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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6205173" data-attributes="member: 4937">My wife likes to say she is a 'half-geek'.  I'd guess that this is a pretty common point of mild but still annoying and unacceptable sexism that women have to put up with more than men.   By the same standards, I'm not a true geek - but my geek credentials are rarely doubted.  I suspect my departure from mainstream geekdom would get more questioning if I was a woman though.My advice is to treat this as the sort of minor hazing any cultural group does when trying to evaluate potential membership and go, "I'm geekier than thou" on them.  Don't focus on the sexism, since at least some of the time you'd be wrong - men would get the same treatment at least some of the time.  Throwing it back at them is the appropriate response.For example...a) I don't like Star Trek.  If given the 'you aren't a true geek' over this, I respond with a detailed critique as to why a true geek shouldn't like Star Trek - technobabble, soap opera in space, zero sum plots, self-contradiction, illogical and frequently bad movies, thrown away plot points, mass marketed appeal, frequent lack of depth, Voyager, etc.  Babylon 5 and the lamented untimely killed Firefly were better.b) I don't like Dr. Who.  Sorry.  If you like Dr. Who, and it's not because your British and filled with nostalgia, its only because you are so starved for Sci Fi that your willing to swallow British treacle and dreck.  If you want British sci-fi TV, you should watch Red Dwarf, which by virtue of being aware it was schlocky, silly and campy managed to be both more fun and more thoughtful.And so forth.  Basically, you only need a geek reason for not liking something, and to point out your affection for something further from the mainstream to totally blow up charges of you lack true geek cred.  At the worst, you'll end up in the sort of passionate argument about trivia that geeks love.</blockquote>

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