well, yeah, if by geek culture you mean men

Wake Up, Geek Culture, in which I think I am reading a geek shaking a virtual cane at people getting their anime too easily, too many people of the ungeeky classes being interested in geek turf, and remix culture because it's killing originality and then I got lost in the Etewaf, which is apparently really bad, but kind of sounds like my perfect life.

...I'm not sure.

I want to approach this from like, multiple are you kidding angles because hello, kind of my entire identity being geek, remix, and also, I like anime and God would I have killed to have access to it in my teens. Or like, knew it existed.

Academics have covered remix culture, and the mainstreaming of geekdom is like, a constant refrain everywhere, so not even going to bother, mostly because he froze me up at the Etewaf horror--very Lovecraftian, that--in which everyone has easy access to everything and that's like, really bad.

Let's not romanticize the past in which we had to wait for years and go uphill both ways to get our manga, okay? That shit isn't nostalgic; that sucked. It sucked. Yes, we had lively discussions waiting for new issues for about an hour and then geeks went to war, and geek war isn't like mundane war; most of us enter with a vocabulary not limited to languages that actually exist and a lot of us grew up beneath the thumb of mainstream contempt and high school bullying and whoo boy did we carry that into every conversation ever? Oh, we did. Harry Potter books had what, a one to two year wait or average? Did you see that fandom? And let me just say, thank God Star Trek II didn't come out during internet culture and have the waiting period before Star Trek III came out: bloodshed, people.

Geek culture was expensive; it was very much the territory of middle and upper middle class who could afford to import direct from Japan or knew someone who could if the titles you wanted weren't here. Even domestic products weren't cheap or easy; it's not that long ago that VHS tapes were this new and exciting thing that allowed recording instead of staring at the television listings for a hopeful glance of something not a rerun of fifties era programming and being really disappointed on a daily basis. Cable still isnt' universally accessible even in the US, and certainly not in rural Texas, much less internet. Working class geek meant used bookstores because hardcovers or even new paperback were for birthdays, Christmas, and when it was something my entire family would want to read (which luckily, we overlapped taste in a lot of things). Buying movies was an event that was considered carefully.

[I'd love to hit a real discussion of classism in geekdom because along with shitty race issues and shitty sexism issues, geek cultural development wasn't just white and male, it was white, male, and specific to certain economic classes as well. It's not that POCs, women, and the non-middle-class weren't geeky or didn't develop their own geek-related culture but geek as it is presented to mainstream culture is--well, white, male, and very obviously both.

[I'm still boggling at people who are utterly shocked that POC and women attended and still attend sci-fi conventions and are interested in the same things that mainstream geek culture is; yes, we've been here all along, and the question you should be asking is not 'where have you been' but 'why didn't I see that?' No one asks that, though. It's weird.]

Geek culture was difficult unless you lived in a city; I was a geek culture of one at my school K through 12 and you think your clique had it hard? Please. I never even met a D&Der until college and a LARPer after that. I met geek culture in college without any geek socialization skills--and we do have them, believe it or not--and I was the geek that geeks didn't like, since I was a feral geek who developed independently in the high school library reading encyclopedias* from 1976 because I'd finished the fantasy section before my freshman year of high school ended.

[* Encyclopedia Brittanica. Accept no substitutes.]

You city geeks had it easy, baby; the nearest used bookstore was one almost-large room and I was buying third rate sci fi where the high point was finding Mercedes Lackey*--say it with me, that was the high point--and Anne McCaffrey* and God help me that shitty Thomas Covenant series that I read in desperation because it's not like there was a lot of choice there. But also Sydney Van Scyoc was awesome with the first time I ever saw a sci-fi matriarchal culture that treated it with such utter, utter normality that I barely noticed I was being taught my first lessons in feminism. Also, no one was raped. New books were the nearest large city--forty miles away--or Wal-Mart--Wal-Mart--and we were so rural we couldn't even get cable, so I never had a meaningful relationship with Fraggle Rock and dear God am I bitter about that.

[I am not saying they're bad; I'm saying, think about a world where my sci-fi pinnacle was Anne McCaffrey.]

Yes, yes, the icky mainstream are all making your geek all less than special; those of us who, let me say this again, were reduced to rapey incesty Thomas of white gold ringness and the Gor novels unironically shelved beside the sci-fi aisle saw the dawn of Amazon.com, hulu, and bittorrent like the second goddamn coming, okay? I waited half my life to fall madly, desperately in love with a million things and Geek!Seperis of the dark days before the internet and access to Amazon would like to say, are you kidding me?

[I won't even go into women in geek culture, because being a feral geek, my early interactions with geek (male) culture were so off that I didn't get the joy and delight of trading sexual harassment for interaction and second class acceptance. My regret, it's legion, really.]

The days when geek culture belonged to the urban middle class male is over; we all own it now. Don't look like that; we're not saying you have to leave. See, we like to share. That's kind of the entire point.

Comments

[ithiliana]

*clicked on link*

*read first sentence*

*snorted at Golden Age Nostalgia bullpuckey and hit backbutton*

Yeah, +1000000000000000 agreement.

And you know, I grew up in a small town in rural Idaho (OK, I admit that's a redundant phrase) that didn't have a bookstore until after I graduated from high school (1973), so the only places for books outside the (thanks to the godddess) incredibly fantastic WPA built library was drugstore wire racks, and thank goodness my dad was a geek (subscribed to the magazines and when we drove to the big city, Spokane, Washington, we always went to bookstores (HEAVEN I'M IN HEAVEN!) as well as shoe stores and clothing stores and doctors and stuff.

We definitely need discussions of class and classism in geekdom.

I was privileged because geek!dad was university professor which meant my family was middle class but located far far away from urban culture (even the big city Spokane wasn't actually that urban, ditto Seattle at that time!). (I couldn't actually get involved in any feminist movement during that time either--and it's frustrating to see how the 'history of feminism' like the history of so much else in the U.S. is urban centered). Or queer movements.

Like you, I never had any access to anybody besides my dad who read or watched sff in the 1960s-early 1970s. I was alone. (I sort of dislike the feral metaphor for personal reasons, but yeah, if that's the term, that's what I was).

I did find a Star Trek group when I went to Bellingham, Washington in the late 1970s -- and had a few lovely years with Trekkies and Apa zine dudes -- and for whatever reason (by then after being a classics major and a history major back in Idaho, I'd perfected the 'honoray guy' mask and plus as I was told by a few guys later on I intimidated the hell out of them by knowing more about sf authors than they did ahahahahaha) I didn't have problems with sexual harassment even though I hung out at the cons with about six of my apa buddies, all male. But it was definitely limiting, that honorary guy thing.

I was so hanging out with teh dudez I never even learned about slash fiction back then, dangit.

Yeah, boohoo, stuff including fannish stuff is more accessible now, to a wider audience, and the white elite boys (including the white male sf academics who all rant about kids these days only watching tv or films and playing games and not read TEH CLASSICS) should, you know, go die in a fire or something since that fact makes them all so miserable.

[seperis]

We definitely need discussions of class and classism in geekdom.

It's definitely not entirely separate from race or sexism--geek culture development was done in a predominantly white middle class (moreso than it is now, even)--but breaking it down, it was and still kind of is very white and leaning middle to upper middle class. It wasn't just the expense or the access so much as both in a weird, vicious circle of writing to their audience, which they assumed was them because it was them, where even the range of 'white' was very limited to again, those same groups.

I mean, it says something that not only was teh original Star Trek shockingly progressive at the time, scifi actually took a step back from that for a while and became even more conservative. Using Star Trek as a cultural marker, compare and contrast TOS and TNG in both casting and subject matter. While technically speaking, TNG was more progressive, it wasn't more progressive than society at the time, which TOS actually very much was. Compare and contrast TNG to Babylon 5 and whoo-boy, while entirely different, and with it's own problems, it was far more the heir of TOS in challenging status quo in scifi that TNG was.

[ithiliana]

P.S. I actually found the Gor novels in the public library!

*shudders* And I read all they had because, well, SF covers!

[seperis]

*glum* I read all I could get, too. I'm still amazed that books with so much sex-sex-sex-sex-sex have so little, you know, actual fucking. If I'm going to read about novels about women and their true wish to be raped because that's love and a woman's place and whatever, at least romance novels have people getting laid without the philosophizing.

Which make a weird argument about Gor versus Romance novels written by women; it's not that I'm saying "whee, bodice-rippers rapey rape yay" but Gor got my back up the way even really questionable romance novels never did. I'd walk out of a bodice ripper twitchy and irritable, but Gor is like, I want to set them all on fire; it's only recently I figured out it's because even the rapey-rape Romances are written almost entirely without a default male gaze.

[revolutionaryjo]

Ha, yes. This. All of this. Especially as someone who is heavily invested in the anime fandom. That article is terribly ignorant from so many angles.

[blueraccoon]

Okay so this is kind of interesting and at the same time you're killing me a bit because:

I was a voracious reader as a kid. I used to go to the library in the summer, check out ten books, return htem two days later and check out ten more.

For my 12th birthday, my uncle (who is a filker, an actor, a total sf guy, etc) gave me two books. One was A Wizard of Earthsea, and the other was Dragonsong. I didn't care much for the LeGuin, although I did buy and read the others in the Ged trilogy, but LeGuin has never been a huge favorite of mine.

But McCaffrey...holy shit, man. I kid you not, this was like NOTHING I had ever read. I went to the library and the bookstore--and I lived in a fairly affluent metropolitan suburb so there were plenty of bookstores (In high school I spent my Saturday nights at the Barnes & Noble cafe with my best friend having tea and talking)--and loaded up on McCaffrey and read eveyrthing I could, and this was...early 90s, so her stuff hadn't gone completely downhill yet. And then I started reading writers McCaffrey had written with, which was how I got to Elizabeth Moon and Misty Lackey, and to this day I will buy Lackey novels because if nothing else they're still incredibly readdable, and sometimes I need comfort pastel ponies in my books and I refuse to be judged on my literary tastes.

McCaffrey is also, I swear to God, how I met my husband. See above for McCcaffrey --> Elizabeth Moon, who I loved when she wrote the Deed of Paksenarrion (and I now think is kind of a failure of a human being, but ten years ago, what did I know?) and Moon was the GOH at Smith's tiny little "blink and you'll miss it" relax-a-con called 5Con that was still ongoing when I went there. Because Moon was attending, I signed up to work the con, which meant I signed up to work it next year, which meant that when this guy everyone talked about, who'd actually started the con and got it off the ground and everything, came back to visit and say hi to people and be one of our alumni guests, I was already primed to fall in love with him. Which I did, and five years later we got married.

I didn't really get into fandom until I was in college, in which one of my best friends in SSFFS (Smith Science Fiction and Fantasy Society) was massively into BUffy fanfic and told me alllll about it and I was completely lost. And then I started watching Smallville, and then the summer before my senior year my boyfriend-now-husband sent me a link to a Salon article on slash that started with a paragraph from a Killa story (Turning Point) and I was like "hell with the article, give me more of the story!" so I hunted it up online. And then the sequel. and then I read my way through Highlander, the Sentinel, TPM, dueSouth, and everything else I could get my hands on, and wrote my way through Smallville for a very short time, and then wrote my way through Firefly and...

I still have crystal clear memories of my fannish junctions, of the moments that set me on one path or another to direct me toward becoming a geek. Gaming? I didn't do it in high school; tried it once and couldn't get into it. Same in college. Moved out to Seattle, Morgan dragged me with him to a game, I rolled up a character, six and a half years later I play every week or every other week depending on who's gaming and it's the best weekend fun ever.

But I guess I got into fandom through women authors, and then through slash which is predominantly women, and so I never had the guys going "What are you doing here?" I had the women going "OMG YES MOAR PORN" and the women authors writing empowered female characters I could (at twelve) identify with. So my fandom history experience is kind of...different, I guess.

[seperis]

OH, don't get me wrong--I love Anne McCaffrey, trust me, even now. I've read pretty much everything she wrote that wasn't done under her name by her son (and some of that, too, sadly). But before Scyoc, Frank Herbert and a couple of others were my only reference point for scifi fiction outside of movies, so when I say that was the best I could get, I mean, that's a pretty narrow area for a vast field, and I categorize her more on the borderline scifi/fantasy for the most part.

[lillian13]

OMG, I read this in Wired. And came close to throwing the damn thing across the room.

I was lucky in so, so many ways. Yes, I grew up in mid-sized town West Texas (Midland, to be precise). But we had a first-rate public library, my mother subscribed to Analog, and she encouraged me to read and watch what I loved. But being where I was when I was (70's), I found maybe 2 friends who were also involved. All of us were female.

And it was hard! I had to find out about conventions from the listings in the backs of magazines (Starlog especially). I'd scour the TV listings for neat and obscure movies and TV shows. My best friend and I wrote fanfiction for ourselves; we had no idea that other people did the same thing. And no way to find out.

Then I went away to school and discovered D&D, and had my first experiences with guys trying to "shock the new girl". (Good luck buddy, I grew up in the oil fields and my brother the future doctor was doing his best to gross me out at a very early age.) I finally dealt with the condecending misogyny of the male SF fan when I started to go to conventions.

So yes, I love the fact that we're mainstream; I love the fact that fans are making movies and TV shows and I can read my SF out in public without anyone making annoying comments. I love being thought "cool", since I've been into this stuff for longer than a lot of my friends have been alive. (When it doesn't make me feel old. LOL) I love old Trek and I love the reboot. I love going to ComicCon and meeting fans of all shapes, sizes, and obsessions. Old Farts can bite me.

[oaktree]

yeah, that article sounded like a big pile of "bawwww get off my lawn" to me. (you analysis may have been a bit more incisive than mine.)

[seperis]

*grins* I think mine was just a looooong version of that. It just constantly amazes me that people like this manage to miss not only racism and sexism in the good old days, but dear God they miss the entire issue that accessibility was limited by income class and location. It's like, how can they possibly not notice that.

[(Anonymous)]

Let's not romanticize the past in which we had to wait for years and go uphill both ways to get our manga, okay? That shit isn't nostalgic; that sucked. It sucked.

WORD.

God. What the fuck, man.

I'm sick to death of dudes trying to hoard the nerd like they should have some kind of secret, priviledged right to it, like they discovered it first and fuck off to all those people who have it easier now that we have the internet or some whacked shit like that (is that basically what he was getting at? Because I'm not going to lie, the back-button backtracking I just did gave me whiplash).

I remember when I was in grade five and absolutely glomming onto The Fucking Babysitter's Club because I didn't know all (or any) of the reasons why I liked the dykey, tomboy main character as much as I did. I just knew that I really loved Kristy a whole lot and no one else around me seemed to be as excited about it as I was and it made me feel like a giant weirdo in a very, sore-thumb-in-the-suburbs way.

Fast-forward to highschool when I discovered the internet and fanfiction and *slash* and it was all so gloriously, *easily* accessible and I was finally able to name why I loved Kristy so much but now I knew other people just like me were out there too and it was suddenly *easier* to, like, fucking breath and I just...I don't understand why that's a bad thing.

Easy access to the gay, man. It saved my fucking life. And it continues to save the lives of others as well, every single day. There isn't any bad here, as far as I can see. But what do I know. I obviously didn't have to work as hard for it.

[marcella_mcphee]

*claps loudly*

[umadoshi]

So much about this post is awesome. ^_^

[cesare]

I see what you're saying and I totally agree. Oswalt screwed up writing that in a big way, imo. But I also think its context changes it a little. It's Wired, an environment where geek culture is expressed as possession of the shiniest toys and x thing crossed with Star Wars. (Links courtesy my husband's recent complaint to me that he was sick of Star Wars remix stuff.) From that perspective, remixing might look like a way to rock in the cradle of the familiar and shut out new things. But I think Oswalt misdiagnosed the problem pretty drastically. Remixing isn't the enemy.

I'm surprised by how far off the rails that piece goes. He's a fantastic comedian and he makes jokes that show at least some minimal awareness of privilege. I think he got caught up in describing the endgame of remix culture in a comically horrified way. He does wish for an Iranian band to get as big as the Beatles in there, so it's not all about privilege barring the doors... some of it is about making room and opening up to new things.

[nagasvoice]

Bwahahah! Laughing quietly along with *everybody* here.
I got lucky as a kid, had fabulous YA libraries in many of the many schools I got yanked around to, even some of the most isolated places. I got Andre Norton and Isaac Asimov and I won't say I'm proud of Heinlein for all his later weirdness, but his early stuff was there too. Rosemary Sutcliff, too, she really twings that same "alien culture" harpstring.
McCaffrey and LeGuin and Harlan Ellison and William Gibson all came later, in bookstores during college; while I was shocked at the thinness of the college library itself. Pfehh.
I have not seen school libraries, or any libraries, of such quality since that time frame.
It's not a small thing, to me. One of the total high points of my life was getting to embarrass Andre Norton in person by stating right out loud, to an entire convention meeting room fulla people, that she'd saved my life. I said I thought she'd saved the lives of a lot of depressed kids out there, writing about loners who figure out a way to survive and make new connections and create friendships.
It got a roar of agreement. People stood up *clapping.*
Like I say, embarrassing.
Way too true, too.
And I say this in spite of the fact that I probably wouldn't read it as an adult, no matter how much it appealed to me as a YA reader. I poke too many holes in it, as an adult.
So, now I kinda wanna stir it by suggesting somebody (or multiple somebodies) go bring this up with theferrett, who often claims to be a giant geek, and see what happens. I'm wondering if the collected geeks there will grok the exclusiveness which we perceive. I'd be happy to do so myself, except I've been mouthing off on other signs of privilege there which I'm not real patient about, and the feedback I've heard from other friends is that I was getting way serious over trivial matters, as I've been known to do.
But perhaps the folks round here don't consider geek economic classism and sexism to be all that trivial, no?

[everbright]

I get your RAGE, totally. I was nonplussed by the article at the beginning. Then it got weirder and weirder and weirder, and I was convinced by the end of it that he was trolling, like, everybody in the whole world; Geeks and non-geeks alike. His hypothetical geek re-birth was super-ridiculous and impractical, and everything else was a steaming pile of hyperbole. As a person who has been on Zoloft, I was assuming he talked himself into trying life without it again and wrote it while NOT under the influence.

Dunno. I either have rose-colored glasses or I'm a totally dismissive condescending dick, but I could not beleive Oswalt was saying any of it sincerely.

[elaran]

Yeeeeeeeeah I'm not gonna click that link.

But yes, internet is awesome. I didn't discover fandom until the internet and it was suddenly a whole new world of people who understood that make-believe about books I read and nerdiness were my escape rather than the one other person who got in primary school (which from the sounds of the other comments here, I was super lucky to have at all).

[language_escapes]

(Hope you don't mind a long-time lurker commenting; also, this comment may not be coherent- your entry stirred up a lot of thoughts.)

THIS.

I grew up in the Internet generation, but I also grew up in an incredibly rural village in Michigan. We had no bookstores, and the nearest bookstore was 40 miles away. Our library was one room (and shared a space with the town hall) and I'd read every sf/f book in it by the age of 10. We didn't even have Anne McCaffrey. I would have killed for something of that quality at that age.

My friends and I thought we'd invented fanfiction, and passed around a notebook between us, writing Buffy stuff. Imagine my shock when our village got finally Internet when I was twelve (this was, fyi, in 2000) and I stumbled on ff.net. We had spent years thinking we were completely alone, and it turned out there was this huge community out there.

Thank you so much for writing about the feral geek. My roots are very much there, and I oftentimes still feel that way, given that I SUCK with technology and couldn't figure out a bittorrent thingie to save my life. But if the option is between discretely handing off notebooks to my friends and hoping I don't get beat up for being a geek, or posting my fanfiction on my journal and proudly proclaiming my geek status, I'll gladly take the mainstream option, thanks.

[petra]

Having grown up without much disposable income in the middle of nowhere, I am with you on the utility of the internet for spreading geek culture and joy. I don't understand the conception of the nerd sandbox as a limited resource at all.

[cleverthylacine]

I have to admit I stopped reading after he completely got the meaning of 'otaku' wrong. 'otaku' began as a really stilted, formal way to say 'you' which was characteristic of the bookish, nerdy male obsessive manga/anime fan who was generally afraid of girls with more than two dimensions, and became pejorative because there was an otaku serial killer in the late 80s or early 90s (I am forgetting which). It's still really pejorative and Japanese fans are often irritated that American fans use it for American anime fans and think that they will not mind having it applied to them too.

What I remember is that in the Midwest and the south anime fandom was largely white, middle class--but on the West Coast it was Asian, often 2d generation Americans who were buying the stuff for themselves and then at school connected with the white fans and that they were the first link in the supply chain for things like fansubs, which at that time, were made by copying the VHS tapes Japanese grocery stores imported (I used to actually have some retired ones of these) or copying laserdiscs to VHS and putting the subtitles on, then copying the copies, so that it mattered how many generations removed your copy was because the quality degenerated.

(In northern California, there was also a group called BAAS. All the officers were black or Asian. I love those people still. I keep meaning to go back to it, it was a big part of my life for years, but they're not as active as they once were.)

I must have had hundreds of those old VHS tapes.

And I remember how ANGRY and MEAN the boys' club was, and how much really rapey art and fic there was, when Sailor Moon first came out. (And also how much money you could make going into Chinatown and buying Sailor Moon toys and Pokemon toys and the like and selling them to folks in the midwest, even if you did shell out the cash to buy licenced stuff to sell.)

And how I loathed the dub because the story was bowdlerised, but a lot of people loathed the dub because suddenly there were all these young girls trying to join anime fandom, and the guys couldn't make up their minds whether to hate them or be sexually predatory toward them or in many cases both, and all the nasty homophobia that surfaced when Matt Thorn started translating and popularising yaoi, and Ai no Kusabi came over, and how angry all these guys who were into yuri doujinshi were that women liked yaoi, and how even angrier they were that some gay men liked it.

I used to think I lost interest in anime fandom after my favourite shows all died out in the mid-90s because I moved on to being into music and other things (HP, ugh ugh ugh) but to tell you the truth I think part of it was that the fandom got so ugly and polarised, and also I kind of associated it all with my third marriage, but I remember also being really tired of all the scary doujinshi and not even having a name to put to why.
Outside of BAAS and a few other yaoi-friendly groups, especially on Usenet and outside of Hitoshi Doi and Matt Thorn's mailing lists, a lot of white, middle class guys were working really hard at being disgusting enough to keep anime fandom from falling to the likes of me and my sparkly pink ass with our Sailor Moon and our yaoi and our costumes and dolls.

And to tell you the truth what brought them down was money--the money that people were willing to spend on Sailor Moon and Pokemon and the recognition that there was a market out there. They will never admit that the REASON anime has so well penetrated the American market is because of us girls.

[idiothole]

Hey, I'm only tangentially in the anime fandom but I found your comment really fascinating and illuminating, as somebody who's watched anime as a kid but not been into the fandom until I found the internet aged 13. I remember going to a fantasy roleplaying store that sold tons of Warhammer and a little manga, and how the store has little by little transformed into being half-fantasy/RP/scif-fi and half-manga/anime/merchandise.

how angry all these guys who were into yuri doujinshi were that women liked yaoi, and how even angrier they were that some gay men liked it.
Ugh I can only imagine.

[sporky_rat]

Yes. YES.

Hi, I'm a Feral Geek from Rural Mississippi.

YES.

I got lucky, my father had a thing for Zelazny. But other than that? I was out of luck until college.

My geek social skills are still....well, they're not very good.

[banah]

Feral geek from probably-not-as-rural Mississippi here, seconding this. I'm still shocked that there's a comic book store within reasonable driving distance (reasonable being an hour) from my parents' place.

[out_there]

Yes, we had lively discussions waiting for new issues for about an hour and then geeks went to war, and geek war isn't like mundane war; most of us enter with a vocabulary not limited to languages that actually exist and a lot of us grew up beneath the thumb of mainstream contempt and high school bullying and whoo boy did we carry that into every conversation ever? Oh, we did.

Yes, this. This exactly. The good old days were when you felt like fandom and geek culture was a safe, hidden space away from the majority that bullied, insulted and made us feel like outcasts. I get that the sense of secrecy, of being a small, precious few who really understand/appreciate/whatever, the sense of something special that's only *ours* is gone. But at the same time, the level of patronising insults from everyone else has lightened up a hell of a lot too -- now it's acceptable enough to be a geek because it's spread and wormed it's way into so many people's lives in so many different forms.

But it's a shocking failure of human nature that we look at the youngsters around us and wish they'd have the same respect for things that we did (or that we believe we did at their age... whether or not that's true is debateable). They may be geeks but they don't feel like *our* kind of geeks, there doesn't seem to have been a trial by fire for them and we unfortunately get a bit snitty about their experience being easier.

We all bitched about it and wanted an easier, more accepting world, and when it happens, it's so easy to complain that it wasn't that easy when we were young. (The flipside is that whatever pressures the youngsters are dealing with aren't pressures that we had at that age. Just because one part of life got more accepting doesn't mean that kids these days have it "easy". Life doesn't work that way.)

It's not that POCs, women, and the non-middle-class weren't geeky or didn't develop their own geek-related culture but geek as it is presented to mainstream culture is--well, white, male, and very obviously both.

Oh, that is very interesting. You're very right. When you think of the mainstream example of a geek, how often does it revolve around someone with the funds to constantly collect roomfuls of comics, to spend on the books and movies and t-shirts and tie-ins of every expensive flavour? It's expanding these days -- there are more female geeks on TV, etc, and in more flavours -- but typical geek culture does come from the idea of white, male and middle-class. Hmmm.

[anime_babble]

This post resonates with me so much. I'm in constant awe ever time I look at all the anime and korean dramas easily availabe on hulu. Or when I walk into any bookstore and there's a whole manga section.

It's so much easier to be a geeky fangirl these days.

[(Anonymous)]

[Here from metafandom.] First off: thank you for this. I read that article a month or so ago, and became very, very pissed off for reasons I couldn't properly articulate. All I could say was, you don't own this, you don't get to define it for the rest of us, but you've said it ten times better than I could. And I'm, you know, young. I grew up with easily accessible geek culture, well quote-unquote easily accessible, because it's still not the easiest thing to play by your own rules in certain sections of it.

The days when geek culture belonged to the urban middle class male is over; we all own it now. Don't look like that; we're not saying you have to leave. See, we like to share. That's kind of the entire point.

This is golden. Thank you.

/will come back and log in later.

^^

[indiw]

... I am deeply amused by the fact that your icon is of a young white male. Who is to be king, if I have my fandoms correct.

*ducks and runs*

(via metafandom)

[kaz]

Yeah, that article starts out making me furious and ends just confusing me immeasurably (Etewaf? what?). And wow some of the -isms in there are just disgusting.

As a kid I was a total McCaffrey fan and read fantasy voraciously and spent a lot of my money on books and almost lived in our town library... and then my family moved back to Germany. All the sf/f I was reading was in English, and I hated hated hated translations. I remember buying books from amazon.com, before .de or .co.uk existed, and paying shipping fees almost as high as the price of the books themselves because it was the only way to get English books (apart from the one paltry shelf of English books in the foreign language section of the library, of which possibly three were sf/f.) And, yeah, that's a pretty bit of class privilege there, being able to pay that much, having an internet connection at all in the late 90s.

Or (also a CRPG geek) playing the German translation of Baldur's Gate, which was rather unintentionally hilarious in many places (hint, people: dialects do not translate well). And that doesn't even address becoming an anime/manga fan...

When I first moved to the UK I'd just go into bookstores and stare at all the books; having that many English books available seemed to me an amazing luxury.

And yes yes yes to geek culture of one. If it weren't for the internet I wouldn't be *in* fandom because I do not know any fellow fannish person in RL. In high school the main "geek" group I knew of were my brother's friends so I could only be the tagalong little sister there (nevertomention I had a pretty damn hard time making friends at all in high school because non-NT). At uni I gave it a try but ended up fleeing the roleplaying society due to what was sort of sexual assault (bit of a tangled mess) and that was that for my RL geekdom.

ETA: should note, I'm relatively young too so my main access problems were language-based and I still wouldn't wish that on anyone.

[lindseykuper]

Man, thank you so much for this.

I spent my teen and tween years in the 90s living on a farm in Iowa and attending school in a rural town, population 1200. The nearest city was a 40-mile drive away. Getting to go to the mall there was an unusual, few-times-a-year experience.

The Internet brought joy and color to my life. There was no way I'd have been able to download music given our creaky dial-up connection, so some incredibly kind and thoughtful people I met on message boards actually mailed me cassette tapes of bands they thought I'd like, bands I never otherwise would have found out about. I owe a lot to those people.

I didn't understand the notion of Comic Book Guy for years and years because the idea of an actual store devoted to comics seemed so exotic that I couldn't believe that they actually existed. Later, when I was visiting a well-to-do North Shore suburb of Chicago, I remember being blown away to see some happy teenagers playing geeky card games in a game store one evening, because I hadn't realized that was something that teenagers could do. It sure hadn't been an option where I grew up.

[lilacsigil]

Geek culture of one, that was me - rural Australia, so not just no cable, but no commercial TV, no cinema and no bookshop (no internet then, either)! I found some other geeks - all male - and was really into that brand of confused proto-feminism where girls are as good as boys and girly stuff like pink and romance is GROSS. You're very right that our geek culture is not presented to the mainstream, and I think straight white male geeks get very upset when - after an adolescence being excluded from "mainstream" - they are confronted with the idea that they *are* mainstream.

But I am white (though all five Chinese students in our school were also geeks), an English-speaker from an English-speaking country and had middle-class parents who encouraged reading and computer games, gave me a book allowance, and were happy to let me travel alone at the age of 13 to the big city (three hours away on the twice-daily train) to buy books.

[nyxelestia]

(I always feel like this sort of thing should go on the Fanfic Symposium. :D)

Having grown up entirely with Internet, and thus having spent my entire career as a geek during the Internet age, I honestly shudder at the thought of living that kind of pre-Internet geeky lifestyle. *hugs*

There are certainly a lot of entitlement issues when it comes to the "original" (white middle-class urban male) geeks. (I found a good outline of lot of the problems with gaming culture here, depending on how reliable you consider a Cracked.com writer).

I remember once mentioning to a "mainstream-culture" friend how my biggest disappointment with scifi was the way it treated women. She was rather surprised - wouldn't women fare well in scifi, in which there are futuristic societies where women can live in worlds without gender boundaries? After all, geeks suffer from the patriarchal status-quo, too! Shouldn't they find a common bond with women, and together create a space that they could both thrive in? *sighs* I wish the world worked that way.

But now that women are here, it's like "original" geeks are somehow afraid we're stealing Geekdom from them? Nevermind that Geekdom is run pretty much on social interaction and imagination, both of which are infinited renewable resources if you don't spend all of your childhood in soul-killing public school, and as such there is more than enough land in Geekdom to go around.

So, yeah, agreeing to The Sentiment At Hand. :D As Lucy Gillam once said about women having as much rights as men to fandom (and by extension what rights other non-"original" geeks had): "didn't nobody create those lists and cons and archives and communities for us, darlin". :D

[stultiloquentia]

I always feel like this sort of thing should go on the Fanfic Symposium.

I desperately want everybody to go put their stories on Fanlore. The comments on this post are so wonderful. And important!