Today I have Thoughts on Geeks, prompted by this post by brilliant fantasy author Nick Mamatas, which I mostly just link because it is the trollziest thing ever and I fully expect the comments to feud with each other for days over it. (Side note: if you like Beat poetry or Lovecraft, and you haven’t read Move Under Ground, do so. It’s available for free online! </plug>)
First off: I agree with Nick that being a geek is not an axis of oppression. You can make even less of an argument for it than you can for kinkiness or veganism, neither of which is probably an axis of oppression either. Geeks do not have a wage gap. Geeks do not experience noticeably worse life outcomes. No one has ever been fired from their job for being openly geeky. You do not have to hide your pony figurines and Marvel comics for fear of being arrested. No one has been murdered for being a geek.
However, just because geekiness is not an oppression, does not mean that anti-geek sentiment is not a product of the kyriarchy at all. Specifically, anti-geek sentiment is related to both ableism and sexism.
Ableism is the simplest. Look, when someone wants to insult a geek, what’s the first word they always fucking reach for? “Aspie.”
Look, many (perhaps most) geeks are neurotypical, the same way that most people are neurotypical. However, we have a fairly substantial concentration of people with certain neurodivergences– most notably, social phobia and the autism spectrum. So when people try to insult geeks… well, a whole lot of times, they end up insulting us for being socially phobic and autistic. Hell, I’ve been called autistic loads of times, apparently because every socially awkward and obsessive geek secretly has Asperger’s, no matter how badly they fit the criteria.
This is multiple levels of fucked. First of all, social phobia and autism are not insults. Social phobia is, if it causes distress, an illness; the autism spectrum is simply a somewhat uncommon (although stigmatized) form of ordinary human variation. Neither of them makes one a bad person or in any way worthy of being used as an insult. Second, it’s simply bizarre to equate “neurotypical geek” with “neurodivergent”: it trivializes disability, it spreads misinformation about what these neurodivergences actually looks like, and it’s simply idiotic. Finally, using these conditions as insults is not only ableist as fuck but also encourages stigma against them.
But anti-geek sentiment can also be really fucking sexist. I mean, think about the negative stereotype of a geeky dude: he lives in his mom’s basement, he can’t get laid, and he’s a man-child. So… he has failed at being a success the way real men are supposed to be, he’s not sexually successful the way men are supposed to be, and he’s failed to “man up” and be a real man. (Gender studies students of the future! Someone should write a thesis about why “woman up” is not a concept.)
The anti-geek-girl sentiment is a little harder to catalog, mostly because people who hate geeks haven’t caught up with the times and still mostly think that geek girls don’t exist. (Yeah, fuck you.) But let’s see here… they’re fat, they’re ugly, they write creepy porn, and they can’t find real love and so escape into fanfic. So they’ve failed at performing for the male gaze, they’re openly sexual AND not performing for the male gaze, and they’ve failed at finding Twoo Wuv the way women are supposed to.
Geeks in general are not very good at performing our assigned genders (although many individual geeks are femme or butch as fuck); it’s anyone’s guess why, although I think the primary culprits are “but wearing makeup/playing sports takes away from vitally important reading/science/Magic time!”, “well, the normal people don’t like me, guess I’ll be a geek” and “but adhering to those gender roles is what those people do.” So of course that’s a cause of anti-geek insults. (It’s interesting to note that, while geeks tend to be less good at their genders, they aren’t particularly feminine either– it’s relatively rare that someone says “geeks are all fags/dykes,” outside of 4Chan, which uses ‘fag’ as punctuation.)
Finally, a lot of times anti-geek thoughts are just silly. Why do you care if someone spends all their free time talking about video games or inventing imaginary languages or writing rage comics, if it makes them happy and doesn’t hurt anyone any? Honestly, this whole “you must be doing something important or it is worthless!” thought process needs to die a hot fiery death. Joy is enough of a justification.
Thing of Things 
>>The anti-geek-girl sentiment is a little harder to catalog,
Anti-geek-girl sentiment directed at geek-girls by male geeks shows a strong similarity to the sentiments that drive opposition to cultural appropriation. There seems to be a notion that geek-girls are coming in and trying to take over a culture that was previously a haven for male geeks.
There is also a perception that geek-girls are more likely to be casual fans than male geeks, and are therefore less likely to show geek culture the devotion and respect they do. This is strikingly similar to the idea that white people who “appropriate” non-white cultures are taking something sacred to others and converting it to entertainment. (In addition, there may be a more pragmatic fear that if there are more casual fans producers of media will start targeting them instead of hardcore fans)
Finally, there is this idea that girls made fun of male geeks in earlier times, and now they are suddenly into all these things that male geeks love. This is obviously sexist (in the sense of judging one member of the sex by the actions of a completely different member of that sex), but it is striking similar to the assertion by cultural appropriation critics that “white people oppressed us, and now they think our culture is cool” (this is extremely racist of course, in the sense of judging one member of a race by the actions of a completely different member of a race).
Now, just to be clear, I hate anti-geek girl sentiment, and anti-cultural-appropriation sentiment. They are both hateful, ugly, and unreasonable demands that other people assign the same level of sacredness and exclusivity to a subject that you do. I am saying that the same psychological drives cause both sentiments.
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Speaking as an angry geek (grrrr), my own opposition to the notion of “geek girl” is twofold.
Firstly, most of the “geek girls” that are heavily promoted in the media are in fact carefully constructed marketing tools. These are actresses paid to put on glasses and speak a few carefully memorized lines, in order to sell some product or other to an audience of people like me. Such efforts are inevitably clumsy and patronizing.
Obviously, not all “geek girls” fall into that category, which brings me to my second point: I disagree with the idea that some people automatically deserve an elevated level of respect simply because they’re female. If a person consistently writes bad code, or repeatedly aggroes the boss and gets the team wiped, then there’s a good chance I’ll end up yelling at that person. I’m not going to check anyone’s gender first, to make sure it’s ok. Of course, people who overcame structural oppression to get where they are today do deserve a lot of respect… but first, they actually have to get somewhere.
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I don’t understand what anything you say here has to do with “opposition to the notion of ‘geek girl'”.
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Who are these geek girls who are heavily promoted in the media? And where did anyone say that geek girls deserve an elevated level of respect, which you apparently define as “being allowed to fuck up more”?
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As far as I can tell, the term “geek girl” is basically a marketing/activism slogan that stands for one of the two cases I described above. In case this was unclear, I am not opposed to the idea that some geeks may be female, because, well, duh.
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In all seriousness, I have no idea where you got that impression.
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AJD: It’s not. “You oppose the notion of geek girls” is not so much a description of how people actually behave as it is a straw man accusation designed to score maximum social justice points and clickbait points against geeks. Hardly anyone who talks about fake geeks really opposes the notion of geek girls.
At best, it seems that way because in our culture, being a fake geek is much more effective for a woman than for a man, so of course there are more of them.
(Interesting fact: when I google “fake geek”, the first page that is actually a complaint about fake geeks, rather than a complaint about complaints about fake geeks, is a column on Forbes that is by a woman.)
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I’m not quite sure what “it’s not” is directly in response to. What’s not what?
Nobody here has said anything like “You oppose the notion of geek girls”. Bugmaster said the equivalent of “I oppose to the notion of ‘geek girls'”. (And I was confused because the “notion of ‘geek girls'” they were talking about didn’t sound like any notion of geek girls I was familiar with.)
Ozy wrote about opposition to geek girls, which is very different from opposition to a notion of geek girls.
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@Jiro
Bugmaster wrote:
Yup, total strawman.
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@Nita:
As I said above, I have nothing against female geeks (who undeniably do exist); my problem is with the concept of “geek girl” as it has been specifically used in a). marketing, and b). social justice activism (who use it as an applause light / oppression category).
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@Bugmaster
But people identify with that label. They think like this: “Hey, I’m a girl and a geek, so I’m a geek girl!” How the hell are they supposed to know that Bugmaster is annoyed at what some other people have said or done, and therefore they must now call themselves something else?
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Nita: Okay, let me clarify. I was responding to how that rhetoric is usually used, not to what Bugmaster means this time. Generally, phrases such as “you don’t like the notion of ‘geek girl'” are used as strawman accusations to mean that because someone talks about fake geeks, he thinks girls cannot be geeks. While in this case Bugmaster has actually said that, even then, he still doesn’t mean it in the way suggested by the strawman accusation.
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@Nita:
I’ve never actually met anyone who identifies as a “geek girl” (despite being geeky and female), so I’m not sure; I’ve only ever heard the term used in the way that Jiro mentioned. Maybe I’m just too old.
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I’m a geek girl. So there. You’ve met one.
Geek girls often get treated badly by geek dudes. We’re seen as fakers and casuals and god forbid we’re actually pretty cuz then we have to juggle all kinds of male insecurities.
It’s easier for me cuz I’m visibly trans. But dudes being shitty to women in a geek context is nothing new. I’ve seen it for years and years and years. I remember a convention roleplaying session once, where one of the players, a big fat bearded guy (which, that’s what he was) kept slagging off at the girls at the table and the GM kinda let it slide. I guess they were friends or something. It sucked.
Shit like that is pretty common. Women in geekspace have been talking about this stuff for ages. I remember long threads on rec.games.frp.advocacy, with women basically wanting to split off into their own spaces cuz the dudes were horrible. (#notallmen, #yesallwomen, blah, blah, blah.) The same conversations played out on rpg.net in all the same ways. They play out in all nerd spaces. If you don’t hear them you ain’t listening.
One way it visibly played out was this meme: http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/idiot-nerd-girl.
Personally, I’ve heard dozens and dozens of stories shared by geeky girls about how they are seen as fake or less valid. In the end this is the same old sexism as the broad culture, just with a nerdy flair.
So, regarding “booth babes” and media generated geek women — whatever. I’m talking about real geek women dealing with real bullshit from dudes.
I guess Bugmaster thinks we don’t exist. Talk about self-induced cluelessness.
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“Personally, I’ve heard dozens and dozens of stories shared by geeky girls about how they are seen as fake or less valid.”
You do realize that fakes that really are fakes are unlikely to share stories, right?
“I guess Bugmaster thinks we don’t exist. Talk about self-induced cluelessness.”
Bugmaster objected to “geek girl” as the category is often used, not to the existence of people who are geeks and girls.
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@Jiro — But he was erasing our real complaints.
Which is to say, Bugmaster is certainly entitled to dislike “geek women as a media construct,” which, I do not disagree with him. In fact, plenty has been written by feminists against this trope. (It seems to fall under the same structure as the Manic Pixie Dreamgirl.)
So yeah, Ramona Flowers is HAWT, but she isn’t real. Gotcha.
However, clearly we mean to talk about actual geeky women and what they experience. Saying, “Fine but I hate the media construct” is derailing.
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Bugmaster objected to something, but I still don’t see what it has to do with “‘geek girl’ as the category is often used”.
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So, Bugmaster doesn’t like anything that he thinks “SJWs” might like. Okay.
In the real world, the “fake geek girls” thing exists outside of Tumblr arguments. I probably own d20s older than some of you and the same shit has been going on since I was a slip of a girl. It’s better now, but it’s not new.
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@mythago: I always assumed it was a generation difference, and going in the opposite direction to what you are saying (i.e., getting worse with time)
Something else, I often noticed the gatekeeping going differently:
1) In my rpg-geek-groups (2 tabletop clubs I co-created, the first one in 1997, later a group recruited from anime fans), the vicious remarks against “geek girls” or “poseurs” came mainly from our geeks of the female persuasion (but then, considering those groups where almost close to parity, they may have been very unusual).
2)Same for MMO guilds (GW1 and wow), 2 out of 3 guilds I was in were led by women (for one of them, there are grounds for an interesting analysis of gendered behavior, she fitted the ‘guild mom’ trope to a t). Female officers in those guilds were *harsh* on female players not pulling their weight, or playing cute to get stuff from naive guildies.
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Well, there are women who play the *queen bee* role, which can be very annoying for everyone else.
For myself, I’ve learned to be patient with such women, as we’re all trying to find a place for ourselves, and in my experience the queen bee types are usually women who spent their adolescence pretty socially isolated and the game store is the first place they got to feel cool, popular, and desirable. In the end, they’re following the one gender-script they have available, and it’s a broken script. On the other hand, I totally get why the regulars at the game store aren’t really thrilled about this dynamic. It can fuck shit up really fast.
There is a lot of immaturity in these spaces.
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It was my impression that the “queen bee” role is typically held by a lone individual, or a small minority within a group, who have power over the rest. Even if one could apply it to the MMO guilds, it does not fit the tabletop groups. Those groups were, as said above, close to parity, and they were criticizing outsiders.
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Actually, for me the iconic queen bee was this one girl I knew at the gaming store. She sooooo wanted to join our game until she found out all the guys were in relationships, when she lost interest in us. In general she flirted her way back and forth across the social space in a really obvious way. Some guys sucked up to her. Others were pretty put-off.
But in any event, she was a nice enough person and I hope she finds what she is looking for. She was young. We all were.
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@veronica d:
I think it’s somewhat disingenuous to say, “Bugmaster is erasing me”, when I explicitly said, “obviously female geeks exist”, several times. On the other hand, if you are referring to the term “geek girl” specifically, then yes, you are the first geek I’ve meet who identifies as such. I stand corrected: you do exist. So, can you tell me the difference between “geek girl” (as you use the term), and “a geek who happens to be a girl” ?
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I don’t think there is a difference between “geek girl” and “geek who happens to be a girl.” Should there be?
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Because ‘girl’ when referring to an adult woman can be seen as derogative, so we prefer ‘female geek’ if we need to give precisions on gender, and try to avoid ‘geek girl’?
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@ thirqual
Excuse me, who is “we” here? What’s next? Queers and dykes don’t exist because these words can be used to insult them? I don’t think it makes sense to police someone else’s self-description “for their own good”.
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We as in me, and I assume bugmaster from his use of “female geeks”. And probably people who are not women and are polite/aware of the use of ‘girl’ to infantilize. And yeah I would not use dyke to talk about a lesbian.
I can’t see how you could think I was meaning that veronica could not call herself ‘girl’ if she wanted.
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@ thirqual
Bugmaster just explained that he wasn’t avoiding the term “geek girls” (meaning actual people) out of respect, but because he didn’t believe anyone identified with it. My position is that actual geek girls do exist, so declaring that all “geek girls” are either marketing or rhetorical devices is a bad idea.
Sorry for misunderstanding your point, though 🙂
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Yeah, obviously veronica d can call herself whatever she wants. Also, if by the term “geek girl” she merely means something like “a garden variety geek that happens to be female”, then I have no problem with it.
That said, I do feel uncomfortable addressing anyone older than 20 as a “girl”… Maybe I’m just old-fashioned, I don’t know.
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The anti-geek-girl sentiment I’ve seen seems driven mostly by a perception of inauthenticity: the stereotypical “I love Harry Potter, I’m such a geek” attitude. Almost none of it (again, just in my experience) is driven by anything I would label as “misogyny”. Geek girls are welcomed if they have the bona fides, although arguably there is a higher bar for them than for men; even this is understandable, based on historical sex ratios. There’s a higher bar for men to establish our bona fides in a gender studies class, is there not?
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To clarify, I’m not saying that a higher bar for women is defensible, merely that it’s explicable by something other than hatred of women.
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OK, could someone please explain what interests are “geeky enough”?
I just don’t understand how to combine “rage comics are geeky”, “GTA is nerdy” and “Harry Potter is not geeky”. Are people using wildly different definitions? Are all male-dominated-but-not-jocky interests geeky, and all female-dominated interests non-geeky? Or what?
I’ve also seen people state that interests aren’t enough, you also must be a victim of horrible bullying.
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I don’t think many geeks would accept GTA-playing as sufficient evidence of geekiness, either. Geekiness implies a keen interest in the obscure: watching all the Harry Potter movies, no; knowing the hit dice of a Mind Flayer, yes.
Mainstream culture may well define GTA or Harry Potter as “geeky”, so yeah, there are competing definitions of the term. Much like mainstream culture would define a guy who takes his Yamaha out on weekends as a “motorcycle enthusiast”, but a Hell’s Angel wouldn’t.
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I’m not too sure, I never had anything to do with that particular part of geek culture; I get a vague feeling it’s specific to/originates from America and I’m not American.
I’d suspect that it’s not about the interest themselves but a willingness to defy social roles in the persuite of your interests.
So being a Harry Potter fan doesn’t qualify because almost everyone is a Harry Potter fan and admiting it costs you no status. Being an adult My Little Pony fan would qualify because people will judge you for it.
Prioritising Harry Potter over regular activities to the point your status is noticably affected would probably qualify as well.
GTA is almost certainly in the same boat as Harry Potter; being a fan of it is not enough to mark someone as geeky or nerdy. This ironically enough is why you’ll find it in the center of controvercies. It’s popular enough that people like Jack Tompson have actually heard of it.
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That was a reply to Nita not stillnotking btw.
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@ stillnotking
I don’t think you realize just how into Harry Potter some people can be. Even I can’t read Eliezer’s fanfic because he gets canon details wrong so much, and I’m a pretty casual fan.
Also, this definition would seem to imply that an interest in 15th century fashion is geekier than an interest in programming. Is that OK with you?
@ Forlorn Hopes
So, would you say that a girl who likes sci-fi/Linux/spaceships/maths is geekier than a boy with the same interests?
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@Forlorn: I don’t think you’re entirely on point. To me, what really defines a geek isn’t necessarily even the interest, but the immersion therein.
A coding enthusiast might write a neat tool for validating checksums on their downloaded anime eps in their spare time, and keeps meaning to finish that game in Unity.
A coding geek has at least one fragmentary AI hanging around (because everyone’s tried to write one), commits crimes against nature using pointer math, can read the ancient runes of languages thought long dead and cast the incantations thereof, and keeps a list of the x86 register workarounds that are still dogging our hardware, if only because some of them are handy for chao^H^H^H^H “optimisations”.
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“OK, could someone please explain what interests are “geeky enough”?”
For a first approximation, ask yourself what it means to be a geek. Once you’ve decided on that, the answer is that someone who is not that but fakes it is a fake geek. Hopefully you do believe that being a geek means *something*, so this question will have an answer.
It may be hard to define what a geek is, and therefore hard to figure out what it means to be a fake one, but surely you’re not claiming it’s impossible.
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By your comparison to a gender-studies class, stillnotking, you are implying that geekdom is by, about and for men, such that it is appropriate to demand that women participating in geekdom prove their bona fides, in the same way you believe would be demanded of men participating in a gender-studies class. Setting aside the shittiness of that standard, you do realize you just undermined your point that policing the community isn’t a thing?
And the policing is silly. Why the everloving hell should I care if a girl in my gaming group knows the hit dice of a mind flayed and from which edition, please?
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Geekdom historically has been by, for, and about men, mostly. This is distinct from the claim that it should be by, for, and about men, which I would not endorse, as I doubt many other male geeks would.
I think it sucks that women have to go above and beyond to prove their geek cred. It’s not fair. But it’s also not misogyny, by and large, and tarring geeks with that ugly brush isn’t fair either.
Policing is a thing! Of course it’s a thing. It’s human nature to demand signs of commitment before accepting outsiders to one’s in-group. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that, and even if there is, it’s not worth deploring because it will never change.
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I’ve seen plenty of geeky men express open contempt for women. What do you call this?
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Open contempt for women is misogyny, of course. I’ve seen it in geek spaces and in non-geek spaces, much more often in the latter. Is your experience the reverse? Not that anecdotes can settle this, I’m just curious.
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“I’ve seen plenty of geeky men express open contempt for women. What do you call this?”
That probably is misogyny (depending on exactly what “contempt” is, but that doesn’t make it “geek misogyny”.
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There seems to be a particular flavor of woman-hating one finds among romantically unsuccessful men, which is rather different from what one finds among romantically successful men. Geek men have a way of being passive-aggressive in their women-hating. One feels much sublimated attraction-turned-to-resentment. I would not say this is unique to geek spaces, but geekdom gives it its own character.
I once met a woman who preferred the open sexism of Finance to the clumsy sexism of SV tech. Which seems weird to me. Personally I very much prefer geeks to suits. But I *get* her complaints. I think the woman was responding to real stuff.
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@stillnotking For what it’s worth, I’ve experienced more sexism from ‘geeks’ than ‘jocks’. By geeks I mean men in their twenties who like RPG, SF/Fantasy, vidya, LARP, and comics, but they tend not to be doing STEM subjects. This is mostly low-level sexism that takes the form of general feminine insults (pussy, woman, girl are all insults), cordial dislike of most of their friend’s girlfriends, general suspicion that girls in geek spaces are going to be a bit shit or have ulterior motives, lots of generally insulting and degrading talk about women in general (eg. only one of my guy friends saw anything wrong about the fappening; the rest thought it was hilarious and discussed openly and in detail what the enjoyed about the pics). All of this is backed up by assertions that they are definitely not sexist, they would support feminism if it wasn’t for all the SJWs and anyway we’re all equal now.
My experience of ‘jocks’ is mostly from weight-lifting. The weights-section of the gym can be intimidating for women (lots of huge guys shouting and grunting at each other!) but the guys have always been very polite. The people I train with are keen to encourage women into the gym and the sport. I’ve talked with ex-army guys who are really excited about how much untapped potential there is out there, since women are underrepresented. The closest I’ve ever come to experiencing sexism in the gym is overhearing a guy mourn about how he was being outlifted by a girl.
OK, but here’s the thing. The same ex-army guy who wants to get more women in the gym, can’t stop talking about how great the computing guys are, and how systemic they are about their training, and how rigorously they practise. It’s pretty clear that these guys are both jocks and geeks at the same time, and these aren’t mutually exclusive categories. However, I don’t feel like these geeks are anything like my geeks from above. I think part of the reason everybody is having conversations where we all express astonishment at other people’s descriptions of geeks is because we’re all describing different sub-sets of geek that have very little in common.
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This conversation has moved well past it, but it was a direct question to me, so if we may reverse the topic trian for a second.
I would say that for equal levels of interests, and if you assume she looses more social status than the boy (which depends upon their culture), then yes.
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I should clarify that point about culture. I don’t think geekyness is directly proportional to status lost.
Rather, I think that it’s at least partially defined by willingness to sacrafice status in persuit of your intestests.
And since she lost more status then it’s a reasonable assumption to say she’s also more willing to loose status.
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@ Forlorn Hopes
That’s an interesting view, and it would certainly explain why some geeks are upset about geeky things becoming more popular — it might erase some of their “geek cred”.
On the other hand, some of us (e.g., me) didn’t have much status to lose in the first place. And it seems that it’s exactly those who do have some status to lose (e.g., pretty girls with good style and social skills) who get subjected to the harshest suspicion.
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Is lost status some kind of badge? That seems silly.
There is a lot of unhealthy “reverse discourse” stuff going on here.
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No nice way to say this so I won’t exactly say it- You don’t experience misogyny at the gym for… reasons. These reasons are not an absence of misogyny at the gym. Source- am not a bro but can pass for one with chameleon like skill when required to for social purposes, and am therefore privy to bro conversation when women are not around.
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@ Patrick
So, you’re saying that when hanging out with men, the choice is between shitty attitudes + shitty behaviour and shitty attitudes + decent behaviour? Firstly, that seems like a very bleak view of men. And secondly, if these two were the only options available, who wouldn’t choose the decent behaviour?
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@nita
Yeah, those are your choices.
Feel free to choose the decent behavior, I would.
Just don’t make the mistake of assuming that different behavior means different attitudes. The behavior differs because you’re interacting in different ways in different contexts.
Specifically, in the gym context, there is almost nothing a woman could possibly do to make a fit, regular gym going male feel threatened or insecure, and a great deal she can do almost just by existing to make him feel secure and affirmed. “Woman goes into male dominated space where men conspicuously perform masculinity in a way that men believe makes them more sexually attractive; is surprised to find that said men are happy she’s there.” Not a shocker.
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But geeky spaces are also often male dominated, and male geeks conspicuously display their skills and knowledge in ways that are attractive to female geeks.
So, you’re saying that women in geek spaces are punished for geek men’s insecurity?
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I thought that was obvious.
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@patrick Thank you, this made me laugh out loud. I don’t think I would try to deny that gym-bros can be just as sexist as anyone else. When Stillnotking said that their experience is that misogyny is worse in non-geek spaces than in geek-spaces, I wanted to provide an counter-example. I don’t doubt that some gym-bros are polite in public and sexist in private, but I doubt very much that the guys who are working to raise the number of women in olympic-lifting are misogynists who are doing it solely to have someone ‘mire them in the weights section.
I think that following the conversation about geek-oppression around rationalist blogs has been deeply frustrating because there seems to be an assumption that ‘geeks’ ‘jocks’ and ‘women’ are all mutually exclusive categories. Geeks=good, jocks=bad, women=outsiders. Actually, I feel like it’s much more complicated than that, different sub-cultures at the gym (body-builders, oly-lifters, power-lifters, curl-bros) are going to have different levels of sexism. Different geek subcultures (rationalists, gamers, SF fans, programmers) are going to have different levels of sexism. A person can be a woman, a gamer and a lifter.
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A late reply, I know, but you can’t help when thoughts pop into your head 🙂
Anyway, it just occured to me that instead of thinking about it strictly in terms of how much status you lose by persuing geeky interests; think of it in terms of how much status you could theoretically have had if you persued popular interests instead.
(Also adjust the potentials upwards, because it’s hard to judge potential)
From that perspective, someone like you – who had no status – has “spent” all their status on geek hobbies. Someone like the sylish girl you mentioned only spent a fraction on the hobbies.
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@ Forlorn Hopes
Hm, I’ll try to express my point more clearly. I didn’t spend any status on geek hobbies — at that age, I would be a weirdo no matter what I did, realistically. Becoming, or even wanting to become sociable or stylish or athletic was not on the menu. I’d be just as likely to sprout a pair of wings.
And I think that it’s a pretty common story — most geeky or nerdy kids never stood at a crossroads, pondering the choice between more and less popular interests. So it’s weird to hear it phrased in terms of sacrifice.
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No, if I implied a conscious choice is involved then the bad phrasing is all on my head.
Basically I’m thinking of it in basic economics terms – instead of “spent” I should say “would be willing to spend”.
If the school-age you was magically given 100 social status points by a Disney faerie, how many of them would you be willing to spend to continue pursuing your geeky interests? That question matters more than how much you actually spent.
If you look at it this way; then from an external point of view it’s impossible to tell the difference between someone who spent (/didn’t acquire/would be willing to spend) lots of status and someone who spent little – all you can see is the current level.
Which would be one possible explanation for why you were perceived as more geeky than the pretty popular girl. It’s easy for the human brain to shortcut from “she has less status” to “obviously she spent more!”.
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Nita:
“But geeky spaces are also often male dominated, and male geeks conspicuously display their skills and knowledge in ways that are attractive to female geeks.”
I think that misogyny is how the kind of sexist geeks you are talking about express their alief that they are *incapable* of being liked by women (whom society sets up as keepers of esteem and sociality). Male geeks tend to have really horrible self esteem IMO. And scapegoating femininity comes from the same place that it comes from in every other part of society: it’s just how patriarchy frames everything.
Okay, summary:
NERDS DO NOT SCAPEGOAT WOMEN BECAUSE THEY ARE SEXIST. NERDS BECOME SEXIST BECAUSE THE PATRIARCHY TELLS THEM TO SCAPEGOAT WOMEN.
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“How the hell are they supposed to know that Bugmaster is annoyed at what some other people have said or done, and therefore they must now call themselves something else?”
That, Nita, and beyond that – why should they be expected to give up a title they like? I happen to be irritated by civilians in military apparel. So what? I have no right to expect hem to take it off.
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@thirqual: I think there are more assholes, numerically, because geekdom is bigger, but I don’t think the problem is worse; very much the opposite. When I first started tabletop gaming, I would go to a con and have guys actually walk up and stare at me. And not, I would hasten to add, in a “Wow, you’re so beauuuutiful” way, but in a “do I have three heads” kind of way. It was thought of as no big thing for a guy to say that he didn’t think female GMs were any good, or to ask me if I was in a game because I was the GM’s girlfriend. That’s far less a problem than it once was.
@stillnotking, this myth that geekdom was by, for and about men is…let’s call it ahistorical, which is nicer than ‘self-serving revisionism’. What we think of as SFF geekery today was developed by women (who drove Star Trek fandom). Women have always been involved in geekery and have been the ones ‘by’ and ‘for’ quite a lot of it. Were they a minority? Sure. But they were, and have, always been there and at times a disproportionate engine in geekery. They’re not some newfangled thing invading the boys’ clubhouse.
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Mmm, cultural bias probably explaining our perception difference. My first groups were mixed enough that the behavior you describe did not happen, and we did not go to cons. My wife and I had a bit of a culture shock the first time we went to a tabletop meetup in the US — although there was no unpleasantness.
Your answer to stillnotking is… let’s say you select as also you see fit (making Star Trek the major axis, rather than tabletop where the wargame filiation is key, or early Tolkien fandom).
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My sister introduced me to Tolkien. Also I played my first D&D games with her. So, yeah.
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@thirqual, but that’s the whole point; trying to define “geekdom” by a single axis that is a lodestar for all others so as to say it’s “by, for and about” men is silly, unless (as some people do) we choose to say we were always at war with Eastasia and erase history. I think it’s fair to say that certain kinds of geekdom, like tabletop RPGs, have historically had a majority male audience – but to call that “by, for and about” men, or to extend that to “geekdom”, is begging the question.
(Re early Tolkien fandom, my recollection is that it wasn’t really that slanted; and certainly there has been a longstanding perception in SFF circles that fantasy writing is a Girl Thing. That has changed now that GRRM and grimdark is a thing.)
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>(In addition, there may be a more pragmatic fear that if there are more casual fans producers of media will start targeting them instead of hardcore fans)
I’d just like to point out that this happens all the time, especially in videogaming (where the fear isn’t gendered as it is also directed at the “frat boy” demographic, perceived as the stereotypical FPS/EA sports player). My personal examples: Dungeon Keeper (a game of my childhood, now a microtrasaction-ridden mess), Sim City (major issues with mandatory internet connection, especially right after launch), Rayman (got turned into a minigame collection, franchise almost killed, but fortunately triumphantly returned because of its original creators’ determination. In general, anything primarily on mobile and anything with microtransactions is seen as The Devil.
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A factoid that verges on OT, but anyway… Regarding:
I once managed the AI department of a pharma company. We wanted to hire a guy who everyone in the department agreed would be great for the job. He was vetoed by the VP of HR on the grounds that he was “too geeky.” The HR head’s view was that his being “too geeky” would somehow make neurotypicals in the company uncomfortable. Can’t have that!
Of course, the HR department was very big on diversity… most important value for the company, as far as HR was concerned…
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Some of Ozy’s other claims seem questionable too. Geeks don’t have a wage gap? How do you know? (I suspect Ozy is thinking “Geeks are computer people and the computer industry pays well”, which is bad reasoning.)
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I’m a coder. Going for interviews a year or so back, the process was generally dual-layered, with one interview to determine if the prospect would fit the “culture” of the company, and the second to determine technical competency.
Geeky people might not get fired for being too geeky – although that’s debatable if said interests disturb others by being “creepy” – but they also might not get the prospects in the first place.
@Jiro: my intuition would be that there would be a geek wage gap, if only because of the tendency of geeks to be less social, and the well-documented tendency for more social people to get more cash and better advancement.
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Well, if you want to claim a wage gap, you’ll need some stats to back it up, otherwise this is empty speculation.
I mean, it is possible there is a gap. It is possible there is not. I don’t know. How would I find out?
Actually, I expect this to be strongly bimodal. Surely some geeks are well above average. Surely some are well below average. However, I suspect many of the well-below-average geeks are those who suffer other issues, such as being visibly neuro-atypical. One point of this article is those people are indeed oppressed, but not from being merely geeky.
I’m a NAT geek with a decent salary. I know quite a few geeks in this situation.
Anyway, want to make the point, find the research.
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Sure, it’s empty speculation. As you point out further down, it’s all but impossible to get decent stats given that even geeks tend to take the old “I know it when I see it” approach to geekery.
As Jiro points out, though, the assumption that there’s no wage gap is just as unfounded. Arguing from anecdote would just go ’round and round. That’s why I qualified my intuition as such, rather than presenting it as a baseline fact – as Ozy did theirs.
And yeah, there are conspicuously rich geeky folks out there. There are also very social geeks out there. Thing is, geekdom – as has been noted in a number of posts here at Ozy’s – became home to a lot of NAT types, and the culture has been affected by that – as has outsiders’ view of it. Add to that the idea discussed elsewhere in the thread that performing as a geek involves conscious loss of status elsewhere, and you have a pretty good formula for the social, successful guys being the outliers.
Maybe it’d be easier if geeks could work for other geeks – and happy day, a lot of IT geeks can! – but in my experience, it’s usually business folks doing the management etc., and they’re not working off a geek perspective.
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Man fired for being an MLP fan:
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If you’re looking for a wage gap, don’t forget to adjust for differences like technical skill. I.E. Would a technically skilled geek make less than an equally technically skilled non-geek?
(That said I agree that this debate isn’t that useful without actual data)
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Fine, but to make this case you really need more than one anecdote.
Which is to say, I could fill this thread with anecdotes of trans women being unfairly fired, or in a few cases having their businesses destroyed. But I can also point to labor statistics that back up these anecdotes.
Which, as far as I know the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count “geek” as a category, never mind “brony,” so fine. Getting good stats might be impossible.
But failing that can we get more than *one* anecdote? We have the NEET crowd on Wizchan. But, well, is their problem really being a geek, as such, or something else?
My view is biased, as I work in bigtech and am surrounded by successful geeks. Like, we have a whole industry where we dominate, and we have taken over a pretty wide swath of media culture — which, some geeks seem to regret the latter, just as indie fans bemoan when their fave goes mainstream. But whatever. I get it. I don’t like when my special playground gets popular either. No one likes non-locals on their beach.
But as a trans women, were are our movies? Do we get a Matrix?
(Yes there is some irony in that example. I get that. But still, it’s a movie by and for geeks and it’s association with trans-dom requires some reading between the lines.)
Where are our careers? (Well of course, our careers *are* geek careers and most financially stable trans women I know are well-off *because* they are geeks. Funny how that works.)
Most geeks I know had really tough adolescent years, and then they get through college and find a pretty great life waiting for them. Which, good for us.
Does anyone have any stats?
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“No one has ever been fired from their job for being openly geeky.”
Everyone here should see the Imitation Game immediately. Geekiness and nueroatypicality was the real source of the grief Alan Turing caught, all his life.
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…also Turing was gay?
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Um, I’ve heard that the film takes major liberties with Turing’s personality*. Who needs some boring real-life guy when we can have another version of Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, amirite?
* choose your preferred format:
Wikipedia summary
Q&A
old-fashioned article
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bem, of course he was gay, but that wasn’t what he was bullied for in school. It was an English public school for God’s sake.
He was prosecuted and sentenced for being gay, and that sentence drove him to suicide. Believe me, that part of the story resonated with me. After all.
My point was that Turing’s pain was not all about being gay in an institutionally homophobic society.
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I read an analysis that drew on the analogy of gentrification. The essence of it was that geeks, unable or unwilling to follow the social codes required for popularity in the general culture, have built their own culture. Now that it’s all created, nice and hip and exciting, here come the people from the general culture. ‘Great neighborhood you’ve got here – we’ll move in too. But you’ve got to change a few things to make it more welcoming for us!’ — most of those things being in the direction of establishing the very social codes geeks built their culture to escape.
I have no personal insight into any of this, but that analogy made me feel more sympathetic to angry geeks.
Regarding the ‘man up’ issue, I always thought ‘put your big girl panties on’ was the female equivalent. Am I dating myself?
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The problem with that analogy is that gentrification isn’t about new people moving in and changing the local culture. It’s about rich people moving into poor neighborhoods and causing the property taxes to rise to the point that poor residents have to move out.
Geek girls aren’t making it more expensive to be a geek. Nor are they new to the geek neighborhood to be begin with.
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Sounds like you could make the case that social skills = paying taxes in this case though, right?
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Right, the proper analogy is the eternal September.
A few people carve out their own space with its own culture. The culture of the space suits its founders, and the people enough like the founders to get drawn in and not leave. As long as there aren’t too many new people coming into the space, newcomers will either assimilate or leave — but if a flood of new people come in at the same time, the old culture and the old norms will be obliterated.
That’s how Usenet died back in 1993. It’s one of the largest killers of internet communities, and another one of the largest is also caused by a large influx of newcomers: there aren’t that many high-quality people around, so a large increase in numbers is probably going to lead to a decrease in quality. (See: SSC’s comments section.)
(The eternal September problem also implies that an increase in mobility will decrease the possible complexity of a geographically-tied culture.)
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I’m convinced that this is the main driving force behind Gamergate as well. Nerds carve out a space where a lack of social skills is okay. Criticism of others is considered taboo, at the cost of having to put up with a few assholes. SJWs come in to tell them that they need to get rid of the assholes and start enforcing social rules. Nerds lose their shit, as they see that the whole purpose of their spaces is being attacked.
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So, every GTA player is a nerd now?
Ozy’s example of rage comics as a geeky thing left me completely stunned, too.
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What are “rage comics”, actually ? I’m not much of a comic geek, so I don’t know…
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I dunno, it seems to me that GG originated from 4chan (and wizardchan?), and lives on 8chan. Image board culture may have its taboos but ‘criticism of others’ is not among them.
I find it a bit weird that GG can count as nerds, since the gamers of /v/ hate neckbeards and ‘autists’. If they are all nerds, then nerd is too broad a category to adequately describe the demographic conflicts here.
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@Pluviann
That’s not true. As far as I can tell Gamergate’s origins can be traced back to just about every major geek hangout; and bounced around quite a lot based on which websites banned it. Right now the three biggest gamergate communities are on reddit’s kotakuinaction, 8chan, and twitter.
This is suprising, because culturally reddit and 8chan are mortal enemies. I ocasionally see small fights between chan cultural values and reddit cultural values on twitter between different members of gamergate.
However, as far as I know, Wizardchan was not on the list. Wizardchan is mostly a depression self-help group that Zoe Quinn _allegedly_ faked harassment from. Games jounralists reported this harassment as fact, without giving Wizardchan a chance to comment, which resulted in harrassment against against Wizardchan.
It became a promiment early example of unethical behaviour in games media that Gamergate liked to point out. Which is only natural, harassing a drpression self help group is just shockingly bad.
(The alligations against Zoe Quinn are “allegedly”. The alligatoins against games jouranlists are pretty much proven. There’s an editorial on The Escapsist by Greg Tito (former editor in cheif) applogising in his part in it).
@wireheadwannabe
It is definately a large part of it; but I would go so far as to say it’s the main driving force. There’s at least two other factors that I would call equally important.
The first is anti-censorship. Because of many attempts to censor gaming as a whole a lot of gamers are very very anti-censorship. For years now we’ve had games criticism that falls somewhere between “I don’t want to censor you, I want you to censor yourself” and “I do want censorship, but I won’t say the c-word”. Gamers instinctively opposed this, and were portrayed as sexists for it; creating divisions that eventually led to gamergate.
The second is that games journalism for historical reasons – I’d point to Jack Tompson again, and also the video game crash of 83 – have held a position of great importance in the gaming culture. This gave their actions the weight needed to create an event the size of Gamergate
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@Pluviann: Perhaps criticism as taboo is off the mark. Let’s say instead that criticism doesn’t have any social effect. The issue appears when these newcomers show up and suddenly there are demands that the beloved landscape of geekdom change as a result of their criticisms.
Worse yet is that there aren’t just criticisms – there are accusations being thrown, labels being applied, that have social and real-world consequences, and that’s against the spirit of the space that geekdom was.
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@Bugmaster
Rage comics aren’t the kind of comics that stereotypical comic geeks are into. It’s stuff like this:
You can find more in this subreddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu/
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@Leit Interesting; if we’re talking about feminism in geek spaces (and I think we are?) then I think the responses are two-fold: older feminists say ‘I’ve been in this field since the 60s and you’re only just noticing the criticism?’ and younger ones say, ‘I may be a newcomer, but only as much as everyone else born in the 90s’. There’s a strong rejection of the framing of them as ‘newcomers’ at all.
To the second point the criticism I most often see is that geek spaces can claim to have a spirit of inclusiveness and lack of criticism, but that can mean that they accept people who are misogynist or racist, and fail to acknowledge that to a certain extend, accepting racism means excluding people of colour.
But overall, I think my main frustration with this argument is that words like ‘geek’ and ‘nerd’ aren’t being clearly defined, niether are ‘geek spaces’. For example, whether or not the landscape should change surely depends on which landscape we’re talking about? I can’t see any harm in people writing SF books that make an effort to include more people of colour in the future; I can’t really see any harm in a gamer who wants to play nothing but COD derivatives forever. I don’t really understand the instinct in some geek cultural spaces to treat cultural artifacts as if they were holy scriptures, and criticism of them as harmful and blasphemous.
If you’re talking about geek industries, like science, computing and engineering them it becomes more important. But even within these the cultures vary so much from sector, to company, to lab that it doesn’t seem helpful to discuss them as if there was one monolithic geek culture.
@Forlorn Hopes Would you consider 4chan, 8chan and reddit to be geek spaces then? I’m curious, because they seem quite hostile towards the geekery that Ozy defends here (eg. non-NT, scrupulous, effective altruism, neckbeards).
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@Pluviann
I would’t consider 4chan, 8chan or reddit to be anything. You have to look at them on the level of individual subredddits or boards.
I don’t understand that either, but I don’t understand why Jewish people consider an ancient book as holy scripture either (and I was raised Jewish). I do understand why moral criticisms – especially with the implication that it might cause immorality in the viewer – is treated as blasphemous. It’s the legacy of Jack Tompson, the comics code, and similar.
That said, there is a dynamic at play right now in which geek cultural artifacts are criticised in a manner that’s:
a) Built upon subjective mortal frameworks that geek culture disagrees with (e.g. sex negative feminism)
b) Lazy, poorly argued and low quality.
c) Both of the above.
But if you criticise the cricism you get acused of sexism, being a neckbeard, being a manchild or something along those lines. It’s a problem because both the pedalisation of bad criticism and the flamewars it causes crowd out good criticism that could actually lead to improvements.
The vibe I get from a this is when the Christian missionaries arive in some village and go “ooh I don’t like the look of that tradition. We’d better replace their culture with Christianity”.
The missionaries aren’t nessacary wrong. Maybe it is a bad idea to have boys prove their manhood by hunting a tiger, or whatever. But replacing one culture with another is still a terrible solution. From one angle it creates enormous fights (Atheism+, Gamergate, etc) that prevent progress. From another angle you’re just replacing one culture’s issues with another culture’s issues. From my outsider perspective social justice culture has absolutely enormous problems with bullying that far exceed geek culture’s issues; so I’m opposed to social justice coming into geek spaces and demanding we adopt their cultural norms.
A far better solution would be to see how you could use the norms of geek culture to enact imrpovement.
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That’s certainly one way of looking at it. Total bullshit, but one way of looking at it.
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@Forlorn Hopes
From another angle you’re just replacing one culture’s issues with another culture’s issues
It sounds like your saying that geek culture and respect for women/minorities are mutually exclusive. I find this rather depressing.
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@Nita:
I see, thanks, I didn’t know there was a special term for those kinds of comics.
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Nope. I’m saying that the improvements to make geek culture more welcoming for women and minorities should be built upon the foundations of geek culture; not imported from social justice culture.
Basically; Right now there a lots of women and minorities who are saying very strongly that they like geek culture and oppose social justice culture. I think the best way to make geek culture more welcoming to women and minorities is to find what attracted them into geek culture and try and enhance those qualities.
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Funny, I know plenty of people who like geek culture *and* social justice, and who want their geekdom to be more social-justice-y.
This is almost like an actual social conflict.
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It’s an ideological battle. The major clash is that” social justice” proponents want heavy moderation to make communities a safe space to less privileged people while the nerds think it would disrupt the “Information want to be free” nature of the internet.
There is also the fear that such moderation could abuse their power and silence selective things out of ideology. Wikileaks and Snowden is still in everyone mind.
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@veronica d:
I think it would helpful to make a clear distinction between social justice, the sociopolitical goal (which includes sub-goals such as shrinking wage gaps, increasing minority participation, reproductive rights, etc.); and social justice culture, the culture (which includes things like a nearly exclusive focus on personal lived experience, bullying people you disagree with, dividing the world into “us” and “them, the evil ones”, etc.)
I think there are people who want geek culture to be more socially just, and there are also people who would like geek culture to adopt more tropes from social justice culture — but these two sets of people, though overlapping, are not identical.
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@CraneSat — I’ve seen a lot of nerd-rage over simply including a gay romance as an *option* in a game. Likewise, any call for increased minority representation, regardless of the specifics of the request, is met with a storm of rape and death threats. I promise you, the reactions to Sarkeesian do not slightly resemble “information wants to be free.” They more resemble “Shut your cunty cunt you dumb bitch before I rape you to death. Oh and if you hold your talk at this university I’ll murder a bunch of people.”
Yep, that’s the free speech crowd at its very best.
(I’m not even slightly exaggerating here.)
I certainly want media companies to give us better products, which includes better representation of minorities, queers, and women. Moreover, I find the male-geek resistance to such change petty and sexist. I don’t mind saying this out loud. Does this make me anti-free-speech?
Folks should be free to play the latest kill-hookers-for-the-lulz game, but if I point out how messed up that is I should have my cunt torn wide by rape wolves? I should have my Twitter account become unusable? I should be stalked by unpredictable, angry men at my workplace.
This stuff is routine you know. But hey! They’re fighting for free speech.
Sorry, but I’ve seen how nerd-men talk to women, talk about women, welcome women into their club. *Most* nerd men are entirely pleasant, but there is a seething mass of brutal rage lurking in nerdspace, so you don’t get to grab the free speech mantle. Sorry, it don’t fit.
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You’re both wrong, and being actively hostile. It is a ludicrous exaggeration to claim that vulgar threats are your oppositions’ behavior at their best. It is libelous straw-manning. You should be unsurprised at the resistance of male-geeks if this is the kind of change they’re supposed to accept.
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In addition to the risk of an eternal September, there’s… well, gamers aren’t just a community: they’re also a market demographic. If a larger market demographic comes in, game developers will target that instead, so there will be fewer games for gamers. Of course people are going to be hostile to demands that resources be diverted from them to their enemies.
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@Forlorn hopes This is interesting. It seems to me from our discussion that you are mostly opposed to ‘social justice culture’. I don’t really know what that would look like so I’m perfectly happy to jettison it, and focus on how to make geek culture more friendly to women and minorities.
Enhancing the things that attract them seems like a good start. If I join a SF book club because I love SF, then there’s not much more it could do to attract me than continue being a SF book club. But if just one member makes the occasional misogynistic comment, and multiple sly jabs at me, and acts to make me feel unwelcome then I’ll probably leave, especially if everyone else accepts it as ‘just his way, he’s one of us’.
It seems like most of the methods available to us for preventing this kind of exclusionary behaviour are a bit censorious: mostly they revolve around shaming him into stopping, instigating clubs rules against sexism or asking him to leave. Is there a ‘geek’ way to encourage him into stopping? I don’t know; I’m not sure what it would look like.
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@InferentialDistance — Sorry, but that is the stuff we actually encounter. There really are men in geek space who hate women, enough to create relentlessly hostile environments. They tend to be accepted in the culture and the only answer to them is “grow a thick skin.”
Which, I do have a thick skin. But that does’t change how awful that stuff is and I want women to join who perhaps don’t have such a thick skin.
So I am not being mean, hostile, or unfair to point this shit out. It’s very real, undeniably so.
I mean, you are *aware* of this stuff, yes?
So look at @Pluviann’s example. What do you do with the guy in your book club who keeps saying shitty, misogynistic things? Just roll with it?
That’s what usually happens, but what if a woman convinces a majority of fellow book club members that this guy is an asshole, and maybe they like her better, and then what? Do you stay with the club and its new “no misogyny” rule, or do you jump ship to the new “all the misogyny you want” group?
And what happens when you’re dating this cool geek woman who wants to try out your new group?
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Except that’s not what you said. You said that everyone in favor of free speech behaves no better (ever, in the entirety of their acts) than the sending of vulgar threats. That the prior statement was not an exaggeration (i.e. you really mean that that was an example of their very best behavior). It’s kinda hard to interpret that as anything less than accusing me of behaving in a manner no better than the sending of vulgar threats. For writing posts like this one.
Wanting fewer assholes in geek space is not hostile (except to assholes, but they started it). Expressing said desire is not hostile. Calling me an asshole for civil discourse wherein I disagree with Sarkeesian is hostile.
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@InterfentialDistance: look up sealioning. I have read that twitter was unusable now because of all those pesky sealions.
There is (sometimes) an assumption of malice (the previous iteration was JAQing off, for Just Asking Questions), but even if one as the best intentions, the problem of those tools is the detection threshold calibration, which is completely out of whack in Internet exchanges in most places (partly because of the lack of ability to carry tone, I think).
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Dude, I’ve accused *you* of nothing. I was responding to this, which was not said by you:
This clearly was pitting one tribe against the other. I was pointing out *why* my tribe wants more moderation, that such moderation is justified due to the relentless nature of the attacks.
You said this:
I said no such thing. You are acting in bad faith. Bye.
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By stating that every member of *my* tribe is a horrible threat-sending monster (or worse). How am I supposed to interpret that?
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@veronica_d I am so sorry. The book-club guy is hypothetical. I was just trying to draw an example of how sexism is exlusionary, and it’s difficult to think of ways to end sexism that aren’t exclusionary to some extent. That being said, I have experienced that kind of sexism from friends who RP (one guy told me that women ruin tabletop gaming, and he was pretty anti-sexism in other respects) so it still holds as an example of the type of behaviour that one can encounter IRL.
@InferentialDistance I realise that @veronica_d can speak for herself, but I am quite sure that she was being ironic when she said ‘the free speech crowd at its very best’. Because obviously this is a case of some people actively working against free speech values by trying to censor others by intimidating them into silence. This is infact the free speech crowd at their very worst. Which is why you think she accused ‘everyone in favor of free speech behaves no better (ever, in the entirety of their acts) than the sending of vulgar threats’ and she thinks ‘I said no such thing’. Neither of you are acting in bad faith (I think). It’s just that tone is hard on the internet.
Nick Cohen’s excellent book on censorship ‘You can’t read this book’ has a great chapter on how random acts of intimidation are more effective at censorship that blanket bans moderately enforced. She is in fact correct, that in online spaces like Twitter, a person can make a seemingly mild comments against certain geek-groups and be swamped with detailed threats and descriptions and images of sexual violence. I have never encountered anything like it in meat space, so I’m inclined to believe it is a phenomenon of the internet.
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Irony doesn’t always carry online, but there are levels of irony which really should be obvious. But *just in case*, when I said “free speech at its best,” yeah I meant that was the worst. But I also meant to say it is very real, so when the anti-SJ crowd starts crowing about free speech, I have to look at the tribes as they are, what actually happens, who actually says what.
Part of free speech is this: free speech can lead to real social change. Which certainly is my goal. I want the media to be better. I want these culture spaces to be better. I want them better for women, queers, and minorities. This means representation, a voice, and ultimately CHANGES.
And yeah these are tricky topics, cuz no one wants to be called a bigot, but calling people bigots is a very tempting weapon. So yeah, we get a lot of toxic discourse. Sorry about that. Myself, I try to do better, but that does not mean I’ll roll over, cuz the stuff that happened to Sarkeesian proves her broader point, that geek-space has a misogyny problem.
I mean, we knew this, but recent history has made it pretty undeniable — so much so that those who still deny have to be questioned on their basic motivations.
(And yeah, maybe jock-space also has a misogyny problem. Sure. But is that your rallying cry: “We are no worse than the jocks!”? “Finance guys are as douchy as we are!”?)
I think the outright bigots are a minority. That said, I think plenty of people are clueless about this stuff and it would help if they were more thoughtful. But the bigots shout loud and calling them out hits the wrong targets much of the time and we go round and round pointlessly. And yes, the full-on SJ spaces don’t do a good job. That’s why I am here and not there.
(Plus I got tired of the “fat virgin neckbeard” jokes. I happen to quite like a few fat neckbeards, who may or may not be virgins I have no idea it ain’t my business. But the dudes are awesomesauce and they make me smile and happy to know them.)
Anyway, sorry about the mess this is. But on the other hand, some of you *are* bigots. I mean, it’s pretty obvious reading your posts. So there is that, even if it doesn’t help to name names. I see you. Others are stubbornly clueless, which maybe in total does as much harm as the bigots. I dunno. I think it probably does.
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Thank you.
I agree with the entirety of that post.
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Regarding the book club hypothetical –
In real-life situations similar to that one, I’ve found it sometimes works to wait for a chance to pull the person aside, and say privately “Hey, don’t take this the wrong way – I think you’re a good guy and I like hanging out with you. But it made me feel really uncomfortable when you said (example of something he said). Do you think you could stop saying that when you’re hanging out in this group?”
I’m not saying this ALWAYS works. It doesn’t always work. And – for me, at least – initiating the conversation can be incredibly uncomfortable (much more so than the conversation itself).
But in my experience, it sometimes works, and depending on the situation it might be a good first step to take. (It also might be an easier thing to do if you’re a guy, although of course it also depends on an individual’s personality.)
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Absolutely. And if it wasn’t clear I’ve been referring to to social justice culture.
Correct 🙂
A good starting point might be Ozy’s post: https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2014/12/13/certain-propositions-concerning-callout-culture/
As an outsider I shouldn’t speculate too much into it’s core values, but whatever those are they produced the behaviour described in Ozy’s post. It shouldn’t be too hard to see why I don’t like the thought of that culture colonising mine.
Ampersand has a good example. I think a ‘geek’ way of encouraging him into stopping would be anything that builds upon the core cultural value of “assume social ineptitude, not malice”.
While freedom of speech is a core cultural value, geek spaces have always had moderators with the power to ban people. Or at least, their online spaces did. I would say the core value is closer to censor “ideas”, than “don’t censor assholes”. (Note that ideas include artistic visions.)
Also. No culture is perfect, Ampersand also listed some disadvantages and I cannot disagree with them.
I just think that attempts to work with a culture’s core values are more likely to succeed, because attempts to replace core value’s with another culture’s values are going to breed hostility and resentment. (and might be inherently unethical barring exceptional circumstances).
And I think that if you were going to replace geek culture values, social justice culture is just a terrible choice for a replacement. It’s also the only culture actively trying to colonise geek spaces.
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This is also the bedrock of chan culture. The chans know that if people see a great neighbourhood they’ll want to move in. So they cover everything in graffiti, throw broken needles around, and enjoy their neighbourhood while the gentrifying classes think it’s a dangerous slum and stay away.
I’m not a channer myself, but I have to take my hat off to an ingenious plan. It faces it’s final test this year since Moot wants to sell 4chan (to Gawker of all people if the rumours are correct). I’m very interested to see the result.
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“It faces it’s final test this year since Moot wants to sell 4chan (to Gawker of all people if the rumours are correct).”
Oh ffs, this is clearly just someone trying to pull your leg and/or rustle your jimmies.
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Except that, in your analogy, they ARE living in a dangerous slum. They’re living in a community full of graffiti with broken needles littering the sidewalk. It’s like that old conundrum in psychology: if you engage in the behavior of a severely mentally ill person in order to fake mental illness, aren’t you mentally ill after all, because a stable, sane person would not be able to convincingly engage in those behaviors?
The “gentrification” analogy is particularly revealing, because gentrification is not just people moving into a new and established neighborhood, or putting a Starbucks in where a boarded-up bodega used to be. It refers to wealthy people moving into a ‘bad’ neighborhood and raising the costs of living to a level that the existing residents are forced out. In other words, the comparison here is that geekdom was always full of happy people who are now being driven from their beloved hobby because they can’t bring themselves to treat women and POC decently.
Which is….well, setting aside what other people have pointed out about women and POC always having been geeks, is rather a backhanded slam on geekery, isn’t it? It suggests that the real reason people play D&D or hang out on chat boards talking about Green Lantern is not that they love their hobby, but the geekery is a mere pretext for getting to be graceless assholes. Wow.
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In your opinion.
It’s amusing that you phrase it as “treat women and POC decently” when in practice playing D&D or chatting about Green Lantern is derided as graceless asshole behavior (because D&D and Green Lantern aren’t female or PoC enough). I’m all for treating human beings decently, and there are certainly issues with that in geek communities. I don’t agree with that being synonymous with changing geek media so that it appeals to a different demographic, and I find it frustrating that I can’t oppose the latter without being accused of opposing the former.
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It is amusing to read the term “mindkill” lower in this thread considering the range of attitudes fashionables about 4chan. I started a long post speaking about my experience as a regular /tg/ poster and “gurpsfag”, but then figured, what’s the point?
Seriously, considering the degree of violence and pettiness on tumblr and twitter, 4chan cannot even pretend to be the cesspool of the Internet anymore.
(@multi: some people like Auerbach note with interest that Mr. Poole gets a free pass, even from Anil Dash, see here for example)
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Link fail again… here
Mon royaume pour un bouton Éditer !
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Citation Needed.
4Chan has way way higher proportion of women than the internet average, while geek sites like RPG.net and polygon.com that explicitly align themselves with internet social justice have a lower proportion of women than the internet average. 4chan must be doing something right.
(Source is alexa; it’s not perfect but I don’t know of any other statistics, and it’s still more evidence than you’ve provided against 4chan.)
Where’s Scott Alexander when a psychology question comes up?
But no. That metaphor doesn’t work, because 4chan isn’t trying to convincingly fake a slum. There’s no need to fool people who actually live in a slum; just the middle classes who can’t tell the difference between a real slum and a fake one.
That sounds about right for social justice gentrifying geek spaces. Just switch cost from dollars to the amount of effort you have to invest in social skills.
In social justice culture cost is enormous. There’s a constantly shifting set of pronouns, theories, etc, that you must memorise and keep updated. If you don’t you get called out.
Geeks, metaphorically, can’t afford to spend that much money on social skills for a verity of different reasons; aspbergers or autism being two examples of reasons why.
Nonsense. You’re assuming that correlation equals causation.
You’re seeing two traits; poor social skills and traditionally geeky interests, then assuming that the poor social skills is causing the geeky interests; as an excuse for indulging poor social skills.
To be blunt. That’s just stupid.
If poor social skills and geeky interests are commonly seen side by side, it’s far more likely that there’s a root cause that causes both traits. One example might be autism.
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Or mere introversion/social anxiety. A couple decades of preferring books and games over people because interacting with people is stressful can end up there.
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@ Forlorn Hopes
There’s a difference between poor social skills and being an asshole. Sure, poor social skills can cause misunderstandings, just like clumsiness can cause accidental stepping on toes. But these are not examples of poor social skills, IMO:
But I don’t think gamer and channer culture is geek culture. I went to FOSDEM this year, and guess what? Everyone I interacted with was nice.
Maybe free software geeks have better social skills (it’s a cooperative enterprise, after all). Maybe a culture that values creating and sharing attracts kinder individuals or inspires better behaviour. Maybe productive people are happier than competitive consumers, and less eager to hurt others. I don’t know.
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I’ve seen some pretty bad stuff in free software spaces. I don’t think it quite rises to the -chan levels, but then, there is less anonymity in free software. That probably helps. But it ain’t no rose garden either. There’s plenty of “girls can’t code” and if you try to sign on with girl-name they offer to let you write docs. Cuz that’s what girls do. Maybe you can bring coffee.
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@ veronica d
Sure, there’s still some ignorance and stereotyping, but it’s a far cry from “THREATS ARE A PART OF OUR CULTURE, YOU DUMB BITCH”.
Even Linus, who is infamous for being rude, insists that he only does it to experienced developers who don’t mind. In fact, some of them probably do mind, and he’s being a bad role model, but he doesn’t try declare it a sacred cultural value.
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You won’t find me disagreeing with that. But Firstly I’d like to point out that your examples come from twitter, not 4chan.
Chan culture encourages everyone to act like absolutely horrible assholes to drown out the actual assholes (among other reasons). If 99% of insults are a joke, you’ll assume that last 1% is also a joke and it will have no power to hurt you.
I fully admit it’s not for everyone. It’s part of the reason I don’t hang out on chans. However I also respect that it is for channers; and that a lot of women and minorities are channers. I don’t know why it works for them, but it does, and I’m happy for them.
Obviously it causes no end of issues when channers talk to non channers. But I think tolerance for different cultural values is the only ethical solution.
=================
Since you’ve moved this to geek culture, I’ll start by saying that certainly does acknowledge the existence of assholes. You can debate whether “don’t feed the trolls” is good strategy, but it shows acknowledgement of the problem.
Anyway. There is a large grey area (especially on the net where there’s no bodylanguage or vocal tones) when you don’t know if someone’s being asshole or if it’s a misunderstanding. (Obviously, those tweets are not in that grey area).
Geek culture errs on the side of assuming it’s an honest misunderstanding. The social justice culture errs on the side of assuming an asshole. This will catch more genuine assholes, but also more innocent misunderstandings. More relevantly it will raise the minimum level of social skills required to participate in geek culture.
Since geek culture was designed to be a space where people with low social skills can come togeather, well you can see why geeks don’t like the idea.
It’s worth pointing out that Linus is Finnish and makes it clear that directness in communication is a Finnish cultural value.
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Forlorn Hopes:
Your statistical skills are good enough, but your skill at reading comprehension while correcting for the temptation to believe your opponent is saying something stupid *because* they’re your opponent, well… I mean, maybe it’s usually good and you just messed up this time.
Mythago had just said “In other words, the comparison here is that geekdom was always full of happy people who are now being driven from their beloved hobby because they can’t bring themselves to treat women and POC decently.” That this implied a cause for geeky interests (resistance to treating women and POC decently, which you equate with poor social skills) which Mythago found insulting to geeks and, reading between the lines, not particularly believable.
I’m a strong introvert with, in my estimation, poor social skills. I don’t think I was ever THAT shy (despite being voted “most shy” in my high school yearbook; I think the truly shy people were too far off the radar), but I’m pretty bad at body language, reading emotions, faking enthusiasm, thinking on my feet to give compliments back to people, answering the literal question instead of thinking about the implied question, etc. etc. I don’t think of what you’re describing as “social skills”. I mean, maybe by some dictionary definition they are, but terms and theories that you are mostly discussing online so you don’t have to puzzle out people’s body language and you can look stuff up, seem like actually a pretty good fit for geeks. Maybe that’s why a good chunk of the geeks I know are also interested in social justice.
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That this implied a cause for geeky interests Hmmm. First I started writing justification for why my accusation was correct, then replaced that with a post starting “maybe I was wrong”, but now on third thoughts I think I was correct to say Mythago’s post is a classic correlation vs causation mistake.
It all comes down to this sentence in your post:
“That this implied a cause for geeky interests”
And it’s equivalent in Mythago’s post
” It suggests that the real reason people play D&D”
You see; it doesn’t imply a cause for geeky interests; or that there’s a real reason behind geeky interests.
I never said that, none of the people making the gentrification argument said that. We just said that there was a correlation between geeky hobbies and being unable to afford a high social skills neighbourhood.
It was mythago, and now you, who saw us talking about that correlation and said it implied causation. Which I disagree with, I think it implies a root trait that causes both the low social budget and the geeky hobbies.
I don’t think of what you’re describing as “social skills”. What would you describe it as then?
Social Spoons maybe? Spoons as in Spoon Theory – they are able to achieve social skills, but they cannot do it consistently without running out of spoons – so they favour social spaces where the “spoon tax” on every day interaction is lower.
I’ve heard anecdotes in asperger’s groups of people who managed to achieve normal levels of social competence for years, before having a breakdown from the effort. Which demonstrates both that some people need spaces where they aren’t required to put in effort to obey social niceties. And that the ability perform social niceties not necessary proof that it’s far to ask someone to perform them.
While anecdotes are not data, they are sufficient to demonstrate the existence of an X.
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How odd. The blockquotes vanished in my previous post.
“That this implied a cause for geeky interests” and “I don’t think of what you’re describing as “social skills”.” were supposed to be blockquoted.
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@ Forlorn Hopes
You are still conflating politeness and ethical behaviour.
Politeness: smiling, greeting, making “eye contact”, using “appropriate” body language, engaging in small talk.
Ethical behaviour: not insulting people for fun, apologizing if you insult someone accidentally.
For instance, I have poor social skills. Constantly being polite is difficult for me, and maybe always will be. However, that does not make me “ethically disabled”.
I am as capable of choosing justice and kindness over fun as the most charming social butterfly. And when I’m informed that I’ve hurt someone, I apologise and try to do better.
So, if we could all agree that being a halfway decent person does not require excellent social skills, that would be great.
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@nita
I talked about the distinction between those two in my reply to you February 10, 2015 at 9:36 pm. In that post I agreed with you that there was a distinction.
Since then the only other post I made on this thread is my reply to closetpuritan which is primarally about the “social spoons” required to participate on a social space.
I don’t believe the ethical/polite distinction is that relevant when talking about social spoons. I mean sure, you should apologise if you accidentally insult someone, but I don’t see why it’s relevant while talking about spoons.
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As an addendum. My post about spoons was about spoons being used as an alternative to dollars when describing geeks getting priced out of geek neighbourhoods by gentrification.
I can’t think of a single time when someone was arguing against actual gentrification; and somebody said “you’re conflating hard working poor people with thugs and gang members”.
I bring this up to say that the existence of criminals in low income communities is no more an argument against real estate gentrification; than the existence of assholes in less socially adapt communities is an argument against social spoons gentrification.
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Forlorn Hopes:
I’m going to refer to “geeky interests” as “A”.
I’m going to refer to “exclusionary and unwelcoming behavior towards women and minorities”/”stuff maybe we would ideally do but we just don’t have the spoons”/”stupid SJW stuff” as “B”. Exactly what “B” is is in dispute, not just because of value judgments, but also because of both strawmanning by anti-SJWs, and motte-and-baileying by SJWs–as well as disagreement on the part of SJWs on what is okay behavior and what is not. (I think most of both the strawmanning and the motte-and-baileying is unintentional.)
I’m going to refer to “whatever causes B” [poor social skills(inability), unwillingness, etc.] as “C”.
I think part of the confusion is that C is being assumed to be a cause (of B, and maybe of A), but we weren’t making that explicit. And part of it is that we’re switching back and forth between our preferred causes/explanations (C) of B.
If I understand you correctly, you think that some other thing, “D” (maybe something that makes people good at certain skills and not others), causes C. D causes both C and A, and C causes B. But mythago misunderstood you as saying that C [again, identity of C is in dispute] causes both B and A. And then you said that mythago’s error was mistaking correlation for causation, but after writing all this I think it was a miscommunication/misunderstanding of what you believed and therefore a reading/writing error, rather than a math error. But I guess there’s no reason D couldn’t cause both C and A, even if C=unwillingness to stop doing B, not just inability.
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Forlorn Hopes:
I wouldn’t describe it as “social” at all. It’s pretty much either vocabulary or relatively agreed-upon and explicitly-stated rules/ideals. And usually if people think you’ve done something wrong, they’ll tell you exactly what it is. I don’t always agree upon how they do that (is there anyone posting here who *doesn’t* have a problem with callout culture?), but it’s a lot less confusing.
To me it’s more similar to, say, learning that actually, “alpha” and “beta” are not good terms to describe wolves, new science has come along and we need to now refer to the “alpha male” as a “breeder male”. Or, whoops, we just realized that that genus is polyphyletic, gotta rearrange it now, that’s not a “pleco” anymore. (Or, to use more basic biology, “animals” includes small invertebrates and humans even though colloquially people tend to use it to mean “nonhuman, not a bug”. Or basic science: “theory” does not mean what people use it colloquially to mean–which creationists exploit.)
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Not quite.
I think that C causes both B and A. The example I used for C is aspbergers/autism; saying that autism can cause both geeky interests and social issues should be completely uncontroversial. It certainty doesn’t make the social behaviours into the real reason for the geeky interests.
Also. I wouldn’t say that C is in dispute, so much that there are many, many, different Cs.
That said; I don’t think you’re wrong in saying that D causes C and A; C causes B. I was clear that aspbergers/autism was just one example. I wouldn’t be even slightly surprised if another example followed the A,B,C,D pattern.
No, it’s really really not. It’s about consciously remembering all the rules and consciously applying them every time they come up. If I relax I slip into totally direct honesty – can you think of any social situation when you’re expected not to say what’s on your mind, because I can think of plenty.
And from my observations, that’s _mild_ aspbergers, probably not much more than the threshold for a formal diagnosis.
Also, are you seriously suggesting that the vocabulary of social justice culture is agreed upon? :p
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Forlorn Hopes:
It’s interesting that you emphasize ‘consciously’–social skills are the kind of thing that I think of other people knowing without having to consciously think about it, and stuff where everyone has to think about it consciously seems like a more level playing field to me.
Dishonesty /= saying whatever pops into your head. (Though that isn’t really important to your point.) I guess I’ve had to reinforce in myself “think before you speak”–though that’s a lot easier in the not-real-time environment of the Internet. Even that is only partly a social skill; it’s also an intrapersonal intelligence/emotion management/impulse control skill. I would say of all the things that are part of social justice culture, that is the thing that most resembles a social skill. Though in geek spaces that dislike social justice culture, it’s not as though you can say just anything and expect not to be harshly criticized–far from it. I guess to the extent that this skill is different at all from the level of social skill that one would need in non-SJ geeky spaces, it’s because SJ norms are further from average-society norms than non-SJ geek culture norms are (are they?) and harder to do for that reason.
Also, I guess it wouldn’t be completely unfair to define any kind of writing or talking related skill as a social skill, (other than diaries, etc.) since you are by definition either listening/reading or talking/writing to someone else or with an audience in mind. But, for example, writing a political essay and deciding which things to mention and leave out to make a good essay… you could make a pretty good argument that it’s a social skill, but it’s not what I think of when they hear “social skills”. (For that matter, you could make an analogy between how people know not to use colloquialisms and texting-speak in writing formal essays, and using different language than normal in social justice spaces.) So I guess that’s part of why I said I didn’t think of it as social skills.
I’ve seen quite a few people in social justice spaces who say they’re on the autism spectrum–it seems like more than in the general population–so while I don’t dismiss out of hand that people on the autism spectrum, specifically, would have more difficulty with social justice culture than neurotypical people, I do feel some skepticism about it.
I did say relatively 🙂 Obviously nothing is going to be universally agreed-upon by a group of people, those geeks who are uncomfortable with social justice culture included. However, among the limited subset of places where I read the comments, it’s pretty well agreed-upon, and I haven’t seen notable differences when I read stuff from other parts of internet social justice culture. But more importantly, with the terms that aren’t fairly well agreed-upon (e.g. “crazy” or “lame” as pejorative, saying “let’s use ‘infants with penises’ instead of ‘infant boys’ to talk about circumcision”), even in spaces that are relatively uncritical of callout culture, people are usually pretty gentle in pointing it out unless someone has already demonstrated an unwillingness to stop using the words when pointed out. When it changes it usually changes in a wave, rather than some spaces stubbornly sticking to the old terminology. So, no worse than when it was decided that galaxy rasboras were now going to be known as celestial pearl danios, and some fish stores and hobbyists still haven’t gotten the message, so I have to remember both names if I want to talk about them. 🙂
I think people do tend to overestimate/get hyperbolic with the whole “constantly shifting set of terms” thing, too. I mean, I still hear people trot out “blacks or African-Americans or colored or whatever they want us to call them now” when that terminology has been stable for ~20 years in my estimation.
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If “geek” means something other than just “anyone who chooses to call themselves a geek”, doesn’t that imply that fake geeks are possible?
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“Gender studies students of the future! Someone should write a thesis about why “woman up” is not a concept.”
I think this is tied to the assumption that masculinity is an achievement that men work towards while femininity is the inevitable outcome of being a woman. When it comes to geeks this manifests itself as male geeks are losers and failures at manhood. While female geeks are fakers, wannabes and intruders into “male spaces”. Male geeks aren’t masculine enough to be seen as “real men” and female geeks aren’t feminine enough to be seen as “real women”.
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“… the assumption that masculinity is an achievement that men work towards …”
This is right, I think – to develop the theme a little, the dangerous things that men were historically expected to do – fighting in wars, hunting large game – were prone to “free-rider” problems, and highly dependant on group cohesion ie. trusting the guy next to you to fight as fiercely as possible and take risks etc. Reserving the identity “man” for someone who proves themselves is a very good way to encourage those behaviours.
If you look at the behaviour of Linus Torvalds (although as I understand it Torvalds doesn’t care what your gender is as long as your code is good), or you read Ally Fogg’s review of the movie “Whiplash” (Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men in the sidebar), you can see how this attitude has carried forward into modern culture.
(By the by, Roy Baumeister addresses the “Woman Up!” thing in a fairly interesting way in the first chapter of “Is There Anything Good About Men?”)
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Content note: Roy Baumeister seems to be a pretty unpleasant person who does not bother to understand where basic feminist theory is coming from.
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multiheaded – Maybe – but I thought the book I mentioned was quite charitable to feminism.
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“This is right, I think – to develop the theme a little, the dangerous things that men were historically expected to do – fighting in wars, hunting large game – were prone to “free-rider” problems, and highly dependant on group cohesion ie. trusting the guy next to you to fight as fiercely as possible and take risks etc. Reserving the identity “man” for someone who proves themselves is a very good way to encourage those behaviors.”
This is false. In actual hunter gather societies men who are good hunters aren’t elevated above other men. In fact they are often mocked. This is because elevating a class of people above all others causes them to be arrogant and self-absorbed which inevitably leads to group conflicts. On the other hand encouraging humility enforces group cohesion because no one thinks their better than anyone else.
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Uh-oh – can of worms coming.
First, [citation needed] on good hunters being mocked in hunter-gathering people – I find this somewhat incredible. I mean, yes, hierarchies & status were more fluid in foraging cultures – but hierarchies & status there were, and based on prowess/ability. (Although OTH everything said about h-gers is controversial and based on scant evidence so I’m updatedable here)
Second, I can *give* you the point about hunter-gathers and everything I said would still be true (broadly) in terms of the gender system of post-agriculture civilization.
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roe: seems like you need to show yours first, no? You were making the assertion about men hunting big game and fighting wars and that attitude carrying over; shouldn’t you, as well, be [citation needed] here?
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Actually, that’s quite fair – and by the lights of conventional anthropology I’m the one making a controversial claim. I’ll concede and withdraw it re: foraging cultures.
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>seems like you need to show yours first, no?
jesus christ dude, do you care about finding out what’s true or winning arguments?
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In case anyone still cares, I have a couple sources for “hunter-gatherers mock good hunters”:
One regular practice of the group that Lee studied was that of “insulting the meat.” Whenever a hunter brought back a fat antelope or other prized game item to be shared with the band, the hunter had to express proper humility by talking about how skinny and worthless it was. If he failed to do that (which happened rarely), others would do it for him and make fun of him in the process. When Lee asked one of the elders of the group about this practice, the response he received was the following: “When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”
Consistent with an egalitarian ethic that seeks to avoid singling out individuals for praise or condemnation, ekila provides a neutral medium for discussing success and failure. Thus, difficulties in the food quest or procreation are discussed in relation to ekila rather than to inadequacies in human skill or the environment’s ability to provide. People recognize each other’s skills, but it is impolite to refer to them. Rather, success is talked about in terms of proper conduct in personal and mystical relationships as defined by ekila taboos.
…
The implicit valuation of equality between members of the group can result in some surprising behavior from an economic perspective. Men are very sensitive to who is provisioning the camp with meat. Individuals who hunt a lot will become a target for teasing and mockery, even cursing, if people perceive that the group is eating their production too often. In contrast to models of economic behavior that assume that good producers will get recognition, status, and fame, here it is not the case. They stop hunting for a while rather than be subjected to teasing, gossip, and jealousy. I have described a man who was an obsessive hunter (Lewis 2003). Despite repeated calls for him to stop hunting so much, he continued. Eventually the women of his camp formed a coalition that refused to cook any meat that he killed. This was so offensive that he left to live with neighboring Luma Pygmies where he remains to this day. In effect, the women exiled him for producing too much.
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Actually, there is an analogous concept. If one looks for symmetry, one will fail to see it, but if one looks for anti-symmetry (as one would expect with conventional ideals of gender), the concept exists.
Demanding that one “acts like a lady” is the anti-symmetric equivalent of “man up”. Both are an order to act in accordance with one’s gender’s traditional ideal.
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A “slut” is still a “woman”. A “lying bitch” is still a “woman”. Men who are “losers” or “freaks” or “faggots” are not “men”.
Women do get gender-policed in awful and very oppressive ways, of course, esp. regarding the control and direction of their sexuality and their emotions – but the threat of being denied masculinity is a singular terror that men face.
(In an impressively Molochean way, men who feel insecure about their own masculinity can regain some self-esteem by attacking someone lower on the pecking order. An ever-present threat. )
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(I am NOT saying that women experience less oppression, or categorically cannot relate to some kinds of oppression.)
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But why isn’t it an “axis of oppression”? Or, more generally, what makes something an axis of oppression vs not?
I mean, anti-geek sentiment is a widespread social stigma against the core identity of a group who are frequently marginalized. Sure, the intensity may be less than many axes, but if that’s the case, we get into the whole “oppression olympics” thing. And if so, where’s the cutoff?
I’m not trying to pretend geek suffering is greater than it really is, but it seems pretty arbitrary about what is and isn’t an “axis of oppression”.
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I’m not sure, but one possible answer is that, in order to belong to an axis, oppression has to have a biological component. Thus, if someone is oppressed because of their sex, race, sexual orientation, or neurodiversity, then they are clearly an axis-oppressed group. Feminists disagree on whether trans people are oppressed in this way or not, because they disagree on whether being trans has a biological component or not. Obviously, geeks don’t qualify under this metric.
A slightly more charitable answer would be that any immutable properties of a person could make that person eligible for axis membership, and is just so happens that most of these properties are biological. Under this metric, trans people can get in, but geeks are still out (since they could stop being geeks any time they wanted, presumably).
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Does that mean that oppression based on religion also doesn’t count?
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But that leaves out class, religion, and wealth. It’s no different saying “stop being geeky” and “just convert religions”, since both can be changed.
And, now that I think about it, how would one detect geek oppression? A wage gap would have to control for education, gender, class, etc., and if geeky kids kill themselves more often due to bullying, it might not be included in most reporting. Being fired or arrested may not be so explicit, but what of being passed over for promotions and/or axed first in downsizing, or considered first in criminal investigations on account of being “weird loners”? Or not, but how to tell? Has there been any statistically rigorous investigation into whether geeks do have detectable oppression?
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It depends. Is religion considered to be an immutable property of a person ? If so, then under this “axis” model, it probably counts. If not, then most likely it doesn’t. If there’s some debate on the topic, then we’d expect to see a lot of disagreement as people fight over the issue.
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@MCA:
> Has there been any statistically rigorous investigation into whether geeks do have detectable oppression
I think this is a much more valuable question than “do geeks belong in an axis of oppression or not”. The whole “axis” model is too deontological for my taste.
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@ Bugmaster – That’s the problem. If you try to approach it empirically, the data simply isn’t there, but if you try deductively, you wind up with weird, irrational conclusions, like class not being an axis of privilege / oppression.
Honestly, the “axis” thing largely is just code for nothing more than “things the social justice movement cares about”.
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I thought class not being an axis of privilege was common wisdom among those who use the term. The most commonly refered to explanation of the concept (the one using video game difficulty as a metaphor) specifically holds up economic class as an exemple of something that can positively or negatively impact your life that isn’t an axis of privilege.
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One of the biggest criticisms of the whole privilage concept is precicely that proponents of privilage don’t treat class as an axis.
The only reason I can think of for not including class, is that the people defining privilage didn’t want to people to call out their class privilage.
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@JE – Really? I’ve seen it treated as one a few times, and specifically used to demonstrate intersectionality (e.g. “you can have white privilege but get screwed due to lacking class privilege, and one doesn’t cancel out or erase the other”).
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Class is an axis. It is not limited to biology.
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I think the reason is this: simply being “geeky” is hardly oppressed. I mean, I’m geeky and I promise you, I am not even slightly oppressed cuz of that. Not even a little. In fact, it’s pretty fucking great and I more or less brag about it.
Fuck yeah, I’m a geek. I tell pretty much everyone.
On the other hand, I’m also trans and NAT and stuff. Those are certainly axes of oppression.
Which I think is the answer. Being a social outcast is an axis, but not all geeks are such, nor are all social outcasts geeks.
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I think that standard is pretty obviously a bad one. I’m Jewish and I’m not oppressed, therefore being Jewish is not an axis of oppression. Except that’s totally wrong; being Jewish in random urban America is different from being Jewish in extremely insular Christian-or-bust communities, which is different from being Jewish in certain New York or California neighborhoods where people sniff haughtily and shake their heads when people move in and don’t have menorahs in the window come Hanukkah, which is different than being Jewish in Israel, which is different from being Jewish in Saudi Arabia…
In short, it’s obvious to me that “Are Jews an oppressed group?” is the wrong damn question to ask, and it pretty logically follows that trying to stack-rank other group’s oppression is similarly wrong. It is certainly true that some groups tend to report consistent oppression, but that doesn’t make it universally true, and it doesn’t mean that the people who consistently report being oppressors are never oppressed themselves.
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But then what’s the quantification of “oppressed”? How “oppressed” does a group have to be before it counts as an axis? And how much does it matter if the level of oppression varies between individuals, locations, ages, etc?
It just seems like things are unilaterally declared “axes” on an arbitrary, “I know it when I see it” basis, which IMHO seriously undermines the intellectual legitimacy of the entire concept.
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I think it is a “I know it when I see it” thing, insofar as one has to do some work getting past their own privileged viewpoints. This involved empathy and listening. Regarding “intellectual validity” — these are social processes, both the oppression itself and the work against the oppression. I find that people who try to reduce social ethics to some formulaic approach miss the fact that they will never have enough data to see all the ways their model does not work, until they try to apply it and find that other people object. And then their is social conflict. If your model does not include *that*, then your model is not even wrong, just not even about people at all.
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On the one hand, I agree with this post viz. geeks as non-neurotypical gender non-performers.
On the other hand, I think they breezed right past the main point of Mamatas’ post, which is that there’s an element in geek culture that is self-absorbed and narcissistic. That there’s nothing wrong with geek interests, but when one’s identity is formed around choice of video game consoles or whatever, that borders on an unhealthy obsession.
On still another hand, only *geeks* are prone to be self-absorbed and narcissistic? More like the default mode of modern mainstream culture.
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Honestly, I consider geek culture narcissism to be at worst forgivable and at best justified. In my experience with a variety of sub-cultures and interest groups, geeks both hold the highest regard for intelligence and learning (often elevating them far above most other values) and appear, IME, to display very high average intellect and education. To steal a phrase, if that’s wrong, I don’t wanna be right.
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You’re not wrong – but the central critique (I think) is still valid. The (potential) problem with valuing intelligence and learning in and of themselves is that those things should be leveraged to *help other people.* I’ve seen this in action, as I am in a not-central-geeky but somewhat-specialized field where status markers of being able to appreciate quality are sometimes flown in as a substitute for using skills to make a product better. I think this is what Mamatas was getting at with the “code and fonts don’t matter” spiel.
Now, this isn’t *universal* in geek culture – a lot of geeks are highly focused on making the world a better place (looking at you, effective altruism).
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You could fill in “geeks” with a number of subcultures and people who belong to that subculture will confidently say the same thing about how they, and they above all others, are morally and intellectually superior.
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> The (potential) problem with valuing intelligence and learning in and of themselves is that those things should be leveraged to *help other people.*
I completely disagree. I mean, of course there’s nothing wrong with helping people; but just because you are intelligent and learned, does not mean that you should dedicate your life to helping people. It’s also perfectly ok to dedicate your life to studying clouds or finches. Or to creating music. Or even to worshiping triangles, as long as you don’t carry it too far.
Now you might argue that all of those people ended up helping others a great deal, but my point is that they, and most people like them, didn’t really see it that way. They didn’t wake up every morning thinking, “what can I do to help the most people today ?”, but rather, “I really like clouds/biology/music/triangles/whatever; today, I’m going to pursue my passion as vigorously as I can”. We need more people like that, not fewer.
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Getting geeks to help you is trivial, you just frame your problem as insoluble and wait for them to take up the challenge to their intellect.
http://thecodelesscode.com/case/170
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@mythago – I’m sure they claim it, but they don’t have the h-index to back it up.
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@bugmaster – Hold up – I’m not anti-pursuing-your-passion. I don’t think I’ve communicated clearly. Let me try from-personal-example.
If I do what I think is a kick-ass piece of design work, the temptation is to serve my ego by drawing lots of attention to & high-lighting that bit of the project. But that piece of design might be part of a larger project, and I’ve got to serve the needs of the larger project, not my ego. So sometimes the design I worked on is barely noticable, almost subconscious. It doesn’t gratify my ego, but it serves the needs of the audience better. Does that make sense?
Good code is like this too, I think – invisible to the user.
The examples you listed, all of those people were working for a great good – Bach was celebrating the glory of God, Darwin was pushing at the boundaries of human knowledge. Even though they ended up as high-status people, none of them could be said to be working for their own ego-gratification. Right?
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@roe – I disagree, at least as far as the scientists. All of the scientists that I know, myself included, do what we do for sheer intellectual curiosity and fulfillment. Human knowledge advances because each of us reached the point where we knew literally everything humanity knows about a given area, and we wanted to know more – it’s a consequence, not a goal. We get our “emotional rush” from making a discovery, not from any sort of abstract sense of public service.
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Whenever this topic comes up, I’m reminded of these by Johnstone:
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I feel like this would be easier to discuss if we were clearer on who qualifies as a geek. Because, I agree with you that there’s a core group of people who are highly intelligent and who are geeks. They may well work in STEM.
But there’s also a huge larger culture of people who just really really love comic books and who suffer from the faulty logic: ‘Geeks are smart; geeks love comics; I love comics therefore I am smart’ and who then go on to be obnoxious about how the fact that they memorised all 1000 episodes of their favourite show means that they are better than you.
Mamatas is criticising the latter, not the former.
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As a mentally ill AMAB person: the bailey of this kind of complaint is: “those gross dorks are too uppity!”
As noted by many LW-on-Tumblr people: disabled people – or people coded disabled/broken – get told that they are uppity and arrogant ALL THE FUCKING TIME, when the pretense on which this is called would be considered business as usual for any higher-status group.
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” The (potential) problem with valuing intelligence and learning in and of themselves is that those things should be leveraged to *help other people.*”
Speaking as a Marxist here: go fuck yourself with this fucking entitled bourgeois nonsense. I don’t owe other people shit: society and its institutions do. FUCK OFF, I’M NOT DOING SHIT FOR YOU. RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.
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“Speaking as a Marxist here: go fuck yourself with this fucking entitled bourgeois nonsense. I don’t owe other people shit: society and its institutions do. ”
Just like the saying that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, do we need a saying “a capitalist is a socialist who has had people try to redistribute his own stuff”?
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@MCA – Right – but scientists have to occasionally give up on cherished hypothesis when the evidence doesn’t support them – and that probably hurts, yes? Your devotion to the “higher purpose” of the thing isn’t measured by the positive affect of succeeding, it’s measured by the amount of psychic pain you’re willing to absorb for the sake of fulfilling your passion in it’s true nature (ie. separate from you or your desires) (IMO).
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@veronica d
>Whenever this topic comes up, I’m reminded of these by Johnstone:
The people that quote describe who suck at feeling great emotions from artwork are not being intelligent, they are engaging in Hollywood Rationality.
I apply intelligence and thoughtfulness to all the media I enjoy, and I can assure you it helps me enjoy it more, not less.
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I’m fine with others benefitting from the value I create, taxing it, etc. I’m absolutely aghast at people trying to “redistribute” my LIFE: that’s my problem with capitalism to begin with! Trading subservience to bosses for subservience to “community” sounds like a bad deal.
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@Ghatanathoah — Johnstone is writing about his own experience in education, which I found quite meaningful. Myself, I was always able to math very well, but his statement “word-bound and unable to dance” struck a chord with me. It is a thing many of us experience, I believe.
This is not to devalue intelligence. Hardly. I have never stopped loving math. But it is this: I have met many smart people who are complete disasters at living life. I have met people far more humble who live their lives very well. I’ll take the insights of the latter over the former, since I don’t want to be a lonely, miserable fuck.
Oh and I dance pretty well now. In fact, I love it.
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When I was in… it must have been either fifth or sixth grade… one of those two, an English class I had, I was reading a particularly bad piece of Spanglish poetry* and I swore right then and there that I’d never write any poetry or any fiction.
I also picked up the idea somewhere that it’s bad to express — or even feel — any positive emotion whatsoever without throwing it behind a smokescreen of irony: everything is to be either analyzed or hated. Thankfully, I’ve taken enough long walks in the hills to begin to unlearn the bullshit I picked up in school.
* Why is there so much of that stuff? It’s everywhere — Sandra Cisneros, Julia Alvarez getting put on fucking Chipotle bags — and it’s always awful. I have read parts of the Ormulum, generally recognized as one of the worst pieces of literature ever, and the estadounidense stuff is so much worse. I can’t stand reading other people’s self-conscious race operas: people who actually have an identity can write one goddamn sentence without reassuring themselves that they have it. And Tryfon Tolides can go fuck himself too.
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@roe – But I don’t think that’s a “for society!” thing either. I’d analogize it to the “no pain, no gain” part of weightlifting. Plus, even being wrong can be fun – if you’ve got a strong a priori hypothesis, when the world violates that, it means, almost by definition, that the system is even cooler, more interesting and more complicated than you were able to figure out.
I’m actually writing up a paper right now, with exactly that gist. I had a hypothesis that I was SO SURE was right that I got way ahead of myself in my predictions and plans, but then it turned out I was completely wrong, and the hypothesized effect never emerged at all. That sucked a bit, but my inability to detect something has some pretty huge implications for broader science, especially if future studies confirm it in other systems.
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Lets for sake of argument state that humans always will form their identity around something.
Isn’t it healthy to form it around video games instead of gender, class, politics, religion or nationality?
If you’re mindkilled and easily enraged on the subject of playstation vs xbox; surely that’s better than being mindkilled and easily enraged on the subject of how to vote in the national election?
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I think identity should form around *what you do* and not *what you are* – so everything you listed could be either healthy or unhealthy based on it’s expression. To wit:
If a person became a champion-level videogame player, or even just worked really hard and it and became a really really good one – that’s *doing* something, not just being “a videogamer.”
Likewise, becoming an activist and stuffing envelopes for a political party or opening a shelter or whatever is *doing something* – complaining on tumblr is just being something, loudly.
Anyone can be mind-killed, which is why I stated it’s a trend in the larger culture. But geeks are somewhat my tribe, so I’m more concerned about mind-killed geeks.
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I feel the opposite.
A musisian who strongly identifies with the heavy metal tribe, and opposes their mortal enemies, the smooth jazz tribe. Is, all else being equal, probably worse off than a musician doesn’t identify with heavy metal. Because that musician can listen to smooth jazz with an unbiased eye and adopt the good ideas. Same for a politican or an activist.
If the only way they can keep that level headed outlook is by identifying with something eles, a fan of classical paintings, than that’s probably a good idea – even if they don’t paint at all.
Now I admit that all else isn’t equal; because a politican shareing a tribial identifier with their voters or a musician with their fans is going to have an advantage.
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If you’re mindkilled about the subject of whether your small town should allow road signs to be 10′ in height rather than the existing 8′, isn’t that better than being mindkilled about there being more gay characters in blockbuster movies?
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@mythago
>If you’re mindkilled about the subject of whether your small town should allow road signs to be 10′ in height rather than the existing 8′, isn’t that better than being mindkilled about there being more gay characters in blockbuster movies?
That’s a bad example. How many gay characters there are in movies isn’t an example of being mindkilled about geeky stuff. It’s an example of being mindkilled about gay rights.
An example of someone being mindkilled about geeky stuff would be someone who is mindkilled about whether Fictional Character A’s ideal love interest is Fictional Character B or Fictional Character C. Or someone who is mindkilled about what the best portrayal of Batman is. Something apolitical, like that.
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Uh, maybe we’re losing the script on what “mindkilled” means.
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>A musisian who strongly identifies with the heavy metal tribe, and opposes their mortal enemies, the smooth jazz tribe. Is, all else being equal, probably worse off than a musician doesn’t identify with heavy metal. Because that musician can listen to smooth jazz with an unbiased eye and adopt the good ideas. Same for a politican or an activist.
You’re missing the motivation side of this. A musician who identifies strongly with heavy metal has a strong built-in motivation to understand and produce good metal. A musician with no particular tribal affiliation is motivated only by their love of music in general, which sounds good on paper but isn’t that good a motivator in practice.
There are losses. But music is a positive-sum field, so gains from motivation can be expected to cancel out losses from naivete regarding other subgenres, at least up to a point. It’s far less clear that this is reliably the case in zero- or negative-sum fields like much of politics.
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“Axis of oppression”, as a concept, does not cut reality at it’s joints.
… oor maybe I’m just missing something, since Ozy is a gender studies major and I am not.
One of the two.
(Still, this is a pretty good analysis of the topic. Is it a repost?)
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Pretty sure everything’s a repost unless announced otherwise. Also, the “prompted by this post” post is from 2012, which isn’t probative, but.
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The hyperlinks in all the other reposts go to archive.org; either Ozy’s fixed that or the post is new.
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Still repost; it’s from NSWATM, which isn’t from Internet Archive.
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Step 1: Center all social debate around “oppression”
Step 2: Define “oppression” in a very specific way to only cover the cases you’re interested in
Step 3: Whenever anyone has a legitimate complaint, say “But that’s not oppression, according to my definition.”
Step 4: Avoid ever having to consider legitimate complaint
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I think Scott is — not surprisingly — right on the money here. The manic fetishization by so-called SJW’s [sic] over what constitutes “oppression”, and which oppression is or is not “structural”, etc., is to me a real red flag that weapons are being forged rather than truth being sought.
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multiheaded1793: (tumblr)
“Maybe you’ve been hurt by the Inquisition, but it wasn’t ‘Evil’. See, Evil is caused by the devil, and we’re all about fighting the devil”
— Rob Miles (@robertskmiles)
2 January 2015
“So really if you’re upset about us torturing your friends, the only solution is to push for more power for The Inquisition, to fight evil”
— Rob Miles (@robertskmiles)
2 January 2015
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It’s called framing. It’s straight out of Sun Zi – never give battle until you have set the conditions for victory. Avoid a fair fight at all costs.
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You seem to be using “fair” in the same sense as ten-year-olds who just lost at Monopoly use “fair”.
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The sense I am using is where your opponent has the chance as you of winning. A level playing field. Sun Zi says to avoid those battles. Sun Zi has no use for sportsmanship
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Treating truth as a battle is a great way to end up with truth as a casualty of war. If you’re not going to play fair, your opponent has no onus to reciprocate, and thus no reason to listen to you at all.
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“Treating truth as a battle is a great way to end up with truth as a casualty of war.”
Precisely. As someone said above. with these people one gets the sense that weapons are being forged, not that truth is being sought.
“If you’re not going to play fair, your opponent has no onus to reciprocate, and thus no reason to listen to you at all.”
This is where the analogy between war and debate breaks down. In war you don’t fight because some kind of “onus” is on you – you fight either because there’s some benefit you think you’ll derive or because you have no choice. In war you can force the other side to participate. You can’t do that in debate. If your counterpart senses that you are not going to debate fairly, “in good faith”, they are wasting their time with you. That suggests that rhetoric that stacks the deck that your opponents only appear to be talking to you, when actually they are playing to some gallery or other.
That’s another sign that what these people want has nothing to do with debate or dialog.
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Wait, who are “these people”?
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“Wait, who are “these people”
People who employ these tactics in what are supposed to be debates. Fox News stock in trade.
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Honestly, this whole “you must be doing something important or it is worthless!” thought process needs to die a hot fiery death.
Eh, this one goes both ways. Nerds are likely to dismiss non-nerd stuff as “dumb primate stuff” or similar. (I’m not saying they’re wrong, but you can’t ignore that they do it. 🙂 )
(This “nerd-jock” opposition comes up here a lot, but I think the “nerd-suit” opposition is perhaps more informative…)
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Isn’t femmephobia sometimes considered an axis of oppression though? Yet femmes not have a wage gap. Femmes do not experience noticeably worse life outcomes. No one has ever been fired from their job for being openly femmy. You do not have to hide your lipstick and skirts for fear of being arrested. No one has been murdered for being a femme.(AMAB feminine people probably experience all of. these things, but we’ve already got an axis of oppression for that.)
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Actually many SJ people do not include an axis of opression that covers men who wear make up or lipstick. AMAB women are of course covered. But the mainstream theory has a real issue conceptualizing the obvious discrimination against cis-gendered men who wear lipstick, dresses, skirts, etc. The standard answer actually is to claim that this is all really caused by sexism against women. As men who dress in this way are appearing feminine and the feminine is stigmatized in our patriarchal culture.
I however find it pretty callous to claim the suffering experienced by men is “really” caused by sexism against women. Or perhaps by trans-misogyny. Even in the cases where the men are not trans. Note some authors such as Julia Serano have a VERY expansive definition of trans. But Julia Serano’s views are not the mainstream SJ views.
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I’m not sure I’ve understood you. Are you saying:
1. It’s not true that the feminine is stigmatised; and its callous to spread this lie, which is an attempt to downplay the suffering of men.
2. It is true that feminine-stigma is the reason men are forcefully discouraged from appearing feminine; but even though this is the reason it’s still callous to say it out loud?
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I am saying neither of these things, certainly not the second. Anyone perceived as “male” is at serious risk if they wear make up, dresses, nail polish, etc. This discrimination does not depend on the person being perceived as trans. It depends on them being perceived as male. Which is why this clearly sexism against men.
*Which is not to say discrimination against transgender individuals is giant problem.
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Thank you, that’s clearer.
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I obviously meant to say “isn’t a giant problem”
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Haven’t feminists played their own part in stigmatizing femininity?
Traditionalists don’t stigmatize either: men should be men and women should be women, and there’s no single role or standard that everyone should fit into. (Americans tend to have a cultural aversion to anything that sounds like “separate but equal”, but they shouldn’t unless they’re willing to be consistent and say that funeral doom metal, electro house, smooth jazz, gamelan music, pleqërishte, harsh noise, hymns, and Weird Al should all be judged by the exact same standard.)
But there seem to be a lot of feminists who hold the male role as the ideal for both sexes: women should have a career, make money, let their children be raised by the help and the government, and completely ignore the traditional female role in civil society and so on.
As far as I know, my grandmother never held a real job. But she wrote poetry, corresponded with the part of the family that stayed in Germany, was active in local historical societies, and… wrote very strange letters to politicians but for the purposes of the argument I’ll ignore that and say she was in the PTA or something, which is certainly part of the role. If women are all trying to live by the feminist ideal of “career first, then maybe family but maybe not”, who will be in the historical societies and the PTA and keep up with the extended family and write three-page poems about Jack Jouett’s ride that I really ought to dig out of whatever box they’re in and put online after making the obvious fixes to the damn meter and drop a message in a bottle while on a ship and get in the newspaper after striking up a correspondence with the fisherman in the Azores who finds the thing?
And, hell, what else would she have done? Go on to become a translator — she studied Spanish and German literature — and end up as a replaceable cog in an office somewhere and in her case probably fuck everything up because she was by all accounts a terrible person to be around? Because the sense I get from feminists is that they think that entire role is stupid and everyone should be like some bizarre version of a frat bro: swearing a lot and partying a lot and being promiscuous and going on to get a shitty office job.
And another thing. You know the pro-UBI argument that goes “think of how many more cool things there will be when people don’t have to hold a job and can devote their time and energy to making cool things instead?” And you know how, back when there were rich aristocrats who didn’t have to worry about money or careers, rich aristocrats who didn’t have to worry about money or careers did a lot of cool things, like create the field of chemistry? Well, there are a lot fewer people now who don’t have to worry about money or careers than there used to be — and the ones now are mostly young people who will have to worry about money and careers soon enough, so their creative period is limited to a time when they don’t really know much and can’t get much practice and probably won’t be inclined to join historical societies, or retired people, who can keep up the historical societies but who probably can’t pick up something new and get good at it.
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@nydwracu Yes, the history of feminism’s complicated relationship with femininity is fascinating. Even as far back as the suffragettes there were some women saying, ‘When we’re free we’ll finally be able to give up on all this frivilous femininity’ and some women saying, ‘Look we want to vote, but we’re still feminine. We’re not scary butch like those women.’ It’s beautifully satirised in Cicely Hamilton’s: ‘William: An Englishman’ published in 1919.
I think it’s definitely the case that society considered femininity inferior, or felt that being feminine and doing many things (eg. lifting heavy weights, having a job, taking a leadership role) were mutually exclusive. Feminists who were naturally not particularly feminine responded by rejecting femininity. It was easy for them because they didn’t really like it anyway. I don’t think it was until the 90s that feminists started trying to integrate femininity and power.
As for separate and equal: people give it the side-eye because it’s what people always say when they push for laws and social structures that are separate and unequal. Imams and mullahs calling for sharia law claim that it’s separate and equal. Equality means equal access to power and resources (or ‘equal opportunity to access power and resources’ for some). I’ll believe separate is equal when there’s a society where men work, women raise children and a separate House of Mother’s has the right to write, debate and veto laws.
Women want jobs for the same reason men do, not because they love being a cog in a machine, but because they want to get paid and have control of their own money. I’ll write poetry and create the field of chemistry when I have a secure income and lots of free time. Vive la basic citizen’s income!
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If this amounted to claiming that men were not really victims, then I would agree that it was callous. But I don’t think it does. To use a more clear-cut example, when 3 civil rights workers were killed in Mississippi in 1964, I don’t think that only one of them was killed due to racism–they all were, even though only one was actually black. And I don’t see anything callous about saying that. But they were all victims of murder.
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Replying to nydwracu and Pluviann above:
“Progress has never been a bargain. You have to pay for it. Sometimes I think there’s a man who sits behind a counter and says, “All right, you can have a telephone but you lose privacy and the charm of distance. Madam, you may vote but at a price. You lose the right to retreat behind the powder puff or your petticoat. Mister, you may conquer the air but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.”
— Henry Drummond, in _Inherit the Wind_
Not condoning the equation of femininity with “retreat” per se; just pointing out that the idea of trade-offs comes very naturally to a lot of people, almost to the point where you can’t feel you’ve gained unless you can also identify what you’ve lost/spent/traded to get there. Not a logical idea, really, but it does seem to come up a lot.
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I would expect strongly gender non-conforming men to face variations of transphobia. Is this not obvious?
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That was my point. Minus transphobia, femmephobia stands on about as much ground as geekphobia, yet the former is at least sometimes called an Axis
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Well, we can turn to Serano, who argues that transmisogyny has at its roots effemania, which is the hatred of feminine expression by (those perceived as) men. I think she is probably correct. Certainly I would have loved to dress more femme if I thought it would be welcome.
Which is funny cuz I’m a thousand times more attractive in femme mode now. But then, hormones make a difference.
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Actually, cis male cross dressers are often fired from their work and are often victims of violent hate crimes if their outed as a cross dresser. Since not all cross dressers are out of the closet the hate crime statistics against them is often muddied.
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Not about geeks, but a situation with some parallels. Greater Manchester Police record offences against emos and punks as hate crimes in the same way as they do for race and sexual orientation:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/apr/03/manchester-police-goths-punks-hate-crime
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Have we even agreed on a definition of geek?
Is a geek just someone who likes stereotypically geeky things like video games and anime? Do you need to have an unusually intense interest in those things to be a geek? Is “weirdness” or a lack of social skills a prequisite for geekiness, or can anyone who likes geeky things be a geek? Is “geek” even a useful categorization in the first place?
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“(Gender studies students of the future! Someone should write a thesis about why “woman up” is not a concept.)”
There’s not much to study; it’s a pretty simple really:
http://www.genderratic.net/?p=2775
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2015/02/02/submissive-behaviors-being-taken-seriously-and-wanting-to-have-it-both-ways/
http://honeybadgerbrigade.com/2014/04/16/damseling-pity-pumping/
The bottom line is that weakness is a feature of certain type of [toxic] femininity, and it happens to be modal in our society. It is a bourgeois femininity and you don’t see it among military women, who are quite obviously not modal in the mainstream culture.
It is performative and I doubt it would be very hard to find instances where women are policed or suffer for not acting weak enough.
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I suspect another factor is that there are women who act this way and don’t understand that it is signaling weakness. They just act that way because other women do, or because it fits their personal aesthetics. Then when people treat them as if they are weak, they don’t understand why and assume people are being sexist.
It’s actually nicely analogous to problems geeks have with accidentally signalling things they don’t mean to. For instance, I have sometimes gotten in trouble for signaling aloofness and superiority at other people. The reason this is happened is that I wasn’t really interested in what they were talking about, and feigning disinterest in other people is a common way to signal aloofness and superiority. They mistook my genuine disinterest for aloofness-signalling.
My natural feeling is that we need to find some way to shame or punish people who won’t stop drawing subtexts from other people’s behavior. Some feminist activism probably has this effect unintentionally (i.e. “Not everything she’s doing is flirting with you or coming onto you”), but it needs to be more explicit.
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“to shame or punish people”
I like your overall idea, but can’t we try to find a different mechanism? Otherwise, countersignalling and such.
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I don’t find femininity even remotely weak, inasmuch as my femme presentation is the strongest part of myself. I think you are ascribing meanings to thing that are not a part of those things.
I certainly do encounter an occasional man (and more rarely a woman) who thinks that, because I’m in a miniskirt, that means certain things that are not true. But then, such people are the minority. And I quickly set the fuckers straight.
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The specific type of femininity the articles speak of involves acting in a neotenous, child-like fashion in order to engender other people’s protective and supportive instincts:
-Acting “ditzy” and stupid
-Acting emotionally fragile and easily hurt.
-Speaking in an unnaturally high-pitched voice to sound more child-like
-Referring to oneself and one’s friends as “girls” rather than women.
I have no idea if you engage in this sort of femininity or not, but if you do it is probably because you find it aesthetically appealing for its own sake, not because you are attempting to manipulate anyone’s emotions. However, even if you are not intending to signal weakness that does not mean that other people will not perceive it as such (again, I have no idea if you engage in this sort of femininity or not, this is just hypothetically if you do).
I agree with the article that this kind of neotenous behavior is a common type of feminine performance, and that it is much less accepted when men do it. However, I disagree with the article’s seeming assertion that most women engage in this behavior as part of a conscious strategy of manipulation. I think most women do it because they like it, and the manipulation is unintentional.
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I do some of those things some of the time. From time to time I get shit for it, but it doesn’t stick cuz I’ll laugh at them and point out they’re being shitty killjoys and being weird and loud and dancing when others are not dancing is hella fun.
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@ Ghatanathoah
Does anyone actually act easily hurt on purpose? In my experience, being easily hurt is no fun at all, and the only special treatment it gets you is negative.
When I use a higher pitch, I do it to sound friendly. It seems to help social interactions proceed more smoothly. I’m not good at “eye contact” and whatnot, so I try to cooperate in other ways.
And my personal assessment of my maturity has nothing to do with anyone’s instincts.
More generally, I perform femininity not because I’m trying to manipulate someone, or because I like it. I do because it’s the expected social protocol that goes with my appearance. When you seem “cold” and “bitchy” (that is, insufficiently feminine), people can take it personally. Although, thanks to feminism, I do enjoy a lot of freedom to just be myself, which is a huge relief.
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“When I use a higher pitch, I do it to sound friendly.”
Have you wondered how it sounds friendly? it does, but it only works if you’re a woman. In a boy that kind of behavior signals that he can be pushed around.
I think you have an example that shows how this is part of a gender role.
“More generally, I perform femininity not because I’m trying to manipulate someone, or because I like it. I do because it’s the expected social protocol that goes with my appearance. When you seem “cold” and “bitchy” (that is, insufficiently feminine), people can take it personally.”
Bingo. It is a cultural system, like the grammar of whatever language you use, and you have very limited range of motion to act outside its strictures.
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Yeah, there’s a ceiling on “acceptable” friendly pitch for a guy, but guys still use relatively higher pitch when they’re being non-threatening.
Meanwhile, even my lowest pitch is not very intimidating — I don’t just sound weaker, I am weaker, and my voice betrays it.
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“Yeah, there’s a ceiling on “acceptable” friendly pitch for a guy, but guys still use relatively higher pitch when they’re being non-threatening.”
Very true. In fact this is grammaticalized in some of the Zapotec languages – you raise your pitch when you talk to a higher status person. It isn’t gendered.
“Meanwhile, even my lowest pitch is not very intimidating — I don’t just sound weaker, I am weaker, and my voice betrays it.”
I have heard women put such a hardedge on their high pitch that makes it sound like an icepick. It conveys a lot of intensity and authority. But it is certainly culturally constrained.
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Oh joy! More superweapons.
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+1
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“I don’t find femininity even remotely weak, inasmuch as my femme presentation is the strongest part of myself. ”
An appeal for protection is a clear admission of weakness. Signaling that with a high pitched, or pleading kitten voice may be an unconscious behavior, but that doesn’t mean it does not signal anything.
“I certainly do encounter an occasional man (and more rarely a woman) who thinks that, because I’m in a miniskirt, that means certain things that are not true. ”
Okay, I see the disconnect. Wearing a miniskirt is femme, I guess – not a term or concept that concerns me enough to understand – but there are different ways to present when you are in a miniskirt. There is femme, and then there is feminine and finally effeminate.
“I think most women do it because they like it, and the manipulation is unintentional.”
Ultimately the intentionality is secondary to the effect achieved, and in any case this isn’t some kind of court case where we are trying to establish mens rea.
Because in discussing cultural norms and memes and performance, mens rea is nothing. It explains nothing of what is going on. Lets look at one area of culture, language. Even highly skilled speakers of a language are usually only “unconsciously competent” For instance English has one of the most complex system of tense and aspect on the verbs, with a whole range of differing semantic effects. Native speakers are usually effortlessly competent in it. Some can manipulate it to effect – using a progressive tense rather than the habitual to suggest agency in the subject of the verb. and yet it is almost unknown to find lay native speakers who can adequately explain how any of this works.
Speaking of agency, another example – use of the passive. the function of the passive is to demote the agent from the argument structure of the verb, in fact to delete it. So if we see:
“Boys are socialized to X…” the agent, whoever is doing that socializing, is hidden and the comment focuses all the attention, and usually the blame, on the boys were are passive objects of the socialization.
How conscious is that? Probably semi-conscious at best.
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This is concept-salad. What is your point?
I am femme. I’m not weak, most of the time. Except for when I am.
Some guy attacked my girlfriend and her roommate with a knife the other night. Seems the man was hitting on them and got shitty when they blew him off.
Same old story — tale as old as time for we gals.
So he got in their faces, got violent, and when the punches began — well, the roommate is a very beautiful, entirely femme woman who used to be a boxer. My g/f is pretty tough herself, working-class, grew up hard. She works security in a downtown bar.
The man got owned, so he pulled a knife.
You say, “An appeal for protection is a clear admission of weakness.” This is armchair nonsense. Many strong people need protection at some point in their lives, even guys who flex a lot and grunt at the gym. Every solider and cop knows they need backup.
Is that weakness? Only if you strip the word bare. A person’s strongest moment can be when they admit how much they need a friend.
I’m femme as fuck, femme like razors, cuz that’s what lights up my soul. And yes, I see the dominance and submission patterns play out, quite clearly, just as I understand English grammar fairly well. It can be fun to play at the edges of this stuff, but to see femme as weak is to be deeply wrong.
My g/f is now kinda afraid to go home through that subway station at night. Is this her femme weakness? Or is it the fact this fucker might show up with a gun? Should she ask for protection? Would she get it? Should she carry her own gun? — cuz playing quickdraw with a scumbag sounds like fun.
Who is really weak, my g/f and her roommate, two women braving the late night subway, cuz that’s what they need to do to work, or some brodude whose sense of masculinity is so fragile that he can only respond to rejection with chest pounding and (in fact) violence?
There is a world of strength you know nothing about.
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“You say, “An appeal for protection is a clear admission of weakness.” This is armchair nonsense. Many strong people need protection at some point in their lives, even guys who flex a lot and grunt at the gym. Every solider and cop knows they need backup.”
Funny you should mention soldiers. The proverbial example is infantry troops in danger of being overrun. They call for artillery support. They will tell you that right then, their position is weak.
“Many strong people need protection at some point in their lives, ”
You are essentializing weakness and strength. They aren’t inherent characteristics, they are behaviors. If you act in a strong way, you are strong,. Weakness is simply the failure to do that. It’s the same way with courage or anything else. no one has an essence, just action.
High voices – this is partly cultural – German women simply don’t chirp the way so many American women do. There is more than one femininity, and they are all constructed. But there is also an instinctual side of this. When I was teaching the women said the men had it easier keeping the kids calm just because teir voices were deeper .
Raising the pitch of your voice is a submissive behavior. Hardening your voice, even at a naturally high pitch, is a dominant behavior. Female officers do it all the time, And if you are concerned that that kind of behavior is “unladylike”, remember that those women are ten times the lady of any civilian woman. The dysfunctional, false model of ladylike behavior, usually in people trying to fart higher than their assholes anyway, should die.
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Please explain what this means.
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@Ginkgo
>>>>Ultimately the intentionality is secondary to the effect achieved, and in any case this isn’t some kind of court case where we are trying to establish mens rea.
I think it is. Whether someone is consciously trying to manipulate you or not is hugely important to how you respond to it. If someone is consciously trying to manipulate you then you are justified in getting angry at them, and trying to find some way to fight back against their manipulations. If someone is engaging in behaviors for fun, and these behaviors have the side-effect of manipulating your emotions, that’s a whole different ballgame. You are not justified in seeing them as manipulative, cynical, and unpleasant people.
In order to fight this kind of manipulation justly and fairly we need to establish whether there is mens rea or not.
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“Please explain what this means.”
It refers to people putting on a parody of ladylike airs to make themselves seem more referred.
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refined. (fat fingered it.)
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So you think such people should die? And what is ladylike mean? Cuz I’m pretty sure I’ve never done that.
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Submissive is not the same as asking for help, though. And based on my own intuition and Nita’s description:
It seems more like signalling “I don’t want to challenge you; I do not want to dominate you”. Similar to how dogs yawn and lick their lips as calming, I-don’t-want-to-fight gestures.
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Speaking of the whole “yeah but they’re not real geeks because Harry Potter/Call of Duty/Zelda is now a girl game” thing:
Shorter: if your attitude is that only you and your friends are the True Gatekeepers of True Geekdom and interlopers must prove themselves, you’re not a geek. You’re a fucking hipster.
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The whole “sharing” thing really spoke to me. I have a strong urge to share my interests with others. When I read people online complaining that a particular avenue of geekdom has gone mainstream (it was anime in my case) I thought they were insane. If more people love it then there are more people to share it with!
On the other hand I can empathize with someone who thinks they’ve bumped into another hardcore fan to share their devotion with, only to find a casual fan who is put off by your extreme enthusiasm. But that doesn’t seem like a big enough problem to justify all this hipsterism.
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“Shorter: if your attitude is that only you and your friends are the True Gatekeepers of True Geekdom and interlopers must prove themselves, you’re not a geek. You’re a fucking hipster.”
If I were to take that at face value, it would mean that “geek” would cease to mean anything at all, because it would never be possible for anyone who claims to be a geek not to be one.
Almost no other classification of people works that way. If you claim to be a feminist, but you loudly proclaim women to be inferior, it’s not being a True Gatekeeper to say “well, to be a feminist you at least have to believe in equality”. If you call yourself a mathematician, and you have no idea what a prime number is, it’s not being a True Gatekeeper to say that you can’t be a mathematician if you don’t understand a fundamental concept of mathematics. Words mean things; you can’t just say that they mean nothing when they are applied to people, on the grounds that giving the word a meaning may exclude people and that’s just wrong.
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Yes, but if I said “topologists aren’t REAL MATHEMATICIANS” you would quite rightly tell me I’m full of shit.
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Being a geek requires a certain level of obsessiveness/dedication, which newcomers to a newly popular interest tend to lack. If new fans were just like old fans, few would complain, but they’re not. Keeping out casuals is very much a legitimate concern, to prevent the community’s culture from changing or content creators from changing their target audience.
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@Jiro, actually every classification of people works that way. If I loudly proclaimed that any true feminist supports VAWA as written 100%, and grilled any self-described male feminist by telling him he was full of shit unless he could recite the Seneca Falls declaration from memory, would that be appropriate policing of the term “feminism”? I don’t think it is. Similarly, I don’t think that “if we don’t police geekdom for Fake Geeks [especially girls] then the term is meaningless” is sensible.
@blacktrance, that only makes sense if you assume a number of things, such as 1) old geeks have the unilateral right to determine the commitment of new geeks and their status as part of “the community”; 2) the primarily interest of the community is to remain static and unchanging, and 3) content creators, who are always separate from the community, have a moral obligation to direct their content to the existing community, and to keep their content static.
Obviously, I think these are mistaken, insular and frankly selfish, as well as detrimental to the community. I am old enough to remember old SFF fans grumbling about that there New Weird and cyberpunk and how them kids will ruin everything with their ya-ya mirrorshades. I remember a lot of kerfluffle over diceless RPGs when they were new. None of this ruined geekdom.
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OMG remember the Nobilis versus Amber wars!
Good times.
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Well, this showed up in the comments section to Scalzi’s post:
He acts as if this is some scandal that will ruin geekhood. Which, I mean, what a lonely, impoverished attitude.
And if I wonder if this dude’s next complain is that he does poorly with women!
Anyway, I’d say, “Cool. Yeah, that outfit totally works! Tell me about your site.”
Cuz I like people.
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“If I loudly proclaimed that any true feminist supports VAWA as written 100%, and grilled any self-described male feminist by telling him he was full of shit unless he could recite the Seneca Falls declaration from memory, would that be appropriate policing of the term “feminism”?”
There’s a difference between saying that some boundaries are reasonable (you must believe in equality) and some are not (you must recite the Seneca Falls declaration)–and denying that any boundary could possibly be reasonable, no matter what it is.
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“Yes, but if I said “topologists aren’t REAL MATHEMATICIANS” you would quite rightly tell me I’m full of shit.”
But that is because you think that *specific example* is unreasonable. It’s not because you think that no such example could ever be reasonable on principle. You aren’t okay with saying “topologists aren’t real mathematicians”, but you are okay with “someone who doesn’t know what a prime number is isn’t a real mathematician”.
In other words, you’re fine with the concept of “fake mathematician” even if you think the anti-topologist movement has gone a little too far in calling people fake mathematicians.
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Well, right. The Emma Frost porn lady is probably *not* a geek, but does that mean we should close doors in her face? Cuz our clubhouse must be pure?
What about the new girl who shows up and doesn’t know a whole lot, but maybe likes this one show or one costume, and then *angry dude* gets in her shit and makes her feel bad?
Great job, angry dude!
It’s maybe enough that she likes the one show or the one costume and maybe we should be really cool and open to her, like, hey if you like that maybe you’ll like this, or maybe you haven’t heard of this-or-that character, but that’s fine. I’m a beginner at some stuff. When I am, I ask for help. So I’ll tell her about *cool thing* and maybe she is interested.
Or maybe she ain’t and she’d rather hang with *those people over there* who are talking about stuff she wants to know about. And that’s fine.
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> The Emma Frost porn lady is probably *not* a geek, but does that mean we should close doors in her face?
It depends. If we are having a panel discussion about comparative psionic powers in comics, and the lady keeps saying, “All this stuff is so boring, what matters is that Emma Frost is hot. Let’s talk about my adult site instead !” — then yeah, I’d totally show her the door.
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Right. But that is not what happened. Near as I can tell she was milling about the con-space being HAWT and telling people are her site. Which, fine. Good on her.
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@Jiro, but wouldn’t that be my exact rejoinder to being called out on my Seneca Falls bullshit: that we can’t have a complete absence of boundaries, therefore unless you can tell me exactly where that boundary goes, mine is correct? I think this is better addressed in Scalzi’s piece, though.
And of course affinity communities have this problem. If I say I am a baseball fan, or a Yankees fan, what is the boundary? Must I go to a set number of games, or be able to recite current players’ statistics?
@Bugmaster: but that fictional scenario of yours is about someone who interrupts a particular conversation to talk about themselves and probably to advertise a product – not someone who is a “fake geek”. You’d show Ms. Interruption the door even if she knew every bit of X-Men villain trivia from memory and legally changed her name to Emma Frost the second she turned 18. She’s no different from the dude who interrupts a panel about the physics of kaiju to ask “this is more of a comment than a question” to talk about how hot he thinks Rinko Kinkuchi is and to look at his fan site.
@veronica d: and imagine if Angry Dude had been an actual geek, and tried to share his love of X-Men with her. Then there might have been a new fan.
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>And of course affinity communities have this problem. If I say I am a baseball fan, or a Yankees fan, what is the boundary? Must I go to a set number of games, or be able to recite current players’ statistics?
From what I’ve heard of Yankees fandom, it’s more along the lines of sacrificing a set number of goats.
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“Jiro, but wouldn’t that be my exact rejoinder to being called out on my Seneca Falls bullshit: that we can’t have a complete absence of boundaries, therefore unless you can tell me exactly where that boundary goes, mine is correct?”
If being “called out” means that someone thinks we *can* have a complete absence of boundaries, it is fine to reply that we can’t.
I’ve yet to see anyone here with opinions like yours say “of course there is such a thing as a fake geek, I just don’t think a fake geek means ____”. If you’re not trying to abolish the line, at least admit that we’re only arguing about exactly where to draw it.
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Well, it depends on why you’re calling yourself a fan. ‘Cause I don’t particularly care if you’re just trying to get tickets to a game. But when you use your status as a “baseball fan” to justify your demands that the rules of baseball to be changed to be more like soccer, well, I start to wonder if you’re actually a fan of baseball or if there’s something else going on there.
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@veronica d:
Meh, that’s kind of a borderline case. The way you make it sound, that lady was one step away from being a spammer (or whatever the meatspace equivalent of a spammer is called). No one likes spammers.
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Perhaps be specific about the people you object to.
Here is a Tumblr that shows the dynamic I am talking about: http://ami-angelwings.tumblr.com/post/53175045215/hanars-indieintellectual-concerningmishas.
And since we drifted to sports, here Ami links “fake geek girls” to “fake sports girls”: http://ami-angelwings.tumblr.com/post/58462033395/deathspeaker-ami-angelwings-bapgeek.
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@Bugmaster — I wasn’t at that convention and did not observe the women, but if she was walking around looking pretty and then mentioning her site to people who came over to chat with her, then what is the problem? If she is shoving her stuff in people’s faces, then that is not okay. I don’t think she was doing that, mostly cuz the guy says he only knew what she was doing when he talked to her.
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@veronica d:
Yeah, that’s why I said it’s a “borderline case”; I wasn’t there, I don’t really know what this lady was doing.
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@Jiro: that’s kind of the logical fallacy I was pointing out, you know?
@InferentialDistance: So the definition of a fan correlates with a dislike of change?
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@mythago
Yes. Because “thing” correlates to “thing”, not “not thing”. Presumably a fan of “thing” wants there to be “thing” in the universe, and thus one finds it strange that they advocate for there to be less of “thing” and more of “not thing” in its place. I have no problem said individual also liking “not thing”. Even the desire for more “not thing” is acceptable. But the attempts to deprive people of “thing” in order to get more “not thing” do not come across as being in favor of “thing”, and trying to justify it by claiming to be in favor of “thing” seems disingenuous.
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You’re assuming that there is always a single, definable “thing”, the boundaries of which all honest people can agree on, and that any changes to that “thing” are a zero-sum game that erases the existence of “thing” in its previous form. I mean, even for baseball, the rules can change; does that make it no-longer-baseball?
http://deadspin.com/baseball-will-test-out-six-new-rules-to-speed-up-the-ga-1641283166
But since we’re talking about geek culture, sure, let’s go with examples there. D&D comes out of miniatures gaming. When ‘diceless systems’ became a thing, a lot of people didn’t like that and thought it wasn’t ‘really’ gaming. Were they right? Did only people who had been in regular, dice-using, D&D style games for a set period of time (“old gamers”) have the right to come up with diceless systems? What if we found that there was a lot of demand for diceless systems so that gaming publishers started catering to that market, and printing less D&D modules and supplements? Did the diceless people ruin gaming? Can we call them fake gaming geeks?
Maybe we could look at SFF. There is a lot less Golden Age-style science fiction around these days, and I understand people who adore Heinlein and Asimov miss it. Are they right when they condemned young fans who clamored for New Wave, or cyberpunk? Is it really ruining SFF because female writers are less apt to hide behind pseudonyms or first initials, or because more fans are buying works that feature nontraditional heroes? Are they fake fans who should STFU and stop trying to kill the market for space opera?
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“@Jiro: that’s kind of the logical fallacy I was pointing out, you know?”
That’s not a logical fallacy. Or more accurately, whether it’s a logical fallacy depends on what you mean. If you mean ‘I just won’t draw the line here’, then replying to you by saying that I think there are boundaries and you don’t, would be a fallacy. But if instead you mean “I won’t ever draw any sort of line; anyone who calls themselves a geek is one”, then responding that you don’t think there are boundaries and I do is *entirely on point* and not a fallacy at all.
But it seems to me like you’re trying to get the advantages of both of these by not committing to either one. You won’t admit that there are boundaries to who can be sensibly called a geek. But you won’t admit that there are no boundaries either.
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The boundaries are fluid, and where folks try to draw them tells us more about their preoccupations and less about their subjects. Personally I don’t care where the precise boundary lies, since I have nothing invested in holding people outside of geekdom. Now, if a person calls themselves a geek but has zero interest in anything geeky, I’ll wonder at their motives. Likewise, I’ll wonder what I should do with that information. If I have little in common with them, then I don’t see what we will do together. If they don’t want to see the movies I like or play the games I do, well maybe they like dancing. We can dance together.
I might want to talk about math, however. So they’ll have to deal with that.
(Currently I’m dating a total non-geek and it’s kinda funny to watch us communicate. Fortunately we both like punk rock and queer sex, so we have that.)
Anyway, shitty sexist d00dz who give women grief on their geek cred — well, these guys exist and they kinda suck. Don’t be like that.
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Insofar as “thing” actually refers to something in reality, and is not semantically empty gibberish, it matters. I mean, if everything is baseball, then nothing is baseball. We don’t need more equality, because everything is equal, because we’re all men, and we’re all women, because no one gets to say people aren’t! Aldsb””hlfjbl jekberklop asl;kndlkn,dflkndl welneoneoi.!
But if we’re trying to actually talk about something beyond word games, “thing” is a fuzzy concept which can handle some change but not all changes and still be “thing”. You can take a leg away from a cat, and still have a cat, but if you take away two legs, add two wings, make the bones hollow, radically alter the reproductive method, etc… No, I can’t tell you exactly where the boundary is. But it’s pretty clear that there are things in the set “cat”, and things not in the set “cat”, and if you disagree, well, goodnight.
Do I think diceless gamers aren’t gamers? No. Do I think the opinion of diceless games fans are as important in regards to D&D as dice-based games fans opinions? No. When you bring your opinion to a discussion, you are placing your character into the realm of debate. Your credentials matter then. If they don’t stack up, too bad. Shouldn’t have made an argument that relied on them.
In the same vein, I don’t think young fans who clamored for New Wave ruined SFF. But I’d damn well be pissed if said fans chased off an author who wanted to write a novel like Asimov, and wouldn’t take their criticisms as seriously as someone who does like the Golden Age.
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@mythago:
“that only makes sense if you assume a number of things, such as 1) old geeks have the unilateral right to determine the commitment of new geeks and their status as part of ‘the community’; 2) the primarily interest of the community is to remain static and unchanging, and 3) content creators, who are always separate from the community, have a moral obligation to direct their content to the existing community, and to keep their content static.”
Re 1: The old geeks were there earlier and established the community or were accepted by those who established it. Before the arrival of the newcomers, the community consists of the interactions of the older geeks, and whether the new geeks fit in is determined by whether they follow the community norms, unless they’re so numerous that they can overturn them altogether.
Re 2: The community as it is suits enough of its members to continue existing. Obviously, it needs to attract new members to replace older members who leave, so it could be too exclusionary, but on the whole the people who are in it like it the way it is – otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.
Re 3: I’m not assuming that content creators have a moral obligation to direct their content to the existing community, merely that old and new fans have different preferences, and that old fans lose out when content creators stop optimizing for them, which is a threat when the new fans are numerous. Old fans have an incentive to keep out would-be new fans, as long as there are enough existing fans to keep content creators in business.
Combining the above points, old geeks participate in established communities and run them for their own benefit, establishing norms that they like and becoming a niche for content creators. A large influx of new fans threatens both community norms and the flow of content.
Imagine you’re running a sci-fi book club, and suddenly someone like Oprah promotes a sci-fi novel and a bunch of new people join your club. They don’t like the same kind of sci-fi that the older members of your club like, and many prefer other genres. If you’re too accepting, your sci-fi club will become a branch of Oprah’s Book Club. Presumably, you don’t want that. The same applies here.
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Yes. Of course people are going to react negatively to false signals of thedishness! It’s even in the Sequences!
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“The boundaries are fluid, and where folks try to draw them tells us more about their preoccupations and less about their subjects. … Now, if a person calls themselves a geek but has zero interest in anything geeky…”
In other words, the boundaries are fluid, but they’re not infinitely fluid. Zero is still a boundary. (And even zero is subjective–who’s to say that your idea of which things count as “anything geeky” is correct?)
“Anyway, shitty sexist d00dz who give women grief on their geek cred — well, these guys exist and they kinda suck. Don’t be like that.”
That’s throwing out the baby with the bathwater. “It’s wrong to go after women for not having geek cred” is not the same thing as “there is no such thing as geek cred”.
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The funny thing about this stuff is you seem preoccupied on *controlling discourse*, as in who gets to talk about what. My statements, on the other hand, were more about making friends and finding fun things to do.
I like my way better.
Anyway, nerd discourse patterns can get pretty broken, and the whole “You are not an expert in every bit of trivia like I am so thus you have nothing to say” is a pretty bad argument. It confuses obsession with insight. A person need not have read every book to have something to say about the books they did read.
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You’re losing the concrete for the abstract. In this case a woman is at a public event. She is not invading your house. The fact is, women like her get grief from nerd guys. But more, women who are *not* like her, insofar as they really are fans, get grief from nerd guys, who have a bug up their ass about pretty girls. (And who then complain they can’t find love. Which, I mean, this really happens and it is as sad as it is banal.)
Be nice to her. She might find she really likes the vibe of the event. She might make some contacts, friend a few people on Facebook (or whatever), and next year she might come again, but this time she knows who her character is.
Which, you choose what kind of social space you want. But it’s my space too, and I’m gonna be nice to her and shut down the assholes who mess with her.
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Blockquote was invented to torture us!
Yes, you should care about accurate statements. However, knowledge comes in degrees, and I’ve seen really shitty gatekeeping deployed by people very insecure in their knowledge. Furthermore, I think this happens to women more than to men.
In any case, you won’t escape the fact you have to deal with this stuff socially, and if a group becomes hostile then the culture of that group perhaps needs to be fixed. Which if you are part of a group is something you should care about. But this is not directly related to knowledge levels. Newbs will know less, but they still may have cool insights and you have to let them speak, or you will have no newbs and your culture will die off.
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I think that some level of discourse control is warranted in most situations. For example, if we are hanging out together to play D&D, and you want to make friends and dance and talk about My Little Pony… Then that’s fine, but maybe now’s not the best time. Similarly, if you are running an MLP forum, and I interrupt your hardcore discussion of the exact mechanics of Unicorn magic and how it relates to Zebra alchemy — then maybe my post about the DPS merits of Barbarians vs. Rogues will have to go elsewhere.
There is also a need did “vertical” vs. “horizontal” discussion control. If we are discussing the technical specs of the Y-Wing and how they changed over the ages, and you say “actually I’ve only seen the Phantom Menace, let’s talk about Jar-Jar !’, then you’re just being disruptive.
It’s tough, I know, but being a geek actually does require a lot of expertise sometimes; and since obsession is one defining feature of geekdom, the barrier to entry can be high.
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Again this is social stuff. I often talk about cool topics with people who know quite a bit less than me. So I explain what I know, but I try very hard not to condescend. I certainly don’t use knowledge to gate-keep.
Like, my new best friend is this really cool software engineer, and she’s smart — but not like me, by which I mean she doesn’t know type theory or much about functional programming, so when I explain how “structs” can be modeled as a product over the category of types, and in turn the dual structure (sum types) can then model “union” types, but in a way that is type safe, she really gets lost pretty quickly.
So I call her a stupid fake cunt and mock her until she cries!
Actually wait! I don’t do that. Nor do I suggest she is not a “real” software engineer. Instead, I explain how sums and products work in a category and how they can be represented in a lambda calculus. Then I explain how that can be represented in code.
And I don’t know if she’ll ever love this stuff the way I do. That’s fine. We’re friends and we talk about a lot of stuff, like love and romance, our hopes and dreams.
I actually don’t know shit about a lot of geek stuff. So fine. If I’m curious I’ll ask. If I wanna know more I know where to go. And I expect people to be polite to me.
Even if I’m dressed hot as fuck.
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Re 2: The community as it is suits enough of its members to continue existing. Obviously, it needs to attract new members to replace older members who leave, so it could be too exclusionary, but on the whole the people who are in it like it the way it is – otherwise, they wouldn’t be there.
Wait, this is assuming the old members are the Borg. But in fact, although it’s true that the old members must get something out of the community that makes them continue being members, it doesn’t follow that all those old members will be less able to have their preferences yet if things change.
Maybe I’m part of a comics community that is All About Mainstream Superheroes. But actually, what I love isn’t Mainstream Superheroes – it’s comics. Suddenly, a bunch of newbies come along who want to expand our annual convention to be, not just about 1) superheroes, but also about 2) manga and 3) classic comic strips. In that case, as a certified Old Member of the community, I’m delighted by the changes the new members want and take their side. Now I can have a cool discussion about old comic strips instead of having to sit through yet another discussion of who drew the best Batcave. (Dick Sprang, btw. No contest.)
Often geeks are members of geekdom, not because the local geek community is perfect, but because it’s better than the other available options. Change is going to be against the preferences of some of the old geeks, but it’ll be aligned with the preferences of others.
(Actually, we could say the same thing about the young geeks.)
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@veronica d:
Yeah, it’s really cool that you are willing to spend the time to explain computer science to someone who maybe isn’t as knowledgeable as you. You’re a great person. We need more people like you — no sarcasm, just truth.
But… if we’re having a software design meeting, and there are five of us there, and we all know about lambda calculus already… then maybe it would be best if you took all that teaching offline.
On the other hand, if we are having a “lambda calculus for n00bs” meeting, and I walk in there and start talking about LISP macros… then maybe it would be best if I took that stuff offline.
And if we are all hanging out in an online forum dedicated to Klingon ship design, and you come in asking, “What’s a Klingon ? Are they those lumpy bearded dudes with the big knives ? They aren’t as fun as ponies !”, then… Maybe it would be best if you took that stuff somewhere else.
None of the above means that we hate you, or that we think you’re stupid because you don’t know everything there’s to know about Klingon Lambda Ponies or whatever. It just means that there’s a time and a place for everything, and sometimes, what you want to do is not the same thing as what everyone else wants to do, and that’s ok.
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@Bugmaster — But that has nothing to do with what actually happens. What happens is this: some cool woman decides to cosplay some cool character, and maybe she’s only read a few issues or only knows what her friends talk about, but she loves the costume and how she looks. Then some dudes give her hella grief at a con and start grilling her on this-or-that trivia, and it’s kinda obvious that these guys have issues with women.
(And later they post some anti-woman screed cuz they cannot get laid, which big surprise! Which seems shitty to talk about, but not every lonely geek is a Scott Aaronson type. We should learn to tell them apart.)
Anyway, this really sucks, but then the angry-dudes tangle with someone like Ami Angelwings (or whoever) and she hands them their ass and it gets posted on Tumblr and we all laugh at the sexist douche-bros. Which, turnabout is fair. But it’s all broken and women shouldn’t have to put up with this shit.
She’s not a “fake geek.” She’s an inexperienced geek, so give her time to find what parts of the hobby she likes and what parts she doesn’t. And if she keep interrupting your conversation politely ask her to stop. Easy peasy. Or explain what she doesn’t know, if she wants to learn and if you have the time. Depends on the context. Use your social skills.
And if she’s there at a *public con* to drum up business for her porn site — well be okay with yourself and find stuff you like and stop worrying about the pretty girl who is not hurting you. (Plus maybe check out her site, if you like that sorta thing. I do.)
And I’m talking about *that girl*, not some terrible woman you have invented.
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@veronica d:
> And I’m talking about *that girl*, not some terrible woman you have invented.
Actually, in my previous post I was talking about… you. FWIW, I don’t think you’re terrible.
> …and start grilling her on this-or-that trivia…
If I showed up to a LISP convention in a shirt that said “LISP programmers do it functionally” on the front and a giant Lambda symbol on the back, waving a sign with John McCarthy’s face surrounded by bunch of parentheses on it, then… yeah, I’d totally expect some people to ask me some LISP questions at some point. And if my answer was, “I actually don’t know anything about LISP, I’m just here to sell my new and improved brand of coffee, it’s called Prefix Notation but I don’t know why”… then yeah, I’d probably expect some people to be upset, or at least confused.
Would I deserve public shaming and invective because of this ? No, of course not. Should I be kicked out of the convention ? No, of course not. Should I be upset because strangers kept asking me questions about tail recursion, or because I wasn’t unilaterally welcomed with open arms ? Again, no, of course not.
I want to sell my hot, hot coffee; but this is a place for LISP people to discuss LISP. Other people don’t want the same things I want. And that’s ok.
> And if she keep interrupting your conversation politely ask her to stop.
Yeah that’s pretty much what I said; except that a). generally we expect adults to know when it is and isn’t ok to interrupt conversations without being told (“use your social skills”, amirite ?), and b). I wish it were always possible for a man to politely ask a woman to stop interrupting, without immediately being called an “oppressive sexist”, but alas — this is not the world we live in.
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I dunno, it seem pretty different to dress up in a costume you think is HAWT and go to an open convention and lounge around and chat, compared with showing of a proggie convention wearing specific programming mantras. I mean, I don’t think the analogy quite carries. And we can kinda hope the cosplay woman might get interested in the scene, which she might do if she is welcomed but surely won’t if she gets endless grief.
Which outcome do you think the gatekeepers are seeking? Why?
Plus plenty of women who do know what-is-what get *treated like the clueless woman*, which is the problem here.
######
Oh and Common LISP is pretty fucking not-functional, says I. (As I drift into my own nerd rage!)
(Which I say as an actually real life professional Common LISP programmer who writes LISP as the main aspect of her day job.)
Anyway, Scheme is kinda-sorta functional, if you insist, but I’m a total Haskell snob at heart.
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> I dunno, it seem pretty different to dress up in a costume you think is HAWT and go to an open convention and lounge around and chat, compared with showing of a proggie convention wearing specific programming mantras.
I think there’s a difference between a costume that is merely hot; and a costume that, while hot, references a specific comic book character, which is being worn to a comic book convention.
It’s the same as the difference between a T-shirt with a bunch of zeroes and ones on it arranged in a hypnotic pattern; and a T-shirt with, say, Duff’s Device printed on it.
The first T-shirt proclaims, “I like numbers in hypnotic patterns”. The second T-shirt proclaims, “I know C”. A person who does not know C wouldn’t be able to tell the difference; but a person who does, would; and it would be reasonable of us to expect that person to wish to discuss C with the T-shirt wearer.
> Which outcome do you think the gatekeepers are seeking? Why?
I don’t think I understand the “gatekeeper” narrative well enough to answer this question.
If people keep pestering you with C questions, and you find yourself having to reply, again and again, “actually I don’t know C”; then maybe now’s the time to take off the T-shirt that effectively says “I know C, ask me how”. Alternatively, you could learn some C. You can’t really blame people for acting rationally.
> Plus plenty of women who do know what-is-what get *treated like the clueless woman*, which is the problem here.
I think this happens due to a combination of some lingering prejudice (i.e. a skewed prior), as well as the prevalence of women who wear costumes saying, effectively, “I know comics, ask me how” while not knowing anything about comics (or anime or Star Trek or whatever). Eventually, people tend to update their beliefs.
> Oh and Common LISP is pretty fucking not-functional, says I.
Yeah, you’re right. Sorry, I didn’t mean to trigger you
I personally have never used Haskell, but IMO Scheme does achieve a good balance between pure functional programming and usability.
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I find the way you use ‘neurotypical’ to be odd, Ozy. Most people seem to only be referring to people not on the autistic spectrum when they use the word, yet you have adopted it to mean anybody with a mental illness? Or anybody with a mental illness that hinders socializing? I have rather bad social anxiety, but I never considered myself non-neurotypical.
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I like the linked argument a fair amount, but I think that the author underestimates the importance of self-identification with a group for human beings. I feel like he would benefit from practicing The Believing Game on some of the neoreactionary and evopsychological arguments about the importance of community.
http://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1004&context=eng_faculty_pubs
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@blacktrance: “If you’re too accepting, your sci-fi club will become a branch of Oprah’s Book Club.”
So now we’re talking about a subgroup of people within “geekdom”, rather than “geekdom” as a whole – that is, people who belong to a particular book club. But that aside, I don’t know what “too accepting” means, but it’s more likely that some combination of things will happen other than the heat-death implosion of the book club:
– Some old members of the club will also like the new book.
– Some new members of the club will learn about and enjoy other SFF which, prior to Oprah, they hadn’t heard of or didn’t realize they’d enjoy.
– New members who only joined because they liked the one book Oprah promoted but don’t like any other SFF will drift away after a while.
– SFF hipsters who are mad that Oprah publicized an SFF book will drift away and start their own, more exclusive book club.
Here’s what happens if the SFF club is devoted to preserving only the Ancient Ways of a select group of old fans who like a select type of fiction:
– The club becomes a small clique of friends who mainly bond over a shared interest in SFF.
– The club peters out and dissolves as people move away, get busy with jobs and family, or lose interest, while newer members don’t join.
The idea that the community always has the interests of its oldest members and hates change assumes that 1) change is bad and 2) people always hate change.
@InferentialDifference: To circle back to what Ozy is saying, the problem is that the “credentials” at issue here are not, do you appear to know what the fuck you’re talking about, or even do you agree with my version of The One True Way; it’s the presumption that women, or attractive women, or women dressed a particular way, should be presumed to be lacking in credentials because of an imaginary influx of Fake Geek Girls.
Also, why would you be “damn pissed” if a Golden Age-style author decided to retire because the market for his work wasn’t there anymore? Seriously? I mean, if that person quit writing because of death threats, that’s one thing (and reprehensible), but the complaint that they don’t make my favorite type of movie/book/game anymore – I’m kind of sad that there isn’t a sequel to Grim Fandango and that text adventures have gone out of style, but I’m not “damn pissed” that the new kids are clamoring for FPS.
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“it’s the presumption that women, or attractive women, or women dressed a particular way, should be presumed to be lacking in credentials because of an imaginary influx of Fake Geek Girls.”
That’s what I mean by refusing to commit to either side.
If all you really object to is assuming that someone is a fake geek because of gender or attractiveness, then you should be able to admit “there is such a thing as a fake geek. It’s just that being female doesn’t make you one”. But you refuse to admit that.
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“So now we’re talking about a subgroup of people within ‘geekdom’, rather than ‘geekdom’ as a whole – that is, people who belong to a particular book club.”
Geekdom as a whole is the same phenomenon but on a larger scale. Instead of a book, some element of geekdom becomes popular, casuals invade, etc.
In the case of the book club, if enough new people join, they can hijack it and run it according to their own interests, rather than that of the old members. They’ve condensed around the nucleus of the existing book club, so they may not disperse (and if they do disperse, the club should consider itself lucky). As for older members forming a more exclusive book club, that wouldn’t be necessary if the original book club had been exclusive in the first place. And what, besides gatekeeping, is supposed to prevent this from happening to the second club?
“The idea that the community always has the interests of its oldest members and hates change assumes that 1) change is bad and 2) people always hate change.”
If the oldest members wanted the club to be different, it would’ve been different already – no need for new members for that to happen.
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Yes, but when defending the credentialed, you should be using the credentials, not playing semantic trickery that obliterates all meaning. People who assume that women cannot be credentialed are wrong, and assholes to boot. Not everyone who claims to be a geek is in fact a geek.
That’s not what I said. I said “chased off”; think closer to “Golden Age novels are evil, and you’re a horrible human being for writing them”. Oh, and then calling anyone who attempts to defend the author a horrible human being too. While claiming to be a fan of Golden Age novels.
I may lament that the market doesn’t produce enough media to my tastes, but that’s a separate issue. What we’re talking about are conscious efforts to change what the market produces via the application of social power. Misrepresenting the the demographic of Golden Age SF fans is not a normal market force. It is deception, designed to undermine the preferences of Golden Age SF fans in favor of the deceiver. Golden Age SF fans have every right to be outraged at this, and to exclude these people from their communities. They don’t owe you any allegiance merely because you claim their label.
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Uh, has this actually happened?
Note that there’s a difference between saying “Hey, this cool story also has a few flaws” and “All these stories are EVIL, and all the authors and fans are horrible human beings”. Unfortunately, I have often seen people accused of the latter when they had clearly stated the former.
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I agree sometimes people are accused of it when they aren’t actually doing this, but think you’re rude to suggest it never actually happens. I’ve noticed it happen before, and would be surprised if you haven’t ever witnessed it happen. Questioning people’s personal experiences like you just did is pretty rude. Are you claiming InferentialDistance is a liar, or merely stupid?
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Feminist critics of games do a TERRIBLE job of differentiating between
1. Aspects of this are sexist
2. If you like this you are sexist
3. This isn’t sexist but it could be more welcoming to women
4. This isn’t sexist but the overwhelming amount if this in the market creates an environment that is unwelcoming to women
I think the reason they don’t differentiate is because they don’t consider 3 or 4 to be different from 1, and bleeding 1 into 2 feels sooo satisfying. Which kinda makes them awful.
For reference, see any and all criticism of games (or books, or movies) that relies on trope counting, and/or claiming that something seemingly innocuous is part of a “larger cultural narrative.”
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27chaos- cut it out. Declaring asserted personal experience sacrosanct is one of social justices dumbest maneuvers. Don’t copy it.
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Yeah, to gamers and nerds. Like, every fucking day. Also actual calls for violence, and not from random anons, egg avatars or 0-day-old accounts. “Bring back bullying”.
“It’s a joke” is certainly not going to cut it, because it is the excuse used by the bullies when they get caught being a little too public in their abuse.
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I think we’ve reach the point where we need to see actual quotes.
Myself, I’ve seen a variety of stances from feminists and SJ advocates. And yes, some take a pretty hard line, but many others are eager to separate the sexism present in a work from the moral caliber of those who enjoy them. Many geek feminists themselves enjoy “problematic” material, but find it useful to criticize its failures.
On the other hand, I’ve seen people insist you are terrible person if you watch Enders Game. So yeah, all parts of this discourse are out there if you look for them.
That said, I don’t see how this supports your point:
Certainly we can criticize larger cultural narratives while at the same time distinguishing points #1-4. In fact, doing so seems obvious to me. I think such tropes as the “damsel in distress” or the “smurfette” thing are problems only insofar as they are (nearly) ubiquitous. If only one media property had a group where “the girl” was a well-defined team role, then who would care? But when many properties do this, well we can notice this and talk about it.
And should we not *count*? How else do we show this is real?
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@ 27chaos
It was unclear to me whether this was a personal experience or a hypothetical — that’s why I asked. Of course it would be ridiculous to question InferentialDistance’s personal experience. If I thought they were a liar, why would I bother talking to them?
@ Patrick & thirqual
My question was specifically about classic sci-fi, because it’s a huge part of my childhood.
But if you fellas wanna talk about games, let’s talk about games.
Here are some quotes from the Feminist Frequency video transcripts and project description:
…well, you get the idea.
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“Bring back bullying”
“Nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission”
“Max told me I’m getting a raise because I made gamers cry”
Max Biddle.
I’ll stop their because I start researching, so you message about bigots, not naming names (I sure hope moebius stays far from the comments on this article) and “I see you”. You are not asking in good faith.
Oh, I also remember you mention that you follow(ed ?) shanley. You had all the evidence you wished in your twitter feed.
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Actually I stopped reading Biddle after that.
I still follow Shanley, in the sense I see her feed, but I have many problems with her and she is not my favorite person.
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Although, now that you mention it, has Shanley every said “bring back bullying” or anything like that. I don’t like her tactics, but has she actually *said that*. I think it matters.
[citation needed]
Anyway, the point is, I’m going through her recent Tweets and she is blunt and a bit paranoid and very confrontational. I think her approach is very unhelpful. But that said, I don’t see her saying “bully shy awkward nerds.” Has she said that?
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So you know the behaviors exist but feel the need to say publicly that you want proof?
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@ thirqual
Wait a second, I thought we were talking about cultural criticism (by self-proclaimed fans, in fact).
These people seem to be saying: “we should hurt nerds/gamers because they are abusive assholes who send threats to people”. Sure, that’s both dumb and mean, but it doesn’t fit the template we’re discussing, i.e., “nerds/gamers are horrible people because they like book X / play game Y”.
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I’m honestly not sure if she advocates the abuse of shy, nerdy men. I don’t think I’ve seen her say that — which, I don’t monitor Twitter 24/7. But let us criticize people for their actual flaws, not the flaws you imagine they have.
I found this in her feed. Here is a man giving a rather typical criticism. (Trust me, this stuff is constant and normal):
https://twitter.com/wrencontrol/status/563003099694919680
(BTW, how do you do the “embed the Tweet here in the forum” thing?)
Here is her lovely response:
I mean, it’s all a total mess right? But it ain’t like she is uniformly bad in the face of a tribe who is uniformly good. Whoever “Mr. Nobody” is, he is obviously a terrible person who probably deserves a Shanley or three in his life.
That said, she certainly is not who I want to be. I would not handle things as she does. I hope I would go more the Sarkeesian route. Actually, I would hope to go the Serano route, or maybe the Katherine Cross route. Those are the women I admire.
There are some great feminists out there saying things you should listen to. Or you could focus on Shanley. Your choice.
(There is a reason I spend my time on SCC and ToT and stuff, and focus much less on the -chan trolls and the GG idiots and the dopey NRx stuff. Which, I *notice* them, but they are not my model of nerdy men. Elevate.)
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(I guess the embedding happens automagically when you link. Nice!)
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(Which, my comment about embedding is about a comment still in moderation, in case that makes no sense at all.)
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That specific example? No. That magnitude of nonsense? Not outside of twitter/tumblr/Jezebel/Gawker/etc.. as far as I know. Are those sentiments implied in the some of the language used in these discussions, and further backed by the behaviors some people exhibit around them? Yes.
I see some issues casually dismissed with the assertion that no one actually cares about them, they’re just a smoke screen so that people can harass women. I have seen works of media accused of being hateful, and all alternative explanations refuted by claiming that the only reason the author would care about those things was because the author was hateful. But they’re totally a fan of the author!
I don’t like the assertion that I have nothing to worry about, because it looks patently untrue. It’s not the central tenets of social justice, but it happens.
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Veronica D- you CAN discuss trope overuse without vilifying the trope itself, or attacking specific works for containing the trope. It’s not literally impossible. Non feminist do it all the time! Feminists, though, have a pre existing narrative in which the tropes themselves are the problematic thing, rather than their overuse. Nita mentioned feminist frequency, which of course would be Exhibit A.
Nita- disclaimers mean nothing. Kotaku in Action won’t shut up about how terrible harassment is and how much they’re against it- they still harass people all the damn time. It’s almost as if their need to disclaim it is connected to a need to preempt well deserved criticism of their actual behavior.
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I agree, and this stuff is worth talking about. However, it is *not* an argument against social justice in general. It is an argument against a certain subculture with certain discourse patterns, which are pretty uniformly rejected here (as they should be). So yes, you get to talk about this stuff. But it does nothing to lessen the way women are treated, how their opinions are considered “less than,” suspect, in ways that the opinions of men are not. Nor does it mean that video games are *not* hella sexist, nor that we should not work together to improve these things.
For example, a person might say, “You know, I think Sarkeesian got some things wrong, and she totally dropped the ball with {game}, and I don’t like how she took people’s screen shots. The ‘fair use’ argument doesn’t hold up [1]. On the other hand, I think she’s totally right about the smurfette thing. We should stop doing that. And I’d love more games with queer themes, or that handle violence against women in a thoughtful way. Like, I’ll still play GTA to blow off steam, just like I’ll watch the occasional crappy Summer Action movie. Brain candy is fine. But I want the art form to grow and these tropes are shallow and sexist. I can have brain candy on one day but something excellent the next.”
That would be a thoughtful response. But how rare is that? How did the discourse actually play out? Furthermore, do you really think broken discourse is Sarkeesian’s fault?
OMG no! The -chan troll and the angry nerd-bro set proved to be a shitstorm of terrible.
You get to call out the bad SJ people. But if you use that to reject the better SJ arguments then you are being intellectually vapid.
[1] Personally I suspect he fair use argument does hold up. But reasonable people can disagree.
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The broken discourse is definitely not Sarkeesian’s fault.
Her perspective is still ignorant. A healthy discourse would involve people ignoring her, or politely explaining that tropes don’t work the way she thinks they do, and yes, her opinions have extremely false, hostile, and insulting implications. I don’t want to talk about her specific failures, I want to talk about systemic ones shared by her and others.
The case for gaming culture being sexist is easy to make, and treatment of Sarkeesian’s demonstrates it very quickly. The case that games, themselves, are sexist is a much, much tougher one, and to the extent it is even possible, requires nuance she is incapable or unwilling of displaying.
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@Patrick, I’m not sure that it works to draw a parallel between Sarkeesian and KiA. Sarkeesian is doing a series about sexism and tropes. She shouldn’t even need to disclaim that ‘sexism and tropes are not the only things in games’; that’s obvious. We wouldn’t criticise an essay on cyberpunk tropes in games for failing to address high fantasy tropes in games.
It’s not hypocritical to acknowledge that there’s a bigger picture but to focus on one small part of it. It is hypocritical to say that harrassment is wrong and then go out and harrass.
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has this actually happened?
Can’t name a specific example, but I recall some handwringing around the Hugos that someone like Ray Bradbury wouldn’t be able to have a career today because of aspects of his stories being sexist. In effect, that the social norms are enforced so strictly that we would have been deprived of an author that is considered significant. I tend to agree while I understand the complaints against older work that contains sexism and racism, wouldn’t be acceptable being created today.
There is also increasing backlash against HP Lovecraft because of his racism (even by the standards of his time), where in the past his work was held in respect and now is being rejected as something acceptable to like, take his bust off the award with his name because it makes people uncomfortable, etc. I think these are really bad developments. They are not yet pervasive but they just keep increasing over time and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to worry.
In every case I understand and agree with the complaint, but feel that rigidly enforcing these kinds of standards has a chilling effect on creativity. Imitating golden age won’t bring back the omnipresent patriarchy of the golden age, it won’t even really reinforce remnants of patriarchy in the present because it is niche. HP Lovecraft is not alive and cannot materially oppress anyone, and ultimately having that guy on an award can’t do much more than sometimes remind a person that he was a jerk a hundred years ago.
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The question is to what degree do tropes (1) cause sexism versus (2) reflect existing sexism? I think they do both to some degree. Sarkeesian talks much about #1. But in either case, I think #2 is plainly true and that alone is enough to talk about the tropes. So even if you reject #1, you still have good reason to watch her videos and think about the tropes themselves.
And in any event, you can look at the tropes according to pure aesthetics. On the whole they are pretty lazy and many women, including me, want to see them done better. So her videos also stand as culture criticism.
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1 is minimal, 2 is slightly less minimal but still minimal. That’s why the defenses of 2 tend to resemble a Glenn Beck style chalkboard diagram of disparate concepts and nouns, with lines connecting them, while someone leans into the camera and expounds with wide eyes on how “it’s all connected, man! And that’s how damsel in distress plot lines lead to rape and wage gaps!”
The better argument is something like
(3) some tropes are part and parcel of the way media is marketed to target audiences. Over all, games tend to be designed for and marketed to young men. This doesn’t just mean failing to cater to women. Marketing and design targeting one audience can alienate another. This happens to women in the gaming world, both in terms of specific games, and the overall tenor of the hobby. I believe the pendulum has gone too far in that direction, and needs pushed back.
But phrasing the issue like that gives up on vilifying the tropes themselves, gives up on vilifying those who enjoy them, gives up in vilifying games that contain them, admits that this really is a dispute between two groups with skin in the game, and essentially constitutes disarmament. So it won’t- can’t- happen.
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Well, I flatly disagree. I think male fantasies reflect a pretty stilted view of women, and this does not make the men terrible, but neither is it realistic nor admirable. And as they grow up we expect men to realize that real life ain’t like their stories. But this seems like a long path for a lot of guys and I don’t do emotional labor. Nor do I want anyone’s fucking pedestal.
And yes! I definitely encounter this stuff — many women do — and it is terribly off-putting.
So anyway, when I see a string of sadsack nerd boys writing, directing, and then consuming en masse the manic pixie dreamgirl thing, I get to say, “Hey guys, you know she ain’t real and you won’t find her and you think that’s the girl you want you’re setting yourself up to fail.”
And yeah, dudes do this.
Plus can you sorta understand why women hate this shit? I would FUCKING LOVE to be Ramona Flowers, but I don’t think I’d settle for Scott Pilgrim. Sorry. I mean he’s cool enough, but Ramona is cooler and everyone knows it. I’d travel on. Where are stories for me, where it’s my adventure and I ain’t settling for obvious nerd-guy author-insertion?
And Scott Pilgrim is one of the *better* dudes in this trope. At least he can play base and kick ass. The kinda cool. The average MPDG guy is a fucking non-entity.
Dudes, do better!
(On the other hand, I’m no Ramona Flowers either, despite my desperate attempt to mimic her hairstyles. So there is that.)
So yeah, we talk about the tropes, what we think they say about men, what they mean to us, what we would like to see, on and on.
Which does not mean you should not enjoy Scott Pilgrim. I did. It’s a fun flick. But it has flaws.
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Your making the mistake of assuming that fantasies 1) should be realistic, 2) should be whatever you mean by “admirable,” and 3) are something men have a hard time separating from reality. The strangest thing is how you can take the position you’ve just outlined, complete with the “sad sack” comment, and not understand why people perceive your position as one of naked hostility.
Where are your self insertion stories? Your Mary Sues? If you can read my comment again, you’ll find that this is the one area we agree upon. You deserve these too, and the fact that men get them and you don’t does in fact demonstrate one if the ways the game industry is unwelcoming to women.
The difference between our positions is that some day, when you DO get shallow escapist fantasy just for you, I will have the grace and courtesy not to belittle you for enjoying it while simultaneously claiming that I’m doing no such thing.
…other men WILL attack you for liking them, of course, because social justice has no monopoly on jerkdom. See, eg, male reactions to Twilight, 50 Shades, Hunger Games, etc, etc.
I’m taking this exchange as confirmation of my point above.
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Slightly OT, but did you think that Brian Lee O’Malley handled this issue somewhat better in the comics? I felt like the last volume or so did a pretty good job of showing that Ramona is a person who’s sometimes pretty goofy and lazy in ways that aren’t so different from Scott, and having Scott become less self-involved and more compassionate. The end result seemed much more like a relationship between two flawed people who saw each other as equals than about Scott’s successful winning of his dream goddess.
(I actually love the Scott Pilgrim film and think that it’s wonderfully cinematically inventive and engaging, but I felt that the adaptation lost something really important there.)
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@Henry Gorman — I haven’t read the comics, but yeah I basically liked the film. I really liked that they *did not explain* how superpowers existed in the world, nor why they were kinda visible but not noticed. It was just, don’t take this seriously just ride. Which was pretty cool.
The film was still drenched in MPDG stuff.
@Patrick — I’m not going to go rewatch all of Sarkeesian again, but I’m pretty sure that she makes the point that tropes are fine in isolation, but it is their ubiquity that makes them a problem. It is not that men like damsels or dreamgirls, nor that they think a super-team needs “The Girl,” it is that they so seldom get past this stuff. It happens again and again and it’s boring.
So yeah, it’s obviously tweaking something in your lizard brains. We get that. But what? Why? Whatever is going on, it ain’t above critique.
And to say men always separate their media tropes from real life, I give you the madonna/whore complex. Trust me, it shows up in real life plenty. And maybe the MPDG is less problematic, but this guy existed.
(For the record I don’t like all the transparent geek-shaming that the guy faced. The conversation surrounding that episode was fucked on many levels, which you can see plainly in how Kotaku presented that episode. Plus, THE COMMENTS OMG! On the other hand, if I were that woman, after his “You didn’t delete your FB account so this is okay” comment — OMG I would have given him an earful.)
I mean, he *literally says she is Ramona Flowers*. It’s a pretty clear case.
Which, I have more pity for that guy than contempt, but he probably needed a truth-bomb.
Anyway, yeah, we’re gonna look at the media that is popular. We’re gonna see the patterns. We’re gonna talk about how those patterns reflect the consumers and creators, how they effect us, what we want to see. Get used to it.
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I’m familiar with that somewhat, and from what I’ve seen a lot of the people who are in favor of taking his bust off the award DO hold his work in respect. I know that the person who does the HP Lovecraft page I’m subscribed to on FaceBook has shared articles about the possible bust removal–I’m not sure if they directly expressed an opinion, but my impression was that they had no problem with it.
FWIW, *I* like Lovecraft, but I don’t think he’s a good choice for the award image. (People have also pointed out that this is a fantasy award, and Lovecraft is not considered by most people to even be a fantasy writer.)
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Veronica D- I completely and totally agree that Sarkeesian says that. Then she turns around and says things that make no sense if she believes it. She treats the damsel as one that debases women, she treats it as one that is inappropriate in a game in 2015, I could go on. None of these things make ANY sense if the only thing you object to about the damsel trope is its ubiquity.
Substance over tissue paper thin disclaimers.
You do the same thing in both of your two latest posts. Your position, as summarized in both of your latest posts, goes well beyond the idea that mere ubiquity is the problem with the tropes of male aimed entertainment.
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>t’s interesting to note that, while geeks tend to be less good at their genders, they aren’t particularly feminine either– it’s relatively rare that someone says “geeks are all fags/dykes,” outside of 4Chan, which uses ‘fag’ as punctuation.
There is one stereotype, but it’s mostly in-group: transwoman, engineer, Japanese culture enthusiast. If you mention this combination on 4chan’s /lgbt/ their reaction boils down to “no shit”.
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“Joy is enough of a justification.”
At some level I disagree. The fact that you enjoy doing something is some justification for doing it. But I think most people feel as though one ought to accomplish things in life and thus a life that accomplishes nothing has something wrong with it, especially the life of someone with the ability to accomplish things.
Making what does or doesn’t count as accomplishing things specific is hard, but it may help to consider the opposite—Robert Nozick’s experience machine.
Suppose someone has a VR device so good that, once attached, you will have an entirely convincing illusion of a fictitious life. Further suppose that the person who has it somehow knows what sort of life you are going to live and can believably guarantee that what you experience will be a mild improvement. You will make a little more money, get a little more status, have (illusory) children who are a little better behaved, a wife a little more affectionate. Once in the machine you will no longer realize it is fictional.
Do you attach? My strong reaction, even assuming the claim is true, is no. I don’t want just the illusion of doing things, I want the reality.
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I think one version of “what *those people* do” is–emphasis on *performing* gender–“I’m not gonna be all fake and do stuff to be popular like those *other people*!” Part of me also likes to think* that a lot of stuff that disproportionately attracts one gender… well, there has to be a problem with the ratio of quality vs. fanservice/appealing to the lowest common denominator, because if there weren’t a problem, then more people outside its target audience would like it, right? (My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and The Devil Wears Prada could be viewed as evidence in favor of this. OTOH, a lot of my male coworkers seem to be reading/have read 50 Shades of Grey…)
*I’m using this phrasing because I’m not sure if it’s more “self-flattering thing that’s tempting to believe” than “actually true”.
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As far as I’m concerned, anti-geek sentiment is just a thinly disguised form of ableism, and the “geek” and “nerd” words are themselves ableist in their root
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