But I’ve also sometimes had this issue when I talk to feminists. They’re like “Guys need to be more concerned about women’s boundaries, and women need to be willing to shame and embarrass guys who hit on them inappropriately.” And maybe they spent high school hanging out with bros on the football team who thought asking women’s consent was a boring technicality, and I spent high school hanging out entirely with extremely considerate but very shy geeks who spent their teenage years in a state of nightmarish loneliness and depression because they were too scared to ask out women because the woman might try to shame and embarrass them for it.
I don’t think this one fits. I’ve gotten way more sexual harassment from geeks than from jocks, partly because I’m a woman and a geek, so I spend more time around other geeks, but also because geeks tend to have relatively poor social skills and an underdog mentality. (ie, where they assume that they are the good guys, so what they do is good, while the jocks are the bad guys, because they’re getting the girls they want. I don’t say this to pick on you, just that I’ve found it’s a very common mentality among young nerdy guys.) Marc Lépine certainly wasn’t a jock and most incels aren’t jocks either. “Revenge of the Nerds” (which includes an instance of the nerds sexually assaulting a woman and selling naked pictures of her without her consent) was targeted towards nerds, not jocks. When I was in college, I once had the pleasure of being followed back to my car by a group of CS nerds after a night class, while they loudly discussed amongst themselves my dress and how much they enjoyed gang rape. I also got to listen to rape jokes in the computer lab, as well as discussions about which of the female professors and students they would like to fuck. This was around 2010.
I would suggest a couple possible alternatives for why you may not be seeing a problem with sexism in the nerd corner of culture: first, a lot of this stuff is intentionally orchestrated to happen when no other men (and preferably no other women) are around. Secondly, some of the more minor things may be happening in front of you and you’re just not paying much attention to it.
It seems that you’re missing the point of the article here. The author clearly states that one’s experiences strongly inform his or her opinions, which are, to the person who holds that opinion, valid. The author, in that segment, was putting forward a combination of a hypothetical situation (women who grew up around jocks that took their consent for granted) and his own experiences (the shy but well-intentioned nerds he hung around with). You’ve had your experiences, and the author’s had his experiences. They would both seem valid to you and him because they, despite their stark differences, are both valid. The author writes about how controversy has erupted around r/atheism as its members and visitors gleaned different but equally valid experiences while positing that the other side’s experiences are clearly wrong and invalid. Your experiences seem to have been particularly traumatic for you and I understand that the author’s semi-generalization of his own experiences could have made you feel like he was invalidating your experiences. However, it would be counterproductive and ill-informed of you to generalize your experiences because, as you have said, other people would have had different experiences.
I don’t think this one fits. I’ve gotten way more sexual harassment from geeks than from jocks, partly because I’m a woman and a geek, so I spend more time around other geeks, but also because geeks tend to have relatively poor social skills and an underdog mentality. (ie, where they assume that they are the good guys, so what they do is good, while the jocks are the bad guys, because they’re getting the girls they want. I don’t say this to pick on you, just that I’ve found it’s a very common mentality among young nerdy guys.) Marc Lépine certainly wasn’t a jock and most incels aren’t jocks either. “Revenge of the Nerds” (which includes an instance of the nerds sexually assaulting a woman and selling naked pictures of her without her consent) was targeted towards nerds, not jocks. When I was in college, I once had the pleasure of being followed back to my car by a group of CS nerds after a night class, while they loudly discussed amongst themselves my dress and how much they enjoyed gang rape. I also got to listen to rape jokes in the computer lab, as well as discussions about which of the female professors and students they would like to fuck. This was around 2010.
I would suggest a couple possible alternatives for why you may not be seeing a problem with sexism in the nerd corner of culture: first, a lot of this stuff is intentionally orchestrated to happen when no other men (and preferably no other women) are around. Secondly, some of the more minor things may be happening in front of you and you’re just not paying much attention to it.
It seems that you’re missing the point of the article here. The author clearly states that one’s experiences strongly inform his or her opinions, which are, to the person who holds that opinion, valid. The author, in that segment, was putting forward a combination of a hypothetical situation (women who grew up around jocks that took their consent for granted) and his own experiences (the shy but well-intentioned nerds he hung around with). You’ve had your experiences, and the author’s had his experiences. They would both seem valid to you and him because they, despite their stark differences, are both valid. The author writes about how controversy has erupted around r/atheism as its members and visitors gleaned different but equally valid experiences while positing that the other side’s experiences are clearly wrong and invalid. Your experiences seem to have been particularly traumatic for you and I understand that the author’s semi-generalization of his own experiences could have made you feel like he was invalidating your experiences. However, it would be counterproductive and ill-informed of you to generalize your experiences because, as you have said, other people would have had different experiences.