Something I’ve been meaning to talk about for awhile.
Anger at the Stupid, a new blog I just found, names the problem pretty well.
Basically the sloppy, disheveled, misogynist douchebag nerd, who will whine and whine and whine about how the girls he’s attracted to are shallow, materialistic whores because they want nothing to do with him because he hasn’t got money or isn’t good looking, or whatever…
HOWEVER, when someone points out that there are girls who do find him attractive and share his hobbies, he will scornfully dismiss them as “Fat and Ugly” or otherwise “not his type.” And if confronted on this will then expound on how you can’t help who you’re attracted to.
So, when hot girls aren’t attracted to him they’re shallow, materialistic whores who don’t know what they’re missing.
But when he isn’t attracted to girls who are available and possibly interested in him, it’s because “you can’t help who you’re attracted to.”
Yeah, fuck you, Captain Double Standard.
Seriously.
And every time I talk about a “hot” nerd guy (say, Vin Diesel) in the GGR colulmns I catch a ration of shit for making real geek guys feel bad, because I’m all about the pretty. But really, if you’ve met the Husband and I, you know that he doesn’t look anything like Vin Diesel, and to me he is the most beautiful man in the world, because he’s smart, funny and just all around awesome. Would I like to fuck Vin Diesel? Yes. Duh. Would I trade him for the Husband? Not in a million years.
I’ll probably post more on this later, but I wanted to get this out before I exploded.
Polimicks 
Your husband could whup Vin Diesel’s ass.
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And one can never be just fat – oh no! That would be too easy. We must be fat and ugly or fat and gross or some shit like that. What really kills me is this is said by guys who are no prize winners themselves…
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But what if you, and your husband, and Vin Diesel could sit down for a one shot 3 way D&D scenario. Best of both worlds, am I right? 🙂
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Does it have to be D&D? Maybe some GURPS or Burning Wheel? Or would that be kinky?
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It could be Kult for all I care. I’m not opposed to a little kink. I can’t speak for Vin Diesel though. 🙂
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I’m totally picturing you, hubby, and Vin in a 3-way that has nothing to do with dice, but might involve a bit of roll playing.
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and now I’m picturing it.
yep.
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The hubby does have Vin’s hair, however, so I can see the similarities. 🙂
I have reserved a seat for Vin at my dream RPG session, along with Chris Rock, Robbin Williams, Will Wheaton, and Felicia Day.
It’s good to aim high.
As for misogynist nerd boys, fuck em. That just leaves more hot, funny, and wicked smart nerd girls for the rest of us nerd boys with our heads on straight. They don’t know what they are missing, and might just die alone in a basement somewhere surrounded by their Budweiser girl posters and Power Girl action figures.
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Seconded.
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And every time I talk about a “hot” nerd guy (say, Vin Diesel) in the GGR colulmns I catch a ration of shit for making real geek guys feel bad, because I’m all about the pretty.
Indeed, because women never, ever have to listen to men talk about how some celebrity fantasy object is sooooooooo incredibly hot and wonderful and completely different from their own reality. It’s only men who experience the “meanness” of hearing someone talk about a fantasy object they can’t live up to. Poor widdle men.
Double standards. Pah.
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I know perfectly well that some Cat Piss Man will pop up and whine about how he’d never do that. He lies. Back during my science fiction writing days, I’d listen to twits like that go on and on about their celebrity fantasy objects with their wives right next to them, and then they’d wonder why they’d come home to an empty house one day.
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*sigh*
This has troubled me for years. It’s not just geeks, it’s guys in general.
Some guys (maybe even most) get the impression that they are destined to date either a super model or a porn star. Their expectations are completely bizarre. They want, if they were honest with themselves, subservient, oversexed, non-opinionated women who were only around when they needed sex, someone to listen to them bitch, or food.
When that doesn’t immediately appear, they get all misogynistic and direct anger about how stupid and sad their life is onto women in general.
I get angry about this. I get angry, too, about the geek/non-geek divide. I married a non-geek (well, she’s strange, but not a geek per se. A geek about art, about design, about music, and a number of other things, but doesn’t game, hates anime, doesn’t read SF, hated Firefly within the first 4 minutes, and generally doesn’t share anywhere near all my interests). She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.
But, just in case there are any guys out there who are still so woefully unclued as to expect a supermodel – guess what, having a relationship with another human is tough. It requires listening and respecting the other person. It requires, amazingly, putting them first, just as they do so for you. It requires dealing with the fact that you’re not going to be perfectly compatible in all things, that you’re going to fight, that you’re going to struggle, that she’ll get pissed at you, and you at her, and you need to be adult and deal with it.
No magic ponies. No porn stars. Humans. And I wish, if guys aren’t capable or willing to make the sort of compromises and put in the work that’s necessary for a relationship, they would just STFU.
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People who are incapable/willing to make those kinds of compromises, they’re highly unlikely to be rational/mature in other situations either.
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OK, Vin Diesel has a nice body, but he is not attractive by American standards, so they can get the hell over that, too. I would venture that most nerd guys have more appealing faces than Vin Diesel. If you saw Vin Diesel on the street and didn’t know who he was, you wouldn’t give him a second glance.
SO, lets look at what makes Vin Diesel attractive.
1: We don’t actually KNOW him, he has never farted under the covers while we were trying to get hot & heavy.
2: He’s intelligent
3: He’s good at SOMETHING
4: He’s not a whiner
5: He has not creeped us out by being a remora or an asshole. It’s all about the personality, baby.
No point in listening to me, though, I fall into the ‘fat & ugly’ faction. 😛
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Hrm, I think you can learn a lot about a person who farts under the covers.
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Not the least important: what not to feed him before bed. *grin*
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I’m not sure that I really disagree with you or AATS, but I think this is a little simpler of a picture than what I’m comfortable with. To wit, I think attraction can be a complicated thing, but I can’t really explain it that well. I’ll try to offer something approaching an example or a metaphor or an analogy or whatever.
First, before I begin, I have my own hangups. All of the gamer women I’ve personally known were either a) involved, b) crazy, or c) frequently both at the same time, which has given me the irrational idea that women who are gamers are frequently crazy. I am working from an extraordinarily small sample size, and so this isn’t a real idea.
Anyways, I’m very overweight, intelligent, a gamer, male, clean, and generally polite, occasionally charming. I also have no luck meeting women. Getting to the point of actually going on a date is a rarity, and then it never leads to a 2nd date or even a potential friendship. Among my female friends, I’ve only asked out one, and while I initially thought she was interested, it turns out she just has no interest in dating me. I do believe that the commonly held assertion that being attractive and/or wealthy can help you date, but at the same time that would mean dating people who were into people for such things. My friends say that I over-emphasize the attractiveness thing, because I’m overweight, but from where I’m sitting it seems to matter a lot.
On the other hand, there’s the issue of dating a woman who shares the same interests as you, which in this case I’d say gaming is the big one. I think a lot of the same issues can apply. If I get refused in all dating circumstances, I’ll be just as likely to get refused in a gamer dating circumstance. When you add in any element of physical attraction, things get worse, as it takes an already small sample size and reduces it even further.
If my own personal experiences are any measure of what gamers deal with, I have grown up thinking that my weight issues were the result of an extremely unhealthy psychology. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that I might just be eating the wrong food, and was the fatty-fatty-mc-shove-food-in-his-face that media and school taught me I was. This had the unfortunate side-effect of helping me develop an unhealthy psychology (I’m depressed, you see) and in no way assisted me in losing weight in order that I might become attractive to myself. As a result, I tend to look at overweight people through the same lens by which I judge myself. Overweight = an unhealthy mind = someone I don’t want to date. After years of beating myself down and learning that, it’s taking a while to change that. And I’ve known fat gamer women and thin gamer women. There’s still a point at which I don’t find someone attractive because of their weight.
So, you see, I’m more or less coming to the same conclusion you are. Holding a double-standard about dating like that can be a shitty thing to do. But sometimes, I don’t think it’s a double-standard as much as it is a gigantic lump of personal problems that get all pushed together under the banner of ‘relationship problems’.
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Oh, like the “Nice Guys”(tm), right?
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Oh, I could go on for DAYS about Nice Guys ™.
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Have you read ‘The Brief Wondrous life of Oscar Wao’? I think it won the pulitzer and is partly about a nerdy geek guy who lusts only after hot women (but not the less attractive ones who might share his interests) yet remains unwashed etc. And the rest of his family.
It’s actually a pretty fun read.
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