withasmoothroundstone:

moteinthedark:

Controversial opinion:

Geekiness is neither feminine nor masculine. It’s neotenous, or genderless. There’s a cluster of people who read more as “little kid” or “robot” or “serious, sexless nun/monk/scientist” than as “man” or “woman”.

There is a cluster around science/tech, introversion, neoteny, a particular kind of gender weirdness, and some flavors of autism. The geek stereotype is based on a real kind of person. I am that kind of person.

I actually like being that kind of person. Sometimes it means I Fail at Girl, but mostly it feels natural and good.

I get the sense that society has gotten way more interested in gender, and assigning genders to everything, and arguing about gender. And that’s good on net, because it results in more freedom for LGBT people. But also…the pinks are pinker and the blues are bluer, y’know? Marketing has gotten more gendered, and that includes the marketing of “content.” Everything you read is either marked blue or pink. It wasn’t, in the 90’s. Tech is marked “blue” now , and it didn’t use to be.

Feminism is very pink these days. 70s feminism had women who looked and talked more like me. Judy Chicago was dinky and Jewy and nerdy and slightly butch. She would have been easier for me to make friends with than most of the feminists I read on Tumblr.

I see people who are my kind of people, who are in the cluster, and they primarily talk about it as a “trans” thing or a “disabled” thing. What I see is a type that includes some trans and disabled people and some who are neither, but all of whom have some of this weirdness regarding gender and thinking style (and interpret it/react to it differently.) There’s a “geek phenotype”, so to speak.

Contemporary culture doesn’t really allow you to talk about that. “Geek” is defined to include everyone who likes Marvel movies. When you try to talk about the specific thing that is Our Kind Of People, you get accused of being insular. Or people say “oh you mean autistic” and it turns out that there’s overlap but there are lots of autistics who definitely aren’t “geek phenotype”. If you claim “there are more men than women who are phenotypically geeky”, you start being suspected of sexism. So you can’t really talk about this cluster that everyone knows is more-or-less real.

I mean, there’s a “nerd accent.” We’ve all heard it.

What *is* it that prevents us from identifying as a group?

I am… not that type but have known tons of people who are and at times hovered near social circles with a lot of such people in them and emulated elements of it.  I don’t know how much of the above observations I believe or don’t believe – by which I mean I literally have no opinion because there’s a lot I don’t know.  But I think I know what general type of person is being described.

Something that is not directly related (or may be, but not sure), but for some reason I kept thinking while reading this:

I have long observed that there is one set of traits that is read in two supposedly opposing way depending on context.  In some contexts it’s read as like the super-genius uber-geek.  In other contexts it’s read as retarded.  (I’m using that word, no matter how offensive it is, because I don’t mean intellectual disability, I mean an idea in people’s heads that correlates with the idea of ‘retarded’ most people have.  An idea closely related but not identical with intellectual disability. Just as ‘genius’ is an idea in people’s heads related to the idea of high IQ but isn’t identical to it at all.  If I meant high IQ and low IQ I would’ve just said those things.)  

The common denominator is autism.  These are traits of voice, appearance, habit, and mannerisms that are absolutely identical to each other and it is only context clues that make people sometimes read them as one thing and sometimes as another.  

Like I was trying to describe möbius mouth (one of the earliest ways to screen for autism in infants, and something that usually persists for life, and part of the stereotype-that-goes-both-ways) to an MIT professor, and she couldn’t see it as an unusual expression because it’s so damn common at MIT.

And that thing is related to the geek phenotype thing.  As in, the geek phenotype thing is like… one of several things that can happen in a lot of autistic people and some other neurodivergent people, that causes a couple different stereotypes in people’s heads to form, and which one they see depends entirely on context.  There are other things besides the geek phenotype that can be read in a similar polarizing way.  I’ve been able to notice this contrast because I have been seen as gifted and put into gifted programs, and I’ve been seen as developmentally disabled and put into DD programs, and I’ve watched the way utterly identical behavior is treated as opposites within these two contexts. 

Explaining to an MIT professor why I was terrified to lie down on the floor… she acted like my ideas came from outer space.  I’d seen people get the crap beat out of them and tied to tables for lying on the floor not bothering anyone at all.  Apparently lying on the floor is socially acceptable at MIT.  I felt so horribly out of place there – like I was an infiltrator who would be revealed to be not as smart or useful or interesting as they thought I was.  The last time I was on a university campus, several people with a lot of authority told me I didn’t belong on a university campus at all.  And then the professor took me to a neighborhood of a type I have been thrown out of for walking alone.  I couldn’t explain any of this to anyone and still can’t entirely.  It has to do with experiences that have shaped me on levels I can’t describe without any conscious awareness until events like this brought them up.  Emphasized the most emphatically because the day before MIT I was at an amazing DD self-advocacy conference where I felt a sense of belonging and rightness i’d never felt anywhere, and the contrast kept piercing my heart into pieces.  I kept trying to get them to be as interested in the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities as they were in the experiences of autistic people, but it wasn’t happening, they kept asking why, I couldn’t explain, but I felt that out of loyalty to the people who have made a place for me in their lives in a way others haven’t, I needed to say “You’re overlooking people with valuable perspectives.”

And I know that’s way off on a tangent from the OP.  But somehow this ‘geek phenotype’ thing reminded me of one of many different ‘phenotypes’ that are read in supposedly-opposite ways (’genius’ and ‘retarded’ are ideas most people refuse to combine) based on identical behavior in shifting contexts.  Which led me to my own experiences being read both ways, and once read one way people refuse to read you the opposite way, most of the time.  I find both ways dehumanizing and inaccurate.

If there’s a ‘geek phenotype’, there are… other things, too. Whatever I am, overlaps heavily with some autistic people but not others, like the geek thing, and also overlaps with a lot of nonautistic but usually neurodivergent people, including often people with certain kinds of epilepsy, certain kinds of intellectual disabilities, and certain things that don’t have official classifications as of the moment.  I can’t really describe it I just know it when I see it.  And for whatever reason we seem to inspire very polarized ideas in other people, and we also seem to be unable to fit into any of the common categories people create, not just a little unable to fit but a lot.  Like functioning labels apply to nobody, really, but for us we completely break the concept to pieces in a very visible and unavoidable manner, and that invites hostility and suspicion from people invested in the categories existing.  Some people try to shove us into one or another but when we don’t fit we get blamed.  And sometimes we try to shove ourselves into one or the other but it never works no matter how hard we try, and the not-working is unavoidable it’s not something we can avoid confronting for long at all.  (Like, some people it takes work to say why they don’t fit, we just flagrantly don’t fit in ways that become obvious quickly if not instantly.)

Anyway, I hope the OP doesn’t mind a zillion tangents like this, these things are just where my mind went.