I don't know if anyone has ever cracked my impenetrable shell of Fonzie-like cool and noticed this, but I'm really quite geeky.
I know, I know. Take a moment to let that sink in.
I'm sorry, I should have broken it more gently. God, this must be what women felt like when they found out Liberace was gay...
If you've recovered from the shock, I'll continue. I'm quite geeky, and as such I always have half an eye on the nerd scene, or half a finger on the pulse of geekdom, or some fraction of a body part on the relevant metaphorical measure of dork-ness. This is how I came across the below article from the New Statesman that deals with the always-tetchy subject of women in geek culture.
To summarise a fairly long article, comic writer Tony Harris (that's "comic" as in muscular men in tights, not as in "funny") has gone on a long, misogynist rant on facebook and everyone hates him for it.
There are plenty of good reasons to hate him for it, too. Aside from being unpleasant and nauseatingly sexist, it shows him to be a whining, petty asshole and - perhaps most heinous in my eyes - a paid writer who can't understand where punctuation is meant to go.
As a side note, I think I take umbridge at this because there's no excuse. If you're a sheltered or embittered loser who hates women, that's not necessarily your fault. Sure, you're wrong, but moreover, there's something wrong with you. On the other hand, everyone in the western world spends years and years of other peoples' tax money learning where capital letters go. This isn't a matter of ill-thought-out opinion or an unfortunate symptom of some psychosis, it's just a case of getting things wrong, and it's annoying, especially coming from "writers."
But back to the sexism.
Harris' point seems to be that women who hang around comic conventions dressed as hot characters from fiction ("cosplayers," for the unaware) are a group of evil harpies who are ugly anyway, and he totally didn't even WANT to have sex with them in the first place because they're probably all lesbians and don't deserve to be there with the real geeks.
If a lemon rolled itself in salt and joined a convent, it still wouldn't be as bitter and un-sexed as this jackass.
Sadly, it's by no means a minority viewpoint in geekdom. There seems to be a genuine sense of wounded pride when attractive people with breasts partake in nerdy, male activities. Like these alien, menstruating beings couldn't possibly find geek stuff entertaining, so they must all be phonies and posers.
It's not hard to see where this all comes from. The kids who played Dungeons and Dragons in school or who went to the chess club or who were no good at sports (there's a lot of overlap on that Venn diagram, in my experience) didn't get laid very much. By which I mean "ever."
Maybe things have changed since my day; maybe the whole "Harry Potter" thing meant that kids with coke-bottle glasses and an interest in wizards got access to hot and cold running titties in their formative years, but it sure as hell wasn't that way for my generation.
So there's a lot of bitterness and resentment towards women in the geek community, and to a certain age, it's justified. Smart kids tend to have things like "personalities" and "a sense of humour," and this is what females claim to want. It makes for a frustrating and lonely life. After the age of about seventeen, however, the karma seems to even out and most geeks end up in stable, loving relationships. Women, I like to think, finally realise that a guy who can make them laugh and program HTML can probably figure out the clitoris better than the guy who is good at lighting his farts and thinks Irving Berlin is the Jewish part of Germany.
A lot of this karmic balance, however, involves give and take. I was never, for the record, into Dungeons and Dragons, and I can't write HTML for shit, which is why I still only use the qualifier "quite geeky" for myself. One thing that does stand out, however, is that I got laid a lot more often after I lost some weight and stopped being such a whining, bitter asshole.*
So maybe this is the problem. Maybe the true, super-geeks never quite make the jump into functional society well enough to meet some girls and chill out.
Maybe people who go into things like hardcore gaming (I'm talking "World Ranking" type gaming, not just playing "Batman: Arkham City" for eight hours because you're too hung over to move like the rest of us) or, say, full-time comic writing are the people who never bothered to develop even the rudimentary social skills of an internet blogger who is currently wearing Spider-Man socks.
So, the reason there's so much misogyny in geekdom is because the hardcore geeks still hate women for not having sex with them.
And y'know what? Good! Fuck 'em. (Not literally.)
If you're so stupid that you hate women for not seeing how smart you are, and immediately propositioning you, you don't deserve the female attention you so obviously crave in the first place. If you're simultaneously that smart and yet so dumb that you can't learn to come out of your shell and stop treating women as a separate species, then you have no right to an opinion on gender relations.
And ladies? Don't be mad about it; don't be offended or intimidated. Just don't have sex with these people, like you're already not doing.
Nothing could be a better revenge than that.
(Well. Nothing except sex with internet bloggers who have a whole range of comic book socks...)
*Marvel, for a moment, at the fact that I used to be more of a bitter asshole.
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