How does nerd rage feel from the inside? And what can be done about it?
—-
In part one of this article, we talked about the cluster of people who are, or believe themselves to me, permanently awkward and socially nonfunctional, people who need simple and consistent rules for interactions. They’ve tried to make spaces for themselves within geek/nerd culture, where they don’t have to be acceptable to other people, and they respond with rage when they feel those spaces have been violated by “outsiders”. Their experience of outsiders, and especially of women, is that they cause pain, therefore causing them pain is justifiable.
“Well, that’s a nice theory,” you may be thinking, “but does it fit the facts? Does it have predictive value?” If you’re not thinking that, you should be. Always. Let’s look at some examples. First, we have this rueful essay by Devin Faraci, in which he recalls his own youthful nerd rage, and analyzes how current events look through that unhappy lens:
I’ve done it! I’ve cried about how girls only go for assholes! I’ve whined about outsiders invading my geek spaces! I’ve felt bad for myself because I couldn’t understand why a very beautiful girl wouldn’t want to date a fat, greasy oddball who wore a severed finger earring. I was lonely.
Don’t like ads? Become a supporter and enjoy The Good Men Project ad freeThis loneliness has manifested itself in #GamerGate in a big way. They see the world of video game journalists and developers as ‘cliquish’ and ‘nepotistic.’ That’s because they don’t understand networking or, frankly, making many friends. People who work together in an industry will socialize together, especially in an industry like games, where everyone pursued their jobs because they love the field in which they work. When you work in a field you love your hobbies and your work become impossibly intertwined. But for the dispossessed 15 year old this looks like an impenetrable world of socially entangled hypocrites, indistinguishable from the impenetrable social world at school. Games are what these angry nerds love, how they spend their time, and here is a group of people who are on a higher social plane than they are in this video game world and they do not understand why. And some of them are girls.
Again we see the theme played out: the defining quality of these guys is not being white and male, it’s being socially nonfunctional. They don’t understand how to be around other people, and they feel instinctively that anyone who does understand how doesn’t belong in their club.
We see the same problem in all the nonsense about “fake geek girls”, who are always conventionally attractive. You will never, ever see a fake-geek-girl joke with a photo of an overweight, frizzy-haired woman in an ill-fitting T-shirt. The cries of “fake!” come when a woman looks like someone who’s been socially accepted, and therefore by definition can’t be in the geek club, which is only for the unattractive and ostracized. Yes, this is a toxic, self-loathing worldview, but it’s the one too many guys are stuck with.
Next, let’s look at a series of actual comments from a Gamergate supporter who shall remain nameless, but whose guileless, barefaced anger and pain show the nature of the problem in sharp relief. The following screencaps were taken from comments on a Gamergate article on a very popular website.
First we have the simple rules and the insider vs. outsider manifesto: Then, in response to criticism of what he honestly thinks is a moderate and reasonable stance, we get this revealing clarification of his terms:
When actual women challenge his exclusionary rhetoric, he gives us this remarkable one-two punch of, again, what he thinks is simple and reasonable logic:
Note the phrasing. Women “barged in” and the “real gamers” felt awkward. Like they always have around women, like they fear they always will. Now there must be payback for making them feel awkward.
Naturally, this guy gets a lot of pushback from people refusing to grant his premises, and very quickly his I’m-being-reasonable stance breaks down and we get a look at the raw hurt underneath:
He says it outright: he couldn’t deal with “the world” and he tried to retreat to a place where he didn’t have to. How bad does it hurt when he’s told that there’s no such place? Pretty bad:
It’s like a Scooby-Doo episode. The mask comes off the cartoon monster and we see that inside is just an embittered, angry human being. In this case, a guy whose experience of interaction with socially functional people has caused him nothing but hurt. He hates those “outside” people with their nuance and empathy and rules he can’t understand; he hates them for causing him pain.
That’s not an excuse for anything he does, and for what too many like him do; recall that all those embittered human beings on Scooby-Doo wound up going to prison for their actions. An explanation is not an excuse. But we can’t address the problem unless we accurately diagnose it.
♦◊♦
So once the problem is diagnosed, what do we do about it? How can we keep the pain and alienation these guys feel from turning into the ugly, inhuman hostility that’s too often displayed? I don’t pretend to have definitive answers; it’s a deeply-rooted and largely unconscious problem, which makes it resistant to most simple solutions.
However, I can think of four definite actions that can offer, if not a cure, at least a vaccine. Maybe we can’t easily fix the guys who are already so hurt and scared that they’re lashing out in all directions, but we can, in the words of Batman, stop the world from making more people like us. Here’s some things we can do.
1. Anti-bullying campaigns and programs
This one is off to a good start, but needs to be continued until it’s an accepted social norm. The hurt that gives rise to nerd rage comes when socially awkward kids are victimized growing up. End that and you end the hurt, you cut the rage off before it can even take root.
2. Validate male pain.
Pain turns easily into anger in men because we’re told over and over that we’re allowed to experience anger, but “pain don’t hurt.” Worse, we mostly have the experience that our pain is too easily laughed at. That makes us just retreat from everything that hurts, and let the pain turn into rage all on its own. We, both men and women, need to break that cycle, to be able to speak and to listen about pain and loneliness and frustration, without falling back on “Man up, dude” or “LOL, male tears” jokes.
3. More women in games, movies, TV, etc.
As discussed in part one of this piece, the misogyny prevalent in nerd rage arises in part because of a culture that’s taught these awkward boys to see women as a unified Other. 51% of the humans on earth aren’t quite real people in their eyes, and it shows. The great Captain Awkward, in her perpetual “dating guide for geeks” advocates that guys who want women to like them should start by reading a bunch of books by women. It’s the first step in unlearning that societal message that women aren’t exactly real people.
It’s no secret that show business has been too much of a boys’ club all along, and video games especially. Let the next generation of socially awkward boys grow up seeing women as people, and much of that misogyny will vanish. That means big-name female writers and directors and game designers, it means fictional women who are actual characters rather than cookie-cutter stereotypes, it means more female villains and antiheroes and best friends and wise old mentors and lovable screwups and scheming liars and raunchy jokesters and all kinds of characters, not just another couple Badass Action Chicks.
4. Geeks can and must self-police.
One of the problems in geek culture, as noted in the classic Geek Social Fallacies, is that we’re reluctant to impose social sanctions on our own. That’s understandable: we learned young that the worst thing people could do to us was make us feel excluded, so we don’t ever want to do that to someone like us. We’ll just do it to the entire rest of the world instead.
What this means in practice is that you can get away with a lot of crap in geek circles without ever being called on it. That’s a very bad state of affairs, and it’s one we as geeks need to end. As long as we let people get away with cruelty and ugliness and hatred just because they’ve also seen every season of Red Dwarf, we’re betraying our own ideal of inclusiveness.
Fortunately, it’s actually fairly easy to nip these behaviors in the bud, at least in their public manifestations. It doesn’t require hazing or mockery or yelling “Get thee hence from this comics shop and never return!” Just a little bit of social reinforcement goes a long way. Don’t laugh at the rape joke. Get comfortable saying “C’mon, that’s in bad taste” and “Enough already about her boobs, man.” It might not cure the deep-rooted confusion and anger in the recipient, but it’ll help him learn to at least not inflict it on other people, and that’s progress.
♦◊♦
Ultimately, there are no easy answers to the problem of nerd rage. If there were, this article wouldn’t be in two rather wordy parts. But we can’t even begin to engage with the problem if we only view it through a simple privilege/oppression bad-guy/good-guy lens, or if we think it’s only about white guys with certain interests. What it’s actually about are people with certain handicaps, and how failing to acknowledge and understand the world they live in is what feeds their pain and anger in the first place.
this is why your website is evil. it pretends to be a space for men, but in your article you insult people like me. you pretend to be geek by saying us & we but you clearly aren’t because when the man reveals his pain you belittle it by comparing him & us to a scooby doo cartoon & ignoring the argument that he made about joining a country or other organization. noah, you don’t even run this website anymore. a man-hating girl runs it & you should be ashamed. you’ve let all men. you suck. you shouldn’t be writing… Read more »
OP…you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. Trying to pass of gamers as angry, bitter individuals looking to attack women does nobody any favors. I’m a gamer and I’ve also been bullied and hurt as well. You know who you remind me of? Those very bullies whom derived pleasure from policing people considered weaker and on the lower rung of the food chain. Do you seriously see any difference? That’s the real issue here. Not misogyny, not prejudice against women, or nerd rage. Gamers who have been hurt in real life are seeking solace in the only thing… Read more »
Faraci is a bad choice of support to have used – not least because of his Gamergaters are worse than ISIS statement. Frankly, his article comes across as rather smug. Again we see the theme played out: the defining quality of these guys is not being white and male, it’s being socially nonfunctional. They don’t understand how to be around other people, and they feel instinctively that anyone who does understand how doesn’t belong in their club. If you’re going to assert the problem here isn’t that the problem isn’t being white and male, then again, Faraci’s essay is not… Read more »
It’s all well and good to say that we need to end bullying to end the hurt that leads to this rage, but that’s like saying that all that we need to do to cure cancer is to eliminate defects in the mechanisms of apoptosis. The devil’s in the details.
It might seem like nit-picking, and to a certain extent it is, but it should be noted that geek and nerds while of a similar cloth, do not share the same pants. This explains it well actually…
http://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/nerd-venn-diagram-20110626-192132.jpg
Hmmm…not what I hoped for…but not unexpected.
Anti-bullying programs? Oh you mean like the ones that GG supporters donated thousands of dollars to after anti-gg people like Sam Biddle and Max Read (both of Gawker media) tweeted how bullying nerds was awesome and we should bring that back? proof: http://dangerandplaycom.c.presscdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Max-Read-bully.jpg http://www.mediabistro.com/prnewser/files/2014/10/Gamergate.png And Faraci? Are you shitting me here? The guy who said he had respect for islamic terrorists who beheaded journalists Proof Say what you will of GG, Brand… but it’s the antis that actually have a Neo-Nazi on their side, as well as Geordie Tait who recently said that the holocaust was a fine idea… as… Read more »
Dr Helen Smith covers this at http://www.drhelen.blogspot.com/2011/02/decline-of-male-space and in her book Men On Strike. She argues that many of the traditionally male spaces and clubs that gave men a place to bond have been eradicated, leaving them without a place to call their own. This is one of the reasons men are avoiding relationships, marriage and college because they see no real benefit in it. By the way, was the illustration a crying potato? It was hard to tell.
It’s actually the “standard-ish” troll for memes.
Link does not work anymore. Dr. Helen seems to have relocated her blog to PJMedia.
I agree that both men and women can feel a need for same sex spaces. It is perhaps easier to preserve these spaces for women since most men have little interest in joining female dominated activities. Knitting and other crafts come to mind for example. On the other hand, no one has “dibs” on a hobby. It seems silly to me for gamers to act like “this is our club, stay out.” No one “owns” gaming, or knitting, or a love of French cinema or winetasting or baseball. The makes of videogames are selling a product, and they will sell… Read more »
Jen: I feel bad if there are men (or boys) who feel their male identity is so tied to their hobby that allowing women to enjoy it too causes them panic.” No, that’s an assumption you’ve made based on an article written by someone who hasn’t bothered to do their research. Gamers are made up of a population that have been ostricized and ridiculed (even physically attacked) for their hobby when they were young. They see it as the ONLY thing they’re good at since the message that they”re worthless had been drilled into them by support structures that tossed… Read more »
Or the people who say stereotypes in gaming are bad and that they should be discussed, and then resort to stereotyping their critics when their opinions are criticsed.
Why should these people take the notion of stereotypes against women seriously when the “lolololol straight white male gamer social loser in his basement!” stereotype is regularly used against them?
Jen, if you want to know what gamergate supporters are actually worried about, why not actually talk to some of them (hint: it’s not that icky girls will play games.)
Noah Brand is flinging straw around, as usual.