I’m not getting into the nerd discourse right now because I’m not supposed to be posting tomorrow, but it does remind me of something I’ve been meaning to talk about for a bit because I find it super weird: Tumblr argues about nerds as a social group all the time, and it argues about “not like other girls” all the time, but hardly anybody seems to have recognized that these are the same topic. “I’m not like other girls” is about being weird and nerdy – sometimes actually, sometimes just because you’re fully aware of your own self rather than the masks people wear in public – and framing it as a kind of humblebrag, a kind of “yeah this thing makes me weird and lame but really it makes me interesting and authentic, wink wink.” This is, like, the default YA protagonist, especially in books since it tends to appeal to the bookish. “Not like other girls” is just a particular variant of that.
Like, everyone remembers the creamsicle thing, right? KYM doesn’t trace it back that far, but there was at least one actual serious nerd-chaunivism post that the original creamsicle thing was parodying, and I’ve seen any number of those over the years. It’s just the nerds-vs-jocks thing, and the backlash against it – the ridiculing of not-like-other-girls chauvinists as arrogant and socially stunted – is part of the same backlash against nerd chauvinism more generally, which, there as elsewhere, boiled over into hostility toward nerds as a class. I think both sides on these fights have some good points and I’m not really here to lay down the law because it’s a very complicated issue, but do I feel like there ought to be more awareness that these are different aspects of the same fight.
Relatedly, a lot of people try to frame some of this stuff as “feminism vs. nerds” and once you recognize that “nerds” encompasses this much broader group that angle sort of falls away, because nerd women are often shamed for being too into feminism, and the wrong types, and a lot of the discourse we do here about choice feminism and makeup culture is orbiting that conflict. (I wonder if it might be more accurate to say that nerds tend to have strong opinions about feminism qua feminism, whereas non-nerds are more likely to view feminism as just one of many arenas to Do Society? I need to think about that a bit more.)
I don’t really have an overarching point here beyond “we can eliminate a number of redundancies in these discourse streams”, I guess, but that was enough for me to say it because this has been driving me up the wall for a while now.
Relatedly, a lot of people try to frame some of this stuff as “feminism vs. nerds” and once you recognize that “nerds” encompasses this much broader group that angle sort of falls away, because nerd women are often shamed for being too into feminism, and the wrong types, and a lot of the discourse we do here about choice feminism and makeup culture is orbiting that conflict.
This is interesting. Not saying you’re wrong, just…I don’t think I’ve ever heard nerd-girls-qua-nerd-girls slammed for excessive feminism, or indeed for anything other than Betraying the Sisterhood via excessive nerdery and insufficient feminism.
Maybe a milieu thing? In places outside the Hip Urban Centers, where e.g. the Perky Sorority Girl with her big smile and her downhome values is still an ideal that’s very much in force, I can imagine the nerdy girl stereotype getting crossed with the conservative-land Ugly Hairy Feminist stereotype. But in liberaltopia, well, the archetypal stylish popular well-put-together woman is super feminist, and you have to go many rungs down the fashion ladder before you get to “actually not caring about your looks” (as opposed to “going for a grungier and more proletarian-chic form of stylish”), and overall it really doesn’t seem like there’s room for nerds to be more-feminist-than-average.
Also,
I’m not getting into the nerd discourse right now because I’m not supposed to be posting tomorrow
Why not? Are you ditching this place for good? Observing some kind of extended moment of silence?