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“Friends, nerds, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Geeks, not to praise them.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones.”
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare, slightly paraphrased.
What we are experiencing is a term called hegemony, for all you poli-sci nerds. It’s when a ruling power dictates through the implied threat of force, as opposed to direct force. In this case, through the currency of coolness. Currently, nerdery and geekhood is cool. Nerd is the current lingua franca of popular culture. Therefore, nerds and geeks reign.
This opposes the reactive, conservative mindset seemingly on the rise, creating a social duality much like in the 1950s when the first real nerds hove into popular media, such as Poindexter on Felix The Cat or the professor himself in The Nutty Professor. It’s this conservatism that controls the mediums of the mainstream, creating conflicting hegemonist messages. Nerds are cool. Nerds are on top. Nerds are anti-social misfits and should be destroyed. Go team! Hoorah!
Monty Python explains hegemony best:
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“Help! Help! I’m being repressed.”
Sometimes, it all goes horribly wrong. When you hand Kevin Smith the keys to a comic shop and a TV show at the same time, we see that the fat man in shorts can’t straddle two horses at the same time. Especially when not fording the river of Kevin Smith’s inherent sexism in his love of all that is comics; at least, the ones he loves, the comics aimed at the oppressed 12 year olds seeking power trips who can occasionally get their mobility scooters out of their mom’s basements and away from playing World Of Warcraft. Metaphorically speaking, that is.
Worst. Column. On nerds. EVER!
“The show’s called Comic Book Men, I hope there is some female viewers, even if they don’t feel that it’s gender-oriented towards them.”
It’s not like there aren’t chicks in the show…there are chicks. But the reality of the comic book stores is that these are the people who work in them. There’s not a woman among them. When we originally showed the idea to AMC, they said ‘It’s a sausage party,’ so we said all right, let’s bring in a chick. And for the presentation we brought in and shot a chick, and it was wonderful and great, but then AMC, god bless them, said ‘Well, that’s not the reality of the show.”
And from the “chick”, Zoe Gulliksen:
“During my “in store interview” Walt and Bryan asked me to come in the following day dressed up in costume. I did as I was told, and came in my Black Canary suit…When I showed up at the comic shop on my “second day”, Walt berated me, saying what I was wearing was inappropriate and sluttish. On camera I was nearly in tears because I did not understand what was happening. I was only doing what the producers had me do, and yet I was being yelled at. The producers stopped filming and told me to yell back at Walt fiercely on camera.”
Instead of a cordial explanation, I was made a topic of ridicule on their podcast. Walt, in what I now realize is his true to form sexist manner, falsely stated on the Tell ‘Em Steve Dave podcast that I chose to show up to their shop wearing almost nothing in my Black Canary suit. This has only confirmed that, yes, I was right to speak out because these three grown men already saw me in a poor light and now claim I was acting upset because I was not on the show; they even stated that I “felt like I deserved to be on it”….I did not in any way, shape or form express ANY ill feeling over not being on the show, I was merely thrilled to have the experience and curious to the new direction they chose to take it. Only now, after the fact — and expressly because of the way they are acting — do I regret being involved.
I feel very sad that this show will validate to people, those not in tune with the comic/geek lifestyle, the belief that comic-centric fans are misogynist, uppity anti-socialites.”
This was all stated and decided back in the dark days of, well, this time last year. AMC, for all it’s desire to pander to the comic-book geeks spending squillions of dollars on merchandise, televising The Walking Dead (spoiler: It’s based on a comic book!) then proceeds to shoot itself in the face with a Mac-10, full spray. This is the same channel that aspires to create geek-like fandom; how many people do you know who talk ad nauseum about Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Prisoner, or The Killing? And you just want to stab them in the femoral artery for their geeking out about them (spoiler: the femoral artery is the one in the inner thigh, just below the genitals)?
One of us! One of us! Gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble!
Just to reassure the non-comic fans out there, not all comic shops are full of assburgers-suffering shut-ins who ogle girls and wildly masturbate to theories of who can beat The Hulk (Spoilers: Wolverine).
Except, for the last five years The Big Bang Theory has been running to popular acclaim on CBS. I’ll be honest. I enjoy it despite the fact that it’s a conceptual knock off of Brit-coms The IT Crowd or Spaced, funneled through the American shit-com blender. Malfeasant tech-geeks sit around, talk about pop-culture, and get into scrapes. Hi-jinks ensue. Unlike The IT Crowd, however, there are no story arcs. No characters develop, and each episode is self-contained for the sole purpose of syndication.
The Big Bang Theory has come under repeated fire for its consistent portrayal of female characters. Smart, nerdy ones get written out, and attractive non-nerdy ones are treated like mindless sex objects. Bitch Magazine wrote a far more succinct piece about this back in 2011 than I could – extremely similar criticisms to Comic Book Men, and worse. This has come to a head with a recent episode , “The Bakersfield Expedition” that had the female characters going to a comic-book store, and treated like three-tittied whores by the shut-ins of the store. This has generated numerous columns about it. Bleeding Cool had a score of reactions from female comic-book readers, describing the show as “The Television Show That Hates You.” and we here at Techcitement ran a piece yesterday about it.
I don’t have to watch it.
No. No, you don’t.
Why these shows offend, why they get their concepts of nerdery wrong, is because they’re writing about the death of nerdery. Most of these habitués are over. Comic book stores are closing down, being replaced with digital models like ComiXology, Madefire, or people creating and reading webcomics you’ve probably never heard of. Dungeons & Dragons was replaced with Call of Duty and World of Warcraft decades ago. Even the medium these geeky concepts are presented on is being redefined for the internet age and falling behind as more people watch more and more entertainment online. Nerds can argue about statistical differences in hockey teams in online forums. Sad, bitter conservative politics nerds have the comments at Fox News Nation and The Daily Mail. Mothers in suburban Kansas City can compare WordPress template coding tips with designers in Uttar Pradesh to make their mommy blogs that much better than that bitch in New York who thinks her two toddlers’ shit smells of roses and who constantly repins cupcake recipes to Pinterest she stole from Martha Stewart. Cosplay enthusiasts can share patterns and ideas from L.A. to London and wind up at Dragon-Con in Atlanta.
Where we are now with geek and nerd pursuits is a far cry from LARPers, cardboard and latex swords, spray painting wool sweaters to look like chainmail, storing your character stats in an Excel spreadsheet, or carefully keeping concert tickets and theater programs in a scrapbook.
The latest versions of the geeky kids of yesterday now make high-production movies using After Effects on YouTube, pwning you at Halo, or streaming the latest Deadmau5 live show. They’re creating internet start-ups, coding the exercise apps you use to lose your middle-age spread or make fart noises on your iPhone, or trolling creationists in Louisiana. And they’re ALL NERDS. Just ones that the media hasn’t tapped into. Yet.
So, look at these shows, work out why they piss you off, and stop doing it. Go find new things to get excited about. Geek out over a new TV show. Learn a new (programming) language. Start rock climbing or go to a trapeze class. Find out how you can go to work on an egg in a unique way. Be a new kind of nerd.
Grow up.
Evolve.
In case you think I’m trolling for the sake of it, I present my final, and maybe most compelling evidence. Coming soon to TBS:
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Le nerd est mort, vive le nerd!
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
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