Atomic Sex

from nerdgirlpinups

In a recent post I wrote about a boy nerd who used the Drake equation to figure out how many possible girlfriends existed in his area.  Well turns out using the equation for this purpose had already been done and guess what? A female physics professor ran herself through the numbers and came up with a much worse answer: There is no one out there for her. This might not be surprising because she adds the following conditions: the man must be taller than her (she’s tall) and smarter than her (she’s a harard physics prof). I guess when you start heaving stereotype after stereotype and unrealistic but strictly defined expectations onto the equation it can’t add up to anything of real substance– except as maybe a romantic comdey flick. Listen to the story whole story here.

But then it got me thinking are nerd boys and nerd girls given the same respect in pop culture.  On the Salon.com site silenced commented :

Honestly, you want my opinion as a female nerd — I think Broadsheet engages in the same kind of breathless worship of the precious male nerd as the rest of society.

The typical “precious male nerd” narrative here suggests itself immediately — lonely nerd male who reduces life to an equation, cute-meets a happy socially skilled non-nerd female who teaches him how to be a non-nerd and not reduce life to equations.

That’s how the Hollywood version goes.

In real life, he experiences mucho angst as he competes furiously to win the confidence of the nerd women who haven’t been turned into crabby misanthropes by the double whammy of being devalued and misunderstood by non-nerds and male nerds alike.

In the Nerd series of romance books girls are allowed to totally fall head over heels for nerds but when a girl tries to become a nerd for a movie she is just too sexy to move on over to the uncool side.  So I guess the opposite is true a nerd girl can’t harness her sexual power and attract boys to her brain and boobs.

Oh wait was this what Kathleen Hanna’s Dork Manifesto was about?

Maybe I got to dust off the zines and start writing dork erotica to help get my sisters dates.