Comic Book Wednesday: Nerd Culture

This article has been making the rounds recently (I qualify seeing two people link to it on Facebook as making the rounds), and for those of you who didn't read it, it's about male privilege in nerd culture and why it's a bad thing for geeky girls. The author makes some good points about how the geek culture caters nearly exclusively to men, particularly in the comics and videogame sectors.

I've already discussed my feeling on the portrayal of women in comics, which relies on arguments that the article dismisses as products of male privilege, which does have some merit, but I still think that comics are a business, and should not be vilified by for catering to their primary audience.

Anyways, my feelings about female comic book characters aside, the main gist of the article is that many women are alienated by the geek/nerd community because they are treated differently, and often weirdly, by the community because they are girls in a traditionally male only space. This is a fair point, and his arguments about why this is a bad thing are pretty solid.

I found this whole issue somewhat interesting, because while I know it's true to a great extent, it is fairly far removed from my experience in the nerd community as a female comic book fan (if you didn't get that by now, Imaginary Readers, you have obviously been skipping Comic Book Wednesdays, for shame, I am currently shaking my head disapprovingly at you). Only one on occasion have I ever felt like I was treated differently because I'm a girl at a comic book shop, and that only entailed a guy assuming I was buying manga rather than mainstream American comics because I was a teenage girl. I wasn't particularly offended by this assumption, because it seemed to me that The Source's extensive manga collection was what drew in most of their teenage girl clientele. Maybe that was my own concession to male privilege, but it does seem to me like making an assumption based on observed patterns is not necessarily sexist, it's just pattern recognition.

It is true that most times I have been in a comic shop, I've been the only girl there, also, very often the only person under 40, but it's never bothered me. Granted, I've never been totally immersed in the culture, as my interest in comics seems to follow a sinusoidal pattern with a period of about 2 years. And The Source, the store where I've primarily gotten my comics, is a mixed comics and games shop, so it serves a more diverse clientele than say, Big Brain, the exclusively comic book store I pull from when I'm at school, where I've only ever seen one other human being aside from the guy behind the counter.

I can't honestly say the male privilege isn't a problem in the nerd community, it's just something that I've never really experienced (at least to my knowledge; I'm not the most perceptive person). You should definitely read the article, because, if nothing else, it's food for thought.