Alfrebaut

February 24, 2012 10:14 pm You know what? It is kind of a problem. I think the essence of this problem is this: there's expectations, and then there's reality. It's easy to blame our culture of geekdom itself for being this way. I mean, this is the same group that still gets excited when people talk about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or pre-movie Transformers. By that I mean we don't change much; don't evolve. Look at our heroes. Superheroes, if you will. We still have the same ones from like two generations ago. Or more, depending on how you count generations. Our culture has been predominantly a male-driven one. That's just a fact. And more recently, in what Hardison of Leverage would call the, "age of the geek," there has been a lot more proliferation of it beyond what we would have, in our younger years, called "geeks." And yet, we cling to these old memories, because that's who we are. That's what we obsess over. We're not so different than the "jocks" that we feared or adored in our days of youth. In our own ways, we are alpha dogs. We are territorial. When the ones we thought were "jocks" started in on "our" territory, we created artificial divisions of credential, calling people "casuals" and "noobs" and other meaningless distinctions. The point was that if they liked something that we didn't like, played games we didn't play, chose a console we didn't choose, they were something to be abhorred. This got worse in what I want to call the G4 era. G4 had Morgan Webb, who was a very popular game reviewer who happened to *GASP* be female. And so whomever was watching the success of that show at the higher end of the network decided that they would hire girls to host their shows. This worked well until it didn't. It soon became abundantly clear that many of these women G4 hired, through no fault of their own, knew nothing about the things they were talking about. It's not entirely G4's fault, there was also an internal pushing of this sort in the games industry as we saw in the "booth babes" and such pushed by the games industry as well. This sort of pandering is the sort geeks of both genders have come disillusioned by. Okay, let's get back to the point. Expectations and reality. If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck... well, you're probably going to think it is a duck. No matter what books you read as a kid, no matter how wrong you are going to be sometimes, you're going to think it's a duck. The uncommonness of geeks who also happen to be girls, in the past has conditioned us to believe that they don't exist. Or at the very least that they're rare. You could say finding one equated to finding a Unicorn. Especially an attractive one. The one thing I can say from my own experience is that I, and a lot of other geeks I know, are afraid of what we want. I know you're looking at this confused right now, so let me say that again: we're afraid of what we want. Of course it would be awesome if an attractive geek girl were your friend. Then you could blog on the internet about how you talked to a girl for once! Kidding. Still, that is every guy's dream, right? The reason why we're afraid of it is because like pretty much every other experience most geeks have in this delicate matter, we're afraid of being disappointed. Again. Think about it this way: if the article writer had been Alyssa Bereznak, or someone like her, and the geeky dude at the store had come at her with Warren Ellis and Mark Millar, he would not have only been disappointed, but you can bet the article written about it would probably be pretty damn different. And let's face it, girls, most of the time, that would probably be the case. Better to be pleasantly surprised than disappointed yet again.