The terms are endless: Poser. Noob. “Stupid F***ing Hipster Chick”. This are words a female in today’s nerd culture hears on too common of a basis.
Women in “Geek”, or “Nerd culture” as some may define it, face brutal sexism as their passions and expertise in the area are not taken seriously just because of her gender.
An infamous example of this is an exchange between two Tumblr users. A user anonymously posted this: “The picture of that stupid f***ing hipster chick in a Star Wars shirt needs to stop, she probably hasn’t even seen all the movies.”
This person was referring to a picture of Natalie Portman wearing a t-shirt that had the words “Stop Wars” imitating a Star Wars logo.
After pointing out that it said “Stop Wars” not “Starwars” on the shirt, another Tumblr user hilariously responded, “I sincerely hope you’re joking right now because that’s Natalie Portman. She was in them.”
Humor aside, this exchange really does perfectly perfectly the kind of scrutiny that women and girls face in a world of Geek Culture.
How can an actress, who not only definitely knows about the Star Wars movie franchise but also was actually part of them, be so ignorantly attacked? This person just assumed she was a “Stupid F***ing Hipster Chick” (his/her words).
And it is safe to assume that one of the reasons for this was because she was female.
Geek culture includes interests such as comic books, anime, and Sci Fi movies. For the longest time the world of nerd interests seemed to be a boy’s world. Video game companies design games aimed at the male population. Most superheroes are men.
Zoe Di Giorgio, a senior English major, has been a comic book fan and gamer for years and has experienced this sexism first-hand. She has a blog titled “Idiot Nerd Girl: Navigating the Experience of Being a Lady Nerd in the 21st Century.”
“When girls actively started playing, they had to elbow their way into a guys’ club where negative attitudes toward women probably had been festering for a long time,” Di Giorgio said.
Most protagonists in movies, videogames, and comics book are men. Women are portrayed as sex objects that are meant to be possessed. It is no wonder that women are sexually harassed constantly on this medium.
“I first experience more overt sexism in gaming when I was a freshman at Maryland,” Di Giorgio said. “I was playing Team Fortress 2 online and a guy in the text chat was absolutely stunned that I was a girl and asked me to make orgasm noises while playing.”
This kind of behavior is disgusting and the only way to “fight the sexism is to keep pushing against it, both from the inside and outside.”
UMD has an anime club and Jasmine Hawkins, a sophomore Government and Politics major, is proud to be part of it.
About 70 percent of the anime club is male and the other 30 percent is female.
“Many girls attend clubs to potentially find friends to accompany them to other non-club events, such as conventions,” Hawkins said. “In relation to Anime Club, girls are usually accustomed to this sort of gender gap, but are ultimately dismayed by the lack of potential female companionship.”
Whether guys want it or not, girls interested in gaming culture are not going away. It is time to end, as Di Giorgio put it, the view of girls being newcomers in the culture “rather than a large but silent portion of the population.”