Fake Geek Girls - NOT!
Awesome post: You can check my credentials if I can check yours.
I just realized that my attitude towards geekishness is the same as my attitude towards Christians: if someone identifies as one, they ARE one. They may not be the same flavour of geek or Christian as I am, but if they wear the (metaphorical) badge, then I will treat them as a brother/sister in that circle. Mind you, that includes calling them out on bad behaviour, but if you wear the badge, you have a responsibility towards that badge, too.
This whole "fake geek girl" thing - the "testing" especially - reminds me of the attitude in certain conservative Christian circles: that if one does not give the "correct" (i.e. approved) answer to some given question about Doctrine (i.e. dogma) then one is deemed to be "unsound". My father got that more than once in his early career (being an Old Testament scholar). He tended to be too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives.
This sour exclusivity is an attitude I simply cannot comprehend.
I've never been subjected to a "fake geek girl" test, probably because I'm not in comics fandom, where this particular form of misogyny runs rampant. If anyone ever did try to do that, I'd give them a piece of my mind. I am very confident in my geek cred. If Saint Paul was a Hebrew of Hebrews, I'm a geek of geeks.
Let me turn a geekish spin onto Philippians 3:2-7 here...
Beware of the dogs, beware of the evildoers, beware of the fake geeks; for we are the true geeks, who are enthusiastic and welcoming, and rejoice in the things we love, and put no confidence in geek tests, although I myself might have confidence even in geek tests. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in geek tests, I far more: I listened to The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia stories before I could read, and can quote whole swathes of them; as to technical prowess, a professional programmer for more than twenty years(*); as to fannishness, a convention goer, a convention panellist, a costume maker, a fan writer, a reviewer, a fan artist, a fanzine editor, an owner of mailing lists, an organizer of ficathons. But whatever things were gain to me, these things I have counted as loss for the sake of being welcoming to newbies and making fandom a fun place to be.
So there.
(*) A line I would love to use: "I've been programming since BEFORE YOU WERE BORN!"
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I just realized that my attitude towards geekishness is the same as my attitude towards Christians: if someone identifies as one, they ARE one. They may not be the same flavour of geek or Christian as I am, but if they wear the (metaphorical) badge, then I will treat them as a brother/sister in that circle. Mind you, that includes calling them out on bad behaviour, but if you wear the badge, you have a responsibility towards that badge, too.
This whole "fake geek girl" thing - the "testing" especially - reminds me of the attitude in certain conservative Christian circles: that if one does not give the "correct" (i.e. approved) answer to some given question about Doctrine (i.e. dogma) then one is deemed to be "unsound". My father got that more than once in his early career (being an Old Testament scholar). He tended to be too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the conservatives.
This sour exclusivity is an attitude I simply cannot comprehend.
I've never been subjected to a "fake geek girl" test, probably because I'm not in comics fandom, where this particular form of misogyny runs rampant. If anyone ever did try to do that, I'd give them a piece of my mind. I am very confident in my geek cred. If Saint Paul was a Hebrew of Hebrews, I'm a geek of geeks.
Let me turn a geekish spin onto Philippians 3:2-7 here...
Beware of the dogs, beware of the evildoers, beware of the fake geeks; for we are the true geeks, who are enthusiastic and welcoming, and rejoice in the things we love, and put no confidence in geek tests, although I myself might have confidence even in geek tests. If anyone else has a mind to put confidence in geek tests, I far more: I listened to The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia stories before I could read, and can quote whole swathes of them; as to technical prowess, a professional programmer for more than twenty years(*); as to fannishness, a convention goer, a convention panellist, a costume maker, a fan writer, a reviewer, a fan artist, a fanzine editor, an owner of mailing lists, an organizer of ficathons. But whatever things were gain to me, these things I have counted as loss for the sake of being welcoming to newbies and making fandom a fun place to be.
So there.
(*) A line I would love to use: "I've been programming since BEFORE YOU WERE BORN!"
This entry was originally posted at http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/975074.html. (Comments
) Respond here, or respond on the Dreamwidth post, as you prefer. You can use your DW login or OpenId there.