You’re right, it’s not 50-50, but I am talking about PAX East.
The split was 35-65 in 2014 (http://www.betaboston.com/news/2014/05/02/positive-trends-in-the-gaming-industry-emerge-from-pax-east-despite-controversy/) and I’m betting the 2015 split was closer to 40-60.
I’ve also seen more women doing barbecue which years ago seemed like an all male thing.
But other areas I see few women:
Model railroads
Woodworking
Skateboarding
From clueless dudes that think that just being “nice” is basically supposed to be a key to a woman’s vagina? Same with “friendzoning,” or so I hear.
Not recently. Wang stopped making computers years ago.
I guess that would all make sense if I had actually said any of that.
The actual point I made is that the concept of “cool kids” is a dying one, but a lot of older nerds will always continue to suffer the social consequences of being ostracized as kids. One of the (many) symptoms of that paradigm is the extremely well-documented, toxic behavior that a lot of these men have towards women.
If recognizing and avoiding people who exhibit that behavior makes me one of the “cool kids,” then I think I’m okay with that.
PAX South last year sure seemed to be at least 40/60, with a surprising number of good looking women who weren’t cosplay models even.
As to the OP, I think that in years past (I’m 43), there weren’t fewer nerds than now, but rather that it wasn’t nearly so socially acceptable among non-hardcore nerds to actually admit to it. So what you had was a big crowd of “in the closet” nerds who were dressing normally, acting normally, and circulating in the wider society, and you had a relatively small group of “hardcore” nerds who tended to be so socially awkward that they either didn’t know or didn’t care that their particular nerdery didn’t fit in with everyone else.
In college, there were girls in the sci-fi/gaming groups, but they tended to be equally awkward, so the hardcore nerds tended to be some combination of clueless, obsessive, and when they thought about girls, they got angry and misogynistic, as the only girls they knew were the awkward nerd girls… who despite being awkward and poorly groomed were always dating the “alpha” nerds, such as they were. The rest of the women around wanted nothing to do with them because they were smelly, obsessed about strange things, including what seemed to them to be animated Japanese tentacle porn and weird Japanese big-eyed sex fantasy women.
Now I don’t know how much of the stinky, obsessive, misogynistic nerd persona is due to misogynistic, stinky obsessive people being interested in nerdy stuff, or how much is due to the nerd lifestyle making people stinky, obsessive and misogynistic.
The rest of us, who were more interested in girls and socializing than being obsessive about watching anime or collating our Magic the Gathering cards, or playing D&D tended to be somewhat circumspect about our participation in the more nerdy activities, or were socially adept enough to own up to it, and not have people think we were nerds… because the last thing you wanted in say… 1992, was to be lumped in with the pungent, bearded weirdos who wore strange t-shirts and talked about role playing games and japanese animation.
I think what’s going on nowadays is that a lot of what would have been considered “nerdy” back in the day, is now cool, so the pool of today’s “nerds” is much larger and encompasses a lot of people who would have kept their nerdity in the closet in prior eras.
But I’d bet the core of awkward, stinky, obsessive nerds is still there, even if they’re outnumbered (and probably just as shunned) by the rest of the more normal latter-day nerds.
(FYI… basing my observations on 20 some-odd years of being a closeted nerd, and interacting with the un-closeted ones in college (1991-1996) as a RA in the honors dorm, and thereby knowing a lot of people in the sci-fi and gaming clubs.)
I think in large part it’s kind of a numbers game. Nerdy hobbies are sort of traditionally a bastion of acceptance (or at least tolerance) for the weird and/or socially awkward. The classic model is sort of that it doesn’t matter how weird and stench-filled you are - or how obnoxious your attitudes and viewpoints happen to be - or how poorly you treat other people - you would always have a social “home”. In practical terms, this often meant that a lot nerdy and geeky communities felt obliged to put up some pretty questionable behavior.
Nerdy and geeky hobbies then picked up a fair amount of general social tolerance - which both increased the numbers of people exposed to those areas of interest and encouraged mainstream folks also interested in them to come out of the closet.
I get a pretty strong sense that at least part of the reason there has been a fairly widespread movement away from the more . . . flagrant misogyny is purely because since there are considerably more people involved in nerdy and geeky pass times, people who are involved in nerdy and geeky pass times have the fairly-recently-discovered luxury of being able to tell the weirder, more hateful, stinkier, more misogynistic among them to stick it up their jumper without having to be particularly worried about major social ostracism resulting. In the old days, the risk of being booted out of the only bastion you had was a pretty big threat for a lot of folks. Nobody wanted to call out Mister Long-Time Pillar Of The Community Who Also Happened To Be A Flaming Asshole and be wrong (or just not be as forceful as him about your disagreement), and consequently be reduced to not being able to pursue their interests locally anymore.
When you’re an outcast (or think you are, or feel like one, or suspect that if anyone who didn’t share your hobbies would turn you into one if you told them about it), there’s a big incentive to put up with the people who are outcasts with you. When the things that make you (in your own mind anyway) an outcast gain widespread social acceptance, that incentive takes a really big hit.
I know for a fact the hardcore stinky misogynists are still around - I run into them from time to time. The thing that has actually started changing is that a lot more people are willing to tell them they’re jerks, and the incentive to put up with their bullshittery has largely evaporated now that there are actual answers to questions like “But if we tell James to go fuck himself because every female character (or player) in the D&D campaign gets raped or sexually harassed constantly, where in the name of God will we be able to find a replacement DM?!?”
I agree. Now that the more normal nerds (part-time nerds?) are coming to dominate the fields of interest, they’re much less tolerant of the really, really awkward and assholic behavior of the old-school core group.
Which in one sense is a little tiny bit sad, in that those guys are suffering the effects of having their interests/hobbies change around them and going from being accepted to being reviled. On the other hand, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for weirdos who can’t be bothered to fucking bathe or not be creepy as shit.
Brilliantly written, Maggie. 
I’m a male geek (as if my screenname didn’t tell you that), and turned 50 earlier this year. I’ve been fortunate that, throughout my nerdy adult life, I’ve always found a lot of women of the nerdy persuasion – as friends, and, in several cases, romantic partners. I met my first girlfriend through my D&D group, as well as the woman I eventually married. I suspect that the gaming groups and other social groups I’ve been in, in college and beyond, may have been a little more socially adept, and thus more welcoming of women, than the stereotypical group of nerd guys.
That said, back in the 1980s, the presence of a number of women in my nerdy activities was undoubtedly an outlier. I’ve been attending GenCon since '82, and it’s absolutely become closer to 50/50 (though I don’t think it’s there yet, probably more like 60/40 male) in the past decade or so.
From whiny jackasses who are often bigger bastards than the ‘bad boys’ but who hide it under a veneer of polite behavior. Generally those oh so terrible bad boys are actually interesting people who do stand up for themselves, are willing to banter or argue with women, but don’t actually treat them badly.
Absolutely. It just doesn’t add up, in my experience. And I’m not just talking about taking a survey of tournament attendants.
I’ve met lots of women who play games. I’ve been to Comic Con and GenCon and there are lots of women in attendance who play and enjoy technical strategy games like RoboRally and Settlers and Power Grid. There are lots of women who read and enjoy science fiction and comic books. I’ve met lots of women who play roleplaying games and women who play video games. These are all stereotypically male-dominated activities, but it’s relatively easy to find lots of women who enjoy them and actively participate. Female magic players are very rare in comparison.
So, where are the women Magic players? They’re apparently not a major fraction of women who enjoy other geeky pursuits. So there’s some massive group of women who buy cards from big box stores and play amongst themselves with no other strong connection to geek culture? I find that hard to believe. Mostly because Magic is absurdly complicated. And I want to be clear that I’m not implying that women aren’t just as capable as men at complicated games. I mean that very few people learn to play Magic without being taught by someone else who plays. You can learn to play Magic by buying some cards and reading the rulebook, but you’ve got to be very motivated to do so.
This calls for a link to The Five Geek Social Fallacies, which describes and attempts to explain this behaviour (which is Fallacies 1 and 2), as well as pointing out the negative consequences.
I suspect pretty strongly that a large number of the women Magic players that gets cited is actually pretty much a survey failure. If I were guessing, I would imagine that demographic breakdowns of Magic’s market share probably count “anyone who has ever played Magic” and possibly even “anyone who has ever purchased an MtG product” as “Magic players”. On the one hand, if you’re a marketing exec trying to figure out “Who the fuck buys my product and how can I sell them more?” this is a perfectly reasonable way to evaluate the concept of who is and who is not a “Magic player”. On the other hand, if you’re looking for someone who actually plays with any sort of regularity (and I will totally count “I only show up for pre-releases” or “I only play commander with my buddies” as regularity), then it’s not a great way to measure. I know how to play chess - and I have purchased chess products in my lifetime - but I would, under no circumstances, consider myself a “chess player”, if you see the distinction.
It just occurred to me that it is also well within the realm of possibility that a fairly high percentage of the women Magic players that are getting cited in those claims are online-only players and may not own a single piece of cardboard. In that case, I suspect there is a fairly substantial margin for error, since demographic data about who’s using the online client is (at least to the best of my recollection - I fucking hate the online client in ways I cannot fully explain and refuse to use it) 100% self-selected and not in any meaningful way verified.
Personally, I would guess that the majority of women Magic players, play 90% of the time with their boyfriend or husband.
I know (even as a male) that when I played magic, I basically just played against my brother. Most two player games, I think your average person plays against the same opponent time and time again.
This I think is what proves to be the major stumbling block. Socially clueless guys just flat-out cannot understand why the object of their desire visibly prefers to fling herself at the kind of guy who wastes her money, runs around on her, verbally puts her down in public and ultimately leaves her in tears, much less why she complains about him to them while insisting on staying with him. But you’ve hit upon the guilty secret; these guys just want to “have sex” with a woman they “find attractive”, which is obviously ridiculous and out of the question.
Fortunately I for one don’t need to struggle with the sometimes-baffling world of dating any more. I have long since chased my last kitchet across the dunes, and Mirassou-light is no more than memory.
Socially clueless guys who lack relationship experience entirely, don’t understand friendships or romantic relationships, and who pretend to be a woman’s friend in hopes that she will sleep with him do not actually make good partners, and such relationships are also likely to end in tears. If you don’t want to hear her complain about her relationship, just tell her. You’re not obligated to listen. And she’s not obligated to have sex with you whether you do or don’t listen. Oh, and if you want to bang her, actually make a pass at her instead of faking friendship and thinking that one day she’ll decide you’re The One.
Showering also helps.
Can’t help but feel this is a mountainous projection that really misses the mark on the intention and character of “nice guys.”
Why do you think they’re faking it? Friendships come in many flavours, they’re not all heartfelt and deeply rooted.
Every attempt I made to “make a pass” at a woman was met with either disgust, ridicule, or sympathy. It’s humiliating, and why I gave up at an early age on ever hoping women would find me attractive. It has borne out to be true, they still don’t, which I try not to think about too often* as it depresses me.
*It’s inescapable, in our culture. You have to think about it at least sometimes
It’s a shame socially clueless guys have such specific, yet terrible, taste in women. I don’t think I’ve ever even met a woman like the one described, but somehow every whiny self-described “Nice Guy” on the Internet is hopelessly in love with one.