You don’t know many nerds, do you?
And if we want to get into evolutionary psych: While it’s much debated just how much of intelligence is attributable to nature and how much to nurture, it’s at least more skewed towards nurture than, say, physical strength is. So if a woman has a choice of a smart weak man or a strong dumb man, her best bet is to mate with the strong man, and then try to get the smart man to raise the kids.
I probably know more nerds than you know women.
But if you wish to suggest they are the sage Adonises of our society, such is your deluded prerogative.
I don’t think I would make a very convincing woman.
This made me laugh.
I guess you know the wrong kind of girls then
So woman here. And for the record I collected comics (I had a badly damaged Silver Surfer #1 and at a string of low digit Fantastic Fours–anyway, sold all that stuff years ago).
I’ll take a stab at why some geeks don’t get women.
Many are stuck at the emotional age of 14. No offense, but stop all the obsessive shit about collecting and gaming and sitting at your computer and coding til dawn. And if you’re another kind of geek, women don’t like a guys either who spends the entire weekend with his car/cycle/fitness/lifting/shooting. Being obsessive may win you petty awards, but in the long run it’s not going to get you a woman who’s a keeper.
You want a date? Go out and volunteer, or go to church, or take up an outdoor hobby but not something you obsess about. Meet people. Don’t be desperate, if you’re desperate, women will stiff arm you. It will take a year for you to change yourself in order to meet someone. If you stay absorbed with stuff that is teenage boy stuff, it’s unlikely that you’ll meet one of the rare women who are interested in it too. You have to broaden your horizon of interests. Like to code? Volunteer to help your church or a club out. What to do good deeds? Volunteer w/ the red cross. Like to help kids? Work with a group teaching kids to code. Want to read comics all day? Get involved in reading workshops for kids and adults. Want to do steampunk? Actually there’s probably a cosplay group nearby, or even LARPing.
And BTW, if you only want to go after the pretty girls that all the other guys are fighting over, you need to be more realistic. True beauty is on the inside. Look for a woman who will help you when you need help, who can make your laugh, who you can share interests with.
If you find yourself in the company of a woman who you like to be with and talk to but you thing “Oh, she’s not good enough for me,” you will live and die…alone. (Unless of course someone manages to invent sex-bots, then you’ll die alone too, but plugged into a piece of machinery)
Then, whence comes the “chicks dig bastards/bad boys” meme?
They have been known to hang out with their wang out, though.
Is it a given that the question is not “How come guys that cannot get the girls become geeks”?
No, it is not a given; the roots of geekdom are entirely different from sexual frustration.
See post #27.
and can you translate this into something meaningful? 'cos all I see is worthless babble.
Geeky things women do tend not to be seen as geeky. For example, Orwell is very wrong when he says that, “… women, apparently, fail to see the peculiar charm of gumming bits of coloured paper into albums.” If he were correct, “scrap-booking” would never have been a thing. Scrap-booking is, in my opinion, clearly a geeky activity.
And that’s not the only geeky thing that tends to be practiced more by women than men. I don’t know what the ratio of female to male owners of collections of “Precious Moments” porcelain dolls are, but it’s probably very high. I’ve met grown women who collect Cabbage Patch dolls, nutcrackers (the soldier-y Christmas kind), and those trolls with the hair. This is not fundamentally different from grown men collecting Star Wars action figures. But only one of them is regarded as geeky.
Women play video games at about the same rate as men.
Even games like “Magic: The Gathering” are nowhere near as lopsidedly male as people pretend. The game has about a 40% female playerbase. While that’s still a solid male majority, it’s nowhere near the 80/20 or 90/10 split that many people would assume based on stereotypes. Viewership numbers for “Game of Thrones” are similarly close to 60/40, as are the demographics of people who went to see “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “The Avengers” in theaters.
Basically, what I’m saying is that geekdom does get the girls. As a culture we’re both less likely to notice it (especially if it’s in an area where there is a male majority, despite it not being a vast majority) and less likely to label it “geeky” even when it’s virtually indistinguishable from activities that are universally declared to be geeky.
Have you ever been to a sci-fi/gaming convention? The split is roughly 50-50 now. Anime conventions are probably majority female at this point.
You’re working from incorrect information. Geek guys get geek girls and they make geek babies. In 15 years, those kids are going to live in a world where “geeky hobbies” are just “hobbies.”
I think this accurately describes why geekdom tends to be male dominated. IMHO it’s not the specific activity that makes men more likely to be geeks. Whether it’s playing video games, being into manga or comic books, watching sports, or the stamp collecting mentioned in the Orwell quote above, I think the common denominator is the obsessive type behavior by the geeks involved in these activities. For some reason it seems men are more prone to spend excessive amounts of time on geeky activities. I think what’s actually happening is that non-geeks will call an non productive activity taken to the extremes as geeky, and that men are more likely to take such activities to the extreme. I think this applies to other activities that are considered non geeky as well. As examples, think of the guy who spends all day restoring that old 60’s Mustang, or the guy who practices archery all day so he can go bow hunting in Africa (I know a guy like this personally), or the guy who spends all day fishing. I think the only reason these activities are not considered geeky is because they are not considered a waste of time.
The fundamental difference, I think, is not the nature of the specific activity. Some men are likely to spend a lot of time on one particular interest. Women are not as likely to become obsessive over one particular activity.
I remember when I was 14 and started playing in a D&D group with several boys. My character seemed to get raped and fondled on every possible occasion. The DM would offer narratives such as “and then you wander into the mage’s secret cave and [roll] a magic spell makes all your clothes fall off…”
They didn’t make me feel very welcome and I stopped playing after a couple of games. Some geek boys grow out of this creepy stage and end up pretty cool, but some of them seem to stay emotionally frozen at 14 forever. Funny enough, a female friend of mine who grew up in another state reported a similar experience as a teenager, where her character’s clothes seemed to fall off by magic at every game as well.
Fortunately, not always true. I met Pepper Mill and her sister at a WorldCon. There are plenty of women at Arisia and Boskone and other such places. But, I’ll admit, not as many as guys.
There are plenty of geek girls at geek events. It used to be we expected them to have brown hair and eyeglasses. Now they dye their hair all different colors. No, few of them are television commercial standard beauty but then again, neither are the guy geeks. The young mean will do fine if they preferred Velma over Daphne in their daydreams.
(My younger daughter met her current boyfriend a little over a year ago because they both were cosplaying character from the same webcomic. I will be damned if I know which one or what characters because that does not intersect with my interests. They have been doing couples cosplays for the last few cons and are currently making a gold suit to do Moist von Lipwig and Adore Belle Dearheart for their next event.)
I think it’s partly a self-reinforcing loop.
Males who do more conventional things are a group that include the popular socializing males with experience interacting with people (including females), this being part of what defines the activity as “conventional” in the first place. Males who do more unconventional things are less likely to be engaged in activities that include the popular socializing males; they don’t see social interaction modeled for them (including specifically social interaction with females).
It’s worth noting that less socially-interactive males often tend to avoid contexts where clusters of socially popular socially interactive males congregate. There’s an active principle here, not just a passive state of being left out or avoided by socially-interactive males.
Anyway, you end up with pools of males who may be brilliant and clever but who lack social confidence, don’t have lots of social experience, and hence are likely to be abysmal at social skills, not just the mechanical “how-to” skill set but the emotional underpinnings of how to be interested, pleasant to interact with, etc.
We may be no less self-immersed than popular males (even though self-immersion is often a characteristic of popular males); we’re far less smooth and practiced in interaction and tend to be far less confident; we have not yet learned from our mistakes in social interaction (even jerks learn how to be less blatantly a jerk with social interaction practice). We may be no less sexist and no less selfish and no more empathic despite being marginalized socially and hurt by being left out of things. We may, meanwhile, harbor a sentiment that females would find us much better company than those popular males if they just gave us a try, an attitude that helps offset the low social confidence somewhat but also puts a chip of sorts on our shoulder. We may be suspicious and defensive, not trusting that this is real interest and not a cruel joke at our expense.
And we know this because there are such things as pre-pubescent geeks.