I used to think that sexism in the world was entirely due to men, but I think the factor has more to do with how both genders build up their identity as children. For instance, When males grow up they have to separate themselves from the femininity because guys who show their “sensitive” emotions or thoughts will be ridiculed for being feminine.

This isn’t fair to both boys and girls because it devalues femininity which leads to sexism for girls (since girls are expected to be feminine). Additionally, this causes problems for males because they will have to live up to the “superior” ideal of masculinity and if they don’t, the will be considered feminine or female-like. In other words, a sissy.

I think identity-building has a big root in the reason why some people find blatant sexism acceptable. Such as female characters always having to be the one rescued, females characters usually having to look sexually attractive in movies/games, and even in school, not just online. In my graphic engineering class, mostly dominated by men, a guy needed help and the teacher assigned a girl to aid him. One guy sitting next to him said, “haha you need help from a girl.” What was most disturbing was the girl was right in front of him, including another girl, me, who was sitting next to him.

Since, I’m a female, I have to acknowledge that I can’t completely form a guy’s perspective, but I will try tie up my ideas to geek culture. Because males, at a very earlier age, are pressured by society to be strong and powerful, geeks males try to find ways to make themselves live up to that ideal. Some find answers in putting-down geek females online – saying things like “females stink at (this or that),” attempting to build up their sense of worth, and the pride of being a male. Other ways they can make themselves look stronger (than women) is to insult other males by calling them “you’re a women!” I’ve witnessed this in my engineering class and in online games/forums. Sometimes I question why I let myself be exposed to this kinds of blatant disrespect, but I love gaming and if girl geeks are to be accepted into the gaming culture, we have to show we are strong by brushing off slurs like these.

Although the gaming culture does show many forms of sexism towards women, I think that people are becoming more and more tolerant of female gamers and females as a whole. Most tolerant people are older and mature. The many friends I’ve met through gaming respect me as they do the other males, the ones that don’t respect me are usually the ones who don’t have respect for most other people – their parents, themselves and even their friends. However, there are males and females who just disrespect women period, and those are the people who’s opinion don’t matter because their opinions are just full of hatred and no reason behind it.

I don’t think it’s a question of why geeks don’t accept girl geeks. It has more to do with the complexity of how people find their identities. I see girl geeks almost as if they were the tomboys of the internet/media. Girls aren’t being bashed for being geeks, they are being bashed for being a girl and the privilege that they can be feminine (and even masculine) and not be ridiculed for it, and since you can say anything on the net, some geeks will say anything to feel more big and superior. That’s just human nature. But of course, it’s not a right or just excuse in the treatment of women.

In order for both genders to become more tolerant of the other, we have to stop treating females and males like they are totally different. We act like we are all either pink or blue, why can’t we be green, somewhere in the middle? When I grew up as a child I thought I was the same as a guy apart from physical characteristics and sexuality. I had to steadily learn that society did not view females in society (including the geek culture) in the same way they did men. I thought that I was a guy in a woman’s body when really, it was society that was distorted. Today, there is no doubt I’m a women and my boyfriend is pretty sure I’m a women even though I may “act like” a geek sometimes. Society acts like femininity is only acceptable to women, while masculinity is more valued in society from both genders. It is ridiculous.

P.S: Even though I spent a great deal of time reading everything above and writing this, I’m glad I did because it organized thoughts and gave me new insights, and I hope it helps other girls or guys who are looking for answers.

If I may follow up in the spirit of Mike’s hopefulness, I’d like to share a page I stumbled upon recently: a list of “Resources for Men” in the Geek Feminism Wiki. (I hadn’t been aware that there even was such a wiki until Google Analytics told me that some people found their way to this site from it.)

I haven’t read all the links on that page yet, but I was particularly fascinated by “A Straight Male Geek’s Guide to Interaction with Females” (linked to not by that page but by one of the links on that page, “Don’t Be That Guy”, who points out that the behaviors in the “Guide” should be common sense, rather than a rarity in some circles). I also thought that the “Male Programmer Privilege Checklist” offered an interesting perspective, coming from someone who altered his extrinsic gender (female to male), and suddenly realized just how different the experience of being a programmer can be depending on gender (both in terms of one’s own subjective discomfort and objectively observable treatment by others).

P.S. I sure like to use parentheses.

Allow me to explain how I found this page, bear with me as I know it’s boring, yet it is relevant: my fiancée readily identifies herself as a member of the geek subculture, specifically anime and gaming (not video gaming, but tabletop and card games). Suffice it to say I never saw an anime movie or series until I met her. The more I saw, the more disturbed I became regarding the pervasiveness of “fan service” and blatant sexism that was portrayed (usually) in a lighthearted manner.

Now, I realize nearly all films have sexism to some extent, but there is such a thing as gradation, and from my experience the majority of anime series (as David points out) have an absorbent amount of sexism within them. Thus I found myself reading this webpage.

As a feminist activist who has organized more than a few events for NOW, I have to say that I found the pessimism Aenna exerts disheartening. I think, of course, that Aenna is brilliant and points out many important things; however I have serious problems with statements like these:

“there’s not much you can do to get the message across to these people”
and
“It doesn’t matter how logical or thought out or fact-based your arguments against these kinds of people are, they just don’t give a damn”

This is, in my opinion, incredibly false and to a dangerous degree. Aenna obviously cared about sexism in the subculture, yet takes a hopeless inactive stance on it. The logic for this doesn’t make sense to me–for if there were “not much” one could do about combating misogyny in the subculture–and that, according to Aenna the main reason for sexists in the geek subculture is because of percolation of sexist sentiment in the mainstream culture–then what change do we have to change the minds of sexists anywhere? In the mainstream or in a specific subculture? It seems you are advocating we do nothing and just throw our hands in the air and bitterly curse geek sexists in our dark corners.

Certainly: if we don’t attempt to change the status quo and just let it be, we will indeed have no chance to alter the stagnation. It seems to me that attitudes like that are self-fulfilling.

It IS possible, and totally possible, for a subculture to become less misogynistic than the larger subculture as a whole. As an example I give the punk subculture, for instance. While widely regarded as initially typically sexist, after female bands (such as the Slits in England, Bikini Kill in the U.S.) and enlightened male bands offered differing viewpoints the subculture began to shift. Indeed in most punk circles it is now the requirement for (predominantly male) members to be anti-sexist. [Interestingly, I read a blog article online about how punks are becoming so anti-sexist, that they increasingly exert violence and abuse on men they deem to be sexist... an ironic paradox, as such behavior is typical phallogocentric, patriarchal thinking!] Another subculture that has (as I understand it) more open-mindedness and less sexism than normal society is the goth subculture. I am sure there are other male-dominated subcultures with more egalitarian views, but these are the only ones I can speak for with some knowledge.

The way these two subcultures changed is because the cultural productions created by members of the subculture (albums, fashion, writings) advocated feminist views and pointed out the hypocrisy and denigration of women within the subculture. Why is it so impossible for this to be done in the geek subculture? Granted, I understand some such things are being done, but they seem to lack impetus from the people in the subculture, going largely ignored. This only means more needs to be done, and that those people with pro-feminist viewpoints need to speak louder. Not bitterly retreat to that familiar corner.

Thanks for this discussion and all the posts as well,
Mike

Regarding why women may feel uncomfortable or unwelcome within that culture, I was wondering if any of your posts discuss the visual representation of females in video games, comics, and science fiction (it seems like you must have, I just haven’t come across it yet). To my mind, a lot of visual media aimed at “geek” consumers is so blatantly objectifying that I feel immediately put off. Of course women are objectified visually all across the media – but with, for instance, comics, there is a prevailing idea held by most women I’ve talked to about it that these are explicitly male fantasies – so even if geek guys treat women respectfully in real life, there’s the sense that they’re happy consumers of misogyny.

Sorry if this is just rehashing stuff you’ve talked about a million times! But I’d love it if you could direct me to content on this topic.

I think what I wrote has been interpreted as if I had meant that geeks get picked on by girls, and this causes them to be mean to women later in life. That’s not what I meant. I was very careful to say in my original post that my argument concerns how these geeks feel about (that is, construct) their past. In that post, all I was saying was that geek misogyny is constructed around blaming women for geeks’ own insecurities. This is victim-blaming on the misogynists’ part, as described by some comments here. What was missing from that post was some guess as to what might have engendered that feeling of rejection; Aenna, I think, filled in the blank with me claiming that geeks were actually rejected by women (and that this caused geeks to become misogynists), but this was never what I meant to imply.

When given the opportunity to expand on this in the comments, I thought I should introduce (for my first time in this discussion) the possibility that there might be some actual persecution in geeks’ childhoods and adolescence to consider as a factor in this. I did this in a way that I had hoped would make clear that this persecution comes largely (even mostly) from members of the same gender. In doing so, I expected the implication to be that it’s not rejection by girls, in itself acting as a major causal factor in developing misogynistic attitudes. It might be, however, that being rejected by one’s peers more broadly is a factor that causes some geeks to construct a sense of resentment, hostility, even hatefulness—and some geeks construct and redirect this differently from others.

Now, I will try to tie all this together. I think that having feelings of rejection by women—leaving aside whether one was rejected by anyone at all—is a major predictor of later misogyny. Where do those feelings come from? Not necessarily by being rejected by women, but perhaps by being rejected and feeling powerless more generally by most or all peers. I think that some individuals who are actually persecuted by peers attempt to find a specific target to blame for their rejection, reshaping their feelings of inadequacy into feelings of rejection by women. Women make an easy target for persecuted boys to blame, representing a group who may be more easily constructed as an unfamiliar “other” (for heterosexual and homosexual males alike), and who they may sense some traditional cultural power over already.

I think that this indicates that we have agreed more than we have disagreed. I am on board with the assertion that we live in a cultural context with self-perpetuating and institutionalized power. That’s just not what I focused on in my original post, as it’s an area of theory and research that has already been very well explored.

I hope that adequately addresses some of the concerns expressed in the last set of comments. I did want to address two other things more specifically, though.

First, Aenna said:

I don’t see past wrongs as even a reason for misogyny, since the evidence doesn’t logically follow on the flipside of the gendered coin.

This is an interesting point. But again, I don’t mean to argue that past rejection is the sole causal factor of misogyny, and I never meant to imply that it was cross-gender harassment that was specifically making male geeks pick on female geeks, but harassment more generally that gets redirected at a target rather than a source. The fact that female geeks don’t display widespread hatred for popular males does probably point to the explanation that there isn’t a cultural prescription for such an attitude already (and/or that there is an active cultural prescription for males to pick somebody to target for blame, I suppose). It doesn’t preclude the possibility, however, that past harassment plays some role in what triggers certain actions or how perpetrators justify them.

And second, Jordan said:
on the whole I don’t see male geeks harassing male jocks online nearly as violently and consistently as they do female geeks

And Aenna said:
the accusations against such groups are usually expressed through pathetic homophobic slurs

I think there’s a lot more to the male geek/male jock tension that you’re acknowledging, and I’m confident that I could throw out a bunch of examples, given some more time. For now, I’m going to share a couple quick examples in a new post on this subject, as this comment is getting pretty long.

Thanks to both of you, by the way, for your detailed responses. I hope you can forgive me in advance if I don’t offer much in the way of future responses, but we’ve kind of hit my blogging limit for awhile if I want to get any actual work done…