like, eesh, i know this is really fucking petty to be complaining about when they are literally putting kids in fucking cages but
i’m so tired of how posturing against Nerd Culture ™ has become part of the leftist party line, even if you’re gonads deep in Nerd Culture yourself
like. yes. i am fully aware that Nerd Culture ™ has some serious problems and there are some really nasty bigots there and they need to get the bigotry stick out of their fucking anii, but.
it honestly seems like the whole tumblr ‘LET’S MAKE FUN OF NERDS/GAMERS/PEOPLE WHO LIKE BAD SHIPS’ is based in ableism and self-loathing more than anything valid. at best it’s misguided attempts at ‘punching up’ and hurting people who hurt you back; at worst it’s just general high school bullshit. it’s making fun of the ‘weird’ ‘greasy’ kid who wears a top hat and talks about my little pony too much and doesn’t perform their gender correctly. or making fun of the ‘fat neckbeard’ who’s autistic and doesn’t have the best grasp on personal hygiene. or making fun of the ‘creepy’ fat otaku dude who says awkward things about how he’s more interested in anime girls than real ones… because, guess what, he’s asexual and doesn’t have the words for it. or, or, or, or, or, list goes on.
it’s like, do you really care about fighting bigotry, or do you just want to be able to be the ones bullying other people? if it’s the first one, why the fuck are you always picking on marginalised people? if it’s the second one, why the fuck are you in my justice space?
Bluh. So…
I appreciate this post, and the sentiments that appear to lie behind it. I really honestly do. You are speaking up for kindness, and speaking out against people who seem invested in cruelty.
But this kind of rhetoric always makes me a bit twitchy. I guess I’m not totally sure what you mean by “marginalised” here, but it usually translates to “falling into a generally-understood generally-approved Sympathetic Oppressed Persons category” – and this seems underscored by the three specific archetypes you cite, which boil down to “the nerd is actually gender-nonconforming!” and “the nerd is actually disabled!” and “the nerd is actually asexual!”
Because sometimes that turns out to be true, but a lot of the time it doesn’t. A lot of the time, the awkward nerd really is just a straight white dude. A lot of the time, the social weirdness doesn’t rise up from some diagnosable disability, it’s just…weird.
And everyone, on every side of the discourse, knows this perfectly well. Trying to shield the nerds, as a class, under the umbrella of “they’re members of oppressed protected groups” just isn’t going to work in the long run – they don’t have the right kind of oppression narrative, they don’t have the right kind of community identity, it’s too often just a bad fit.
The question is: does that mean it’s OK to be cruel to them? Does that mean that their suffering doesn’t matter?
To which the only possible answer for a decent human being is “of course not.” But you can’t get there through the plays in the basic SJ playbook.
I’m sorry. I know this isn’t the discourse you meant to be having; I know that I’m kind of reacting to things that you didn’t actually say. I just…want to illuminate some of the dynamics that are in play, here, in this infernal meta-conversation.