Admitting it is the first step: On the stigma of fessing up to being a geek

When I first proposed this blog project thing and set it loose onto the intertubes, the reaction was genuinely positive. Lots of my friends, classmates, and colleagues are interested in comics, movies, sci-fi, fantasy, etc. They identify as nerds or geeks, and many of them identify as women and feminists, so I have opened up a forum for dialogue about the things that matter to us.

I’m not even going to pretend like this casting rumor isn’t important to me.

I promised to further explore the stigma of Fake Geek Girls in my blog birth announcement, but before I can get into that, there’s a bigger umbrella topic that demands addressing: the stigma of geekiness.

As some of my older friends just pointed out to me when I first revealed this baby, I’m lucky. Being a conventional geek now is hella easier than it was years ago. Now we have conventions and movies and web communities out the Astro Boy. However, these older friends told me stories about how collecting comics was something you hid from romantic partners and branding yourself a “geek” was a form of social suicide.

Also, it hearkened back to the time of freak shows, and that’s… that’s just not good. Nothing related to freak shows can be good.

While I can’t speak for the experiences of my friends, I’d like to start this conversation on the stigma of nerds and how women feature into this with a little personal meditation: How I realized I was a geek.

I guess I was in fourth grade when I first felt that something I liked was uncouth. Not normal. Wrong, even. Until that point, I was of the understanding that what I was doing was perfectly normal. From puppies to Pokémon to Neopets, there was nothing that I was interested in that I felt ashamed of.

How could I be ashamed of this? Kacheeks were AWESOME.

Then fourth grade happened. I think at that point I became girlier. First grade I was riding high on the Pokémon and Furby trains, pretending to like DragonBall Z to strike up conversations with the boys in my classes. Second grade into third grade I was, like other kids, obsessed with Harry Potter. But in Fourth grade I was in Girl Scouts and playing the flute and getting into fashion and style and tween issues. My twin best friends moved away; they uprooted with them our tomboyish games and shared interests in fairies and other such whimsy.

And then I got into X-Men Evolution.

Though I hadn’t wanted to watch it, there was one night in which my brother and I were watching TV ad he absolutely refused to change the channel while my mom was busy cleaning the house. However, though I protested, I found myself fascinated by the episode. It was the one where Rogue was first introduced as a character on the show. As the episode progressed all the kids on the teen X-team were introduced to Rogue and they all showed off their powers and it was just awesome.

After that, I started watching the show more and more. And then I realized, without problems or pride, I really liked it.

It was a hard revelation. After years of playing with Barbies, how was I to introduce my female friends to the concept of super heroes? (And I mean REALLY liking super heroes?) My twin friends and I had played Spider-Man around the playground before they moved away, but after they were gone, I felt like I finally had something to hide. I slowly introduced my friends to the idea that I watched the show on a whim, and they went along with it, so I got by. Still, it wasn’t until my slightly older female cousin validated my interest in the show by enjoying it herself that I felt that the stigma was gone.

In fifth grade, I changed schools, but that year I didn’t fear being myself. For as weird as that one-room schoolhouse was, that was the place in which I found out it was okay to be me. There weren’t enough people for cliques to form. You hung out with whoever. Interests be damned! We all had pretend swordfights with our rulers!

This was what we were going for. Bruised knuckles meant we succeeded.

In middle school, I kept that vibe going. When I was interested in Star Wars, everyone knew. The year I was interested in My Chemical Romance and Kingdom Hearts? Even the teachers knew it. After I shed the initial stigma from X-Men Evolution, I really didn’t feel it much any more.

The only other times I felt like it wasn’t okay to be me were in junior year of high school when I went on retreat with a bunch of girls I didn’t know. Before retreat, I felt like I was the kind of nerdy kid that they would have shoved into a locker, but I found out after a few days of teary heart-to-hearts that that was not the case, and my confidence was restored.  I felt it again senior year after I went to an anime convention for the first time; if you, like me, were able to be comfortable amounts of you nerdy self while around some girls more girly than you, you really have to re-evaluate how you present yourself after you spend a weekend hanging around life-size human Pikachus.

And being this utterly kawaii. It really changes your self-perception, man.

People usually peg the coolness of geeks emerging in 2008, the year in which The Dark Knight and Iron Man came out and made serious box office bank. At that point, it didn’t feel revolutionary; these big-name films were just a new outlet for me to be a geek. I didn’t realize how big of a deal it was until the final Harry Potter movies were released and everyone in my high school exploded as they fought for the mantle of biggest fan. It was then officially, unequivocally okay to be nerdy in a way it hadn’t been before.

A relevant visual metaphor! Hooray!

But is there still a stigma? As much as burying myself in the Internet and surrounding myself with positive, nerdy people has caused me to delude myself, I know that it’s still there. I realize it at work every now and again when I have to explain what I like about video games and why their music is worth performing. Or when I have to explain that, as a legal adult who works four jobs, yes, I still play Pokémon regularly. Or confess that yes, my family did unintentionally wind up naming both our dogs after nerdy characters (Frodo and Leia, to be specific). I realize it when I encounter a person who doesn’t know a thing about Star Wars or has no idea what Super Smash Brothers is.

It’s weaker today, but the nerd stigma is still there, and I still occasionally find myself feeling like maybe, just maybe, I’d be better off if there was a cozy locker somewhere I could climb into and hide in.

I guess a nice box would also suffice.