If you don’t, you wind up with studies on whether a new perfume or a new vacuum cleaner will make the little woman feel sexier, rather than studies on why the heck men don’t do their share of the work that’s killing their wives’ sex drives in droves. In other words, you wind up with some pretty silly pseudo-science.

No they don’t. More precisely, the scientific method isn’t just favoured over anecdotes and personal experience because it’s the “dominant paradigm of analysis”. The anecdote-based method has some fairly undesirable properties due to issues like confirmation bias, the availability heuristic and availability cascades, outgroup homogeneity bias, illusory correlation. In short, you’re very likely to end up with the answer you want, not the answer that’s correct. (Science is hardly flawless in practice, but at least it tries to avoid this problem in a systematic way.)

If anything, evaluating social and group phenomena is a particularly unwise thing to favour anecdote over the scientific method for if you want accurate conclusions, with problems above and beyond the usual issues. Especially once you start talking about groups you’re not a member of…

I have definitely witnessed the phenomenon you describe in my own research on geeks (on which I recently completed a doctoral dissertation in a Communication program). It’s extremely important to point this out and offer geeks some food for thought.

That said, I wouldn’t necessarily say that this approach to geek identity among males is “typical” for the population I interacted with at large, which included qualitative study both in person and online. It does seem representative of a large portion of Slashdot, and is certainly more visible online in general than in person, but Slashdot != geekdom. (Also note that comments on Slashdot that vehemently and intelligently disagree with misogynistic perspectives are often rated comparably highly to those that are clearly sexist, which complicates claims that Slashdot users consistently vote in alignment with a particular perspective.)

Personally, I think it may be reductive to assume that most geeks’ attempts to subvert the norms of hegemonic masculinity necessarily mean excluding or oppressing members of other gender identities. While I find many self-proclaimed geeks’ hostility toward “jocks” and women in general to be hugely troubling (to say the least), I’ve also witnessed a lot of men conceptualizing their geek identity as a way of rejecting aggressiveness and competition over women, valuing playfulness and intellectualism as qualities that should be open to anyone and everyone, juvenile/sexual stigmas be damned. No researcher that I’m aware of has crunched hard numbers on what the proportions are between self-avowed feminist and egalitarian geeks versus ignorant and sexist geeks, but I’d estimate that the former are not so inconsiderable in number as to declare the latter “typical.” The ignorant and sexist ones are definitely loud on the internet, but it remains hard to say whether this is because that’s where their true numbers become apparent or because comment threads and forums disproportionately attract the socially unacceptable opinions that people can’t get away with saying “IRL.”

Also, not all boys who hate jocks/popular kids are or become geeks. Some become the dudes who brood and smoke at the loading dock. Some become the class clown that no one takes seriously, but everyone keeps around for a laugh. I still maintain that those who become geeks do so because they ALREADY enjoyed stuff like comics, or D&D, or whatever. They didn’t decide to start playing D&D to subvert masculinity.

Thought this was a really interesting article. However, though I am a geek (sci-fi, fantasy, and comics mostly), I don’t use Digg or Slashdot at all. So I can’t comment on the data found there, because I’m just not that familiar with how those sites work. Nor do I care to be, honestly. Twitter is enough for me as far as having random articles hurtled at me (which is how I found this one!). Don’t need any other sites to spew content at me in chunks.

However, something I thought was interesting was the idea at the very beginning of the piece that “Most male geeks believe that they are subverting traditional masculinity by reclaiming and self-identifying with the term “geek”.” I’m not sure it’s as conscious as all that. All of the male geeks I know just grew up with that stuff. It’s great that we have an all-purpose term (“geek”) for someone who enjoys certain things, but I think people identify as such only after already liking the things that would qualify them for membership. So, I don’t think that ideas about masculinity and femininity even OCCUR to men who identify as “geeks.” They identify as geeks because they like geeky things. Women do the same. It’s not as if men decide to become geeks *in order to* buck what’s considered masculine. It might be a claim they make afterwards, but it’s not what first brought them to the club.

I think the discrepancy between male and female participation in geekery happens because boy children are handed certain things that girl children aren’t. Using comics as an example, it’s EXPECTED that little boys will enjoy comic books. Little boys are taken to comic shops with their allowance. If a little boy is seen reading a comic, it’s not a surprise. Little girls just aren’t – usually because it’s assumed they wouldn’t enjoy it. Or if they ARE given comics, it’s stuff like Archie Comics or comic strips in newspapers (both of which I read when I was little), which are not considered “real” comics. Sometimes, little girls are lucky. For example, I was lucky to have an older brother who introduced me to Star Trek when I was 7 or 8, making me a Trekkie for life! :) My dad would tell me to go to bed, because if I didn’t get enough sleep “how will [I] ever grow up to be an astrophysicist?” :) However, most girls, because they have to try that much harder to seek out certain things on their own, either never do, or do later in life. Using myself as an example again, I only started reading comics obsessively after a male friend of mine introduced me to Sandman in 2003. Once I was made aware of how awesome comics are, how not inane they are, and how much they can accomplish as a medium, I fell in love with them.

I suppose this puts me in the “sexism in geekery is a byproduct of sexism everywhere” camp. But that’s how I see that it works in specific relation to geekery. And while it’s true that my male geek friends, as well as the ones I associate with at conventions and such, DO tend to reject the standard definitions of masculine and feminine, I think that it happens because it takes a certain kind of personality to enjoy fantasy stories about superheroes, or time travel, or knights and broadswords, and that personality type, which exists in both genders, does not allow for rigid definitions of ANYTHING. How can you allow for something like the existence of elves or traveling through time, but NOT allow for something like girls being good at science, which is decidedly LESS fantastical. :)