The Problem of Fetishisizing Female Nerds

There is an over reaching problem in most of western society where men are still seen as the default gender. Instead of being seen as roughly half of the population, women are instead shuffled off as a niche market, just a small corner of the real demographic. When applied to the nerd subpopulation the male default becomes even more obvious and distressing. To pull a real life example, last Tuesday Nathan Fillion, Captain Tight Pants himself, asked his twitter followers to help him win a bet and agree that “hot girls play halo!” Another example is the user picture for this very blog’s facebook group, Velma looking disturbingly thin arching her tits out with baby doll bows in her hair. Why? This is nothing like the Velma seen on TV. Why isn’t being smart enough? Why must girl nerds be first and foremost sexy?

The main issue here is that once again women are only seen through the lenses of their relation to men. On the flip side take a look how guy nerds are talked about, their gender is never the focal point and how sexy they are is almost never mentioned. It certainly isn’t an ever-present selling point.

Women are being recognized as nerds but still only in so far as they are relevant to men, to the default real nerd. Nerds of the female persuasion are not allowed to simply exist as we are. Before I am accused of misandry let me clarify that I am not taking issue with men who find women who are nerdy attractive. The problem lies when girl nerds are only acknowledged as long as they fall into standard heteronormative definitions of sexy. Girl nerds are fetishisized instead of simply being accepted as just nerds. To barrow a phrases from Amy Berg, an executive producer and writer for Eureka, this “objectifies women under the guise of empowering them” and does a great disservice to nerdom as a whole