Whenever a culture gets big enough, someone will come along and try to create a cool crowd within it. Geekdom has a certain cachet these days, in part because the rise of social media means no one ever has to be alone in his or her love of manga, or robots, or whatever.
If you happen to be an irony-challenged geek who's been yearning for a chance to be part of an in-crowd, maybe you find the widening circles of geek culture threatening. Or maybe you've just always wanted to be recognized for being first or best at something.
So you look for a way to draw a border between the cool geeks and the uncool geeks.
One way to do that is to dust off the old signs saying No Girls Allowed.
CNN has a geek blog (see what I mean about widening circles?) and a recent post on it by one Joe Peacock has created a dust-up in geek circles, and rightly so. He argues that women who aren't bona fide geeks but dress up in skimpy costumes at conventions are just trying to get attention from men, and as a man, he finds that insulting. These women are "poachers" and "a pox on our culture."
His argument has already been demolished on the Internet, including in an instantly classic blog post by writer John Scalzi. But there was one element in Peacock's post that's illustrative of a familiar attitude: a patronizing "some of my best friends are girls" caveat.
Here's how Peacock puts it: "There are lots of geeks who are female. Some of these female geeks are pretty girls. I find it fantastic that women are finally able to enjoy a culture that has predominately been male-oriented and male-driven. The presence of female geeks means that the fiction we're reading is broadening and, frankly, getting better in quality."
"Finally able"? Peacock's a few weeks younger than me, so I'm not sure what era he's remembering.
While he was growing up, doing whatever geeky things turned him into who he is today, I was writing secret messages in Tolkien's alphabets and watching Labyrinth for the umpteenth time or playing ColecoVision after school. Nobody ever told me - or my friends - that the things we loved were "male-oriented" or "male-driven."
And my generation of girls was far from being pioneers in geekdom. One of the Hugo Awards nominees for best novel this year is the wonderful Among Others, by Montrealer Jo Walton. It's a semi-autobiographical story about a Welsh girl growing up in the 1970s and her voracious appetite for science fiction.
Anyone who says something like, "Oh, well, Twilight and the Hunger Games aren't my thing but at least they're finally getting girls interested in genre books," deserves a gentle purse smack from Margaret Atwood, Robin McKinley, Ursula le Guin, Anne Rice, Susan Cooper, Susanna Clarke, Connie Willis, Nalo Hopkinson, Lois McMaster Bujold, J.K. Rowling or Diana Gabaldon.
Or maybe a gentle haunting from the ghosts of Hope Mirlees, Pat O'Shea, Ruth Park, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Madeleine L'Engle or Lady Gregory. Or Mary Shelley or Christina Rossetti, either of whom could probably manage a fine haunting.
I'd like to hear Peacock, age 35, tell them pompously how happy he is that the "presence of female geeks" means "the fiction we're reading is broadening."
Yes, speculative fiction tends to make up a smaller percentage of what women read than what men read, but one big reason for that is that women read more books than men do. The problem, if there is one, isn't that women don't read SF - it's that men barely read anything else.
It's so bizarre, this idea that girls aren't interested in anything imaginative or competitive or fun. I can't see any reason for it, other than the need of certain insecure guys to carve out territory for themselves.
There have always been people who try to keep women out of the geek clubhouse. They're not going to succeed.
