“Fake Geek Girls”?

Just a short one here.

I was just thinking about this the other day: the outcry over “fake geek girls” doesn’t even make sense. Set aside that it’s deplorable and hateful—where’d it even come from?

So, you’re a lonely geeky guy, and this girl shows up flying her geek flag—maybe she’s got a unix t-shirt on, maybe she’s playing D&D, maybe she’s in full-on cosplay mode. And your first reaction is outrage and accusation? Shouldn’t it be “OHMYGOD!! It’s a female geek! We have something in common! Maybe I can talk to her and she won’t run away!!” Why would you automatically assume that it’s an act? Do you automatically assume that a dude in a Neon Genesis Evangelion t-shirt is faking it? 

Or, ok, let’s take the accusation at face value. Honestly, I don’t think that geeky things have reached the point where anyone would want to be seen as a geek if they weren’t, but let’s just suppose. So now what you have in front of you is not a geeky girl, but a girl who is so interested in geeky guys that she’s willing to pretend to be a geek or, at a minimum, show interest in the things that geeky guys are into (but she isn’t—remember, we’re postulating that she is actually a fake geek girl) just to get their attention. 

Again, how is that bad? Shouldn’t you be practically salivating that her is a girl—possibly a super-hot cosplaying girl—who wants to spend time with geeks? Even if they really are fake, so what? Do you care that a girl isn’t actually that fond of Indian food, but is willing to go to an Indian restaurant because she’s interested in hanging out with you? Yeah, ok, you may want to sort out what is her own interest and what is for sake of you before you get married, but I think it’s perfectly reasonable to just go with it initially. 

We’re not all equally gifted

Not everyone is beautiful

This came across my feed, and I think it says it well. But I want to expand on it, because its not just beauty that we have troubles with.

We have a strange relationship with differences in our society:

Attractiveness we all see and recognize (though we may disagree on the details), but there’s a concerted effort to pretend we don’t, and that “everyone is beautiful”.

Intelligence we really, really want to be unimportant outside of a few “intellectual” endeavors like solving math problems, so we downplay it, trying to give everyone the same education (by the same methods) and characterizing a dozen different things as “types” of intelligence just so that we can say that everyone is good at one of them (even if we all still aren’t).

Physical abilities, particularly athleticism? Oh, there we make no pretense and laud those with greater gifts. Nobody claims that everyone is equally strong, just “in different ways”.

Oh, and we pretend that not only is “hard work” an entirely innate trait, when in reality it is very much learnable, but we misattribute all sorts of other things (luck, connections, smarts) to it.

The trick is, we need to recognize that your worth as a person is not dependent on your capabilities, but on your behaviors.

CNN Acknowledges Its Sources

The Daily Show last week was analyzing how the news media—particularly picking on CNN—is dealing with the lack of reliable information coming out of Iran, regarding the recent election.