little backlash by loyalists.
But I think, if we can really look this problem in the face, and if we can address it realistically, we can do good for geekdom as a whole. We can broaden demographics, bring more people into a culture we love, both men and women, and our own culture can be enriched by the new and the innovative. What's more, we can sooth a lot of hurt feelings within our community, on both sides, and we can finally bridge a few gaps that we've been struggling to overcome long before this became an issue. And what's more, we, as a group, can do the right thing. We've all been mistreated and misrepresented for reasons we do not deserve. This is a huge chance to put our best foot forward, to show everyone, not just ourselves, that we can be progressive, tolerant, and morally responsible individuals.
We can really show the world our stuff if we do this right guys. I know I've got a long way to go, and I certainly slip up now and again, but I'm doing my best for that cause. And if anyone reads this and tries a little harder to do so because of it, then frankly, I'd be very honored. And if not, well, come back next time for some tits and ass. That's guarenteed.
This has been your loyal host, S-type. Good night, and good luck!
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All images of cute kitties are courtesy of photobucket and belong to their respected owners.
