Fake Geek Girl
| Synonyms: | FGG, Idiot Nerd Girl |
| See also: | Gamergate |
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Fake Geek Girl is a persistent formal and informal meme regarding the participation of women in SF, comics, and video game fandom. It is known to flare up pretty regularly in different formats and media.
The formal "Idiot Nerd Girl" meme arose on memegenerator,[1] originally designed to "prove" that girls who call themselves nerd lack the proper knowledge and credentials, and provoked an immediate response by self-declared nerd girls.[2][3][4]
Other scenes of FGG-related incidents include various pro-author blogs, post-convention roundups (especially after SDCC), the Twitter hashtag #IAmAFakeNerdGirlBecause,[5], a comic book advert for College Humor featuring the "greatest villains of nerd culture",[6] etc. Geek Feminism Wiki has an extensive article documenting a number of recent FGG-related blog posts.[7]
The FGG uproar is relevant in particular to media fandom, because it's concerned with which expressions of fannishness are valid and which aren't, for reasons of being inauthentic, vapid, or overly girly. Fannish pursuits with a female majority, such as fanfic in general and slash in particular, cosplay, and general squee, are frequent targets of the ire of anti-FGG nerd rants. Media fandom also has a particular interest in the depiction of geeks -- and female geeks -- as characters on TV and film. Examples inclue Willow Rosenberg on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Alec Hardison on Leverage, Abed Nadir on Community, and most recently noted fictional cosplayer, Skye from Agents of SHIELD. CSI's Grissom/Sara pairing has occasionally been dubbed Geek Love. The AO3 also shows an impressive array of non-canonical "character as geek" tags, as well as the canonical tag Geeks.
A tumblr post by user jackthebard created in 2014 currently has over 946,533+ notes as of December 2018:
Just remember. There is no such thing as a fake geek girl.
There are only fake geek boys.
Science fiction was invented by a woman.
#spicy jack talk #mary shelley #frankenstein was written in 1818 #bitches
Meta/Further Reading
- Exclusion As Default: Female Geeks (April 2014)
- I just don’t understand where this concept of ‘fake geek girls’ came from. (September 2014)
- Timeline of Women in Comics Fandom
- Sexy Lamp Test
References
- ^ Idiot Nerd Girl on Know Your Meme.
- ^ A Challenger Appears for the “Fake Geek Girl” on The Mary Sue.
- ^ I really hate the Idiot Nerd Girl meme, so I decided to stage a cheerful coup with the aid of some friends, by Rachel Edidin.
- ^ Just a quick update about the "Idiot Nerd Girl" meme on Eschergirls.
- ^ #IAmAFakeNerdGirlBecause
- ^ So this was the back cover ad on Batman #13 by David Willis.
- ^ Fake geek girls on Geek Feminism Wiki.