This is a comment by ThePaleKing74 on the post “Are Geeks Being Manipulated By Hot Girls?“
“There’s a point in the ‘Metrosexual; episode of South Park where Mr. Garrison, outraged at all the straight men ‘acting gay,’ shouts: ‘One of us? We spent our entire lives trying not to be one of you!’ I think that’s a pretty apt analogy for how most geek men feel about attractive people (of both genders, really, but more so women) making their way into the culture.
“Now, before anyone takes this analogy a little too literally, I’m not saying that geeks are a subculture as unfairly maligned as LGBTs, but the impetus for the creation of their subculture is one and the same: to create a space free from the normative world where they can be themselves—one with its own power structure that follows a different set of rules from the world-at-large. For the geek, obsessive devotion and knowledge of a particular property is the main cultural currency in that subculture, so when a physically attractive woman (or man) enters that sphere, that to them, is the injection of another type of cultural currency—a currency associated with the outside world they’re trying to get away from.
“This intrusion often breeds contempt amongst the original members of the subculture, because at the end of the night, a metrosexual man or an attractive female geek can go home and still retain the privilege that comes with being more socially acceptable, whereas a gay man or a physically unattractive geek cannot (again, this comparison varies sharply by degree, but the mechanism is one and the same).
“This intrusion doesn’t excuse geek men for their lack of empathy for attractive women breaching their subculture, but it does ask that said women and outside observers be less dismissive of their struggle to accept it.”
Photo credit: Flickr / Pop Culture Geek
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