Why nerd girls, and others, get asked to "prove it"

Greetings everyone.

Well, after a lot of time, I think I'm going to weigh in on a couple things here.  The first is a divide between nerd groups today, and the second is some of the perceived discrimination that nerd girls experience.  The reason I'm addressing both of these at the same time is honestly I think they are connected at the source.

I think that the source of these issues is, simply put, an issue of trust.  Until the last roughly 5, maybe up to 10 years, it wasn't cool to be a nerd.  Admitting that you liked comic books, going to any sort of pop culture convention, watching Star Trek, reading Star Wars novels, and wearing costumes in particular were signs that you were a social pariah.

We were mocked, some going so far as to consider us unintelligent, with questionable morality.  We were ridiculed for being immature because of the media we consumed and the way we consumed it.  We struggled to make friends and only found acceptance with our fellow nerds.  It's one of the reasons why some of this has changed, but look at how the "popular" and "normal" people talk about the "nerds" on a show like Big Bang Theory.  While some of the stigma is gone, the overall tone remains one of derision.

A lot of us that are now adults still carry the scars we got growing up a nerd.  And some of those scars go a lot deeper than one might suspect.  Being a nerd, in a lot of ways, became a part of your identity.  It was something that we had to learn to accept.  Some of us embraced it regardless of the scorn it brought us.  It was the thing that we felt made us unique, and it was also the thing that we felt forced us to be alone.  I know that might sound a little melodramatic, but it's actually very true.

Though the next bit of this is anecdotal, I strongly suspect it is something that many others can relate to.  In my own family, my enjoyment of action figures and collecting is still considered a sign of immaturity.  When I initially decided to join the 501st Legion, my family thought I'd lost my mind.  To this day, when people find out that I wear a Star Wars costume, the eye rolls are easily predictable.  That I do so primarily for children's charity events does nothing to mitigate the perception that I must clearly be immature and a bit out of touch with reality. 

This is now, in an age when being a nerd is considered somewhat cool.  This is at the crest of the convention and cosplay boom.  When the top grossing films for the last several years are all rooted in the comic books I anticipated ridicule for reading, one would expect that the stigmatization would've lessened some. 

But old wounds heal slowly.  Now, we're expecting the other shoe to drop.  We see people who have never read a comic book talking about the characters we were teased for enjoying.  We see our subculture being co-opted by the jocks that would bully us.  There exists a divide between fans of comic book movies and fans of comic books today.  And a big part of that divide is caused by a lack of trust.

We are waiting for the next big thing to come along so that we can find ourselves the subject of one big societal prank.  And the reason is because it wouldn't be the first time.  This is why those of us who had to live with the discrimination, who had to put up with society mocking us until technology finally caught up to our imaginations enough that we were able to let people see what we had really been enjoying all along, this is why we have a hard time with those who didn't earn their stripes.  There's a part of us that doesn't trust them to really be our friends. 

Theoretically, this is also why "nerdgirls" have to prove it.  Nerds were never popular.  Girls wouldn't give us the time of day.  Watch any show starring nerds and see how fast you lose track of the number of "virgin" jokes that get made.  Far too many of us have stories about that pretty girl we liked who would only pretend to think we were worth talking to when they were getting help with their homework.  Some of us knew when we were getting played, but we didn't care because at least there was a girl paying attention to us for a little bit. 

So when a pretty woman starts talking about being a nerd, this is why the response is "prove it".  It's not because we want to be sexist or discriminatory.  But we developed a defense mechanism that doesn't let us get our hopes up that we might actually be able to connect, on any level with a woman.  (No, I'm not going to go into the idea that we are only interested in connecting physically here, that's a whole other series of conversations.)  In typical nerd fashion, we don't necessarily manage to communicate well.  It's not that we need to see someone prove they are legitimately nerds.  We want to know if we can actually trust them.

We want to know if this is a safe person.  We want to know if we can honestly be ourselves around them without worrying about being judged or mocked.  We want to know if we've actually found someone it's okay to try and connect with regarding something that really is a core/defining part of our identity.  I'm not saying it's right, but I also think that the divide between old school nerds and new wave nerds, and the distrust of the opposite sex when it comes to this topic is perhaps a bit more understandable.