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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dragoslav" data-source="post: 7651506" data-attributes="member: 6690267">That's part of the larger, systemic problem that I addressed in the last part of my post, that women don't have the agency that men have in defining mainstream culture. A man can pretty much do whatever he wants and be assured that he will fit into a more-or-less mainstream niche, while women don't have that luxury. Until a sex becomes more entrenched in a particular sphere, unfortunately a person's sex sets him or her apart from the people who are more typically associated with that sphere, which is why, on the flip side, you had phrases like "male nurse" for men in typically woman-dominated occupations. Hence, nobody would have thought to use the phrase "geek boy" at all.The pejorative "fake geek girl" developed as a response to a previous phenomenon of the specifically gendered "geek girl" trend. With competitive gaming groups or individuals marketing themselves or being marketed as "geek girls," it suddenly became a gender issue. Before the advent of the "geek girl" label that grew in popularity a few years ago, nobody would have used the phrase "geek boy" not just because geekdom was male-dominated, but because female geeks--while less common--were more often just considered geeks who happened to be female. The "geek girl" label wasn't really a "thing." The "geek girl" label is a mixed bag because, on the one hand, it's a statement of empowerment, i.e. an assertion that women can enjoy and be as knowledgeable of/competent with the geeky things that men enjoy, but on the other hand it risks creating an even greater divide between the sexes by highlighting the differences between "geek guys" and "geek girls" instead of the similarities that unite geeks.So, unfortunately, just like many things in society, there's a difference in how this fraudulence is expressed based on sex and gender. Men who fraudulently make use of geek culture tend to do so in non-sexual, gender-neutral ways like corporate marketing (pandering to "geeks" in advertising, The Big Bang Theory [according to some], etc.), whereas with women, due to having less agency in mainstream culture, it has a specifically gendered expression. And in that respect, this issue is no different than the myriad other issues in society related to gender inequality.I'll note that I've always been one of the ones to argue that we're all just "geeks" regardless of gender, and that it didn't need to become a gender issue in the first place. Unfortunately, that's a pretty Utopian ideal.EDIT: Oops, this post ended up being longer than I intended, so I'll add the disclaimer to not mistake my wordiness for conviction, as I'm more interested in just exploring ideas rather than making absolute conclusions. As usual, play whatever you please. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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