Why Are Geeks Bullied, Excluded, and Taunted? [Jul. 26th, 2012|02:53 pm] Nick Mamatas There are a number of links I could provide, but I'll stick with scalzi Who Gets To Be A Geek? Anyone Who Wants To Be. The theme is recent complaints about attractive women who attend SF media/videogame conventions. Apparently, there are too many of them, and they are just there to get attention from the real geeks. Which sounds exactly like the sort of thing pretty girls would spend their time doing—trying to get attention from slovenly misfits. According to their critics, some of these attractive women aren't even actually super-pretty; they just magically become pretty when they dress in "cosplay" as this or that character from anime or a videogame or a movie. Like so:





She'd be hideous without those guns.





One of the recurring themes in discussions like these is that young people who are "geeks"—this often means they enjoy science fiction-tinged entertainments like videogames or comic books—were bullied, or excluded, or taunted during their schooldays, for their interests. "Geekdom" as a "culture" (ugh) was welcoming while the rest of the world—with its interest in sporting contests and motor vehicles that don't have atomic batteries and flame-spewing jets in the rear—was not. And now pretenders and interlopers have come in and it's terrible. It's just just terrible. Boobs boobs everywhere, and not a one to honk, you see.



I'd like to suggest that geeks are very very rarely bullied for their interests. An interest in books can be a problem, yes, because school is where people are trained to read books, and many kids resent that training. And yes, kids resent their classmates who read a lot and get good grades. Other than that, though, no, young boys aren't being bullied for liking comics or videogames or that sort of thing. Girls, yes, sometimes, thanks to sexist social norms, but in many cases the geek boys do plenty of that bullying, which makes their complaints now about the surplus of attractive women rather rich, in my view.



There's often a distinction made between a geek, a nerd, and a dork. Geeks are enthusiasts, nerds get excellent grades, and dorks socially awkward. It's worth noting that the hair-splitting with these definitions if often carried out by geeks who certainly don't want to be considered dorks. But here's the sad truth: a Venn diagram of the three types would have significant overlap. Most kids weren't bullied for being geeks. They were bullied for being dorks. They're just so socially misfit that to this day they're sure they were bullied because of Nintendo and comics, and not because of their greasy hair or pudgy bodies.



You weren't picked on because of your pop culture consumption habits, you were picked on for being a dork. Perhaps you were slow to develop—or in the case of girls, too fast to develop. Boys who develop fastest have extreme social and physical advantages in school settings. These are the infamous "jocks" who have carried on an eon-long war against the "nerds." But here's the thing: jocks played videogames and watched Star Wars and looked at Batman comics and checked out Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends on Saturday mornings too. Sports games is a major segment of the videogame biz, and Star Wars and Batman were hugely, hugely popular. So was Nintendo generally, and all that other stuff. MTV ran episodes of Monty Python! (I had to watch it on PBS at midnight when I was a kid...) Everyone got every Star Trek reference made on other TV shows. Dungeons and Dragons has had, over the years, something like $1 billion in book and merchandise sales.



Geek "culture" was not a secret counterculture. It was and is a mass culture. If you saw it on TV or in a movie theater at the local shopping mall, or got it for Christmas, it was popular. You may have been picked on for being small, or fat, or for relative poverty or wealth, because of your complexion or haircut, for your glasses or inability to catch a ball, but not because you liked comics. If the comic book was snatched out of your hand when you were yelled at by some bigger boy, it wasn't because you were reading a comic book. Had you been holding a sandwich, or a flute, or your dick in your hand, that would have been the proximate target instead.



Honestly, I grew up in a fairly rough and racially divided area. Sufficiently racially divided that some of my classmates in the "gifted and talented" junior high school I attended celebrated adulthood with a racist murder. My high school, which I attended just for a year before my family moved, had race, performance, and other conflict problems when I attended that continued to grow to the point where the city eventually shut it down.



But here's what, in my time, brought the white, and black, and Latino, and Asian boys together in my school: comic books, kung-fu movies, horror films, pro wrestling, and basketball and football. You didn't need understanding of all six either. At least three, and I'd argue four, of those subjects are resolutely "geeky" (there's a reason WWE Smackdown! is on Syfy, and it's demographical) and they were things that helped limit bullying.



As an aside: Don't get me wrong, I'm not excusing bullying behavior. Nobody controls how wealthy or how poor their parents are, their race, what month of the year they were born, whether or not they have a disability or how quickly they develop physically, or how that mustache initially grows in or breasts develop. Kids don't really have much control over the sound of their voice, or what they were raised to consider important, etc. We're not blaming the victims here. Overly narrow conceptions of what's socially acceptable are to blame.



But greasy kid stuff was and is socially acceptable. If "geek culture" was a huge stigma, there wouldn't have been Star Wars in the mid-1970s and a giant Superman movie in the late 1970s, Godzilla marathons on TV at 3PM—just in time for the kids to come home from school—or Transformers and He-Man toys and cartoons all over the fucking place in the 1980s. Batman wouldn't have been huge in the 1980s, there wouldn't have been a comic book bubble or a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle juggernaut emerging from the black-and-white indie comic scene. Pac-Man wouldn't have been stamped on every conceivable product, and a decade later Super Mario Bros. 3 wouldn't have sold 7 million copies in the US alone.



Unless your abiding geek interest is, oh, I dunno, Lithuanian folk dancing, your "geek" childhood was not anything other than the usual sort of consumption of tween and teen products that millions upon millions of others also consumed. You were in the same special secret club that everyone else who had a TV or went to the mall was in.



And yes, these days if you're 30 or 40 and your abiding interest is still Transformers, you may have some trouble getting dates, but remember that we're talking about formative geek experiences, not yesterday's poorly conceived of OKCupid profile. Okay, StarScreamAnal420?



The same is true in the sexual realm: geek boys weren't being rejected in high school because they liked Star Wars, or because it's impossible to find a girl who also liked Star Wars. They were being rejected because of their appearance, weight, smell, attitude, visible handicaps, foreign accents, failure to own a car, general "creepy" vibe, failure to be interested in women as human beings, difficulty in carrying on a conversation, an annoying giggle, slouchy and asocial demeanor, etc. And it's not like geek boys stared across the classroom at the geek girls, with their braces and weird jutting chins and nose-picking habits and horse books, and declared undying love over mid-afternoon Legos either. Indeed, one reason why sexist attitudes toward attractive women are so prevalent in geekdom is because of the mix of shame and desire attractive women represent to men who feel excluded from the supply of sexual encounters out there in the world. It's abjection—one wants what one cannot have because one is revolting, so one projects that same revulsion on the object of their desire. Some geek men want these booth babes so much that they can't stand them.



Of course, most geek men also grow up eventually, find lovers, comb their hair, take up exercise and get over junior high. They don't need "geek" as some sort of badge of honor. The ones that do, well, they're the ones I suspect are most likely to accept sexist ideas about attractive women, and fearlessly promote them online, where they're safe from reprisals by the jocks of the adult world. (HR departments and the like.) That is, they become bullies. Why does a bully pick on a dork? Because it's safe—there's no downside to doing it. Why does a dork pick on a woman? Because it's safe—there's no downside to doing it. I mean, it's not like the "booth babe" was otherwise going to go back to the geek's hotel room (which he is sharing with four other smelly weirdos) with him, right? So, rage rage, on and on, and all to protect geek culture from the endless horrors of non-dorks and big tits?



Buried somewhere deep in there is an issue worth discussing—marketers use sex to sell anything, and often promise sex in return for consumption. Cars, toothpaste, you name it. But geeks with sexual anxieties are rightly suspicious of of this sex-sells technique, when they are targeted with it. However, rather than blaming the firms that engage in this behavior—the very firms that have sold these geeks their identity—they take out their frustrations on the women. And all goes according to corporate plan...



Let Us Put an End to Geek Pride.