Agreed. When I was a teenager, my high-school ‘nerd contingent’, regardless of gender, was heavily comprised of:
people on the autism spectrum, myself included;
people who were decidedly gender non-conforming, in an environment where that was pretty much a ‘please bully the shit out of me’ sign
All of us were pretty much social outcasts, one way or another and we dealt with that and the bullying in different ways (me, I went and completely lost it one day and beat my bullies with a fuckingchair-leg, viciously enough that I was able to spend my last year in high-school relatively bullying-free, on account of the worst suspects being scared shitless I’d pummel them again). Star Wars was, for example, as popular back then as it is right now, but that certainly didn’t help us, because liking Star Wars wasn’t the bloody problem – it was the fact that we were a bunch of neurodivergent, relatively physically unattractive, unpopular and gender non-conforming kids, from the soft-spoken, spindly boys who’d get pushed down the stairs to the tomboy girls like myself, who got more or less told everything from ‘this is why you’ll never had a boyfriend’ to ‘what’s the issue if I touch you, you’re not going to get any action from anyone else.’
There is a problem with nerd spaces, but it’s a more nuanced one than most people are willing to admit. And this problem, as was also experienced by myself, is that some nerd boys, even though they’ve been subjected to everything from vicious bullying to gatekeeping, turn around and do the same to nerd girls, for a whole host of reasons – ingrained cultural misogyny, a siege-mentality caused by social-ostracism that makes their friend-or-for detector go entirely haywire and the simple, unpleasant truth that being subjected to brutal treatment doesn’t mean that one is in any way inoculated against replicating said brutal treatment against another group (see the complete and utter shitshow that are whole sections of the LGBTQ+ community on here). This doesn’t change the fact that quite a bit of these boys have been subjected to bullying and bigotry, often on the basis of being neurodivergent, even when they went and replicated some of that nonsense against another group. This isn’t to say that they were or are in any way justified in their treatment of nerd girls/women, just that the situation is more complex than ‘lol gross men who want to be oppressed’, as a lot of wokesters keep trying to present it as.
pnkrathian 