If you do that and offer thoughts based on your experiences and find links to seemingly unrelated things that you love, you can’t help but stand out as unique.

You’ll notice male or female never entered into my equation.

My last two posts in a nutshell basically is that I don’t like fads and trends. If a female truly is a geek girl, that is wonderful. Be proud of it. There is no reason not to.

One point I failed to mention is that there are a lot of guys that put on a geek show for fashion reasons as well. I don’t like that either.

There is a certain dishonesty to a person creating a look which implies a lifestyle they don’t live and it sends my BS detector buzzing out of control.

And as far as the ones fighting the hardest to deny your existence, I would be more concerned about the posers diluting it’s value (even redefining what a geek is, which is what I am arguing against)than I would about geek guys. They are going to accept you if they get to know you. But what they are gonna curse is the wanna-bes (the ones that I have been talking about)and you are gonna take some collateral damage from that. It is not fair and it is not fun, but that is the way it is.

Finally, yes, seeing below the surface is important. I would never go on a blog and make personal attacks like the one that started this discussion. Even if I had read every post in your blog, I would still be in a situation where the only thing I know about you is what you have shared. That does not put me in a position to make any judgments.

Finally, regarding the whole self appointed title thing, I have always been a bit offset by that. I think it started with that whole BBW thing. Of course a woman can be both big and beautiful at the same time. One does not exclude the other.

But is it really her place to say that about herself? I mean one’s beauty is an opinion held by others and not a fact written in stone.

I don’t find geek girl nearly as offsetting as BBW, but still the whole self appointed title thing as a whole just bothers me.

I have enjoyed this discussion and I hope you have not found anything that that I have written to be a personal attack, because that was not my intention.

Well, as a self christened Geek Girl, I can give my answer — it’s the only one I have ;-)

If you go back and read my blog, you’d see a lot of what you wrote about. I didn’t read comics, but I did have my geek pursuits when it came to books and movies. Encyclopedia Brown being among them.

There was a lot of pressure on girls when I was growing up to like “girl” things. I’m not much older than you, so maybe it’s generational. Man, I hope so.

As to your defining points:

I was socially awkward and, in many ways, still can be. I’d like to believe I’m intelligent. ::wink::

Maybe it really does all come down to a Venn Diagram of Geek/Dork/Nerd. Who knows.

But there’s something else I’d like to offer.

The internet changed many things for me as a geek and as a girl. Because I found out that I wasn’t as alone in the world as I thought. I’m more outward online than I am in real life. I flirt, I play. Because in cyberspace — my mind had free reign.

I call myself a Geek Girl because it’s my way of owning what I am and joyfully so.

It took me a long time to understand I wasn’t a freak.

I just find it painful to think that geek guys — the guys I’ve always liked best on the planet and who I feel the most kinship with — may be the ones fighting hardest to deny my existence.

I’m just saying that we -all- want people to look below the surface instead of making judgments on names and looks.

Geek girls deserve that just as much as geek guys.

I make a lot of sweeping generalizations here so I should state that I am sure that there are geek girls out there. Just not the great population that professes it today.

I don’t think being a geek is a fad. I think being a geek girl is a fad.

As an example, none of my female friends as a child took much interest in my geeky pursuits like comic books or battleship models or Encyclopedia Brown books. And I would not have expected them to. Those were considered a boy’s pursuit. And not because girls were dissuaded from purchasing and enjoying those things (or maybe they were if daddy frowned upon it), but because girls as a whole simply were not interested.

And as I grew up and maintained and expanded those interests, females simply were not involved. And believe me, as teenagers with overactive hormones, any girls who wanted to participate by my friends and I.

They were not interested and I don’t the stigma attached to geeky behavior at the time appealed to them.

So yes, I think this sudden interest in being called a geek girl is more about fashion and image than any true interest in actually being a geek.

They weren’t interested before and now they are because the nerdy glasses and converse low tops make them look “cute”.

What do I think qualifies as a geek girl?

Assuming that there are geek girls and geek boys, there must be some similarities between them. I think defining these things would be more important, as it defines the geek and ignores the gender.

No one of these qualities defines a person as a geek, but a combination of some or all of them.

The primary defining quality of a geek is social awkwardness. I think that has to be there. Geeks tend to either be very solitary or run with a small group of people with similar interest because social situations make them very uncomfortable.

If you have ever been on a date with a geek, you will know what I mean. Interacting with the opposite sex is not their strong point.

Secondary is intelligence. Geeks are the people behind the scenes who make it possible for us to visit space, make revolutionary discoveries in chemistry, mathematics, and technology. They tell stories in a way that no one else has done before, on paper or on film. They decide that they don’t like the constraints of commercial software, so they create their own.

Of course not every geek reinvents the wheel, but for the ones that do, there are a ton of other geeks working behind them.

I learned a lot about my own thoughts as I was writing this and was beating my brains trying to think of more, but it wondered off course.

So what is at the heart of a geek? It seems it is social awkwardness and intelligence.

Much more simple than I thought it would be, but there is a lot between the lines there.

I also realized while writing this that I am a mid-30s guy who grew up in a very geek unfriendly time. I have to make the assumption that, if I were that kid today, times would not have changed all that much.

And I also want to state again that I don’t deny that there are geek girls, but I also don’t think that christening oneself a geek girl actually makes it so.

Being a geek was not always so fashionable. It fact it could be pretty lonely and uncomfortable. Where were the great masses of the geek girls then?

1) If being a geek is a fad, then will the guys dwindle along with the girls? Or are you saying only the girls have jumped on the “bandwagon”?

2) As a goth club regular, the scene’s not dead. It’s just stopped being “in vogue”.

I have to ask. What are your qualifications for a geek girl? As a geek babe who has a blog, I’m curious.

And because I’m intrigued by the answer, are you male or female?

Just like the whole punk scene in the late 80’s, and the goths of the 90s, the geek girl will die out as well.

The women who want to call themselves geek girls participate in just enough activities associated with neredery to maintain some sort of credibility for their blogs or Tweets or YouTube channels.

But in the end, they are making a fashion statement. You will rarely find them managing corporate networks, pursuing Cisco certifications, or even writing their own HTML to create/maintain that blog that gets them so much attention.

I am not saying women don’t do these things, because they do.

But I am saying that the majority of women who need to identify themselves as geek girls through either name or appearance are doing it because it is cool at the moment.

My guess is that within five years, their numbers will have declined significantly as the majority moves on to the next fashion.

The same may also be said of men who engage in typically-female pursuits. For example, in the bellydancing community, male bellydancers (especially the straight ones) get a lot of attention from women just because they’re male and they bellydance.

As a geek girl… who is uhmm… well endowed in the breast category, I could never use a slogan… Has Breasts, Plays Video Games.

Anyone who would see a picture of me would automatically assume that I use my big boobs to promote the blog I write. It would never be considered as ironic or satirical.
It would only bee seen as calling attention to the fact I have boobs.

Now when you look at a picture of Nerdy Bird, she is.. no offense.. but not a chesty girl… so her reference to her boobs at least to me is an indication that she’s saying she’s a female and not using them to gain readership among males.

I’m discriminated against by both male and female geeks for various reasons. My geekness is often questioned because of how I look. If I had a penny every time a guy tells me “but you don’t look like a geek” I would be a rich woman.

I’m the girl that sits at home having LOTR marathons or 18 hour gaming thons and I format my HD like my life depended on it, and was one of the few girls in computer science classes in college, but you won’t know this from just looking at me. Because honestly, who da fuck knows what THAT girl looks like.

There’s a lot of salient points to be made for both arguments, and it would be cool to have a panel discussion.

As long as I’m on it :)