The recent thread on nerd behavior brought up the claim that nerds are all weaklings. I disagree. I have never seen any evidence to back up such a belief. In all my observations of and participation in nerd communities, they see like a perfectly fit bunch, with average physical strength no different from the general population.
As I see it, the nerd weakling association exists only in the media. Furthermore, it didn’t always exist there. When you watch TV shows or movies from the fifties you can find plenty of nerds among the characters. While they were hardly buff, they were usually fit and decently good looking. It was only in the eighties that TV started offering us characters such as Screech and Urkel under the assumption that nerds must also be pathetically thin and awkward. I won’t go into why this happened; I have theories, but that’s a whole other thread. Suffice to say that for some people television is reality, so they accepted the new picture of nerds without question.
But are nerds really weaklings, wimps, out of shape? Off hand there’s no reason why refusal to be cool should strongly correlate with a lack of physical fitness. Indeed, those who feel insecure about their bodies would seem most likely to deal with that insecurity by carefully conforming to trends started by Hollywood or Madison Avenue. Thus nerds would actually be less likely to be weaklings. Besides that, however, I can think of four specific reasons why one would expect nerds to be more athletic than cool people.
First, the primary social activity among the cool is drinking massive amounts of alcohol. This is unhealthy. Thus, those who aren’t cool don’t suffer the ill effects of binge drinking.
Second, nerds are smarter than cool people. Thus they are more likely to know what constitutes proper diet and exercise. Admittedly not every nerd will put this knowledge into practice, but some will. On average the nerd community gets a leg up on the cool community in terms of fitness.
The erstwhile Calvin once remarked that “You don’t move when you’re cool. You just sort of hang out.” As with any good joke, this one carries a grain of truth. Whether at school, at the mall or some other after-school haunt, or at a party, cool people must prove their coolness by hanging out for long periods. They stand, sit, or slouch while endlessly repeating the phrases and body motions that prove their coolness. Nerds have no such obligations, and thus have more time for sports.
Lastly we have the attitudes of nerds versus the attitudes of the cool. Coolness is, and to some extent always has been, nonchalance. Cool people are not easily phased or affected by anything. In modern times this seems to be shifting from a general guideline to a dogma. To be cool, at least in the high school age group, you must refrain from caring about anything. Cool people don’t care deeply about art, or academics, or religion, or politics, or philosophy, or anything else. They don’t even care deeply about living and planning their lives. Thus, devoting a lot of care and effort towards staying in shape would violate the coolness doctrine. Nerds, again, have no such constraints, and thus may give fitness as much attention as they feel it warrants. Again for some nerds that won’t be very much, but for others it will.
My ninth grade computer science teacher one tried to prove this point. He asked the advanced CS class how many of played on one of the school’s team sports. About two thirds did. He then pointed out that among the entire school, the percentage of students who were athletes was certainly much lower. And he was right.
