Stuff I Learned Today
Irradiated by LabRat
I would have learned it four days ago, but I was busy this weekend, and I like my internet kerfuffles a few days stale, like the bread you make puddings and strata out of. Either way, the source of my education was a CNN column by someone named Joe Peacock on the imminent cultural threat of attractive women in Joe Peacock’s domain who might not be as into stuff as Joe Peacock is, as well as the commentary stemming from the predictably extensive reaction. Most of what I learned is from the original Peacock piece, though I got additional education from various comments.
- Actually being paid for sex, being paid for being sexually attractive in connection with a product, and getting attention for being attractive are all pretty much the same thing: whoring.
- Men automatically ranking women on a numbered scale of attractiveness is just a normal regular thing because of caveman biology, but attractive women only paying sexual attention to men they themselves find attractive is damn near a hate crime.
- Apparently Olivia Munn existing and having a career is such a terrible thing that people on the internet will actually use “because Olivia Munn” as some sort of commonly recognized shorthand for the tragedy that is whores (see first point) in geekdom.
- A woman getting more attention than her attractiveness number objectively warrants is terrible.
- Women will spend up to thousands of dollars and up to hundreds of hours of work, with up to a whole year in advance commitment, planning, and preparation, for the primary purpose of going to major cons to be attractive at people they have no intention of paying sexual attention to. This is self-evidently the height of pleasurable activity.
- Being only sort of into something and interacting socially with people who are more into it than you is a horrific trick you’re playing on them. I’m glad I learned this before I interacted socially with any more shooters, punks, or science fiction fans; think of the damage prevented.
- Geeky men are never attractive. Sexual interest in them by women is always a feigned ploy to gain pure ego gratification.
- Your attractiveness and interests are fixed traits determined in junior high school. Any attempt to venture beyond these boundaries in adulthood are a loathsome act of treason and manipulation.
- Geek culture is defined by alienation and outsiderhood, which is why CNN considers it culturally relevant enough to have a dedicated column about.
- People deliberately and with malice aforethought seeking to sell things to geeks for money are evil, particularly in a universe in which Hollywood spends squidillions of dollars on making giant, lovingly constructed comic book movie franchises. People who attempt to use sex to sell things to people who habitually rank strange women on numerical scales are particularly evil, akin to feeding Superman a dish of Kryptonite stew.
- Having attractive female friends is the new having gay friends, which was the new having black friends.
- It’s okay to be a female geek, with no necessity to pass litmus tests not to be considered a whore, if you are ugly. (This is not as comforting as it sounds like it must be.)
- Feeling alienated and picked on for your intense pop culture issues as a child was an awful experience, which is why having any of those interests achieve mainstream cultural popularity is the most traumatic thing that could happen to you now. (Things that were never popular in mainstream culture, apparently: Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, video games, Lord of the Rings, cartoons.)
- It is possible to be aware of Fat, Ugly, or Slutty and to complain about women who go around being attractive at men and getting attention from them they don’t really deserve with no hint of felt cognitive dissonance.
- Also, if you’re a girl, and you play video games, and you aren’t ugly, and you get sexual attention from geeky men out of proportion to how you stack up against really hot girls, you should expect to get misogynistic threats and insults for doing so. Because you’re pretty much just as bad.
- Not being sexually interested in someone who shares interests you have at least lightly, yet resents you virulently for attracting them, is probably about finding those interests gross if indulged in any less moderation.
I’d go fret over the exact messages my t-shirts send and angst about my number and whether I really deserved any of the thousands of social interactions I’ve had with people who shared interests I had passionately or moderately or barely, but I’ve decided my answer to the quandaries raised is “holy shit I’m not in junior high anymore, and I don’t have to care.”
July 30th, 2012 at 4:06 pm
I don’t even know ‘what’ to say about that… Sigh… And no, we definitely ARE NOT in junior high anymore!
July 30th, 2012 at 4:24 pm
Well, guess I don’t need to go lift tomorrow. Thank goodness for Joe Peacock lifting me out of my false consciousness!
One of these days someone like Joe Peacock should sit down and ‘splain to me why there’s no middle ground between “BAWWWWW my subculture is so alienated and marginalized and misunderstood” and “BAWWWWW my subculture is popular enough that jocks and hipsters and people with disposable incomes like it”.
July 30th, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Your attractiveness and interests are fixed traits determined in junior high school. Any attempt to venture beyond these boundaries in adulthood are a loathsome act of treason and manipulation.
‘Scuse me while I go fling my guns out the window and redecorate my house with Lisa Frank notebooks.
July 30th, 2012 at 5:25 pm
Couldn’t you have simply shortened all that to “Geeks cease maturing mentally beyond eighth grade?”
July 30th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
To be fair to Peacock, that particular point wasn’t as much from his piece as it was a strain of commenters defending him, as well as what I’ve seen elsewhere defending geekdom’s misogynistic side.
Trufax, I once saw in all fucking seriousness a self-identified geeky guy arguing that if girls wanted to play video games and have him be nice to them, they should have fucked him in high school.
Mike- y’do realize I’m a geek, so are the majority of commenters here, and so is everyone else tearing the dude to shreds, right?
July 30th, 2012 at 7:28 pm
What a sad and broken way to live through life.
Junior High ended years ago, put on your big boy pants ‘mkay.
Here’s the great thing about being an adult: we don’t have to care.
And no making fun of those geeks doesn’t count nor does playing the “I was into it when it was underground”.
“Good” find LabRat
July 30th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
I read the Scalzi article earlier today, but I hadn’t read the Peacock piece until now. Wow. That is some serious grade bitter, right there.
The first San Diego Comicon I attended was in 1986. There were Hot Girls in Skimpy Costumes there. They probably wouldn’t have given Peacock the time of day then, either.
Too bad he doesn’t seem to understand how the boy/girl or girl/girl or boy/boy dynamic actually works in geek culture. At the end of the day, you want to go home with someone you can share more than just your physical passion with. I married two geeks (not at the same time.) Been with the second one for almost twenty years. So what does it matter that there are pretty fake geeks that go to cons to get attention? This doesn’t happen in other subcultures? You never know, a fake geek might eventually turn into a real one some day.
July 31st, 2012 at 1:14 am
LabRat, a geek in the Joe Peacock sense? God, I hope not.
July 31st, 2012 at 5:42 am
Although a lot of geeks are social retards, it is not a requirement.
Those geeks that think it is a requirement are merely victims of their social retardation.
July 31st, 2012 at 6:51 am
A couple years after I graduated college (BS in Comp Sci, followed by MS, so yeah I’m a nerd) I noticed a funny trend. Girls, even attractive girls, started paying attention to me, and not just to get me interested to prove they were attractive so they could shoot me down. Girls who wouldn’t have told me the correct time in High School were now batting their eyes at me. Why? Because I was working at a job that paid 30K+ in 1987 when the jocks they dated in High School were working at the car wash for minimum wage.
I’ve no doubt there are attractive women who go to cons just to get male attention they have no intention of returning. There’s a name for women like that, and they can be found just about anyplace there are men. I also have no doubt there are attractive women who LIKE the activities at cons, who are in fact geeks of one degree or another. I further have no doubt that some attractive women see cons as a place to meet intelligent, successful, and secure men.
Hey Mr Peacock, instead of going to a comic book convention, try going to a coffee shop, or a gym, or a car show. You’ll find all those types of women there too. It’s called humanity. Instead of complaining about it, try enjoying it. If a woman isn’t what you’re looking for, move on, that’s also called humanity.
July 31st, 2012 at 9:35 am
Wait, what? I.. ow. my brain is now trying to hide in the bottom of my skull, and avoid that… gah.
that there are people out there that really think like that just make my head hurt.
July 31st, 2012 at 11:23 am
Mark D- to be fair, young adulthood is when a LOT of men and women collectively get over themselves and realize the old social boundaries were ludicrous. I started to get attention from men who wouldn’t have given me the time of day in school around the same time, and they definitely weren’t after my money or my makeover. (That didn’t happen.)
…None of which invalidates your point in the slightest, just wanted to point out there was more than one reason us former untouchables lose that status.
July 31st, 2012 at 11:47 am
Labrat: Oh, absolutely, no argument here, it happens with both genders, it’s part of maturing. Priorities change. It’s also a time when peer pressure becomes much less important, I don’t have to pretend to like the skinny airhead with big boobs, I can go after the shy girl with the heart of gold and high IQ. (Although personally, I didn’t have a large enough circle of friends in high school that peer pressure was an issue in who I liked).
July 31st, 2012 at 12:29 pm
Mike James: The fact that Joe Peacock is a douche is orthogonal to the fact that he’s a geek.
Kristopher:
s/victims of/desperately trying to justify not bothering to fix/
(Assuming more or less neurotypical geeks, that is.)
July 31st, 2012 at 1:07 pm
Yeah, I’m pretty sure one of the crucial bits of self-realization geeks who actually were bullied in school need is realizing that they weren’t picked on for being geeks (FFS EVERY kid watched most of the same things), they were picked on for being weird. I know I was.
July 31st, 2012 at 1:12 pm
Everything I loved about my geekdom has turned to ashes in my mouth
But I guess that’s what I get for having a fireplace licking geekdom.
July 31st, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Geek culture is defined by alienation and outsiderhood, which is why CNN considers it culturally relevant enough to have a dedicated column about.
Never mind it being the focus of the #1 network sitcom in primetime and syndication.
I maintain that if wesley.crusher.die.die.die could grow up and have a very happy and successful life, there was no reason the rest of us can’t.
July 31st, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Mr Peacock still seems to be stuck in the “women do the sexy only for others” phase. Someone should force him to click the Avengers tag on AO3.
July 31st, 2012 at 5:27 pm
Wow! I had no idea CNN was selling storage space for emotional baggage. Sounds like dude has been shot down by girls that were out of his league and is attempting to prop up his ego by tearing them down.
I used to get this shit from his type all the time. I worked at a comic book store and was into the independent and smaller publishing house stuff. This was back when Image comics was a small house. I didn’t read anything DC/Marvel and thus, a poser. Some girl trolling for attention. You know, because if I wasn’t intimately familiar with the infinite universes of The Flash it totally invalidated the Smiley the Psychotic Button poster displayed prominently in my dorm room.
July 31st, 2012 at 6:03 pm
Bluntobject: And that is also a symptom of the real problem here … heh.
I still have some of those issues, but at least I realize they are my issues, and not someone else’s.
August 1st, 2012 at 12:15 pm
Jennifer,
You must be the one that Art Brut was singing about (around the 2:30 mark).
August 2nd, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Mike James,
““Geeks cease maturing mentally beyond eighth grade?””
Oh, yeah? Well, you’re a big poopie-head! :p
August 6th, 2012 at 2:06 pm
Devils advocate time:
1)telling a nerd— a real nerd, not a hipster with an iPad, and yes there’s a difference— telling a nerd that “junior/highschool is over, get over it” is often like telling an amputee “get over it, the war is over, you stepped on that landmine a decade ago.” (And yes that’s far less of an exaggeration than you think; they’re bloody diagnosing the omega-class kids coming out of high school with post traumatic stress syndrome. It’s that bad, and yes, it was worse than you remember.)
2)Is it or is it not understandable that the hardcore geeks and nerds and social outcasts should be just a LITTLE bit bitter that the Beautiful People, who would not even speak to them in their formative years, are now flocking over to call themselves ‘geeks’ now that it’s hip and trendy? As a wiser person once put it, it’s one thing to be biased against a group of people you’ve never seen before- it’s another to be unbiased about people who punched you in the face the last time you saw them.
August 6th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Look, I’m not going to argue that our school system is fucked up or that it can’t be a no-fooling traumatic experience. Schoolkids commit suicide over it at an alarming rate. Or for that matter that it can induce PTSD.
All that? Does not give anybody a license to hate anyone who reminds them of their abuser (absent reminding you by, er, abusing you), or to declare nerd-dom a kingdom of the abused that “beautiful people” are not permitted in on suspicion they might have been awful in high school.
School was incredibly painful for many. It also actually is over now. It was a dungeon of peers that in no way reflected the realities of adult life. The only nice thing about it is its rules actually WERE all lies.
Understandable (and yes, it is understandable) is not the same thing as justified.
August 7th, 2012 at 7:06 am
“telling a nerd that “junior/highschool is over, get over it” is often like telling an amputee “get over it, the war is over, you stepped on that landmine a decade ago.”
FWIW, I’ve very often heard people with serious life-changing disabilities say that after a while you have to stop defining yourself by it or making it the central feature of your life. At first you mourn it like a death, but eventually… It’s there, it requires adaptations, and it changes some aspects of your day-to-day life, but at the same time to some extent you do have to kind of ‘get over it’ mentally and move on with your life if you want to live a healthy happy life.