1. Just because women buy misogynistic products, or sleep with artists of misogynistic products, does not mean that those products don’t express misogyny. […]

4. Feminists are not always looking for something to be angry about. But it’s hard to overstate the sexism in American popular culture. […]

6. Liking art that is misogynist, racist, sexist, or homophobic doesn’t necessarily make you those things, and indictment of that art doesn’t have to be an indictment of you. […]

Folks need to breathe a bit. I think our conversations about culture would be a lot healthier and more interesting if we could hold two thoughts in our hands at the same time and acknowledge that we like problematic stuff. Because really, we all do.

She’s responding to recent discussions relating to rap music, but the connections to ongoing debates in geek culture struck me as so relevant that I couldn’t just link to it on Twitter and move on. I want to be able to refer back to this later, as these debates seem to end up in the same places every time.

I came across this pre-trick-or-treating photo while rummaging around a box in my mother’s house, looking for photos for a documentary, and today seemed like a good day to share it. In case it’s not clear, this lineup includes a robot, a ninja, a pirate, and a zombie. (I’m the tall one.) All we were missing was a monkey, and we would’ve had a complete geek zodiac.

Thanks to Jarrod, Jeff, and Stephen for permission to share this one with the world, roughly 20 years after it was taken.

I received the strangest question in an interview once: somebody wanted to talk to me about MC Frontalot, who coincidentally has a new album out. They wanted to know why rap about nerd things, or make comics about nerd things…. I scrunched my whole face up, and the region between my eyebrows shifted tectonically from plain to mountain. But he could not see this, so I was forced to express my confusion with the human words.

This was a person writing an article for a newspaper, a device which transmits culture, but he didn’t seem to understand what he was doing! Maybe he was confused because he was taught to “speak” without “voice,” that is, to communicate neutrally. Maybe he found the printing press in the woods, and operates it via dimly understood rituals. But here’s the apparently impenetrable math: people create culture. And they create it by describing the world in terms which are relevant to them. Who does he think makes all this stuff?

All that changed was the hand on the tiller.

I find myself having a similar conversation quite a bit. I try not to hold it against people who don’t understand, though. It’s not always obvious to outsiders why the whole “nerd” thing would remain relevant to us into adulthood. I guess that’s why I wrote a dissertation trying to explain it.

At dinner I got straight down to it. Did he still play? “Yes.” Strike one. How often? “I’m preparing for a tournament this weekend.” Strike two. Who did he hang out with? “I’ve met all my best friends through Magic.” Strike three. I smiled and nodded and listened. […]

So what did I learn? Google the shit out of your next online date. Like, hardcore.

I’m not writing this to condemn the author of this article; a sizable portion of the internet seems to have done so quite extensively already. Nor am I writing this to speculate about what Gizmodo, a heavily nerd-trafficked blog, was thinking in running the article (though the “nerd bait” theory seems reasonable). Rather, I’m writing this because I think I might disagree with the message many of my fellow nerds take from this story.

The message I saw implied in many responses to this story – mostly in the form of tweets and blog posts – was that this is why we geeks have to hide who we are. I see just the opposite. This is an excellent example of why we shouldn’t feel the need to hide who we are.

I can see why people get the other message from it. This is precisely what we were conditioned to fear growing up: irrational judgment, and public dismissal by those we can’t help but admire and find attractive. From the outside, this looks like a geek nightmare come true. The savvy but hapless nerd gets a date, only to get laughed to his face. The embarrassment goes public, and the geek is mocked in front of the entire world. (A post about your dating life on a blog with many millions of viewers is certainly public on a broader scale than high school gossip, but high school sure feels like the entirety of the world while you’re there.) It is easy to point at this and ask if it’s any mystery why we would hide our own interests.

Take a moment, though, to see this from another perspective. The story doesn’t end with that Gizmodo post. Soon after I read it, the story exploded in my Twitter feed, with links and responses among the folks I follow.

Leigh Alexander (@leighalexander)
i think magic the gathering is incredibly nerdy. but i’m not a champion at anything. would TOTES date him.

Joey Comeau (@joeycomeau)
I don’t want to sound like a jerk, but I’d way rather go out with a Magic: TG champ than a Gizmodo editor. Any day.

Gus Mastrapa (@triphibian)
If you are not a geek ally you are a geek enemy.

I also had a spirited little side discussion with some friends about how the fellow in the article probably wasn’t interested in having his real name used this way, but perhaps that’s neither here nor there.

The responses I’ve seen to this have been overwhelmingly condemning of the original post. That may represent a minority opinion in our culture at large, but it’s still part of a broader trend of people being unashamed of their geekiness and less judgmental toward nerds. In high school, we might have belonged to just a small group of geeks. As adults, however, it’s a lot easier to find others like us. And on the internet – perhaps even on internet dating sites? – we are legion. This story started with a single person’s snap judgment, but blossomed into a showing of nerd support.

I’m not saying that you should make your Magic: The Gathering and D&D exploits the centerpiece of your online dating profile. For better or worse, managing how we present ourselves in everyday life is fundamental to normal social interaction in our culture. I hope this story illustrates, though, that we don’t need to actively hide who we are for fear of judgment, at least as adults. Yes, sometimes we will be judged, but our world is bigger than it was in high school. We no longer have to deal on a personal level with those who dismiss out of hand, once we’ve been dismissed (or dismissed them ourselves). And once we’ve gone our separate ways, we can get back to to dealing with those who are more open-minded – and those who might even leap to defend our nerdiness in front of the world.

I hope you’ll forgive the moment of navel-gazing, but the topic felt especially worth revisiting in light of Ben Abraham‘s recent Gamasutra article, “Games Criticism, Women Critics, and Challenging Sexism.” Shockingly (to me, anyway), some readers posted comments to that article dismissing the entire argument for not citing enough evidence that sexism exists. These are people who don’t know what sexism is. Asking for evidence of sexism is like asking for evidence of “imagination” or “politics”: it’s an abstract thing, but it’s so obvious once you understand what it is that it’s mind-boggling that anyone would refuse to believe in it.

Part of the problem, I think, is that many people have an ignorantly narrow view of “sexism” – a view I myself unwittingly espoused on my own blog three years ago:

All the actual behavior we’d think of as misogynistic or sexist in geek culture has almost exclusively been visible to me on the internet (or described by others in certain small, isolated contexts full of nerds, such as at certain conventions and CS departments). Not that there aren’t woman-hating dorks wandering around the streets or at the cons I’ve attended—just that certain anonymous or isolated social contexts make people feel they can let this side of themselves show.

A lively exchange in the comments following the post does go some way toward clarifying this. Even so, having just spent two years teaching at a women’s college – including offering a course on “Images of Women in the Media” and many assignments on sexism and misogyny – I think I’ve gotten (slightly) better about discussing these issues. I figured it was a topic worth revisiting.

It’s true that the most overt, vitriolic, and unashamed displays of misogyny I ever witnessed in the course of my research were on the internet. But to say that “all the actual behavior we’d think of as misogynistic or sexist in geek culture has almost exclusively been … on the internet” is devastatingly narrow. Really, this should have said that I only witnessed geeky men harassing and bullying geeky women on the internet, but I picked up some anecdotes of it happening in other contexts.

Sexism more broadly speaking, however, is subtle and easily missed if you don’t know how to recognize it. In geek cultures, for instance, sexism manifests as women getting less recognition and pay than men for the same work (as pointed out in Ben’s aforementioned article), being encouraged to study some subjects in school over others, being chosen as the public face for gaming and tech products only if they’re both intelligent and pretty, and not getting traditionally “masculine” products marketed to them at all because, you know, girls don’t like that stuff anyway. Sexism isn’t just men openly treating women badly, but a whole set of assumptions across our culture that quietly but significantly influence how we all live our lives.

It’s actually quite easy to remain willfully ignorant of sexism. Typically, it only requires coming up with excuses to maintain the status quo. One popular example is to explain hiring and pay disparities in tech companies as a matter of men just happening to be more “qualified.” That only holds up if you’re willing to ignore that the criteria for “qualification” are sexist themselves – either (or both) in terms of restricting access (e.g., cultures that make women feel like trespassers) or arbitrary and exclusionary prerequisites for membership (e.g., years of programming experience even before reaching college).

From my experience teaching courses on this topic to many young women, I can assure you that it’s not just men who fail to recognize sexism. “Feminism” was practically a dirty word among the students where I taught, and that was at a women’s college. One student admitted that she was so nervous about being stereotyped as man-hating that she figured she’d take what liberties she had and quit while she was ahead – yet still behind where we should be as a culture. Along those lines, consider too that many women do recognize sexism, but don’t speak up about it at every turn. After all, you can only spend so much of your time arguing the obvious to those unwilling to listen.

Men experience sexism, but not in the same way that women typically do. During the course of my geek cultures research, it always galled me whenever I read things on Slashdot tagged with “misandry” which were about calling men to task for treating women unequally. Consider, for instance, when Tim Berners-Lee called out “‘stupid’ male geek culture” for discriminating against women in engineering. (The “misandry” tag has since been replaced with “prejudice.”) This is not misandry (however offended any of us might be by inferring that this applies to “geek culture” at large). Rather, this is pointing out sexist practices against women in an industry.

What does misandry or sexism against men look like, then? It does not look like men getting shut out of jobs or getting paid less; that claim comes from those who prefer the current structure of privilege, chafing as they see inequalities very slowly eroding. Rather, sexism against men manifests as an expectation to fulfill the stereotypes of manliness: being physically strong and capable of violence when need be; not feeling allowed to cry or express emotion; happy with promiscuity and treating women as sex objects; and, perhaps most of all, not feeling allowed to be attracted to other men. These are stupid, unfair, and sexist things expected of men.

And, much like women can fail to recognize sexism against their own gender without even realizing it, men can do the same. Geeks are helping to propagate misandry every time they teabag you and call you a fag when they beat you at Halo. They’re promoting sexism – against women and men – every time they talk about one-upping jocks by stealing their girlfriends.

I’ll stand by the opinion that some male geeks bully women – and, I’ll add, each other – as a reaction to their own feelings of powerlessness and rejection. Much of the oppression geeks have felt is very real, in the form of cruel taunting, exclusion, and, sometimes, physical violence, with most harassment coming from members of their own gender. I think we see especially frequent and hateful geek misogyny online not because women cruelly refused to date male nerds, but because possessing women is the yardstick for dominance among men, and some geeks are still bitter about their treatment at the hands of jocks.

Suggesting possible origins of hateful behavior should not be seen as forgiving geeks for bullying, or as blaming the victims of geek sexism, or even as blaming men who bullied geeks when they were kids. Adults are responsible for their own actions, and this kind of behavior isn’t justifiable even if we can take some steps toward explaining it sociologically.

But bullying and harassment aren’t the end-all, be-all symptoms of sexism. Not by a long shot. Geekdom suffers from the same pervasive sexism of our society at large, which means it has a long way to go. Recognizing this and correcting it in our everyday lives is the first step toward fixing what’s stupid about our world.

The geeks who aren’t part of the problem can and should be part of the solution. I’ve met brilliant, caring, wonderful nerds and geeks from all over the spectrum of identities. While some revel in childishness and hatred, or leap to the defense whenever they feel attacked, others are sensitive to bullying and oppression because they know what these things feel like. Which kind of geek would you rather be?

The reasons behind this decision are personal, so I’ll skip the details. I will say, though, that I don’t see this as “quitting academia” so much as engaging with it differently. I’m still slated to go to at least one conference this year, still keeping up with my favorite journals, and still working on a book that I hope will be of interest to general and academic audiences alike. I like academia. I just don’t feel the best way for me to participate in it right now is as a tenure-track professor.

All of that said, I’m really enjoying working on some projects I didn’t have much time to do as a full-time teacher and the coordinator of a Communication department. Currently, I’m developing a mobile game with a friend that I’ve been dreaming about making for years, writing about games and culture, doing some freelance production and consulting work, and, of course, getting Geek Cultures into shape for publication.

For the time being, I’m working on establishing a reliable income from freelance writing, design, and consulting. My LinkedIn profile is geared toward part-time and temporary work, but if you happen to know of a neat company or nonprofit that could use a full-time, Boston-based specialist in geeks, games, online communities, and visual communication, please feel free to drop me a line.

And stay tuned to this space – I probably won’t be any less busy than I was as a professor, but I still have plenty of nerdy things to blog about.

But that is not what this blog post is about.

This blog post is about “Zero Punctuation: Achieving the Cross-media Transformation of Ludological Hermeneutics,” a recent article from the Escapist. The author critiques Croshaw’s reviews as themselves critiques of gamer culture and gender norms. At first, I found it pretty spot-on, if a bit unnecessarily obtuse. Then, I started wondering if it was actually intentionally obtuse. I honestly wasn’t sure of what to conclude until I got to the end, where “Max Steele” claimed to have a Ph.D. from Miskatonic University.

I relate this anecdote for two reasons.

First, that’s a pretty funny gag right there.

And second, Lord help me, but I still found the article interesting, despite being nigh-impenetrable. I can’t decide whether this is a credit to the author or a sad commentary on academics’ willingness to inure themselves to overly complex writing. Maybe both. Or maybe I just used the word “inure” in a sentence without even thinking about it.

Unlike many other gaming and electronics events, like E3 and CES, the Penny Arcade Expo has a ban on scantily-clad promotional models—a.k.a., “booth babes,” women whose job is to attract the attention of the mostly-male attendees to a particular exhibitor. Penny Arcade decided to poll its audience online to get a sense of how readers feel about the policy. I’m not sure how many of the 6,000+ respondents are actually regular or intended PAX attendees, but it seems like as good a sample as you’re likely to get for this sort of thing.

Of those who responded, 20% “dislike” or “hate” the ban, 20% are “indifferent” to it, and the great majority—60%—”like” or “love” the ban. Some additional key figures which Penny Arcade pledges to “formally message in our ‘booth babe’ policy”:

Sample Size = 6,313
Male/Female = 78%/22%
Rep needs to be trained/educated about the product (81%)
Anything that is considered “partial nudity” is banned (43%)
However, cosplayed characters are allowed to wear revealing outfits, assuming it is true to the source game (68%)
No messaging that specifically calls out body parts (47%)

I saw this linked off Kotaku, where commenters seemed divided about the results. My personal favorite comment comes from dogcow:

worthy sentiment, and probably appreciated by the growing female gamer population. But seriously, how do you police something like this? Have Comic Book Guy quiz all the chicks with tight T-shirts? “No, I’m sorry. There was NO Mario Cloud Suit in Flip Flop Galaxy, World 2. Good DAY, sir!”

I found this comment hilarious, but I also think it sort of misses the point. I don’t think that Penny Arcade has to “police” this. I think the company is sending a message just by having the policy. Yes, there is some wiggle room in terms of the implied new rules regarding cosplay and product knowledge, but I think the spirit of the ban should be clear, and I have a hard time imagining that vendors will actively try to circumvent it and risk a backlash from an audience that is clearly mostly in opposition to this form of promotion.

What’s more, it’s worth noting again that the overwhelming majority of respondents on this survey happen to be men. I’d be curious to see the correlation between the gender of respondents and their answers, but that’s just the researcher in me talking. Even so, if every female respondent liked/loved the ban, and every respondent who disliked/hated the ban were male (which I highly doubt was the case, even before factoring in LGBT respondents), that would still mean that there are twice as many men who don’t want “booth babes” as there are men who do.

Think about that for a moment. Think back, for instance, to that article I linked the other day from Cracked, about 5 reasons it’s still not cool to admit you’re a gamer. Think about how much that piece focused on how the gaming industry tries to market to gamers as if we’re all sex-starved adolescent males.

This is not a safe assumption anymore, if it ever was. This is not just about appealing to a male audience vs. a female audience. This is about how people want to be marketed to, men and women alike.

Admittedly, a sample of Penny Arcade readers (or PAX attendees) may not be a representative sample of gamers at large, or even of “hardcore” or “hobbyist” video game players. Nevertheless, these kinds of results should give marketers—and even game designers—something to think about before assuming the quickest way to gamers’ hearts is through our pants.

Death in Games: Peter Mawhorter posted an interesting take on “The Incoherence of Reincarnation: Story vs. Telling in Videogames,” riffing off Jesper Juul’s notes on how dying in video games is narratively incoherent. Tom Jubert jumps in to expand on this at “The Argument for Game Over” jumps in to expand on this as well. The long and the short of it is that dying should not be seen as part of the narrative, but extradiegetic—just as we don’t get confused by reading “Chapter 1″ before a chapter starts in a book, players can handle the die-and-retry approach despite its seeming narrative incoherence. Jesper actually chimes in for the comments on that first post, and I couldn’t help but offer a response based on my own article on this topic, but the whole conversation is pretty interesting and worth considering.

Nerd Shame: Topless Robot held a contest inviting people to describe when they felt ashamed to be a nerd simply by proximity to people being even nerdier than themselves. It’s a sometimes funny, sometimes condescending, and sometimes sweetly painful look at how much nerd identity is still bound into shared feelings of embarrassment.

I wish this had been done in time to make it to my dissertation. Ah, well—there’s always the book.

Gamer Shame: Along similar lines, Cracked is getting a lot of praise for its piece on “5 Reasons It’s Still Not Cool to Admit You’re a Gamer.” Among the more compelling reasons, to my mind, are the points that gamers are still marketed to as if we’re all 17 year old boys, and that video game storytelling generally remains at the level of B-movies.

Personally, I find that the older I get, the less concerned I find myself about whether I can admit my gaming-related hobbies to people, and the more concerned I am about actually finding games I’m even willing to play. I’m getting tired of playing 20-hour action movies with brief, stilted dialog and no actual attempts to explore themes beyond “revenge,” “redemption,” and “saving the galaxy against impossible odds.”

Hey Dudes: Some fellows have reacted pretty negatively to Hey Baby, a game that simulates being able to murder catcalling men. The reaction points pretty clearly to a lack of understanding among many men of how degrading and frustrating it can feel to be a woman, and also highlights a double standard in terms of what’s considered acceptable violence in a video game. Guys can blow off steam by shooting and teabagging soldiers on the internet, but gals can’t exorcise their demons their own way? Regardless of what you think of the game, the resulting discussions are worth following.

Be Nice: And before we conclude that it’s the “d-bags” who ruin interactions with women for all us nerdy “nice guys,” I figured I’d give one final link, “The Nice Guy’s Guide to Realizing You’re Not That Nice.” You know, just in case. I’m sure you Geek Studies readers are generally the nice kind of nerds, but perhaps you know a fellow who’ll benefit from some raw, unfiltered advice by the man behind the Geek Hierarchy.

Thank to everyone who has stayed tuned in—or, in more appropriate new-media-speak, not dropping my site from your RSS feeds despite my extended silence.

Later this month, however, I will be in St. Louis at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association National Conference. I’ll be presenting a paper that originated as a loosely-connected series of posts here about “The Multiple Appeals of Gaming.” Let me know if you expect to be at the conference and feel like discussing geeky things, as I have a tendency to do that when given the chance.