We’ve been treated, over the years, to endless misogynist manifestos declaring that nerdy hobbies like comic books and video games should be kept free from pesky females, for all sorts of ridiculous reasons that usually come back to some allegedly innate characteristics of males and females that show that only men can appreciate said hobbies and that all of the women who claim to like them are only pretending, because really what they want is endless attention from nerdy dudes.
I recently ran across one of these manifestos in the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit. While it was full of the same tired old BIOTRUTHS as most “male space” manifestos — only dudes “are wired to be adept at tasks with inanimate objects,” only dudes have the necessary “diligence” to be true fans — this manifesto offered another powerful(ly dumb) anti-nerd-girl argument I don’t think I’ve encountered before: Nerd girls should be kept out of male hobbies because they’re a bunch of icky uggoes, “sub-4 at best.”
Let’s let the somewhat ironically named NuclearTruthBomb explain this particular “truth.”
The simple fact of the matter is that most women are not, and never will be, into the activities of low-status, but intelligent males. Yes, a few exist. My sister loves drawing, animation, and even video games. But she’s also on the upper end of the autism spectrum, and pretty unattractive.
Dude, really? She’s your SISTER.
Women have status simply by existing. There is only a very small number of girls who are so hideous, no man will show interest in them.
Empathy, not a big thing amongst MGTOWs.
Being a nerd if often considered a sign of low status. Trust me, none of us got laid for being on the chess team. Because women are so concerned about appearences, they will refuse to associate with nerds by default.
So that means, natch, that the only “females” who want to have anything to do with male nerds will be the ugly uggoes.
Male nerds tend to range from perfectly average to the bottom of the barrel. Female nerds however, are sub-4 at best, genetically cursed at worst. They were rejected by the popular girls a long time ago, and will wear a shirt that screams YAOI FAN for a modicum of attention.
These discrepancies cause female geeks to be not only low in number, but of poor quality in general.
And now a cameo appearance by Chad Thundercock, or at least his brothers Brad, Joe, and Darren Thundercock, as well as their cousin Bill BigDick and his friend Tyrone.
Ironically, while women will forever flock to the sports stadium of Brads and Joes, nerds will spell the future for the human race. The guy who gets shoved in the mud by Bill BigDick this decade will be inventing the technology of the next one. The quirky glasses wearing freak will create that game Darren plays after Daisy gives him a rimjob. And all those countless code monkeys will be responsible for the social media websites she meets Tyrone on.
To do list:
- Shove nerd in mud
- Rimjob w/ Daisy
- Vidya Games
Only when these nerdy dudes get super rich will the hotties have any interest in them.
Once she realizes that these men are making bank, she’ll try to swing branches. And many simpanzees will takeher anyways. Us on the other hand, can enjoy our own specific tastes without worrying “Buh-buh-buh, what would Sally think of this!?”
MGTOWs have turned “stewing in your own bitterness about women possibly giving other dudes rimjobs” into America’s fastest-growing hobby. This is a male space no one should want to invade.
Computer generated code leads to things like WordPress, that wonderful blog platform that sucks all the network speed and CPU from your computer to power the browser.
@js; unless we’ve got conclusive proof these guys can make something better, they still don’t have anything to be smug about.
‘That I got started a little bit earlier than them is unimportant and wins me no kudos for having done so.’
Perfectly stated Lkeke35. I’m always asked ‘how do you know all this stuff/how have you read so many books’ etc. etc. Um…I’m older than you. I’ve had x many more years of time to have read/seen/done things. That doesn’t make me better/geekier/smarter, it just means I’ve had a head start.
I’ve just spent a few minutes attempting to track down a quote online and it’s annoying me that I can’t find it right away, but I really HAVE to get up…it’s along the lines of ‘just because many geniuses are unkempt, antisocial and have bad handwriting doesn’t mean emulating these habits makes you a genius.’ [caveat for problematic definition of ‘genius’, but it’s a funny quote]
@IP good luck on your test! I was out partying the night before my day-long qualifying exam (many decades ago) and I passed, so I wish the same to you.
Things I learned today:
1. Because I’m a D&D player, I must be a sub-4 uggo.
2. Because I’ve worked as a model, I can’t be a nerd.
Am I two different people?
Best of luck on the test, IP. I’ve been there with the insomnia-the-night-before thing, and it’s awful. I hope you do really well nonetheless.
@epitome of incomprehensibility:
*applause*
Do you even code bro?
I just… I don’t get it. I used to be part of a role playing group with my brother and our friends when I was a teenager. It started out as all boys, but as people moved away and life happened some girls became involved too. One of the girls started dating one of the guys in the group, and they’ll have been together 10 or so years by now (good lord I’m getting old) though their relationship is long distance at the moment, because she moved overseas to work for Google.
All but one of the guys in the group have, by now, been in long-term relationships and the one who hasn’t explicitly identifies as aromantic and asexual. My brother, a man who once owned a copy of literally every World of Darkness book got married last year to a woman who is a) not a nerd and b) “way out of his league” looks-wise.
I want to know what kind of nerds these assholes think they are, because they are nothing like the nerds I know. The nerds I know are of all genders, all sexual orientations, and pretty much all points on the continuum of conventional attractiveness. Some have lots of sex with lots of different people. Some have no sex at all, and never have had. Most have sex with one person whom they are in a relationship with.
It’s almost like, being a nerd isn’t that different from literally any other group of people.
The only things these jerks seem capable of feeling are hate and self pity.
Probably due to being homeschooled, I missed the memo as a kid that a lot of my interests were considered geeky. Reading novels was one of my favorite things. I was given an NES for my 6th birthday, and after that my family always had one game system or another in the house. Board games were a family staple. All of us (yep, including my mom and dad) played computer games pretty much as soon as we owned a home PC. My brother and I would have hours-long LAN games of Age of Empires 1 and 2. When Episode I of Star Wars came out, my mom took my brother and I to an event where we got autographs from Peter Mahew and Kenny Baker. As a teenager, I had more friends I talked to on mIRC than I did in the flesh. I could keep going, but I’ll just leave it that I had a pretty sincerely geeky upbringing.
It wasn’t until I was nearly an adult that I started hearing people wax bitterly nostalgic about how they were such a geek and had all these weird hobbies that nobody else understood, and I was very confused. What do you mean “weird hobbies”? Don’t most people do these things? Upon finding out that maybe most people didn’t do these things, I still didn’t understand why anyone would find any of my hobbies particularly weird–or why I was supposed to care that some people might think my hobbies were kinda weird.
I’ve never had pushback on my geeky hobbies from non-geeky people. I have only had pushback on my geeky hobbies from male geeks.
It’s one of the things that has been so deeply perplexing to me about geek culture. Even though on paper I have a lot of “geek cred”, I’ve never felt like there’s anything particularly to be proud of in being geeky. There’s certainly nothing to be ashamed of, and I definitely feel for people who were made to feel weird and isolated as kids, but… I mean, if you like video games, good for you? If they’re your favorite thing to do, and you’ve poured hours into getting good at them, then rock on with your bad self, but… just… enjoy them then?
Hobbies are hobbies, and not everyone is into everything to the same degree, or at all, and that’s okay. There’s no need to judge and gatekeep everyone who expresses a passing interest. I get it if high school was tough, and I get why there would be some sore spots there, but ostensibly, these MGTOWs are adults, and it’s therefore time to come to terms with the fact that high school is over and they are neither a persecuted underdog nor a vaunted hero for having completed the mythic raids in WoW.
Women who like geeky things either genuinely like them (by far the most likely scenario), or, okay, maybe they’re just pretending because they think it’s cool to be weird (??)–but that has literally zero bearing on male geeks’ ability to continue geeking out over their chosen field of geekery. The MGTOWs aren’t obliged to date these women, or even make friends with them if they don’t want to, but they don’t get to hang a “no girls allowed” sign over the entire hobby. They definitely don’t get to have a “no girls allowed, especially ugly ones” sign.
(The attractiveness discussion is of course a whole other ball of wax, but I feel like my deer is already teal enough)
That was a fascinating deer, Kootiepatra, thank you for sharing it. I’d be happy for it to be a deeper shade of teal.
Considering the intellectual atmosphere now permeating the upper echelons of the world’s most powerful government, I completely agree.
fuck that, i’m infinitely cuter than at least 90% of gameRAs
@kootiepatra
That was damn fascinating. Thanks for tealing that deer ?
This was especially interesting and also sad:
I’m in my 40s and I’d bet money I’ve been playing video games longer than this asshat has been wasting oxygen on the planet.
I wish all the migtoes, incels and other assorted misogynist skid marks would stop claiming women don’t belong in a space we’ve been in since the beginning and get the fuck out of my hobby.
Yeeesh. I’m a nerd who’s attracted to women. A lot of the women I know are fellow nerds – and, yes, a lot of the women I’ve been involved in fun times with are fellow nerds. Tangentially, I ain’t too comfortable around men in general and “male spaces” give me an overwhelming urge to back the fuck off.
By MGTOW logic, nerddom should be a space that I have to share with people I’d rather avoid, but can’t share with people I want to share it with.
So what they want would basically ruin nerddom for me. Again, no misandrist like a misogynist.
@Mish
Herro !
Been a while 🙂
Unrelated: Haha, holy shit, did anybody else hear about George Goddamn Takei running for Congress against Nunes the Goon? If it’s true, this is going to be incredible.
Oh, eff this whole thought process, if thought indeed it is. I grew up as a geeky girl, child of a geeky mother, and I will continue to get my geek on whether or not some dumb schlub on the interweb thinks I’m faking or ugly. I don’t geek for male geek attention.
I especially resent the remark about being a yaoi fan as a bad thing. I’ve been a dyed-in-the-wool yaoi and slash fan since I found out what fanfiction was back in ’01, as are a great many other people, most of them women and (in my experience) as likely to be queer themselves as not. The hate slash and yaoi fans face outside of their online safe zones is pretty misogynistic and homophobic in and of itself, because the genre was pioneered as a liberating form of expression by women for women, with no one consulting the nearest neckbeard whether it made his dice bag shrivel to see someone wearing a Kirk/Spock or Johnlock shirt at a con.
This all was just illustrated perfectly earlier this year, actually. The anime Yuri!!! on Ice (which is a heartwarming sports show about men’s figure skating, and the main characters are two dudes clearly in the middle of some kind of queer romance, but it is VERY POINTEDLY not a yaoi show, for a number of reasons) swept a a bunch of awards at the Cruchyroll site, including anime of the year, best animation, and best couple. By giant margins, too – the YOI fandom was quite motivated to vote.
Of course, the fans of other shows were upset about it, and the worst ones wasted no time on blaming rabid yaoi fangirls for stealing the awards from more deserving (ie, less homoerotic with possibly fewer female fans) shows. Of course, not many of these salty manchildren have actually seen Yuri!!! on Ice because it might turn them into gays and/or women. Still, clearly YOI had to be inferior to the anime they and dudebros like them enjoy, simply because fangirls liked it so much.
Female geeks can’t win. We’re either ‘fake’ fans, because we’re too casual in our interest, or we’re ‘rabid fangirls’ who ruin everything in our overzealousness. Yet another double standard to add to the books.
Mr. Parasol opines that Felicia Day is a cute geek girl, but he still prefers to sleep naked with me. Smart guys are so hot.
This MGTOW complaint fails on so many levels. Not only do we have geek women who meet conventional standards of beauty, but a “plain Jane” geek woman may be very attractive because she’s just so much darned fun to be around. There’s more to beauty than the physical.
I just ordered my first set of keycaps for my mechanical keyboard!!! I’m really excited!! They are really pretty! I’m also thinking of buying a second mechanical keyboard for work, because it’s the one I actually use all day.
… And then maybe buying a different set of pretty keys for it.
Oh, sorry. Was I not supposed to like or know about these things? I’ll just get back to playing Mass Effect: Andromeda while perpetually wearing my N7 hoodie, while my one room mate plays it on her computer with a brand new graphics card (wearing one of her mass effect hoodies, probably) and my other room mate splits up a large quantity of D&D figures with friends.
Oh, sorry. Were none of us supposed to be doing that? Okay, I’ll just get back to my day job, in animation, where I work in a majority female department (!) and draw things all day.
Oh, sorry. Was I supposed to not do that? I’m too busy using the complicated google sheet that I created to help track various stages of our production. I’m not sure why things always break (I’M LOOKING AT YOU, GOOGLE) but I guess I can just fix ’em.
Oh, sorry. Is that too infringing of your spaces? I’ll just go and brew some beers with my good friend who works over at a large video game company. Or hang out with my other animator friends. Or play the paper and pencil version of War Machine that wound up being an all-lady group. Or one of the OTHER games I’m in (I should just say no but they’re really fun).
Oh, sorry. Maybe I should just talk about Star Trek with my parents, who both watched the original runs. And bought a tonne of fantasy/sci fi books so we had a library growing up. Who bought my sisters and I a n64 with their Zellers points, and we played the heck out of Zelda 64 and Mario 64. (We could have had earlier systems, I am old enough for that, but the N64 was my first one when I was in junior high. And it was beautiful.)
Or maybe I’ll work on that epic quilt that I should be doing, or bake a cake, or try to perfect my macarons (so hard!), or learn about writing, or try to do 3D modelling, or do any of the other activities I enjoy that I enjoy because I enjoy them, and not because I am a specific gender.
… Or my taxes. God I need to do those. Let’s see if I can find that T5. I don’t think I got it. ARGH.
MY POINT IS YOU ARE WRONG, NuclearTruthBomb, AND YOU SHOULD FEEL BAD ABOUT THAT. There are people of all genders and all orientations in every hobby, and every hobby would be richer for embracing them. Why do you want to read/play/enjoy the same story again and again? Isn’t having something new fun?
Also, thank you to lkeke35 for
I like starting at the beginning of something (when that’s feasible) and know that I can be judgy about that. And that’s super shitty. I like the idea of geeking out about things with people and sharing the knowledge that maybe I have that they don’t. Or learning something from them, because their experience is different and they relate to and interpret thing differently than I do.
In excited (non-spoilery) mass effect news, I got the trophy for scanning 100 things during my first pathfinder planet-based mission, which annoyed my room mate. “This game is made for me!” I said, excitedly. “Lots of exploring, lots of scanning!”
I might like going through the levels as thoroughly as possible to try to find all of the caches and stuff. I’m really excited that there’s the scanning mechanic which is how you get points to unlock blueprints to get better things, so I’m being rewarded for something I would have done anyway!
She told me she keeps forgetting to scan. I laughed.
Also how cool is it that you can jump??? I’m really enjoying dodging out of the way, and getting onto high things and sort-of sniping.
I’m so bad at the fighting though… OH WELL I’m playing it for the story, anyway. <3 <3 <3 gamerbros, funny story I just want the combat to be fun, I don't care much more than that.
Always with the teal deers. 9__9 I just have a lot of feels about gatekeeping and how people should be allowed to be interested in things without people being jerks about it.
I’ve been reading (especially Sword n Sorcery, and Forgotten Realms) since before I hit double digits. Programming (in Basic and a little machine code) when I was barely into double digits. I’ve built and troubleshooted everything from an IBM XT (8088) on up. I’ve had lots of fun in my school gaming group playing DnD (2nd edition) and Vampire Masquerade. I’m a gamer girl, my partner is a gamer girl and if anyone wants to bitch about their male nerd only safe space being invaded by ‘ugly’ girls they can fuck right off.
P.S
We both like anime too.
When I was a kid our home contained a truly massive collection of pulp sci-fi paperbacks (they were cheap enough to read in the bath) as well as shelves-full of more “serious” sci-fi, and art, and science and literature and and and. It never even occurred to me to remark on the fact that most of this (including all the sci-fi) was all bought by my mother, who enjoyed reading it for relaxation after a hard day’s leading her own developmental biology research team up at the university. Funnily enough it never in her life occurred to her to deal with anyone – faculty, post-docs, technicians – with anything other than the same courtesy and consideration. You’d almost imagine that science and sci-fi alike had absolutely nothing to do with an exclusive kick-the-ladder-away club-house for blokes only, really.
As someone who isn’t particularly into computer games I am amazed that MTGOWs still see it as a niche or persecuted interest. It’s like complaining about being picked on for watching Netflix. As an older person, I don’t even agree it was that looked down upon in the past – home computers were predominantly marketed to relatively wealthy white men in the 80s and 90s, and rich white guy hobbies are usually socially acceptable. The very fact so many mainstream films starred middle class white boys into computer games overcoming the horrors of temporary mild social rejection should show how accepted it was as an interest.
Most MGTOWs seem young enough to have grown up in a time when nerd consumer culture was already mainstream anyway, they just still want to have some special status for it. I doubt any of them are nerds in the sense of being passionate and interested in actual science and technology because then they would have a) noticed that women contribute heavily to those fields especially these days, and b) something better to do with their time.
If people complain that MGTOWs are immature, have no sense of personal responsibility, have creepy power fantasies, and are completely naive about human interaction and the external world, it’s not because they play computer games.
Prime example of a guy who will remain forever a virgin.
Christ almighty, what is with the sudden explosion of sex-shaming newbies?
FYI, this is not okay.
The ads I see on this piece include a click bait article on celebrities that were geeks/nerds as children.
A+ ad placement, would lol again.