Poor Razib at GNXP made the misogyny-exposing mistake of seeing an attractive woman talk about science fiction and then remarking on it in his weblog. Well, Razib, OR SHOULD I SAY HITLER, your sexist stereotyping has not gone unnoticed among your moral betters:
Why the heck would it be freaky that an attractive woman reads mainstream sci fi? [More]
Personally, I only see attractive women browsing in the Self-Help section. And the only magazines they look at are Beauty & Fashion (if they don't have a wedding ring) and Home Decorating (if they do).
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
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20 comments:
Hey!
This reminds me of a time that a friend of mine and I had run into an attractive woman buying Magic: the Gathering cards and we invited her to play with us. After the game, he remarked how odd it was that an attractive woman was playing Magic. I thought it was a hilarious situation, as it was an obvious insult to my attractiveness...but this friend was gay, and did not need to know how to flatter the chicks.
In any case, yeah, most scifi fan girls look exactly as you'd think (and I do, too). But good news, scifi chicks! The geeky guys aren't going to land Playboy models, either! So the standards of attractiveness in the geek community are much more easily obtained by the girls who wear glasses and don't wear makeup. I've yet to find a geeky chick unable to find a geeky guy to hook up with.
(There are drawbacks, of course: my husband and I have a lot of the same books, but our libraries are so disorganized that we've not been able to weed out the duplicates as of yet.)
A lot of attractive single women like to read trendy contemporary literature (Lethem, Franzen, etc), but they only do it to make you feel inadequate for not keeping up. And you won't find them in that section of the store, they probably order them all straight from Amazon.
My experience over the past 6 years running & playing D&D in London with relative strangers is that both male and female D&Ders split about equally into "geeky" and "apparently normal" camps. Of course we're almost all at least a bit eccentric beneath the surface, but no more than 50% of female D&Ders fit the obvious geek stereotypes.
That said, one of my more 'normal' looking female D&Ders turned out to be an ex-bodyguard/'security consultant', and she kept getting begging letters from Blackwater* wanting her to come to Iraq... she also carried a combat knife on her at all times.
Still, I guess 'survivalist' is another geek sub-type, right?
*A PMC/Mercenary outfit. She showed me some of the hair-raising round-robin emails sent from mercs/'security consultants' in Iraq that she received regularly.
Yea, this whole thing is of course really silly. But why is everyone acting so surprised that low-status people (geeks) try to use PC (a potent social tool) to shield themselves from the harsh truth to some extent?
So Razib's a misogynist while his alter-ego is a "radical-feminist"?!?
Imagine the cat fights that must go on when those two are in the same room! Which is all of the time, of course. Meow!
I read about a series of D&D playgroups, for some reason the people in the British playgroup had much more 'normal' jobs. It might be one of these weird cultural things across the pond.
Actually, you see that combo among nerds sometimes. They think being a feminist is a way to ingratiate themselves with women but secretly hate them for reasons that are not hard to guess.
I ride the train to work every day so I get a chance to see what different people select for reading materials. Most women seem to read novels, either bestseller types or, especially, trashy romances. Now, keep in mind that the vast majority of these women are likely to have fairly high-level jobs, given the cost and time of train commuting. If I've ever seen a woman reading sci-fi, I don't remember it.
Men display a somewhat wider choice when it comes to reading materials, though at least three-quarters of them at any given time are reading the newspaper (women are much less likely to read the newspaper). If a man is reading the newspaper there's at least an 80% chance that he's reading the sports pages; if he's wearing a suit, the chance is more like 100%.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Anonymous: "So Razib's a misogynist while his alter-ego is a "radical-feminist"?!?
Imagine the cat fights that must go on when those two are in the same room! Which is all of the time, of course. Meow!"
I thought I was the only one who suspected they were the same person. Razib also sometimes pretends to be a fundamentalist muslim or a brown identity politics nutball.
My own observation is that nerdy women read much more "fantasy" than they do sci-fi. Probably because it's got more magic and romance and fewer spaceships.
Sci-fi was always considered infra-dig at Oxford.
Nerds tend to make good husbands and fathers. They've got skills worth something in the marketplace and are generally too shy to chase other women. Asian women seem to figure that out, but white women often don't.
Actually, you see that combo among nerds sometimes. They think being a feminist is a way to ingratiate themselves with women but secretly hate them for reasons that are not hard to guess.
Good point SFG. I was actually joking when I pretended to be shocked at the combination. Men who profess to be feminists are undoubtedly of the gamma-male variety, which I would think most nerds to be.
I thought I was the only one who suspected they were the same person. Razib also sometimes pretends to be a fundamentalist muslim or a brown identity politics nutball.
tggp: Definitely not the only one. I've read at least a half-dozen or so people put forth that very hypothesis. Whether or not "Chet Snicker" is Razib, he's obviously someone's alter-ego.
The "woman" pictured in the udolpho link is clearly something other, those types seem to be radical feminists too.
Sailer:
"Nerds tend to make good husbands and fathers... Asian women seem to figure that out..."
This is true, but not an unmitigated blessing for us Anglo nerds - my shy professor father teaches at a Scottish university, he recently confessed to a lengthy affair with a female Chinese PhD student, to much distress in my family! To make a VDare-y point, I really doubt anything like that would have happened with a white student! >:)
Well, I can´t imagine Dr. Fiorella Terenzi (http://www.fiorella.com/fiorprofile.htm)
do the Grace Kelly scene at the end of Rear Window (where Kelly demonstrates the usefulness of keeping two sets of reading matter, one for pretending and another for enjoying).
"This is true, but not an unmitigated blessing for us Anglo nerds - my shy professor father teaches at a Scottish university, he recently confessed to a lengthy affair with a female Chinese PhD student, to much distress in my family! To make a VDare-y point, I really doubt anything like that would have happened with a white student! >:) "
Naaah, professors have been messing around with grad students since time immemorial. I do wonder if there's a limited number of nerd roles in any given social stratum and if they're taken up by one bunch of people, it pushes other people out--ie if science and engineering become 'Asian', white people don't become interested.
This has all sorts of implications for the future--it might be difficult to ensure security for nuclear development to protect from China with a Chinese-American scientific workforce. I'm not even accusing anyone of disloyalty--what would you do if you were a young researcher and the Chinese government threatened to kill your mom back in China if you didn't tell them about some new nuclear project?
"So the standards of attractiveness in the geek community are much more easily obtained by the girls who wear glasses and don't wear makeup."
Of course among nerds glasses are a plus...
So are Razib's critics more upset because they think he's sexist or because he thinks they're unattractive?
Ah, reno, you have hit the nail on the head! A large part of feminists' anger is that of unattractive heterosexual women complaining that women are judged on their looks! (There's also lesbians complaining that men look at them--remember the 'male gaze' of women's studies?)
I could conversely argue that conservatives are nerdy men in red states upset at moral looseness because they're not getting any, just as liberals are nerdy men in blue states upset at capitalist profits because they're not getting any.
Hey Sailer, if you're still reading this far down...what do you think of the attempt to outsource all the nerdy jobs like engineering and programming? Apart from screwing nerds like it did blue-collar white guys with manufacturing, is this going to kill web libertarianism? Certainly Slashdot (a popular technology site) has become very left-wing in the economic sense lately.
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