Nerds

A sizable chunk of my afternoon was spent talking to a guy on our floor called the "cultural discerner," and who tends to have interesting, rather intellectual conversations about (often very obscure) media and culture. It spanned everything from Canadian cultures and stereotypes to videogame ethics and feminist social activists in videogames... And in the midst of this latter conversation, we and the others present went off on the gender demographics of the standard videogame audience. It's pretty commonly-accepted as a stereotype that most of "gaming culture" is male-dominant, but statistics show that there are sizable numbers of women and girls playing the same games. I'm too lazy to go get all the statistics. The point is not that there are vast numbers of women in videogames or that women play the same amount of videogames as men - only that there are some women playing video games, and that a female nerd culture seems to exist.

And it's not just in regard to video game culture that we've been talking about this: girls do all kinds of stereotypically "nerdy" things like watch Sci-Fi and Doctor Who and whatever, too. In fact, the Doctor Who fanbase seems to be predominantly female. I got told today (by a different guy, I should note) that this is because "the Doctor is attractive and whisks women out of their boring lives on missions with him." I asked him why the stereotype includes so many lesbians. Needless to say, I received no answer.

I'm irked by the fact that there doesn't seem to be any kind of established female niche for these things that isn't also labeled "pretentious" or "obnoxious" (see Idiot Nerd Girl). That there seem to be so few Internet and media and even IRL role models for nerdy girls and women. That "teacher" and "nurse" and "undecided" seem to be more than half of what you hear of from women when you ask their major, and "engineer" and "doctor" and "political science" when you ask the men. Earlier today, I was discussing with a (girl) friend of mine how annoying it is that we don't seem to be getting along with most of the girls, so far, not because they're bitches, but because they're... boring. Where are all the girls that would've fit into the nerd demographic if they were men? Where are all the non-gamer, non-literary girls that are still intellectual and open-minded and curious and interesting? We clearly don't fit in with the guys in those same slots, but we're not vanilla girliness.