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She’s An Object To Be Worshiped
A Geek Girl isn’t just a girl, she’s a goddess. She’s a vision of perfection. She’s gone beyond something approachable and now she’s this ultimate being that you can’t believe exists. At one point in her life she was the cute girl you saw at the comic store having a conversation with the clerk about Warren Ellis… but now she represents everything you wish you could find in a woman. She is utterly, incomprehensibly flawless. She doesn’t so much as poop, fart, menstruate or scratch herself. She doesn’t snort when she laughs. Her hair is always perfect, even right when she wakes up in the morning. She doesn’t snore at night. She will never call you names. She will never think that your love of comics is childish. She’ll love you because of your love for the Tom Baker era Dr. Who. She will make all your dreams come true.
She is now what you will compare all other women to. She is the Platonic Ideal and all other women around are just the shadows flickering on the cave walls.
If only you could, y’know. Talk to her.
The best part is, that the Geek Girl will make your life better. After all, being “in love” with this geek Goddess elevates you. You’re no longer just a guy who’s a little awkward around women, a guy who hasn’t had much experience when it comes to adult relationships. Now you’re a man on an holy quest! You are off to conquer the unconquerable and become the one to boldly go where nobody has gone before and find the secret to her heart. Worshiping her, orbiting around her like a trapped asteroid, the tortured nights alone in your room crying the manly tears of unrequited love… these are all part of the epic saga of you.
She Is Not A Person.
The Geek Girl that you’ve been talking about, the one you tell your friends is all you want, the one you insist that is the only one you’ll date… she’s not a person to you. Not really. She’s a fetish, an object. The obsessive love of the Geek Girl isn’t, at it’s base, any different from having a fetish for Asians or Latinas or African-Americans. She isn’t a woman now, she is the exotic other.
The fetishization of the Geek Girl is, at it’s core, a sexist ideal cloaked in the soft tyranny of “worship” and fantasy. By elevating her to the status of Goddess you may think you are paying her the ultimate compliment when instead all you are doing is denying her her own personhood. A girl who is a geek is a woman with all the flaws and imperfections that come with being human. The Geek Girl is a female-shaped collection of ideas, stereotypes and idealized fantasies about what you want in a woman… only without all of the downsides of being a real person. She has a life and interests, desires and experiences. The Geek Girl is defined by two things: her status as a geek and by the man who loves her.
The Geek Girl is, in the end, all about the guy. The purpose of the Geek Girl is ultimately, to validate the man’s existence and interests. By being the beautiful pinnacle of womanhood and a geek, she affirms that – despite society’s prejudicies – that he is, in fact, cool for being a geek. She retroactively transforms all of the scorn and humiliation that he faced for having interests outside of the mainstream into the trials that beset the righteous man by the ignorant who were jealous of his specialness. She eliminates the need to grow outside of his comfort zone because she shares them exactly. And because she is so pure, so perfect, she transforms him from being a castigated loser to a noble gallant lover, a man who’s specialness won the heart of the Goddess.
Ultimately, the Geek Girl is the supporting actress in the movie that is the geek guy’s life. He is the sun that her existence orbits around.
And in the end, if the man is actually able to acquire this Geek Girl, this nerd Goddess? He doesn’t want her.
Y’see, after all of that time and effort building the Geek Girl into a perfect being, he has completely ignored all of her flaws. He’s mentally airbrushed away all of the parts of her that he just doesn’t want to see. He’s convinced himself that he’s in love with an impossible fantasy, something that no woman could ever be in real life. When reality comes crashing in, as it always does, the illusion is shattered and that perfect Geek Girl is revealed to be disappointingly human. Suddenly he’s confronted with the fact that he was never in love with her as a person, just an ideal that only ever existed in his head and he does the only thing he can do: he runs away from the reality and goes back to looking for his fantasy, ignoring the pain and insult he’s left behind.
Let me be perfectly clear: I am not telling you to never date girls who are geeks. I am saying that you need to go into your relationship with your eyes open to reality, and to embrace that flawed, imperfect, all-too-human geeky girl for exactly who and what she is and not a fantasy that she could never achieve.
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