Cybersexism: Sex, Gender and Power on the Internet by Laurie Penny

Author:Laurie Penny [Penny, Laurie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-22T07:00:00+00:00

AND THE GEEK SHALL INHERIT THE EARTH

I’m a nerd-chasing nerd and I’m not sorry. For much of my twenties, I worked on the principle that if you knew about comics, like me, and spent a lot of time on the Internet, like me, then I’d probably want to take you to bed, if we could both stay off Twitter for long enough. If you’re not a geek or a nerd I suspect you’ll be boring in bed and out of it. Nerds are the sexiest. Nerds are quick learners, and they’ve often read a lot of instruction manuals before they get a chance to try out their tricks. Nerds get excited. Nerds can fix things, like your hard drive, or your heart. And sometimes you can learn things from them.

‘Some people are just butthurt that girls get to come into our special club,’ says The Geek, trying not to spill tea on his naked legs. I’m paraphrasing, because I don’t generally keep a recorder handy during sex, unless the other person is particularly into that sort of thing, which tends to be its own special warning sign. There are many geeks in my life, but only one is the Geek, the one I lure into intense anarcho-feminist discussions with the promise of an intense horizontal workout, and occasionally vice versa. We met, that’s right, on the Internet. After three years of semi-regular shagging and enough pillow chat to know each other’s pets and housemates by name, we still claim to know each other from the Internet. I could draw you a map of the moles on his back. I could pick his scent out across a room, a mixture of Old Spice, tannin and something dank from the basement where he works, adding the visual effects to green screen film stock, but the Internet is where we met and where we talk; IRL is just for fucking.

He made a rape joke on our first date. I say ‘date’, but it was more of a mutual test to see if we could stand each other enough to screw, mutual desperation having been established in chatlogs beforehand. We snarked at each other about politics and Joss Whedon shows and appeared to decide, as so many do, that a shared love of certain comics would help us overcome mutual loathing for long enough to satisfy a basic animal need. Three hours later, knackered and sweating, he put on a Jedi-robe dressing-gown and got out his glow-in-the-dark dice to show me their inscriptions and I decided that this one might be worth talking to.

What I want him to understand is what I want every nerd boy in my life to understand: that we were there too, the other geeks and weird kids whose lives were hellish at school, who escaped into books and computers, who stayed up all night scanning obscure forums, looking for transcendence, dreaming of elsewhere. We were there too, but you didn’t see us, because we were girls. And the costs

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.