Nerds and Male Privilege (opens in new tab)

"Privilege" is a loaded word. It's a word that some people take great offense to, but it's a word that cannot rationally be ignored.

Success can be a pretty fragile phenomenon. I never fully appreciated the benefit of privilege until relatively recently. I was an unfocused teenager who slacked in college, but stumbled onto a good career anyway (so far, fingers crossed). I would like to ascribe it to turning myself around and working hard, but the fact of the matter is that privilege played a huge role. I got to work at a cool startup right out of high school, because I lived in the sort of relatively nice neighborhood where well-connected people launching startups from their basements might live. I never had to worry about credit checks for jobs because my parents had kept me on a small line of credit all through college to build up my history. When I quit my job to go to grad school, I never worried about running short of money just as finals were rolling around--daddy could always front me a couple of hundred to get me through the rest of the month. This is not trust-fund level privilege, just something pretty much any engineer or the like could provide for his (or her) family, but I'm pretty sure without it I would be working some below-median job today.

So... before you decry the article, remember that success, for most people, is at the margins. Think about how you got to where you are, and ask yourself: if people just found me 5% less credible because of my gender, race, etc, would life really have turned out identically?

PS) I was reminded of how uneven things can subtly be a couple of days ago during the SOPA hearings. One of the posts that made it to the front page of reddit was a photo of some woman giving testimony, where the photo had been edited to look like it was an x-ray shot through her shirt. I thought to myself how interesting that was. Not that it was so insanely offensive in and of itself, but rather because I've never seen something like that pop up on the front page when a man says something dumb on TV.

"I will pause now for the traditional arguments from my readers...Got all of that out of your systems? Good.

Because that reaction is exactly what I'm talking about."

Why bother having a discussion with someone who sets up their argument to be that those who disagree with their argument are only proving the point?

The arguments that women should be treated with silver gloves are by their very nature sexist.

"mouth-breathing troglodyte" pretty much immediately tells me what way the article is going to go. Which is to demonize male sexuality.

"And that was when I shot him, your honor." another sign of clear bias.

This is like reading straight from a feminist cookbook. Nothing new, nothing that would be worth any deeper thought.

I enjoy what I enjoy. It's not illegal so you may as well shut up. It's not up to you, dear author, to tell me how I should live my life.

There was nothing new in the article. It was the same tired argument that because men like boobs and they consume popular entertainment that contain boobs they are evil. Which makes no sense to me.

Maybe as the author grows up and lives a little he will see through the matrix.

We all have our biases. But it is a different thing entirely to confuse your shallow rationalizations with actual fact.

First, the author complains that women get treated only as sexual objects in most games/comics/etc. Ok, that could be. It's not in Halo or Bioshock, the only games I play, but let's look at the data. So then he mentions opposing view - that men get sexualized too, and then instead of addressing that objection calls it sexist and dismisses it. Really? I would expect some stats, not simply "only sexist would say that" kind of reply. He does this repeatedly throughout the article - not addressing an argument, but simply labeling it with an ugly label and moving on. FWIW, the picture of batman he posted looks sexualized to me, as far as I can judge those things.

Then he just goes to make unsubstantiated broad claims. But of course pointing out lack of substance would be sexist, reflexive and defensive of me :)

A few choice quotes: "A man who's strong-willed or aggressive won't be denigrated for it". In my neck of the woods he will. I did, and I saw others going out of line getting a talk.

"...nor are men socialized to 'go along to get along'." Same thing here, I've seen it all the time.

Men can expect that their presence at an event won't automatically be assumed to be decorative or secondary to another man.

Not really. Ask the benchwarmers for a high school sports team.

Despite the growing presence of women in comics, as publishers, editors and creators as well as consumers, a preponderance of men will either treat women at conventions as inconveniences, booth bunnies or even potential dates.

I can't comment on comic books but in the books, movies and TV shows I want I've actually found the exact opposite is increasingly true. There's a strong temptation to make the female characters super-human creatures with a PHD and a shotgun. Always a witty comeback. Always the most moral and ethical characters.

Men are also not going to be automatically assigned into a particular niche just based on their gender.

Tell that to some straight guy who happens to like female-centric things. They're going to be assumed to be homosexuals most of the time.

And when they are seen as customers, they're often automatically assumed to be buying one of the designated "girl" properties

Perhaps in the same way a man strolling around certain types of stores popular with females would be seen?

One of these is welcomed into geek culture with open arms, the other has to justify their existence in the first place.

Says who?

makes women feel unwelcome in fandom

Tell that to all the rapid female Twilight fans.

And on a related note, I really wish "gender" submissions on HN would start getting banned automatically. Because they almost always end up a case of beating a dead horse over and over and over again, especially from the perspective of those who've been around long enough.

ps. The author of the OA needs to wander into the Romance section of a bookstore some time. He'll be shocked, shocked at the level of sexual objectification and stereotyping that goes on there. But in the reverse direction. But since the college/PC/lesbian/feminist litmob doesn't care about that, then it's not talked about. It's considered perfectly okay. Quotes from the article like this are common with people who've been programmed with that mindset: "(Obvious disclaimer: I'm a straight white man.)" <-- Oh you poor accidental oppressor you!

>> And when you check back on Friday, I'll provide you with some concrete applications on how being cognizant of male privilege will improve your relations with women.

I'm excited about the possibilities of the "practical applications" - there is an awful lot of "identifying the problem" and "raising awareness" (as Helianthus refers to in another comment on this thread), however, not a lot of solutions. Obviously they're not simple, and they're not easy, and they're imperfect, but I'd like to see some other people's ideas about them.

I've known similarly female-dominated groups where men are automatically regarded as good-for-nothing troglodytes who will lazily eat, drink and watch sports all day with no positive contribution to wider life, while the intelligent, capable, hard-working and long-suffering women get on and do the important things the men simply can't, because they're men. Indeed, this will sometimes be seen openly in popular culture - advertising, sitcoms, soaps etc. I've done quite a lot of voluntary work with children, particularly younger children over the years; in some contexts there is still mild incredulity about the idea that a man can understand and cater well for small children, because that's What Women Do Best.

Sure, we need to watch out for ourselves and try to respect all on their merits, not objectify and stereotype. Equally there's plenty of women who don't fit in with the group I outlined above. But - work to address this problem on all fronts. Fix it when we see it in our behaviour and those of us around us, whether we're the aggressor, the victim or neither.

How is this different/worse than having cheerleaders on the side of a football field? Or Baywatch?

Not that I'm defending poor or sexist behavior, but singling out "nerds" as being the worst troglodytes out there seems a bit much.

Men: Serious. Women: Sexy.

Okay, no arguments there. But what does this difference in portrayal of the two sexes really mean? However much some might believe otherwise, humans are hard-wired by evolution to have gender roles. Homo sapiens has been around for roughly a hundred thousand years. Our species evolved from older hunter-gatherer species and has existed for almost its entire history as hunter-gatherers. What little we know about hunter-gatherer societies suggest that they were relatively egalitarian, but with definite gender roles.

Men: expendable risk takers. If half the men in a hunter-gatherer band are wiped out by a mammoth hunt gone wrong, the next generation can still be just as large, only with slightly less genetic diversity. So what makes a mammoth hunter popular with the ladies? Well, he has to look like he's going to be one of the guys who will actually come back. i.e. A badass.

Women: non-expendible reproducers. No matter how many men are around, the number of women who successfully bear children are what defines the reproductive success of a band. If you're a man, you don't want the woman who goes out mammoth hunting with the guys, you want the woman who picks berries (gathering was probably even more vital to a band's survival than hunting!) and who has hips made for making babies.

In this light, what we might really be seeing in geek media is portrayals of both males and females that cater to our perception of desirability to the opposite sex. Powerful, serious, badass men are desirable to women, so they are what we see in comics. The same goes for sexy, fertile, women. Men and women are being portrayed differently because different things set them apart as elite or superior to others of their gender, thanks to our hunter-gatherer wiring.

If this interpretation is correct, then media that portrays men as badass and woman as sexy isn't necessarily showing evidence of pandering to males. It may simply be reflecting evolutionary gender roles. It may be that this is one thing males should stop all the self-flagellation over.

i'm not sure how that had anything to do with being a girl. she was told she didn't get it because she didn't get it. if a male walked into that comic shop looking out of place, picked up a book and said something disparaging outloud, he'd probably get mocked just the same for being a newbie.

my girlfriend is into comics and i'm not. if i went into a store with her and started saying shit about comics, i would completely expect to get called out for it. the only difference is that i wouldn't storm out and never return like the author's girlfriend.

You can't say that Angry Birds is misogynistic, nor could you say the same of Bubble Bobble, Spy Hunter, Tempest, Centipede, Strider, Tetris, Farmville, and thousands of other video games throughout the ages. One thing Facebook, iPhone and Android have FINALLY brought is "casual" gaming for the masses, by demonstrating a market that nobody could see due to the social stigma of the geeky loser gamer.

The crazy shit only comes with heavy action games, mostly FPS (but even here there are numerous exceptions, such as Left 4 Dead).

But then again you see the same thing in TV and movies; they cater to different audiences, some of whom are offended by things the other audience likes (usually what the other audience finds sexually appealing). But when it comes down to it, it's escapist media. People don't care that it's unlikely, and they most certainly don't assume that it in any way reflects real life, any more than someone playing a FPS is likely to take a gun to work and start shooting up the place.

The comic industry in America on the whole has never grown up beyond male adolescent fantasy. That's unfortunate, as there are much richer possibilities (the Japanese manga industry, for example, caters to so many segments it's mind blowing).

But make no mistake: The American comic industry is not an example of male privilege, or any unconscious attempt at keeping women down; It's a vicious cycle of social stigma against comic READERS, and the resulting lack of market for a wider audience. Maybe someday the "iPhone of comics" will come and save us.

I have always hated "You are male, YOU WILL LIKE THIS CHICK" flavored messages, and this still bothers me. Especially in an article like this.

Where do I sign up for the privilige of having members of the opposite sex fall all over themselves doing things for me in order to get my attention?

http://twitpic.com/7to6eb

An article referring to females working in technology as "tech totty".

This isn't some obscure insider tech publication, it's the cover for the industry journal for graduate recruitment.

I find it shocking that a mainstream HR journal would use such a term, and I think it's a sign that it's a wider issue than just the geek community. Society as a whole needs to become more accepting of girls in geek culture.

I'm not saying you should switch to a different kind of games and ignore the trends in the rest of them, but I see that a lot of people decrying "sex and violence" in various types of media are also validating the exact same works that are fundamentally based on sex and violence. That doesn't make sense.

The commic book male figures he mentioned fell into two types: The deadly serious, strong, sexy Batman and two not particularly sexed supervillains. In other words, while the women are all about sex, for men, only the good guys-- the superheroes-- are. This may still make a case for male privilege but it's not as clear-cut I think as he wants to think.

The second thing is that men tend to stare at boobs. This is not unique to geek culture.

This being said, I do think that it is important not to dismiss people's views because of gender. Some of the most talented programmers I have ever met were women. In fact I would take that further and say the most talented programmer I have ever worked with is a woman. I learned a heck of a lot about security audits, programming secure code, and also general algorithms and good software design, development, and engineering practices from her (including her starting IRC dialogs to call me on the carpet for mistakes on my part). To the extent women's views are ignored because of gender that's pretty bad.

But another thing I have heard from women in open source is that one of the most annoying aspects of gender in open source is to be asked over and over "so what do you think we need to do to get women involved in open source?" I have seen plenty of replies of "Do you have ANY idea how annoying it is to be constantly asked that?"

I can't really comment on video game culture, from a personal point of view; obviously there were no video games when I was growing up. And the only video game that ever held my interest, other than for their graphics technology, was Myst; and it hardly had any people in it at all, objectivized or otherwise.

(I have been doing some work learning Blender the last few weeks. And a lot of the tutorials I've been working through have a definite gamer design aesthetic to them. I swear if I have to work through another youtube video about how to create an inappropriately under-clad-for-the-forrest elf girl, or sullen, post-apocalyptic hooker/warrior, I'm gonna barf...)

American animation has always been stuck at the grade school, pre-puberty level. So its gender problem is less objectification than it is the whole princess thingie.

However, for American comics the primary audience has pretty much always been sexually maturing males. (Historically, with a few notable exceptions, comics aimed at girls were created by men with little insight into what a female audience might like.) So it's not particularly surprising that the successful comic market caters to power fantasies, rebellion, and sexual objectification. And the fact that comics, again in the U.S., have usually been considered a third rate art form, means there's been no real incentive to conceal or domesticate the raw, naked id on display a lot of the time.

Now I actually have no real problem with that. Geeky teenagers who can't get a date, or have gender empathy issues are people too. I can relate. And a little misogyny, and misandry, can be fun at times. (There's nothing particularly uplifting and socially relevant about the Three Stooges either; but I still enjoy the occasional Nyuk and eye poke.) And certainly the over-the-top, operatic story lines would seem to require picaresque, allegorical characters, ripped from the collective psyche.

But, damn, a little variety would sure be appreciated.

If I accidentally wander into a comic book store these days I'm surrounded by little else but 40-60 year old S&M archetypes, minute variations on characters created years before most of the current audience were even born. And with a bipolar range of emotions, angry dominatrix to submissive sex kitten, that would make an anime/manga tsundere blush.

I lost interest in most American mainstream comics around 1975, mainly through boredom. Now there has always been higher quality work floating around. It's there if you look for it. But Sturgeon's Law applies, with the added characteristic that the 90% case is almost indistinguishable and frozen in time; and at adolescence. Sure the technology is getting better; we've got better reproduction and the distribution system is no longer random mafioso magazine distribution. But the literary style and moral compass is provided by Frank Miller, with art direction by Eric Stanton. It's an insular culture, with little cross fertilization with the rest of society, that keeps telling the same story over and over. Now the base story and its archetypes are not without their merits, but it's certainly not the be-all, end-all of the medium. It just seems that way sometimes.

A year or so ago, when the _Scott Pilgrim_ movie out, I really enjoyed it. After seeing it I immediately ran out and bought the graphic novels. I had almost nothing in common with the characters, the music and video game references were largely lost on me, but it was so nice to have something a little different than the dull thudding of the mainstream American comics Ur-legend. It was light, fluffy, with a novel, to me, storyline. And it had engaging characters. I found it very manga-like, both in its visuals and its approach to storytelling.

Which brings us to manga.

I got re-interested in comics around 10 years ago when the Japanese manga and anime started to become easily available. Now everything bad and/or chauvinistic that you can find in U.S. comics, and by extension, game culture, you can find in spades in the Japanese product; and that's what you usually find imported and bought by the U.S. comics companies and distributors. However, if you look at the bigger picture, at the market in Japan, there's much more variety and a generally higher level of literary and visual quality than you find anywhere else in the world for visual media. I'm not really sure why this is. Partly it is because there is much less stigma in their culture directed towards comics; but that doesn't explain the problems with video game culture over here. Over there not only boys read comics, but girls do too. And young adults, and even 40 year old salarymen and OL (office ladies). They have comics aimed at insurance salesmen, golfers, pretty much any kind of genre you can conceive of. The Onion would have a hard time parodying the variety of Japanese manga.

Now Sturgeon's Law still applies, but the absolute numbers are so much greater that the absolute numbers of the good 10% is much higher than over here. And the distribution of non-juvenile, male oriented material is much healthier. The anime and video gaming industries seem to be less so, but they do seem healthier than ours. And don't many of "our" more popular games come from Japan?

One big difference in Japanese comic culture, in addition to its size, is that it is much more of a participative one. Non-professional, fan created comics, or Doujinshi, are a major "craft industry" over there. Comiket, the biggest non-professional sales and marketing convention, routinely has half a million attendees, twice a year, with 30,000+ author circles, or groups, selling their often high quality amateur comics and visual novels. Now admittedly, the "adult oriented" Doujinshi get the most press, and a substantial percentage of the audience, but there's a lot of alternatives for those who want it. One of the alternatives is a form of erotic literature, some quite pornographic, and much of it quite good, created by women and aimed at women. I don't see that kind of thing in large demographic U.S. comics. Other than the Japanese imports, of course…

Maybe the solution to the U.S. game industry's geek image has to do with smaller scale, more diverse, more specialized gaming creation companies. With games aimed at demographics who aren't 14 year old males or those who were once 14 year old males and have never had an easily available and well marketed alternative. I'm not really qualified to speculate intelligently. That market may well exist and I'm just unaware of it.

If it does exist, I may be interested.

I really would hope, that women in video games are in fact judged by how attractive they are. I certainly wouldn't want an obese woman superhero saving the world, just as I'm sure the gay males and the straight women wouldn't want to see a tub of lard (excuse my language) in a male, who is supposed to epitomize the superhuman virtues that we lack.

Yeah, it's shit easy to wave a finger and say "omg u guyz objectify womenz!!!" but honestly, stop for a moment and think about it. This isn't unique to nerd/geek/whatever-you-want-to-call-it culture.

This is spread through the ENTIRE western world. Why? We like beauty. We (and I speak as a straight male - feel free to adjust the context to your preference) like the way those subtle curves meld into a girl's hips. And why shouldn't we? The female body is a thing of beauty - it's delicately crafted, given form by years of grooming and attention. You'll be hard pressed, even among the straight-female population (at least the 18-25 age group), to find many people who think likewise about the male body.

When I told pg about my idea, he told me to consider how females would react; this is very much the same situation. Try dressing a video game girl up in a trench coat, with green hair, and ugly classes, and ask a girl if that's a character she'd like to play. No, it's not.

Who am I to speak? I've been in the gaming industry for a while, and I've probably passed my 10,000 hours of MMO development/management. Give most gaming girls a choice, and they will CHOOSE to dress their characters in slutty--or as they call it, "sexy cute"--clothing. Can you almost see most of their legs? Yes. Should their nipples probably slip out once in a while, if there was a realistic physics engine? Yes.

Do they care? No. Just as I would not like to play a male character whose genitals are almost falling out, females would not like to (in general) play female characters who are covered by obstructive and unattractive clothing. Why do my friends adorn themselves in dresses that barely cover their underwear when they go to clubs? I used to think it was because they wanted to attract males, and while that may sometimes be the case, many of them have loyal boyfriends and won't even dance with other guys.

Want to know the real reason, why there are so few girls in gaming? Well, I don't know - though here's one (partial) guess:

Most "nerds/geeks" are disgusting. I have a terrible sense of smell, and sometimes I'm forced to recoil from my more nerdy peers. If everyone took the time to shower daily, use proper body wash, shampoo (and watch out of dandruff) and condition separately, exfoliate, and shave, I'd bet way more women will enter the gaming phenomenon.

Remember - gaming isn't always a solo affair. Much of the time, directly or indirectly, it's a social activity.

And all who care of the sexism in IT, geek culture, etc., should turn themselves to the core problem. Use the Japanese method: ask 5 questions "why?"

Why are geeks so sexist? They see women first of all as a sexual object.

Why they do this? Because this is what they want. They are sexually hungry young men.

Why are they sexually hungry? They don't have much dating and sex. I admit that some guys are ok in this area and just misbehave.

Why do they have issues? Because they're geeks, and geeks are uncool, not sexually attractive.

Now, start curing this issue, not telling them to behave.

If a person is depressed, up to having no appetite, it's a common complaint from the relatives that the sick person is mistreating them, doesn't want to talk, closes the door, etc. Do you think a depression can be solved by telling that person to behave? Or by telling "life goes on", "birds are tweeting, ha ha"? No. It still doesn't make that person's needs met.

Yet when it comes to social phoenomena, the treatment that is zealously promoted is to treat the outcomes, not the source.

So, I suggest to the IT industry managers: start making your nerds' needs met. I don't know how. Hire a prostitute? May be valid in some special cases. Make a dating event? Maybe. Hire a psychologist? Can be useful. Make a party with a most-women company? Maybe.

Basically, I think it's worth trying to let them have more dating and learn some social skills. (This all has to be in a very delicate way, of course.) But stop teaching people how to live. If you don't like how they behave, fire them, don't try to become a father who dislikes his son but keeps living together. (This is exactly what the article says: I hate this, but I stay!)

Solve the real issue, make their needs met.

How hard is it to provide content in 2011?

http://derailingfordummies.com/

Arguments of that form are already all over this thread, so you can also use this as a bingo card.

I'm not going to defend the treatment of women in geek culture, as much of it is indefensible. but it seems that few people bring up one of the most important factors in its existence, one which has nothing at all to do with objectification. It has more to do with envy, anger, and an amazing ability to hold a grudge.

Many HN readers are from a younger generation than myself. Many of you grew up always equating geek with "cool", and have no conception of what it would be like to be treated as nearly subhuman for liking computers. Some of us, however, remember the torment, the humiliation, the violence, the scorn and the ostracism of finding science, electronics, and computers fascinating. There was, indeed, such a time. Many nerds who endured poor treatment at the hands of their peers developed deep emotional traumas that, to this day, exist to some extent or another. One of these traumas is borne of the experience of being not merely rejected, but openly mocked by girls during the most critical time in a young man's life when he is supposed to develop his sense of social status and sexuality. Frustration and humiliation is quick to turn to anger, and from anger, a deep rooted misogyny.

The result of this kind of upbringing is often a socially stunted man who, despite all his powers of logic and reason, finds it difficult to reason away the anger that he knows shouldn't be there, but is. He witnesses sexism and mistreatment of women around him, but he lacks the empathy required to say or do anything about it.

This concludes my armchair psychologist's analysis of one possible dimension of a hypothesis of why many of my generation permits geek culture to allow rampant sexism.

Caveats: I have no data or training in psychology to suggest this is at all a significant factor. But I am quite familiar with the phenomenon, and I know several other nerds who experience the same thing. I mention it only because it seems the zeitgeist is that men don't even see the sexism. I posit that many do see it, but it doesn't matter to (a good portion of) them. And that a possible cause of this in geek culture specifically is latent adolescent anger at women.

All this article really shows me is that the girlfriend was correct to avoid going into a comic book store.

You cannot control culture you cannot control subcultures you cannot make people think "right."

You can be selective about which subcultures you expose you and your friends to and which you'll allow into your home.

Waxing eloquent about how we're unaware of male privilege has become preachy.