Your Princess is in Another Castle: Arthur Chu Calls Out Nerd Guys

[TygrBright]

About the best rant on the underlying misogyny in "nerd culture" I've run across so far:

"Your Princess is In Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds"

It's not just that he busts the kind of whiny "attention whores doing fake cosplay to tease REAL nerd guys at cons" crap that women in specfic media fandom have to deal with.

It's that he pinpoints the media tropes and complicit memes that enable the sense of entitlement, clearly and (somewhat) succinctly.

He cops to his own seduction by the creepy, objectifying cultural narratives common to nerddom, on occasion, and reveals insight and empathy in his self-analysis.

Well done, Arthur.

I would purely love it if nerddom, which has a strong bias to intelligence, imagination, and other qualities I value highly, became "the subculture that GETS it," and engaged in meaningful and successful self-transformation.

Possible?

speculatively,
Bright

[NuclearDem]

1. Well done, Arthur!

But look. One of the major plot points of Revenge of the Nerds is Lewis putting on a Darth Vader mask, pretending to be his jock nemesis Stan, and then having sex with Stan’s girlfriend. Initially shocked when she finds out his true identity, she’s so taken by his sexual prowess—“All jocks think about is sports. All nerds think about is sex.”—that the two of them become an item.

Classic nerd fantasy, right? Immensely attractive to the young male audience who saw it. And a stock trope, the “bed trick,” that many of the nerds watching probably knew dates back to the legend of King Arthur.

It’s also, you know, rape.

Especially this.

On a side note, I think I'm going to go back and watch Anita Sarkeesian's videos again.

[Xyzse]

2. Well written. I will have to thank the guy for his essay.

I can only agree.

[Starry Messenger]

3. Marking to read later.

[Throd]

4. A great exercise in self-awareness on his part. Well done, sir.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

5. Why does the author feel the need to single out nerds as a cause for this tragedy?

I get he self-identifies as a nerd and thus feels obligated to comment on it from that peerspective, but still....Elliot Rodgers' problem was not that he was a "nerd." The problem was because he was a psychopath.

He came from a rich family, his father had an interesting career, he drove a nice car, and he himself was a fairly good looking guy by most standards. If he had applied himself, he could easily gotten himself into a relationship on superficial reasons alone. (And yes, there are plenty of both men and women who enter into relationships strictly for superficial reasons such as looks or wealth)

He was clearly mentally defective in that he somehow assumed women would throw themselves upon him with absolutely zero effort needed from himself. That's not realistic in any sense, and yet when women didn't just automatically throw themselves at him walking down the street, his faulty wiring in his brain somehow took that as a slight. Honestly, most women wouldn't throw themselves even at a Brad Pitt lookalike without some sort of back and forth engagement. People just don't act like that, period.

The author of this piece seems to take aim at the supposed mindset of nerds that lust after the pretty girls, but why is this misogyny a nerd problem? Think about Steubenville--the people accused of raping women were members of the high school football team. They were "jocks" and essentially everything you would associate as being from "the popular crowd." And yet, those men felt like they were entitled to sex with women without any sort of need for their consent.

Frankly, his piece is all one big red herring on the actual causes of this tragedy.

[TygrBright]

6. Thank you, that's very helpful. n/t