What we call geekdom today privileges subjects that used to be esoteric, but are now pretty widely popular. At the same time, it marginalizes the truly esoteric, which happens more or less automatically with anything that becomes a popular phenomenon. Music geeks, history geeks, and archaic-technology geeks are 3 examples of geekdoms that are not cool enough for the new geekdom.
Oh god, talk about dumbshit distinctions. Not a real gamer? Twitch twitch.
You have a broad brush here. Yeah, this happens, and yeah, it’s a problem–but there are plenty of folks in geek culture pushing back hard against it, from the owner of ENWorld to Wil Wheaton to a bajillion others.
No, because the world of geek culture can be incredibly lucrative if you’re a beautiful woman. Felicia Day, who is an actual honest-to-god geek, has a huge following of nerd fans but very little mainstream success. Some of us jokingly refer to her as the Queen of the Geeks. It’s very possible a faker could want a piece of that pie.
I’m sorry, but this is some serious bizarre paranoia. First, do you have any evidence of any real live person who impersonates interest in roleplaying games (for example), without any actual interest in them, for commercial gain? Second, even if they did, SO WHAT?
The whole thing smacks at best of ugly tribalism, and at worse of outright misogyny.
I’m pretty sure the article mentioned in the OP sucked–and it was written by a woman. Generally, however, women aren’t the ones warning about those Fake Geek Girls:
The problem is that female cosplayers–some of whom are young & pretty–attend conventions with other goals than playing Princess Leia to the resident Jabba the Huts. (Or is that Jabbas the Hut?)
I’m not going to Google it at work, but the Jessica Nigri/PAX East 2012 thing comes to mind. Nigri is a “professional cosplayer” (read: model) who was paid to attend the show (which has a strict “No Booth Babes” policy) cosplaying as a character from the game Lollipop Chainsaw. She was eventually thrown out and only allowed to return if she agreed to wear street clothes.
It’s not the same as a faker (I honestly don’t believe fakers actually exist), but her whole gimmick seems extremely calculated and a bit off-putting.
ETA: I don’t give a crap about the faker controversy, I’m just saying that there is a lot of money in geek culture now.
Men have had their geek credentials questioned online since the first flame war on the first BBS. The history of the Internet is riddled with the questioning of mens’ geek cred.
[broad brush alert!!!]
I am/was/will be a geek/nerd. As a 30-something adult, I find that peers who care that much about intensely self-identifying (and being identified) with any subculture often do so out of anger/self-righteousness towards the “muggles” who just aren’t as good at being a human being than those inside the group, as well as a degree of general social anxiety.
There was nothing more bizarre than finding one day in my mid-twenties that all of a sudden I was not up on enough contemporary geeky stuff to fit in with all the geeks out there. I thought that I was labeled as a geek/nerd specifically because I didn’t fit in, and now there are people out there who have the nerve to tell me that I am not geeky enough to fit in with the people who don’t fit in!? Fuck that noise.
I just don’t grok these people. Don’t they see that they have become the very people who had ostracized them in their school days?
(also, if I were holding the keys to the kingdom, no one would be allowed in unless they knew what “grok” meant, and had actually read the damned book).
[/broad brush alert!!!]
I’m explaining it very poorly, but this is what I keep trying to get at… There’s more to being a “geek” than just not fitting in. There’s a whole culture behind it, and some people don’t seem to grok that.
Boy howdy is that not the same thing as fakery. Here you’ve got someone so into her geekery that she’s made a career out of it, she’s so good at her geekery that people will pay her to do it at a convention, and she gets thrown out of the geek convention for being paid to be a geek there.
It may well be that she violated con terms, and that’s another issue. But there’s nothing “calculated” about what she did any more than there’s something calculated about a game designer paying a friend and great GM to go to a con and run the game, in order to drum up interest in the game.
I think the problem is: Who says there is? Why should people who identify as geeks, and often started doing so long before there was any geek cred, have to answer to a bunch of upstarts who declare there’s only one way?
There’s no central planning committee for geekery. No one owns the term. It isn’t a religion. No one was the founder. So when someone starts to demand others bow down to a certain culture, it’s pretty presumptuous.
I don’t think you can use geek/nerd interchangeably. Nerd nowadays lends itself to a wider variety of interests and basically just means someone is extremely invested in a particular hobby. You can be a film nerd, renaissance nerd, sports nerd, etc.
Geek used to be a physical/social insult when I was growing up (unathletic, unfashionable, socially inexperienced) with no real bearing on interests. Now it’s seemed to transfer from the kind of person to a set of specific items of pop culture that stereotypically that geek would be interested in. Like others have said before, there’s resentment and realization that it’s not the LOTR/Star Trek/etc. that made them “uncool” but more superficial reasons.
Notice, also, how it’s the woman who is at fault and is deceptive, and not the (presumebly) men who hired her to shill for their game.
Well, no. Poetry notoriously cannot be measured objectively, and even though publication confers some status it is a rare poet actually happy with the kind of crap that tends to make it into print.
This is a possible touchstone into the topic, because although I’m not entirely clear what the controversy is in the Fake Geek Girl meme, I have a pretty sharp idea what makes a poet a poseur. Poetry, for most of human history, was an interaction with a tradition by people who were steeped in that tradition. Over the past century or so, some important work has been produced by people steeped in the received tradition in breaking away from it. What follows then is a serious of generations with ever-weakening connections to the deep wellsprings of this art form, each believing that previous breaks from the tradition meant the tradition was of no value.
For what it’s worth, the term Poet confers status, and people desire that status. Claiming that status requires no investment in materials, because we all have something to write with. It certainly requires none of the hard work of studying the poetry’s deep roots, its rhythms, tropes, eras and the many important works in the field. Poetry has become reduced to its content, the poet’s feelings. Criticizing poetry is then seen as an attack on a person.
Notice that I’m sweeping in a wide swath of people who regard themselves as poets as poseurs, because they cannot scan a line, because they do not read verse not written by their mutual admiration society, because they think those bards of yore must have just been dumb or something not to realize you don’t need all that rime or reason. In short, because they took on the stylish mantle of Poet without ever bothering to take on the investment in time and mindspace that used to be the mark of the poet.
Now, if people fear these women are styling themselves as geeks without having to actually do the work, and that work under the shadow of social stigma, I can see that as an analogous situation. Of course, one suspects that women are subjected to a higher burden of proof than men. Does anybody have a case of a man actually suspected of being a fake geek to report?
Another analogy perhaps apt: growing up, I hung out with a couple of tomboys. Back then, that was a stigma. They were under pressure at home and at school to become more traditionally feminine. Television shows that featured tomboys would always go out of the way to show them girling up in the end, which even as a child I could see the propagandistic nature of the message. Now and then, as an adult, I see that it has once again become fashionable to dress tomboyishly, and suddenly you find a lot of tomboys who when asked (in college, I would in fact ask) would without fail claim to have always been tomboys. Then one day, suddenly the world is no longer full of tomboys. I feel that I’m justified in being outraged on behalf of my friends who really did live through the stigma when people who skipped all that decide to suddenly enjoy the status.
These days, I go to my weekly HackMaster game in a huge game store (held up largely by Magic the Gathering, but featuring a wide range of geek fodder) and I see young girls regularly bellying up to games of Pathfinder, as well as quite a lot of them playing Magic. Whatever may be the truth to the sudden appearance of a bunch of girls claiming to have been big fat nerds all along, the next generation will definitely have them. But… they will change geekdom. Just as an example, the socialization of girls I suspect is dramatically different in the hygiene department. Far fewer girls will come to this world seeking acceptance in spite of being funny-smelling. And their influence will possibly close the niche for funny-smelling men. And there will be backlash that manifests itself in the worst kind of sexism.
I recall a time when I was shocked and offended that people who only played video games called themselves Gamers. And I am informed that the old school war gamers were once galled that people like myself who played RPGs and not war games called themselves Gamers.
Once again, I’d like to point out that I don’t care about fakes, my posts about Jessica Nigri are about the amount of money that can be made catering to “geek culture.”
Excuse me? Did I ever blame Nigri? No. I said that I think her gimmick (and all celebrities have a gimmick of some kind) is designed to make money off of geek culture. Also, it should be noted that the vast majority of PR people are women. So she was likely hired by a woman.
Because “geek” was always an insult without meaning, but “geek culture” means something very specific.
In this case, “geek” means the same thing. Film Geeks, Renaissance Geeks, and Sports Geeks are all things. But “geek” by its lonesome means something specific.
Why in the world do you think “geek” is/was an insult without meaning? (And then you go on to say that “geek” means something specific, which is weird.)
It wouldn’t hurt the guys to take the occasional shower. And then put on a clean ironic T-shirt!
This blog is run by a grown-up Sherlock Holmes fan. He’s member of the Baker Street Irregulars–founded in the 1930’s, with membership by invitation only. Once, only men were allowed to join.
Sherlock Peoria has become a great fan of BBC Sherlock & really appreciates the energy of the young women joining his venerable “fandom.” Of course, there have been some very loud harrumphs from the more venerable Irregulars. But he thinks that change can be good…
QFT.
At the core of his or her antisocial heart, a true geek doesn’t care about what others think about them, or the validity of other claimants to geekdom.
It’s not a club, because geeks don’t belong to clubs.
A geek club, per definitionem, is full of poseurs. But a geek wouldn’t really care. Real geeks are very “live and let live”, as long as it doesn’t involve a sacred geek flame-war (linux v. macos, f’rinstance).
And I say this in earnest, as a lifelong geek (and recovering flame-warrior in the Amiga v. Atari flamewars of the late '80s).
I think this is already happening. I used to go to Gen Con back in the late 90s/early 00s, and then for various reasons didn’t go back again until last year (and also attended Comic Con for the last couple of years). Back in the late '90s, funny-smelling men abounded. They were all over the place, and it really got quite disgusting (particularly among the wargamers in my experience–those guys tended to be quite large, and didn’t move much once they settled into their spots for the weekend). It got to the point that they had people handing out “The Hygiene Game” (little baggies containing hygiene products, along with a little “rulebook” describing how to use them. Hell, my college gaming group had a couple of guys who, in the words of my mom, “could knock a buzzard off a gut wagon.”
At Comic Con the last couple of years, and Gen Con last year, I noticed almost none of this. Either air conditioning improved vastly or else the geek guys have gotten the message and attended to hygiene better. Even the ratty old wargamers didn’t offend.
Why qualities does she think DO make her a geek?