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  • I know this one fake geek girl who has only watched Star Trek occasionally, usually when her friends are around. She doesn't know any of the episode titles or plots to the original series, after a few seasons of DS9, gave it up completely. She never saw Babylon 5 through to the end, either, even though for a while, she was "really into it."

    She barely knows Star Wars lore either, her enthusiasm for the franchise petering out after The Phantom Menace... which she saw on opening night, but she was with a big bunch of friends, and it was an event, so that hardly counts. 

    She's never seen an episode of Battlestar Galactica, or any of the Stargates, or the any Terminator movies past T2, which everybody saw. 

    She's read exactly one H.P. Lovecraft story, despite having access to all of them in a free PDF. And yet she makes jokes about Cthulhu and The Old Ones all the time.

    She has no idea how the Kree feel about the Shi'ar, or vice-versa, and has no idea who's an X-man and who's not. She heard online that Professor Xavier died, and that Peter Parker is dead, but it's not like she's read the actual comics. 

    Sometimes she confuses the Red Skull and Baron Zemo, and MODOK with Arnim Zola.

    She'll go see the big superhero movies -- Avengers, The Dark Knight -- but will give the smaller, quirkier ones like Green Lantern a pass, saying they "look stupid."

    She likes the Lord of the Rings movies just fine, but has no real interest in the backstory of the elves, or all the stuff in the Appendices. If it were important, shouldn't it be in the story?

    She really likes The Walking Dead and Shaun of the Dead, but shamefully has never seen Night of the Living Dead. "She'll get around to it," she says, but who knows if she ever will? Maybe she'll find the time if they ever stop making Cougar Town.

    Some geek.

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    Hey, wait... that's not a fake geek girl at all! That's me! 

    Being a geek is largely based on tribal knowledge. And there's so much geeky knowledge out there, and so much to be geeky about, that we can hardly judge people by what they don't know. But beyond that, the fact is, we never seem to give these knowledge tests to anyone but girls and women, regardless. It's not my job to say who is or isn't a geek.

    It's not anyone's.

  • Bravo, Ms Staeger!  Well put.

  • And then later there's the big quiz about the Colts, right? It's like a whole pre-cana with that guy.

  • This conversation is interesting, but doesn't really have anything to do with the content of the article I posted! I suppose the term itself is worthy of conversation, but I wish there had been more response to the points she made. Oh, well
  • You don't think Rob's response addresses the issue you put forward?  I think his point is right on the button.  If we are talking about 'Fake Geek Girls' then we are (as usual) using a term of abuse that only applies to females, and doesn't have an equivalent male version.

     

    Since we live in a society and use a language that is loaded with such terms, the very concept has to be interrogated and very much placed in the context of how women are treated by society as a whole.

     

    For myself, I think your friend's point of view is BONKERS, if she is serious.  Why can't someone enjoy an interest in area of culture without memorising whole encyclopedia's full of useless knowledge and spending precious hours immersed in it?  I enjoy knowing a little about Country music, a little about Irish Traditional music, a little about Greek Mythology, etc but no-one calls me 'Fake Country Guy', 'Fake Trad Guy' or ... 'Fake Greek Guy' (lol), nor do they attribute my genuine, but necessarily limited, interest in these things to egotism, vanity, manipulativeness, shallowness or any other negative trait.

     

    That there is even a term for it shows that women still have a long way to go towards genuine equality.

     

    And we haven't even begun to talk about what the term tells us about the attitude of the guys who can't bear women encroaching on their spandex musclebound dreamworld.  Dedicated fans of Cuntry music, Trad music or Greek mythology would all be gratified to hear someone taking an interest in their obsession, but somehow, Geek guys are threatened by the interest a few women are paying to their strange little hobby.

     

    It's about inclusiveness and exclusiveness.  I know which side I want to be on.

     

    In this case, guys are the dominant group and women are the marginalised group (Quel Surprise!).  Citing one of the marginalised group who agrees with the dominant group is far from an open-and-shut case, and is a time-honored tactic of the dominant group in any numbers of arguments.  (Years ago, I'm sure bigoted attitudes were justified by lines like: "But the Irish guy in the office loves 'Stupid Irish people' jokes!") 

     

    In arguments about inclusion and exclusion, there have always been members of the excluded group who for one reason or another (self interest, usually) opt to side with the people keeping them 'in their place'.

     

    Of course I don't know to what extent you agree with your friend, but you introduce her in a tone of approval.  Do you want to state what your beliefs are on the issue are, instead of hiding beind a woman? ;-)

  • Yep, that's pretty much exactly what I was trying to convey. To mix sports metaphors (a telltale sign of a fake sports fan*), I went for the bank shot, while Figs just took it to the bucket for a slam dunk.

    *Another telltale sign? Considering billiards a sport.

  • Naah, it's just what we used to call a "Threadjack" around the Captain Comics Cave! No harm meant, my friend.

    Rich Steeves said:

    This conversation is interesting, but doesn't really have anything to do with the content of the article I posted! I suppose the term itself is worthy of conversation, but I wish there had been more response to the points she made. Oh, well
  • A couple of years ago I was watching the G4 cable channel's coverage of the San Diego Con. Of course, everything was about the movies.

    At the time, Olivia Munn and her male "co-anchor?" feigned a love for comics.

    The giveaway was that at the end of the coverage they encouraged people to read comics so they could find out about possible future movies. I can't imagine anyone who really loves comics using this (tortured) phrasing. This is what I would call fake geeks.

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