Male Nerds vs. Female Nerds

[shirgall]

Today's spelunking features NERRRRRRRDS. We're all invited to the play misery poker:

 

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120653/nerd-entitlement-lets-men-ignore-racism-and-sexism

 

 

Unlike Aaronson, I was also female, so when I tried to pull myself out of that hell into a life of the mind, I found sexism standing in my way. I am still punished every day by men who believe that I do not deserve my work as a writer and scholar. Some escape it's turned out to be.

 

and

 

 

Feminism, however, is not to blame for making life hell for "shy, nerdy men." Patriarchy is to blame for that. 

 

and the empathy that can only come from Y-chromosome deficiency:

 

 

What fascinates me about Aaronson's piece, in which there was such raw, honest suffering, was that there was not one mention of women in any respect other than how they might relieve him from his pain by taking pity, or educating him differently.

 

Enjoy your privilege you had no choice in obtaining, folks. They're coming for the nerds, because they're almost done defeating the jocks.

 

 

Nonetheless, he makes a sudden leap, and it’s a leap that comes right from the gut, from an honest place of trauma and post-rationalisation, from that teenage misery to a universal story of why nerdy men are in fact among the least privileged men out there, and why holding those men to account for the lack of representation of women in STEM areas—in the most important fields both of human development and social mobility right now, the places where power is being created and cemented right now—is somehow unfair. Nerds are not like the "neanderthals," the REAL abusers of women. They should get a break.

 

If you can handle the rest of the reading, look out for a meme cribbed from Peter Joseph: "structural misogyny"

[SueBee]

Is structural misogyny another word for patriarchy? Also, nerds were never on my list of people observed to live with privilege, but....I guess....I was wrong?

[J. D. Stembal]

There are a lot of young men out there—I suspect even now—who sometimes wish they'd been born when things were a bit easier, when the balance of male versus female sexual shame was tilted more sharply by the formal rituals of patriarchy, when men could just take or be assigned what they wanted, as long as they were also white and straight.

 

More straight, white, male prejudice. I am deeply shocked and saddened that supposedly intelligent people can think in this way.

 

Also, when are people are going to figure out that you cannot attribute responsibility on abstract concepts?

 

Anecdotal tangent:

 

 

I was living with a divorcee, and her son would wake up in the middle of the night screaming and crying. I would attempt to talk to her about it to see what was going on, and she would respond with trite expressions like, "The transition is difficult for my son," or "The divorce is really tough on him." That much was obvious to me, except that divorce doesn't really exist. All it means is you have severed your state-sanctioned relationship with your mate. Neither phrase illustrates that it was because of the parents' actions that the son was suffering. It broke my heart to witness it.

 

I also kept imagining myself as the ex-husband, and how I would try to handle the situation if I was him. Was he railroaded into legal separation? The mother told me that the main reason she left her husband was because they had a difference of opinion on how to raise their son, and painted it like he was authoritarian and she was the more open-minded and liberal parent. Instead of coming to a family negotiation or compromise, it was more productive or valuable to dissolve the family.

 

About a year before they separated, the mother initiated an open relationship in the marriage, and started dating another man. This coincidentally coincided with the husband losing his full time job. I didn't put it all together in the moment, but now I realize that this was a simple case of classic hypergamy.