Re: Comment Catcher: Where Geek Girls Come Fromrmc28June 20 2016, 09:20:27 UTC
I know for sure that my dad doesn't really remember pulling out that book for me (and implicitly giving me permission to roam outside the children's section of the library), because of a conversation we had a few years ago when the author of that book died.
I do sometimes wonder what apparently-casual actions of mine will be taken to heart in the same way by my children.
Re: Comment Catcher: Where Geek Girls Come Fromext_3300479June 20 2016, 09:30:11 UTC
Huh, that rings pretty true for me.
I was in the minority of women who answered without reference to other people. In my case, I think that's likely because I didn't have many geeky people in my life until I found them myself, at science camps; what did get me into it was reading my dad's books (he passed away when I was very young so wasn't there to recommend any!).
I certainly didn't think of myself as a programmer, though, until I got explicit encouragement from people at those camps (nearly all of whom were men). (Also, I'm certainly on the younger end of your sample! So I've probably had some quite different experiences.)
Thanks for writing this up -- it's really interesting to think about!
Re: Comment Catcher: Where Geek Girls Come Fromheron61June 20 2016, 09:37:03 UTC
That makes sense and fits with what I've heard from other geeky women.
I have a somewhat amusing reverse case - I encountered SF&F on my own, but I knew nothing of SF cons until I was my junior high gifted program and my wonderful & impressively geeky female 8th grade English teacher took everyone in her class who was interested (IIRC, a group of roughly 2/3 boys and 1/3 girls) to a local SF con. She also had a lending library of several hundred SF novels available to her students.
Also, in contrast to pretty much everyone I've ever met - I got into RPGs via the woman I was dating in my freshman year of college, and was the only man in her otherwise all-female RPG group. I'd heard of tabletop RPGs before, but had never played them.
Weird. I wonder if we're defining geekery differently, if it's a cultural or generational thing, or if my experience is just unusual, but... as a cis guy, it'd been my feeling that regardless of your sex, being enough of a geek always set you apart. I definitely had the experience in elementary school, that very few others were into computers/role-playing/Star Wars/etc. anywhere near as much as I was, in a way that required a special origin story. Not because I happened to be a geeky guy, but just because I was geeky in the first place.
So "most guys took it for granted that they might be like this, thus not requiring any origin story" was a surprising result to me.
If you're from my generation, or older, or no more than a little bit younger, I'm right there with you 100% that being a geek always set one apart. (I have a lot I want to eventually write about that!) "Geek" was (until recently) an insult for a boy or man who was performing masculinity in this (then) socially unacceptable way: "geek" things were "male", but it was an inferior, scorned, disgraceful form of masculinity. What generation are you?
The difference seems to be from where I sit - and I grew up in an era that was openly contemptuous of geekery - that geekery in men always had an implicit essentialist explanation: "some guys are just defective like that". Hence no origin story. Do you have an origin story? When has it come up in your life (like how in mine I found myself having origin-story discussions as a frosh in college)?
"geek" things were "male", but it was an inferior, scorned, disgraceful form of masculinity.
Yeah, that was kinda my feeling growing up.
What generation are you?
1986 vintage. Also Finnish, which may be the biggest thing here, though I'd always assumed that the "geeks were always a breed apart" was an international thing, at least among Western countries.
My origin story is my dad, who read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings to me, was into Star Trek when I was little and got into Babylon 5 together with me when I was slightly less little, and who taught me about the existence of game consoles when he started renting them from the local video rental store for me.
It's always been clear to me that this was my geek origin story, though I don't recall it ever coming up or me discussing it with anyone before this.
I've always felt like a bit of a weirdo as an American-born woman in tech because I *don't* have this sort of origin story. I fell in love with computers at school and at friends' houses and begged my non-geeky parents for one until we got one. We got AOL when I was 9 and I was instantly smitten with the internet. No adult relative ever recommended I check something out; no teacher noticed me and took me under their wing. On the contrary; adults in tech almost uniformly were either indifferent to me or encouraged me to stick with poetry. My tech geekery was entirely self-taught and self-motivated until I was actually able to pursue formal computer science coursework late in high school, at which point people started throwing piles of cash at me to urge me to stick with it. I always feel when hearing or reading these sorts of stories that everyone else got an invitation to the club from someone who was already a member and I just walked in a side door and tried to look like I belonged there
( ... )
I must be almost exactly the same age (I am 45). My father was an engineer. His brother was a draughtsman-turned-programmer. And my dad did buy me my first computer (a ZX81). But I originally got into computing because of a teacher when I was 8. A female teacher. She was typing a program into a ZX80 from a magazine, and it wouldn't work. I spotted that there was a bug *in the magazine text itself* and fixed it. I had never seen a computer or a program before in my life. I just knew that of you started with a " surely you had to end with a " too, just like in books... And that was that. I note that I started in the most "real-world" way possible. With finding a bug, in an apparently authoratitive source, that I had to intuit a logical solution to. I was obviously destined to do this ... So my story is "when I was young, there was a woman" Is that any different? I don't know.
An excellent piece, and one I'll be linking to enthusiastically in my next entry (via supergee). I'd love to say more about myself, but it's a bit complicated at this stage, and better left for an entry not on the open web.
Have you considered approaching Autostraddle with a version of this entry, I wonder? I'm not sure if they have much of a budget, but they do tend to accept that people have costs of living, rather than assuming you'll merrily submit to them for free (eg HuffPo).
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I do sometimes wonder what apparently-casual actions of mine will be taken to heart in the same way by my children.
Reply
I was in the minority of women who answered without reference to other people. In my case, I think that's likely because I didn't have many geeky people in my life until I found them myself, at science camps; what did get me into it was reading my dad's books (he passed away when I was very young so wasn't there to recommend any!).
I certainly didn't think of myself as a programmer, though, until I got explicit encouragement from people at those camps (nearly all of whom were men). (Also, I'm certainly on the younger end of your sample! So I've probably had some quite different experiences.)
Thanks for writing this up -- it's really interesting to think about!
Reply
I have a somewhat amusing reverse case - I encountered SF&F on my own, but I knew nothing of SF cons until I was my junior high gifted program and my wonderful & impressively geeky female 8th grade English teacher took everyone in her class who was interested (IIRC, a group of roughly 2/3 boys and 1/3 girls) to a local SF con. She also had a lending library of several hundred SF novels available to her students.
Also, in contrast to pretty much everyone I've ever met - I got into RPGs via the woman I was dating in my freshman year of college, and was the only man in her otherwise all-female RPG group. I'd heard of tabletop RPGs before, but had never played them.
Reply
So "most guys took it for granted that they might be like this, thus not requiring any origin story" was a surprising result to me.
Reply
The difference seems to be from where I sit - and I grew up in an era that was openly contemptuous of geekery - that geekery in men always had an implicit essentialist explanation: "some guys are just defective like that". Hence no origin story. Do you have an origin story? When has it come up in your life (like how in mine I found myself having origin-story discussions as a frosh in college)?
Reply
Yeah, that was kinda my feeling growing up.
What generation are you?
1986 vintage. Also Finnish, which may be the biggest thing here, though I'd always assumed that the "geeks were always a breed apart" was an international thing, at least among Western countries.
My origin story is my dad, who read the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings to me, was into Star Trek when I was little and got into Babylon 5 together with me when I was slightly less little, and who taught me about the existence of game consoles when he started renting them from the local video rental store for me.
It's always been clear to me that this was my geek origin story, though I don't recall it ever coming up or me discussing it with anyone before this.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Have you considered approaching Autostraddle with a version of this entry, I wonder? I'm not sure if they have much of a budget, but they do tend to accept that people have costs of living, rather than assuming you'll merrily submit to them for free (eg HuffPo).
Reply
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