11:41am November 20, 2013

“The belief that male geeks are incapable of romantic interaction with women that isn’t fumbling, awkward, transparent, and ultimately doomed — the cheap laughs of blockbuster movies — covers up endemic sexual harassment, abuse and assault by male technologists against women in the field.

It also simultaneously forgives, mitigates and erases the rampant and entrenched misogyny at male-dominated technology events, which have long employed booth babes, adult entertainment and casual objectification as marketing and bonding strategies.

Tellingly, this stereotype is one of the only lenses through which we as a community engage with mental illness. You can frequently find a subtle appeal to autism spectrum somewhere in the apologia that occurs around the invocation of the male geek stereotype to explain or justify damaging behavior.

Importantly, these appeals do not represent any actual engagement with mental illness — something that is sorely needed in the technology and startup industry, where many of us suffer in shame and silence with undiagnosed or untreated conditions, where mental illness is incredibly stigmatized, and where very little community support is available.

Rather, it represents a dangerous armchair psychology — expressing no actual knowledge of, nor empathy towards, mental illness, just co-opting the ill-informed and stigmatizing representations of mass media to avoid actual engagement with behaviors and trends in the community.”

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Geek Stereotypes: Misogyny, Mental Illness and Company Dysfunction in Tech — Medium

(via brutereason)

I would add that ASDs are not even mental illness, though there’s no shortage of weird ableism there too. I know some people who really are on the autistic spectrum who work in tech, and also some creepers—without a lot of overlap between those groups.

Some of these stereotypes applied as excuses for predatory types’ behavior sure do throw people other than men who really *are* socially awkward, for whatever reason, under the bus. Try really being autistic and being expected not to make much of a fuss about creepers who target you because you might hurt their “awkward” little feelings or something. Regardless, pointing out that some behavior is, in fact, skeezy rather than blamelessly “awkward” automatically turns you into the bad guy. BTDT, and have known too many other people who have repeatedly had to deal with that at work and related events. :/ I don’t even work in tech, but more than a few of my friends do.

(via clatterbane)

I knew a geek boy/eventually man who used the sweet harmless geeky image to his advantage both in dealing with women, and with convincing people of things (he lied constantly). In reality he was a cold, calculating manipulator who hurt tons of people, but people who didn’t know him really well never believed that.

Notes: