Dear shy, male nerds - on nerd appreciation in the face of shaming and bullying

I was not planning to write anything in English on this blog. I stepped away from the international blogosphere a few years ago – not because I stopped having opinions on international stuff, but because I wanted to focus on my life, my studies – and also because I’d gotten thoroughly sick of the blogosphere culture I was seeing around me.

I used to call myself a feminist. I have stopped. At first it was in disillusionment about how feminism as a movement not only did not manage to clean up its act concerning racism and transphobia, but at the same time also managed to become progressively more aggressive, especially towards those people who were sympathetic to it. These days when I venture into social justice blogospherical circles (spheres?) I am constantly appalled by how the people who claim to fight for a better and brighter future for all humans are actually digging trenches of resentment with shovels of hatred in order to launch volleys of degrading and dehumanizing bile towards anyone who dares think for themselves. Tumblr, designed as it is to invite dogpiling and create hugboxes, is quite naturally the worst source of this, but it comes from pretty much everywhere. Blogging communities, of course, but also mainstream media that lend their widely disseminated spaces to ideological columnists.

These days it seems nerds are the fashionable target for social justice warriors. It’s happening in the #GamerGate conflict on Twitter and elsewhere (I might eventually make a post on that), and it’s happening in several other nerd-spaces. Dr. Matt Taylor was bullied into making a tearful apology by feminists who disliked his choice of clothing. And most recently we have MIT professor Scott Aaronson writing a comment in a discussion thread on his own blog about how feminist rhetoric became really poisonous for him, and we get a prominent feminist Amanda Marcotte tearing him to shreds, not over what he actually said, but over what she portrays him as having said. Note how her entire post is about “translating” his words so he appears to have said something entirely different than what he actually said. Funny how that was necessary to do to a person who is on board with 97 % of feminist ideology, and is merely critical of the last 3 %. Scott Alexander wrote a LONG (seriously, it’s long even for him) post about the case and I highly recommend reading it.

But it is painfully obvious that there’s an active campaign going on amongst progressives on the internet. A campaign to bully male nerds. I don’t understand why. As so many feminists will tell anyone who care to listen: words can and do harm people, so women can definitely be hurt by mean words. But when men point out that they, too, can be hurt by mean words, these same feminists turn around and laugh and denigrate them some more. As feminist (ally?) Sam Biddle tweeted:

Nerds of all kinds are under fire. Not for anything they’re actually doing wrong, but for simply for being who they are. It’s about time someone said something to the contrary.

And this is why I write in English. I have nerdy friends in foreign countries who would not understand Danish. There are nerds who do not know me whose blogs I read, who would not understand Danish. There are nerds whom I’ve never heard about who wouldn’t understand Danish. All of them are nerds and being nerds they are the ones who have been targeted by this latest social justice barrage. This post is for them and hence it is in English.

Mind, it’s not for all nerds. It’s specifically for the shy, male nerds who fit the stereotype sufficiently well to be the ones hated on by social justice warriors who need their daily spleen-venting. But let’s face it: shy and male are probably the most prolific type of nerd there is.

***

I’m a nerd. I’m not half as shy as I used to be, and I am not and have never been male. But dear male nerds: I see you. I appreciate you. I value you.

I was a nerdy girl in school. Being a nerdy female wasn’t exactly trendy (when has being nerdy ever been trendy?), so socialising didn’t come easily. Like many of my fellow nerds I am also on the autism spectrum – something I did not know until my mid-twenties – and this did not make socialising any easier. But at least I had you lot. Yes, you, the nerds.

I could not join in the typical girly activities. They did not interest me. Nor did I have much of a talent for preening and social positioning. There was one other female bookworm in my year (who later decided that she’d rather be friends with the in-crowd than me) and there were a few nerds – all of them male.

Now, I got bullied. Weird kids often do. And with autism and all I was definitely a weird kid. Some of the teachers enabled and even assisted the bullying. Other teachers were nothing short of awesome. I remember two consecutive math teachers (one of them a woman) who were appalled that I was not planning on going a science-y way further on in my education. That decision definitely wasn’t for lack of encouragement. Most of our chem and physics teachers have been women, so it’s not like I was missing female role models. But I got bullied. P.E.-teachers would needle me about my lack of athletic prowess (one of them even did so several years after I finished school when I met HER in town), others would say to parents of the others kids that I was an insufferable know-it-all, and those parents would say that to their kids, who would go on to bully me with being a know-it-all and that even the teachers thought I sucked for being one. That was great fun – when fun is defined as terribly hurtful. Even aforementioned female bookworm bullied me while being my friend – curious how when you’re at the bottom of the social ladder even bad friends are better than none at all. I know I’m not the only nerd to put up with friends, who only want to hang out when no one else sees it.

I wasn’t the only one who was bullied – obviously. There was a trio of boys in the other class of my year. They were the shortest of the boys, they were nerdy. Thus, of course, even the teachers bullied them as well. I remember that even as a child I felt horrified and appalled that that happened. Since they were a trio one of the teachers started calling them the Danish names of Huey, Dewey and Louie. It took. They were soon called that by everyone – and I overheard discussions about which one was which – it stuck for years on end. I didn’t talk to them very much, firstly because we were in different classes even if we were in the same year, but secondly, even a socially obtuse person like myself had figured out that by the age of 13 girls and boys were just not supposed to play together. (Unless of course you were an in-crowd person and the playing involved doing adult-ish things to each other’s genitals that you could subsequently brag (and probably lie) about to all the others). But at age 13 we nonetheless traded Star Wars stickers and discussed the accompanying trivia in the school yard anyway, because dammit that was all we had. (I still have those stickers btw)

There was a nerdy bloke in my own class. He played computer games like myself. When we tried to stay safely out of the way during recesses, we usually ended up being the only two in the classroom. It might have looked like we were reading books, but we were much more likely to be reading game manuals. I remember quite clearly how we one day ended up discussing how ridiculously (and gloriously) thick the manuals for Arcanum and Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri were, even SimCity could not compare, because while the SimCity book was as thick as the others it was in 4 languages whereas the others were only in English. (I still have all the mentioned games and manuals too, of course). This nerdy bloke had been the quiet, awkward and extremely shy type since the very beginning of our 10 years in that school. I have no idea what’s become of him as I have no contact with anybody from back then at all. My mother met his mother a few years back, though, and I think she said he’d become a pro photographer – that was his nerd hobby – aside from gaming obviously. A hobby that was so nerdy and technical, that I only know he had it while in school, because I was informed of it after the fact. He never mentioned it back then. He was probably afraid that he’d be bullied into bringing some gear to school that would then be broken. That’s what my classmates did to people’s shit – they broke it. Heck, they broke people.

My class was awful. They even bullied a teacher. The nerdiest teacher we ever had – incidentally also male – was bullied to the point of a mental breakdown and seeking a position elsewhere. Primarily the bullies were my classmates (and their parents). They actively tried to get him fired. Not for any actual slight or professional issue. Simply because he was too kind and gentle a soul to be able to teach the shitheads in my class anything at all. Whatever happened to it being impossible to teach those who do not want to be taught? Thankfully the principal knew this (and I may accidentally on purpose have written a letter – more like a screed – telling the truth about the bullying this shy, male, nerdy teacher received).

Did I mention that this teacher saw me for who I was? This shy male nerdy teacher was the one to introduce me to Dragonlance and The Foundation series. When he cleared out some of his old fandom things, he gave the few surviving Star Wars items to me rather than chuck them in the trash. Out of all the teachers who interacted with our class, this shy male nerd was the only one ever to figure out that in 7th grade I was depressed as fuck. I figure he recognised something of himself in me – especially since I’m dead certain he’s also on the autism spectrum. I’ve met him years later, and I know his daughter is on the spectrum, and well… he totally is too, I’m willing to bet money on this. I really, truly hope that he showed the same care to the male nerd in my class, and I hope that the three male nerds in the other class had a similar teacher – but I don’t think they had.

Anyway, fast forward a few years. In the third (and last) year of gymnasium I had a most wonderful nerdy English teacher. He wasn’t shy at all, but hey, he was also not exactly young anymore. Probably early 40s or something. He was big as a house with a full beard, and he would have made an excellent Santa ifn’t his beard and hair was black. There was a pedophilia-scare going on at the time, and at some point he said he was now afraid of hugging his own daughter in public. I thought it was solely his gender and thought it was just awful for it to have come thus far. But now I think it was more than just gender. It was also the whole being fat and bearded. Fat and bearded are things associated with disgusting and shady types. And he was nerdy. Under his tutelage I wrote papers on Narnia and Lord of the Rings. For our syllabus in the English class, which we as students had the right to have influence on, he suggested a big-ass package deal of a Coming of Age course, including among other things Winnie the Pooh, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Harry Potter and The Hobbit. Against my expectations all but one person in class liked this idea (probably thinking children’s literature would be easy peasy – hah!) and so this man made that class such a boon to an otherwise very school-weary me. I’m sure feminists would have called this wonderful nerdy (and university educated) teacher and family-man a fat, disgusting neckbeard. Me, I just loved his classes.

And the male nerds… I was in a class-line focusing on foreign languages, so there weren’t a whole lot of blokes there at all, much less any nerds. They were in the maths, physics and chem lines – obviously. But I met some of them anyway. I avoided the cantina like the plague and thus spent time in the computer room instead. And lo and behold, that’s where they were. I frequently skipped classes just to remain in the computer room, hanging out in companionable silence with people whose names I didn’t even know. The internet was an awesome place and there was a whole new world of online message boards opening up to me. Finally somewhere I could talk to other people about the books I read and the games I played, because in my own surroundings there were maybe two people  about whom that was the case, and I only liked one of them. Had I actually met more of the nerds, I might have made more friends there. Maybe.

This was also where that nerdy person I liked met the nerdy person whom she introduced me to (and unsuccessfully attempted to hook me up with), who ended up suggesting me as the fourth member of a newly started role-playing group. Nerds know we’re kind of rare, so putting us in contact with each other is significant for us.

I still role-play with some members of that group. The members have shifted over the past 10 years (wow, it’s really been that long), and though I was only ever truly friends with two of those original members outside of the role-playing hobby we shared, I am forever grateful that they dared let me in. Then again, I don’t think they had been exposed (yet) to the kind of social justice warrior who inserts herself in a situation and attempts to change everything to her own preferences. They had no reason to suspect any such thing from me, and so they treated me like they treated one another – as a nerd and a role-player. That group has been one of the few places in my life, where people have interacted with me solely based on my merits rather than my gender.

As the group was new we all needed to get a feel for each other’s playing style – heck, I needed to develop one, as I’d only played text-based games online before. After about 1½ years our first GM finished his run and wanted to be a player again. I decided to plunge into an attempt to GM a campaign. I didn’t write it myself, I merely modified one I bought. We added another member – also male. There’s still a dearth of female RPG-nerds. Everyone was supportive of me trying on the role of GM, and we all had a good time. The GM-position circulated on, and we continued onto new great adventures. Fantasy, sci-fi, horror.

And I was beginning to become aware of feminist thinking online. Online people were trying to convince me that it was actually deeply sexist that these blokes were treating me like “one of the guys” as that denied the gender I actually was. That didn’t quite feel right with me, but as always I figured that smarter people than me have thought smarter thoughts than me about it, so they’re probably right. By now, though, I think I’ve found the problem with that notion.

These guys treated me like they treated each other. To a feminist (or other social justice warrior) that might seem like denying my female gender in favour of making me an “honorary bloke”, and I can see how that might be construed as being sexist. But in truth that’s not what was going on. When these guys interacted with each other, being a “guy” was not a relevant part of it at all. They interacted with each other as role-players. As nerds. And they interacted with me in exactly the same way. They treated me as a fellow nerd, a fellow role-player. Not as a guy – as a nerd. Something a majority of non-nerdy female acquaintances of mine have seldom managed. I remember statements like “Don’t you have any real hobbies?” and “So… you just hang out with a bunch of boring nerds then?” No, ladies, my hobby was (and is) hanging out with interesting guys doing interesting things – interesting for us anyway. I don’t just hang out with the nerds – I AM one. And while the nerds themselves always understood that fact, most non-nerdy women never did. To these women nerdhood is something you claim, when you think the male heartthrob-protagonist of whatever is just to-die-for. To these women nerdhood equals being a fan of something.

And if male nerds are actually classically nerdy – the type of nerdy you get bullied for being – it’s because they’re being more nerdy than the trendy fandom-nerdhood requires.

And we were nerdy. Oh boy were we nerdy.

And I loved that I was treated like all the others. (That sounds like there were a huge bunch of us – we were 7 at the most) I have no particular need to have my genital configuration acknowledged whenever people talk to me. I don’t want them to talk to me in special ways because I happen to be a woman. I happen to be fairly well-endowed in the breast-department, and this has gotten me plenty of unwanted gendered attention from elsewhere. Never from the shy male nerds, though. For me, associating with this bunch of nerds, was a haven, where I could just be nerdy without having to worry about unwanted advances. None of us were romantically interested in each other. The bloke with whom our mutual friend attempted to hook me up was pretty cool about that, and together we had a good solid laugh about it. He is in a solid committed relationship now – I think he’s actually the one out of all of us with the longest-lasting relationship. He and I have drifted apart, but I wish him and his girlfriend all good things.

One of the others once made a really out-of-line comment to me in a very agitated moment. He called me the next day (and I could hardly recognise his voice, because we’d never spoken on the phone before) and said that it had occurred to him, that what he’d said was really crass and not okay, and he was really sorry about it, and he hoped that it wouldn’t prevent us from role-playing in the same group again, because he really liked having me as a co-player. I was kind of overwhelmed with the praise he also heaped on me (but I know from other sources that he meant every word of that). Sure, he’d said something shitty, but we can all do that when tempers flare. I doubt any human can go through life and never say anything they regret afterwards. And sure it was jarring when it happened and hurtful too, but he apologized and all was well and we went on to have many a good game session afterwards. No need to dwell on something like that. But according to what I’m reading online in feminist communities this would have been reason enough to ostracize him and shame him publicly. I keep wondering: for what? For being surprised that a co-player, who seemed completely innocuous had out-speculated and out-sneaked him in a game? I can completely understand the surprise. And I can completely empathise with saying stupid things while not quite recovered from a surprise. It happens. It’s quite human.

The same bloke was also the one to once state that I wasn’t a real girl. He does seem to have had a propensity for talking before thinking, but that episode was mostly just funny. He’d dumped all his RPG-books on our mutual friend at whose place we usually had our gaming sessions. He was clearing out. I was puzzled and asked him whether he wouldn’t miss them. They’d been such a huge part of his life after all – I know, I’d miss them, were it me giving up all my RPG books. He responded that RPG-books just weren’t the grandest thing to have on your shelf when inviting a girl home. I was even more puzzled, because what would a nerdy bloke want with a non-nerdy woman? In hindsight I can, of course, see that most nerdy guys will have to find non-nerdy girlfriends or none at all, because, well, aforementioned dearth of female nerds. But back then I was just puzzled and asked him “wouldn’t that depend on the girl?” I don’t know if he thought I was coming on to him – I certainly wasn’t – but his answer was a blunt: “Well, you’re not a real girl.” And that just left me flabbergasted. I had no idea what to say, and I was mainly just thinking: Dude, you’re looking for the wrong kind of girls, if you feel you need to hide or even give up your hobby. I don’t think he truly thinks nerdy girls aren’t really girls, I think what he actually meant was that nerdy girls aren’t truly his type. And hey, that’s perfectly okay. He seems to have found someone with whom he shares other interests and that’s a damned good thing as long as they’re happy together.

Bottom-line: the only situations that could possibly be construed to be any kind of thing a social justice warrior might concern themselves with can easily be handled with a little humanity, understanding and forgiveness in the face of an honest apology – and also a functional sense of humour. But just think of the fall-out if an SJW had heard him say what he did. Holy shit there would have been hell to pay. And for no good reason whatsoever.

In my 10 years of knowing these blokes, (I could make a really cheesy story about being crammed into a spaceship with them and spending weeks on horseback in their company, not to mention the many, many nights spent on detective-style stake-outs, but I won’t… oh look, I just did anyway) I have never ever felt unsafe or even uncomfortable around them. Sure the humour has sometimes been crass and inappropriate for younger audiences, but what do you expect when you play characters who are essentially space truckers/mercenaries/swords-for-hire/grifters/con-artists/whatever? I mean really? When people have been a solid group for a while, the humour and jargon does tend to become more frivolous and would probably sound highly inappropriate to outside observers. That’s how group jargon works.

The ironic thing here is that the RPG group where my gender did become relevant was the group in which there was already a women when I joined. And that changes everything, because apparently (according to my observations) women in general have a much harder time treating other women the way they treat men, than men in general have treating women the way they(the men) treat each other. I’m not sure whether this is because of habit, or because these women don’t actually want to be treated the way they treat men, or whether it’s just because women are more prone to thinking in us/them terminology based on gender, whereas men divide the population by markers other than gender – interests for instance. I don’t know. There’s some indication to me that this is the case, but my sample is small (personal observations) so I could obviously be wrong.

In that group where my gender did figure in the interactions, another thing should also be noted: The group had existed for some years already when I joined. There was an already well-established jargon between the others. And yeah, sexual puns happen among adults. For the first several times any and all of those jokes were explicitly directed at people who were not me or my character. There seemed to be an assumption that it would not be appropriate to joke like that with me. I assume that was because of my gender, but it could also just be because I was the new person. I started joining in on the jokes, thereby letting the others know that I was okay with this form of humour, and I think we have had and still have a good relaxed tone for such things. And funnily enough I constantly have the experience that whenever my gender does become relevant in that group, it is usually because the other woman makes it so.

Regardless of the reasons it has never been the shy, male nerds who have made me uncomfortable about being a female nerd. Or even just about being female. Even among autistic people – among whom nerdiness is considerably more common – I run into women who boldly declare that a person is first and foremost their gender and only then their personality. I have never heard such a ridiculous thing from men. I don’t know how widespread the notion is, but it seems to me that if acknowledgement of gender is Very Important to a lot of women and not important at all to most men in most situations, it is sort of understandable, why the women to whom it’s Very Important that they be reaffirmed in their Gender Status feel horribly invisible and maybe even mistreated when the men – in their attempts at treating them like everybody else avoid acknowledging their gender.

My gender identity isn’t terribly strong. I’m female (and cis), but aside from the curves I have a fairly androgynous face (I’m told) and my gender feels really unimportant to my personality. Maybe that’s why the neutral treatment male nerds have usually given me has been a perfect fit for me. I don’t know. What I do know is that the one time a male-presenting person treated my badly because of my gender it was a feminist who was extremely keen on defining me as something other than a female they presumed to be cis. They asked what my gender was, I told them, and they decided that in their eyes I would be something else, because I didn’t have to be a woman. I don’t mind that people might mistake me for something else. I’ve been misgendered as male several times in my life, and aside from having a laugh about the mistake it’s no biggie. But I have never ever seen anyone make such a fuss over gender as I see SJWs do, and mistakes aside I have only ever been purposefully and knowingly misgendered by a self-identified feminist.

And that kind of ridiculousness? That doesn’t happen among people to whom your gender doesn’t matter. And among nerds your gender seldom does. What matters among nerds is what your nerd-interests are and how nerdy you are about them and what new and nerdy details we might learn from each other.

***

I’m a law student. There are two types of law students. Those who are in it for the subsequent career/stability in earnings and those who are nerdy about law – whichever corner of Law they’re into; there are a lot of really weird and nerdy corners, believe me. When – at some point – I divulged the information to some of my fellow law-students that I have boyfriend, who also happens to be a nerd I was asked what we do together (as if a couple of nerds are an entirely different species when it comes to relationships… what?) And I figured saying “Normal couple-stuff” was probably not what they really wanted to know, but I really honestly didn’t know what the hell they were asking. I decided against mentioning sex – because that’s usually classified as “do not mention” in casual conversation – and yes, I really am this methodical in my communication with people who are not close friends and family. Eventually I settled for “going to the movies, reading books, talking, hanging out”. And the asker looked puzzled and said “Talking?” As if that’s the most novel thing two people in a relationship might think of doing. (If normal-people non-nerdy couples don’t talk to each other what the heck do they do instead? Enquiring minds want to know… I think.) Did I mention this asker was female? Presumably not a nerd – or she’d know talking about tiny little details like whether the portrayal of Thranduil in Jackson’s The Hobbit made him more human or not or whether or not it made it more plausible that he’d send the delegation to the Council of Elrond 60 years later is something that can take up hours, and be repeated every few weeks when you’ve thought about it some more.

Non-nerds don’t appear to get this. And being that there are so few true nerds amongst the women of this world – at least compared to the amount of nerds in the male population, I am ever so fucking happy that all you shy male nerds have been brave enough to share your spaces with me – even if the presence of a female has the potential to mess everything up, depending on what she does with the invitation. I am so grateful that you have taken chances with me, that you’ve included me, and most of all that you’ve treated me like you’d treat any other nerd. Some of you have told me that I “out-nerd” you in certain topics. (Note to non-nerdy readers: This is a compliment.)

And there’s this boyfriend of mine. Autistic like myself and a huge nerd. He’s a lecturer in computer science, which pretty much places him dead center in the group of nerds the SJWs are going after these days. He was raised with the kind of feminist values that most actual decent people can get behind, and he and I frequently discuss topics pertaining to social justice – actual social justice, not just the warrior-brand. He has, in fact, spent much more time than I have in feminist activist spaces. He’s probably more aligned with feminism than I am, though neither of us use the descriptor anymore. He’s also the first person I’ve ever connected this well with. We don’t share all of our nerdy interests. I don’t code, he hasn’t gamed in many years, but we do share our love of nerdy literature, we can discuss and rant about plotholes, inconsistencies and poor writing in space operas, fantasy novels and philosophical works alike. He’s awkward. He’s shy. He’s extremely intelligent – and very poor at picking up non-verbal communication. He’s probably the kindest, gentlest and most caring person I’ve ever met, and he’s also so terribly afraid of offending anyone at all – especially women and minorities – that he’ll tie himself in knots over little things that most other people likely won’t even think about – including the women and minorities (unless they happen to have SJW-proclivities). And he’s cripplingly aware that his lack of non-verbal communcation skills means that if he offends someone he won’t realise that it happened, how it happened, what he did, nor what he should do differently. What he knows is that all of a sudden someone might take offense at something he did, and he will never know what it was. He sees it happen all the time in the call-out campaigns of SJWs online. And I see the man I love becoming so much of a nervous wreck that he is prepared to give up on having a hobby at all, give up on ever putting his creativity to use, give up on sharing his ideas and thoughts – just in case the very sharing of them might be considered sexist by someone. Not because he’s afraid people won’t like his things – he’s a programmer, such people are usually pretty blunt about code they don’t like, I hear – but because he’s afraid of the flood of hatemail that might ensue.

I understand his fears. Mind, it’s unlikely that anyone’s gonna want to go after him – he’s not exactly a high profile anything. But when Dr. Matt Taylor is bullied into a tearful apology, when Scott Aaronson is flooded with hatemail, when people get fired from their jobs because someone overheard them sharing a dongle-joke and posted their photos to get them identified, rather than just talking to them and requesting they keep it down – you know, like a regular person would, when people talk too loudly at the movie theater.

But no matter how much I tell my boyfriend that he’s fine, that he’s not oppressing anyone at all, and that he’s doing everything that could possibly be expected of him in terms of inclusiveness, it doesn’t actually matter. My reassurances would never be able to stop the flood of hate from the cesspool of bile that is online social justice activism. I can do nothing about that.

What I can do is tell him and other nerds that you aren’t monsters. My mother always tells me that no one is required to perform beyond their abilities, and that applies to you as well. If you do what you can to be good, decent human beings and treat other human beings with kindness and respect for their abilities and situation, then no matter what vitriol others might fling at you, you have done all you can. And I think it’s about time a little appreciation came your way.

Sure, I have also run into a male nerd or two, who have not exactly been prime examples of awesome people. There are jerks among our population, too – anything else would be very strange, we come in all varieties. But by far the most prevalent experience I have with you guys is that you’re awesome, witty, knowledgeable on a variety of subjects, interesting, and once you feel safe enough to stop being shy around another person you’re usually every bit as talkative as I am (if not more – and that’s saying something). Funny how that also seems to be a shared nerd-trait. I love how, when I talk to you, I am constantly at “risk” of learning something new about a topic I might never have dreamed could be interesting, and I love how you seem to be equally interested in my weird niche interests.

I want you to know that I see you. In a world that seems to not want anybody at all to be nerdy we all experience bullying, but judging from my school days and the experiences of people I know, it seems generally easier for nerdy girls to be left in peace with a book. Girls are allowed to be quiet and contemplative – in fact we are generally encouraged to develop our intellectual abilities, and especially SJWs encourage women to excel in the hitherto male-dominated fields. We don’t exactly lack encouragement – and neither should you guys. I am so sorry that being smart, contemplative and quiet/shy has netted so many of you such horrible times at the hands of childhood peers, adult rolemodels and adulthood peers as well, and especially that you receive it not only from the easily identified schoolyard-type bullies, but also from people who claim to be against injustice.

I know you don’t hear it often. I know that in fact you hear much to the contrary. But to some of us nerdy women (who used to be nerdy girls) it is a boon that you exist at all and that we can share our hobbies. You are interesting. You have worth. You are not monsters for not wanting to go through life alone. Everybody wants to love and be loved – it’s very human. You are not disgusting for being human like everybody else, despite what social justice warriors might tell you. You might be socially awkward – yeah, join the club, I regret to inform you that there’s no fancy membership card – but so are a lot of other people. And the people who are worth your time won’t care anyway – they’ll be busy discussing Asimov, BASIC or Elder Scrolls Lore with you and won’t have time to worry about silly little things like what kind of pictures are on your shirt, or those 3 % of modern feminist ideology or methodology you find it hard to agree with.

So basically: If I had to make do with female nerds I wouldn’t have had real company aside from one friend in gymnasium while we were 16-19 years old. And the one I did know before then ditched me in favour of the in-crowd without so much as a goodbye, and she actively bullied me while we were friends – some friend, huh. I have never ever been bullied by a male nerd, I have never been back-stabbed by a male nerd, my best friend through 10 years is a shy male nerd, my loving boyfriend is a shy male nerd, and no male nerd has ever had unrealistic expectations of me – at least none that I was ever made aware of [EDIT because I just remembered: the only unrealistic expectations a male nerd has ever had of me was specifically a boyfriend who later turned out to be borderline, which rather does explain a thing or two that doesn’t pertain to his nerdiness]. You are human; with everything that entails from misfired communications with other humans to gloriously nerdy hours spent discussing minute details in something obscure and interesting.

You are not wrong, bad or terrible in any way for being nerdy. We’re a social minority, us nerds, and the social majority will probably always have a hard time understanding us and appreciating us for what we are (even John Stuart Mill talked about this exact thing in the 1850s before the word “nerd” even existed). That means that we will all have to look around for a lot longer before we run into that special someone, and as nerds are disproportionately male those of you who are interested in female nerds as partners are going to have look around extra long before you run into her. Statistics, chance and all that. It sucks, truly. And it’s no bloody wonder that a lot of you become very lonely along the way. It can be a long wait. Heck, I became lonely, and as a female nerd interested in partnering with a male nerd my chances were still better than the other way round. I cannot solve this problem for you, I cannot single-handedly de-stigmatize nerdhood and conjure up more female nerds – damn, I wish I could – but I can tell you that the friends – male or female – you make along the way appreciate you. I sure as heck have. Even if most have not been lasting friendships it has been good times of acceptance and fun.

Dear shy male nerds. I’m glad you exist. You make the world a better and more interesting place.

You. Are. Good. Enough.