The Rise of the Geeky Girl and Reactionary Men Who Should Be Sterilized

Or, Gender, Gender Issues, Power, and Powerlessness.

Welcome to Thursday. Let's get right down to it, shall we?

I'm not sure who has seen this article already--I know that my own mother had to bring it to my attention: Geek Girls: Revenge of the Nerdettes. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait.

Done? Good. This article is characteristic of the worst parts of Newsweek's "fluff" reporting, which is too bad because it allows really stupid people to take shots at the badly written article and then use those shots to try to smear the Nerd Girls. Although I should have expected that kind of slant from a site named Men's Activism.com: Reaction to Newsweek Article.

I especially like how the post and subsequent comments react to statements not even in the actual article or video, such as claims that the women in question are blaming popular culture or complaining that 'guys' can't tolerate a strong woman. Huge projection issues, anyone?

I shouldn't get so upset--I have no idea how many readers MensActivism.com has per week, and three comments to a post doesn't signify widespread beliefs, thank BLOG. It just burns me. It burns me like anonymous commenters saying Jennifer Love Hewitt is fat, it burns me like gross, paunchy men twice my age leering at me, it burns me like a recent comment from a homeless man about the supposed "girliness" of the LT's bike. (The LT's sport motorcycle is yellow. Not as manly as, say, a black Harley, perhaps, but no one sane, under any circumstances, would consider his monster of a bike not manly.)

I'm trying to find a common theme here. What, specifically, burns me about these encounters? Is it simply a question of reality? For example, Jennifer Love Hewitt is not fat. Under any circumstances. She may not be perfectly toned--therefore exposing a few lumps and bulges in a swimsuit--but I'd bet she still fits a size 4. So first, these people are factually wrong. Second, it also burns me that people--even a very few selected persons--feel qualified to judge, since according to statistics, it's very likely that the people marking Jennifer Love Hewitt as fat are size 16s themselves. For example, it burns me that the homeless man felt qualified to judge the LT's bike for being girly. I mean, seriously? You think you have room in your life to judge other people's possessions? And the few commenters who bitched about the claims they thought they saw in the Nerd Girl piece--how can you bitch about hypocrisy and dumbing down of standards when you've just proven you can't read what's actually on the page?

Perhaps it's reality. I know that my version of reality is right--especially in the areas of "people who wear a size 4 are not fat" and "homeless people have no room to decry the quality of motorcycles"--and it bothers me that a few don't agree. Or maybe it angers me more that the few who don't agree don't realize how wrong they are, don't realize how dumb they are, don't realize how far they've fallen to the bottom of the social ladder or how out-of-step they are with the rest of society. But what would I be able to achieve by somehow holding up a magic mirror to those I deem unworthy? Is my desire to hurt people that strong? And what if I discovered I was wrong and it was really me who was too far around the bend? My need to punish people who burn me in this way--especially, for example, old men who leer at me--scares me. And yet so far I've managed to stay on the right side of my anger.